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> Two Tracks / Becoming a manager is not a promotion To any young engineers who may be reading this, this is social fiction. If someone can fire you but you ca

• threeseed 7y ago
  Or even around decision making which is a large part of engineering. If I ignore or undermine the choices made by manager I will be fired. But vice versa is not true.
• doh 7y ago
  That depends on how you define "manager". In our company, managers serve empowering function and don't have firing powers. They take full responsibility for growth and progress of the people they manage. They can report issues with people they manage to certain parts of the org, but can't solemnly pull the trigger. We are also significantly smaller than Square though, with 40+ employees. We want to keep it this way up until sustainable, then figure out something else. We don't want managers to ever be able to single handedly fire people.
  • ori_b 7y ago
    > That depends on how you define "manager". In our company, managers serve empowering function and don't have firing powers. They take full responsibility for growth and progress of the people they manage. Who does have firing powers, and how does one get there without being in the management track?
    • doh 7y ago
      Currently only the C executives, mostly because we are so small and this is a very solemnly an issues. We have not let go a person for more than 2.5 years. As we grow more, we will change it too, but will try to keep it very friction heavy so our employees are not worried about someone frivolously firing them.
    • taude 7y ago
      I worked as a dev manager at a large org and definitely didn't have firing powers. It involved a process with HR, and following a pretty riggid pip-ing process, paperwork, etc, so that there's accountability at all levels. I'd be curious the size and type of company the OP is talking about where managers get that much power?
      • awakeasleep 7y ago
        The managers werent the ones who flipped the switch with HR to start the firing process and provided the evidence to make the decision?
        • taude 7y ago
          Not always. Managers sometimes like the people on their teams, and don't want to fire them. That's when someone else notices the team needs shaking up, or overhears conversations that are unsettling, etc. Also step-over meetings, too: that's when a manager's manager (or higher-up) will have a meeting with someone the manager is managing....good orgs have all these types of playbooks.
          • arethuza 7y ago
            "Managers sometimes like the people on their teams, and don't want to fire them." I remember early in my career meeting a very senior and experienced manager from another company on the same project who said he intentionally didn't become too friendly with people in case he had to sack them - which I thought must be a miserable way to live. NB I have sacked people for poor performance and laid off people I considered friends (and who are still friends).
  • Aeolun 7y ago
    Just wait until you get to 10000 employees. You must delegate at that point. A manager might not fire someone by themselves, but since the involvement of HR is generally limited to executing the decision it might as well be.
    • doh 7y ago
      I'm aware that we will not be able to retain this policy forever, however not going to change it before it has to. Also, I'm glad that you believe that we will get to 10k employees. Currently beyond the scope of my own ambition.
• iaresee 7y ago
  Is it possible you are conflating positional power with earning power? Your earning power is not limited by staying on the IC track in this setup. Positional power is always dependent on where you are in the organization and what your actual job in the organization happens to be.
  • bradleyjg 7y ago
    That’s not true either. Who’s the highest compensated person at Square? Is he a manager or an IC? The root poster is absolutely correct. The responses that say you can have a great life without climbing to the top of the highest ladder are also correct, but they aren’t refuting what the root post says. Also, while things look pretty rosy for senior ICs right now, I wonder how many people lauding that path are in their forties or older. It’s one thing to be a respected principal engineer in a strong economy but what about if we hit another recession and your third wave tech company gets bought out by IBM?
    • ryandrake 7y ago
      If a company claims to have “parallel and equal tracks” ask them how many VP equivalent individual contributors they have and how many manager VPs they have. Ask then what the CEO-equivalent individual contributor role entails.
      • joshuamorton 7y ago
        This gets pretty tricky at some point, because there are a lot of hybrid people. The "standard" image of a VP is someone who has multiple directors reporting to them, and probably 50+ (really 100+) indirect reports. So what about a VP-equivalent with 5 direct reports who are all ICs? That person isn't an IC, but they're also not really a people manager, they're like a really high impact TLM. Do they count more as the first, or the second?
    • vageli 7y ago
      > That’s not true either. Who’s the highest compensated person at Square? Is he a manager or an IC? > The root poster is absolutely correct. The responses that say you can have a great life without climbing to the top of the highest ladder are also correct, but they aren’t refuting what the root post says. > Also, while things look pretty rosy for senior ICs right now, I wonder how many people lauding that path are in their forties or older. It’s one thing to be a respected principal engineer in a strong economy but what about if we hit another recession and your third wave tech company gets bought out by IBM? I was with you until the very last part of the very last sentence. In my experience, often times where there is management duplication they will trim management (we don't need _all_ of these engineering managers do we?) but keep performing ICs.
• empath75 7y ago
  My boss does an evaluation of my performance for the purposes of HR, but he doesn’t really manage me and I don’t think he makes more money than me. Our IC roles go all the way up to Director level without having any reports.
  • vageli 7y ago
    > My boss does an evaluation of my performance for the purposes of HR, but he doesn’t really manage me and I don’t think he makes more money than me. Our IC roles go all the way up to Director level without having any reports. I think it will be hard to find another job at director level without any reports. I have witnessed the struggle of my friends with this exact setup.
• closeparen 7y ago
  The way we implement this, you cannot report to a manager who is the same level as you. A sufficiently senior IC with an entry level manager gets transferred up the org chart upon promotion.
  • timv 7y ago
    In my experience that leads to the organisation hiring more people at the upper ranks of the management track, and the end result is that management becomes the easier path to promotion and most of your senior staff are managers, not ICs. If you have a team of engineers rangining from L3-L7 (on Square's scale), and you want to hire a new engineer you'll interview, and then decide on a level based on the person's skills & experience. Probably you knew up front that you were targeting a 4/5 or a 6/7, but generally, you don't go looking for a L7 IC, you look for an experienced engineer and then put them at the level that is appropriate. But if that same team needs a manager then your policy is that they need to be a L8 or above (otherwise you'll need to do a big reshuffle to move all the L7 ICs out). So now you interview looking for a L8+ EM, and you hire the best person you can find, and you make them a L8. Maybe they're at the lower end of the L8 scale, and you know this role will be a stretch for them, but that's OK because it's good to stretch people into new roles and you think they'll step up. But, you would have made a different decision when deciding what level to give an IC. My experience has been that for ICs, companies (rightly) err on the side of caution and if they think that the new hire is on the lower end of the scale they'll bring them in at the lower level, and let them prove themselves. So if you're asking Is this engineer a N or (N+1)? you'll be more likely to bring them in at N. But for a manager, there are incentives to bring them in at N+1 so that they can maange the members of the team who are N. And now your standards for an (N+1) IC are higher than your standards for (N+1) EM. And when it comes to promotion time, the new hires form part of the benchmark. And your existing Level-N EMs are performing just as well as your new N+1 EMs, so they're good candidates for promotion. But your existing Level-N ICs are really only performing at the same level as your new Level-N ICs, so things seem to be balanced. I don't think there are any easy solutions to this problem. If you have a policy of ICs reporting to higher-leveled EMs then you create a system that makes it easier to be promoted on the management track. But if you have ICs reporting to a same-(or lower)-leveled manager, then you have a perception (and possibly an reality) that being a manager gives you more organisational power than the same level IC.
• codingdave 7y ago
  OK, they can fire me. There are other coding jobs. They move up the chain and have to sit in meetings taking on greater responsibilities while I sit back and code for years, increasing in position and compensation without really having to be more accountable for the success or failure of the business. They probably make more than me, but I just shut down at the end of the day and run around with my kids. There are far more ways to measure success in life than your paycheck or where you fall in an org chart.
  • throwaway082729 7y ago
    Completely concur with this. After 10+ years in engineering management, rising through the ranks, I'm at a stage where I don't want to solve people problems anymore. I want to get back to coding or solve problems as an IC. Most companies will need only a handful of VPs, Directors and Managers but almost all companies will need software engineers. As a manager, one has to sacrifice becoming technical and competitive in the market or be the best in their field. Even if they are a really good manager, different companies have different expectations of their managers. Google might want pure people managers whereas LinkedIn might want managers that write code 60% of the code. It's just not worth it though some perks are really nice.
  • coffeemug 7y ago
    I agree completely. If that's the choice you made in life and it makes you happy and fulfilled, I'm genuinely happy for you. But you can only make that choice if you walk into the situation with your eyes open. I don't like being bullshitted.
  • aczerepinski 7y ago
    Upvoting this. Being a well-paid individual contributor who can work a ~40 hour week is amazing. I was a manager in another industry before I learned to code and I'm grateful I don't have to do it anymore. Having to put under-performers on a plan, being on the hook for work not done during a staffing shortage, trying to keep people happy when there aren't any raises or promotions to offer... if some other engineer wants to take that stuff on and get paid more for it, more power to them!
• taurath 7y ago
  > They'll sit in on senior meetings, work on strategic decisions, and you'll watch them rise further and futher in the company hierarchy while you're enjoying your "parallel track". If there actually is a parallel track, this doesn't happen. Directors sit on meetings with sr. staff engs and principles - directors think about the resource allocation, principles think about the technology direction. The technical track is just management of and responsibility for larger and larger technical areas.
  • matthewowen 7y ago
    Take a look at most companies, and compare the quantities of director/VP equivalent engineers to the number of engineering directors and VPs. In my experience, there are many many more of the latter, if only because orgs want to build out the org chart and so there's a natural place and need for those roles, and because there are basically default title bumps that come with the increased responsibility.
    • joshuamorton 7y ago
      Sure. But that's not relevant to the argument being had. Growth beyond a certain point in management being easier, while perhaps true, isn't the same thing as claiming that swapping from IC to management is, alone, a promotion.
      • matthewowen 7y ago
        the original comment said "you'll watch them rise further and futher in the company hierarchy while you're enjoying your "parallel track"", and the comment i replied to disagreed. the question was about "parallel track", and i don't see how you can conclude that they're parallel: it seems to me that the IC path is circuitous and takes a lot longer to get anywhere on. put another way: imagine that you had no preference over the work, were equally good as both IC and manager, and wanted to optimize for career progression. you would _always_ prefer management. and in fact even if you'd make a better IC than a manager, to a large extent you'd still profit more in management. i agree that it isn't necessarily a promotion to move from IC to manager. but it also _isn't_ a parallel track: by moving, you've moved to a track which is much more direct.
• CoolGuySteve 7y ago
  I think a lot of responses to you are missing the point. Managers have more autonomy and more control. You may get paid the same while working as an individual contributor, at least for a while, but over time your power in the org suffers a slow decay. For example, you may not be able to direct your work towards that which generates the most revenue, people you passed on in the interview process suddenly appear next to you and you're required to mentor them, projects that seem dumb get assigned to you from on high without your input, compute resources appear or disappear from under your control, etc. It's like death by a thousand cuts. And in my experience, the only way to actually get paid on this track over the long term is to create something so valuable that you are the single point of failure. At least for programming, the only real 'Individual Contributor' career track that makes any sense to consider is one where you're a lead developer, that is you still code, but you manage a team of other people as well.
  • aeternus 7y ago
    An IC can definitely have and maintain more control than managers, they just need to produce visible value to the company. I've seen multiple ICs with more power than their direct manager. They are basically immune to being fired because higher-level leaders understand their value and respect their track record.
    • nugget 7y ago
      Same here. Not only are they immune to being fired, they can more or less switch teams whenever they want.
    • lambdasquirrel 7y ago
      Were those higher-level leaders managers? I mean I agree with your exact statement, but in my direct experience, the higher-level leaders tend to be less and less engineers. Unless there is some power of the purse-strings, the two-tracks thing is always going to be biased in favor of the managers.
      • filoleg 7y ago
• theflyinghorse 7y ago
  Point taken. I haven't thought about managers that way, but you are absolutely correct - tracks can not be parallel by definition. Next question is - is manager the only logical progression for a dev at some point?
  • encoderer 7y ago
    Build a product, cover your salary. It's not easy, but it's doable. I've done it.
  • bradleyjg 7y ago
    There is an option to go into consulting. Outside of the top of the IC ladders at the giant tech companies, they are the highest paid ICs around. But that keep in mind you don’t have to keep progressing your career. There are risks to not doing so, but also rewards.
    • opportune 7y ago
      I always hear about these people but I never hear about the profile of the places that hire these people to do consulting. Since you mention "Outside of the top of the IC ladders at the giant tech companies" which is about $600k or thereabouts, I am guessing this means they are billing for about $500/hr-$600/hr? So a week's rate is roughly $20k+. What kind of place is paying software engineer contractors that much?
      • sophiebits 7y ago
        Some ICs at top tech companies get paid much, much more than $600k.
        • deleted 7y ago
          [deleted]
        • bradleyjg 7y ago
          If you think you have a reasonable chance to become a Google Fellow or equivalent, then by all means ignore everything I’m saying here.
• soneca 7y ago
  In my last company it was indeed parallel. A Team Leader couldn't fire a Tech Leader (or have access to meetings that Tech Leaders didn't). They would work in pairs as leaders of a "Tribe". The company shared the average earnings per position, so we could see that the Tech Leaders used to earn more than Team Leaders too.
  • nilkn 7y ago
    Many companies have team lead positions that have no formal management authority or responsibilities. Was that perhaps the case here? The bottom line is some folks in the company do have firing authority -- or at least have broad say in initiating the process to have someone fired. Rarely are these folks not on the management track or its equivalent.
    • soneca 7y ago
      In theory the Team Leader could fire the other devs in the tribe (even senior ones, just not the Tech Leader). In practice it appears that the Tech Leader has a lot of influence in firing a dev. In case of disagreement, the last word, I assume, would be from someone higher up (the CTO).
      • nilkn 7y ago
        If a C-level executive officer would be involved in a decision to fire a low-level developer, am I right in assuming the company was quite small? As companies get bigger, firing power and other forms of authority cannot stay concentrated only in the executive suite -- it's just not sustainable or scalable.
        • soneca 7y ago
          It had around 500 people, I believe around 90 developers. There was a Engineering Manager too, I believe that would be the final word actually. But see that I am talking about "last word"; if a Team Leader and a Tech Leader disagree in a decision to fire someone. If both of them agrees, it doesn't scale up
• dmurray 7y ago
  At first I thought the solution is that it needs to be a step down: becoming a manager entails taking a cut in pay, a lower nominal role, an increased vulnerability if the team needs to be cut. Make people pay a cost in order to switch to this role. But a large part of me tells me this would just make things worse. The only people who would opt to transfer to the manager track would be those who are really career politicians, who can take credit for every success but blame every failure convincingly on someone else. Ideally with management thinking all the time that this guy is a loyal contributor and not a politician. This is what seems to happen in practice. So what can you do? Hire only people who are strong engineers and who don't have any ambitions to management? Hire excellent engineers and mediocre management? This last seems to be the approach of many tech companies. Frustrating though it is for the engineers, this explains one reason companies may go for this approach.
  • paxys 7y ago
    In most companies becoming an entry-level manager IS a step-down from staff engineer or equivalent in terms of compensation.
    • lazyasciiart 7y ago
      There might actually be 0 people who go from staff engineer to entry level manager in most companies. They go from engineer or maybe senior engineer.
  • pmiller2 7y ago
    I have no real ambition to management, but, at 5 years in, I’m considering it as a way to keep my salary growth going.
  • kemitche 7y ago
    > But a large part of me tells me this would just make things worse Agreed. You'd end up with more of the folks who just want power for power's sake, instead of growth/validation.
• paxys 7y ago
  Managers have a lot less power in decisions like firing and compensation than you might think. Note that by "manager" I don't mean the entire management unit. Of course executives & directors have influence, but at a standard software company a staff+ engineer will 100% have more "power" than a regular manager (and will be paid a lot more as well).
  • pmiller2 7y ago
    I know my team manager can’t unilaterally fire me unless I fuck up in a truly egregious way. But, if I don’t keep him happy, word will get to the people who can start the ball rolling to fire me, and then I’m in deep shit.
• erobbins 7y ago
  Can not agree more. Anyone wonder why IC starts at level 3 but managers start at level 5? It's not because they're separate but equal.
  • bethling 7y ago
    My experience at most tech companies (Amazon, Google, etc), to become a manager you need to demonstrate that you have the technical ability to perform at senior(ish) level IC before you become a manager. i.e. You go from L5 IC to L5 Manager. Not L3/L4 IC to L5 manager.
• gerad 7y ago
  Career and compensation growth is a function of scaling your output. The more senior you get and the higher your compensation gets, the greater the expectation is that you accelerate the work of others around you. Historically, this has been easiest to do through management. If I make a team of 10 each 10% more effective, then I've effectively doubled my (individual) output. Software engineering is different than most traditional roles. It offers other ways to accelerate the velocity of others; ways that don't require being a manager. This is why compensation can be decoupled from management in these roles and why parallel tracks can truly exist in this role. But the tracks remain parallel only as long as you're continually scaling your output. This takes effort and discipline. It happens more automatically through management promotion (though not for managers that never get promoted to lead larger teams).
  • dublidu 7y ago
    This 100%. Having been both engineer and manager, I have to say it is much harder for engineers get promoted beyond the senior level, so pay is going to be higher over time for managers.
• jonathanfoster 7y ago
  Will Durant puts this very succinctly in "Lessons of History" [1]: "History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all." In my experience, a management role has typically come with 10-20% more compensation versus a comparable individual contributor role, but 100% more responsibility and accountability. I wouldn't worry too much about parity between the two tracks, focus on what you truly enjoy doing. Besides, the money guys can fire us all ;-) [1] https://www.amazon.com/Lessons-History-Will-Durant/dp/143914995X/ https://www.amazon.com/Lessons-History-Will-Durant/dp/143914...
  • specialist 7y ago
    The last time I had a supervisor that wielded actual responsibility and accountability was 1992. aka A Good Boss. Every one else just failed upwards or was cannon fodder for those who could (fail upwards). As a Junior Power Ranger, I had three terrific jobs. Work hard, do well, get rewarded. Good experiences that completely screwed me for the shark infested waters of corporate america. I wish I had read The Prince earlier.
  • sjg007 7y ago
    This being hacker news, the best way to capture your value is to go create something and sell it directly to the market.
    • vinceguidry 7y ago
      Entering a market isn't for the faint-hearted. I got interested in buying turn-key online businesses last week. This way someone else gets to bear the risk of bringing a product to market and you can just focus on cashing checks and helping it grow.
• prepend 7y ago
  I spent a lot of time in big4 consulting and it’s got a lot of high bill rate specialists in addition to normal partner people. It’s not true that manager know your salary, nor that they can fire you. Managers there controlled projects and investments but almost no one knew salary unless you were HR. Raises and bonuses were always in percentages and only your local mega partner who didn’t actually manage you knew real numbers. Profitability was based on averages and bands to discourage minmaxing profitability on projects as that was detrimental to delivery and to clients. Markup and overhead was so high it was pretty difficult to be unprofitable. So maybe in some orgs there’s strict boss type ladders. But there are many orgs where parallel is real.
• Waterluvian 7y ago
  An interesting situation is when you become known as so invaluable by higher levels of management that this dynamic gets inverted. Maybe it just feels good but there's something that feels right about your manager working for you, getting you the resources, answers, and commitments from others that you need. And in return they get to boast all the cool shit you make to their boss.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • greymalik 7y ago
    Some organizations actually consider that arrangement an important part of their work culture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership https://planet-lean.com/spotify-agile-leadership-lean/ https://planet-lean.com/spotify-agile-leadership-lean/
• dilyevsky 7y ago
  I agree with informational advantage and sort of self patting on the back thing but it’s also that average manager is a lot better at politics than average IC. Because it is literally their job. So a lot of power imbalance comes from that imo
• dublidu 7y ago
  It’s also much easier to get promoted as a manager M1 to M2 vs senior engineer to staff engineer. Managers automatically have a lot of impact across multiple teams, but it’s much harder for senior engineers to demonstrate that.
  • bethling 7y ago
    Having been a Senior IC and a Manager at a couple of big companies, I agree that that promotion is probably easier as a manager, but I worked with orgs/teams that had multiple senior staff/director-level ICs, but only 1 senior manager, director, etc. M1->M2 is possible managing a single team, but often M3 isn't. As long as the senior manager/director is there, you're not going to get promoted. On the other hand, I've worked hard to get IC's on my teams promoted up and out of my team because good directors rely on their Sr. Staff/Prinicpal engineers so there's room for them to grow (even if it's difficult).
• hinkley 7y ago
  Managers have a perverse incentive to use 100 engineers to do something that a team of 20 with adequate support and equipment could do just as well.
• zerr 7y ago
  What if I prefer working with the code (and fellow engineers)?
• vonseel 7y ago
  the good ones will soon become managers of managers, and then managers of managers of managers. Perhaps the most successful managers (sometimes) are the best at pushing their own agendas and making themselves look good, as your comments may imply. I’m sure the Peter principle comes into effect here when that is the case. The best managers in the most functional organizations must align more with your final comment.
• je42 7y ago
  why wouldn't you be able to rise on the "parallel track" ?
• goatinaboat 7y ago
  Right. Companies - which means "managers" - operate on the weird assumption that "programmers are smart enough to model our arcane business processes, but not smart enough to figure out the implications of those processes for themselves". If you are at level N in a company and (capable of) operating at level N+1, then your choices are to wait and hope that is recognised by your completely fair, impartial managers and you get promoted, or interview elsewhere and take your career path into your own hands. The second option is more reliable and likely to result in higher comp too!