6 ms·

The problem with growth as an IC is that one person only has so many hours in a day. The only real way to multiply your impact is to transition from using your

The problem with growth as an IC is that one person only has so many hours in a day. The only real way to multiply your impact is to transition from using your own hours to produce work towards directing the hours others use to produce work. Simple math shows that your own productivity scales only up to 24 hrs/day while you can easily direct a team of 4 towards 32 hours a day of productivity and actually get some sleep.

geofft 7y ago
I don't know if that requires being a people manager, specifically. You can also scale your work by being able to work alongside other people to help them maximize their impact - you don't necessarily need to work above them, choose their work, direct their performance reviews, etc. If you do it right, this also scales well. If you can help a hundred people do their work 10% more productively, that is also more effective than helping four people do their work 50% more productively. Most tech companies that have separate engineering-IC and engineering-management ladders try to keep roughly similar expectations at each level about scope/breadth of impact, it's just that for engineering management, it's "how many people do you transitively manage," and for the IC ladder, it's not as obvious. I think this article does address that by pointing out that the design management career track generally expects you to manage both increasing numbers of people and increasing amounts of work, and those don't need to be the same thing: > Overlapping responsibilities between IC and managers is the most prominent issue I’ve observed, but it’s an easy one to resolve by looking at where the line is drawn between people and product on the team. (This sort of reminds me of a similar problem in academia: there are three separate skillsets, doing research, leading researchers/scaling a research lab, and instructing students, that tend to be conflated into one ladder. They don't need to be.)
BurningFrog 7y ago
You can also pair program. No better way to spread your skills to the whole team.
bcrosby95 7y ago
This just isn't true. A friend of mine is an IC and regularly ends up making original tools that solve his problems that everyone else at his company ends up adopting. The company recognizes this and awards him in kind. He makes around 1 million in regular salary. He has way more impact than any individual manager. If you want to have a huge impact at your company as an IC, solve the higher level problems that both you and your fellow developers are having.
- bob33212 7y ago
  It is simpler to manage a company without arrangements like this. It makes ICs and Level 1 managers more interchangeable. If you moved the 1M employee over to another group it would blow up that manager's budget. The more interchangeable employees are the better for some people in upper management who don't actually care about maximizing cost efficiency and productivity. They are maximizing other metrics.
  - lbotos 7y ago
    You've hit the nail on the head for bigCo. It's alllll about what's being measured.
  - herewego 7y ago
    That 1M employee is generally not “moved” to another group, in my experience. They are often already at a seniority level that is above the group. Also, like most VP’s, their compensation is not typically accounted for in a group/division/etc budget in the same way as their reports.
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    > They are maximizing other metrics. Can not be customer satisfaction (by quality) or employee happiness or retention. I wonder what those other metrics are.
    - matfil 7y ago
      I wonder what those other metrics are. A big one is that managers are de facto judged by the size of their team (and, for more senior ones, the size of the tree underneath them, too). It seems to be really, really hard to have middle management in an organisation without "maximise headcount" becoming an unofficial goal. Edit: Employee happiness is an interesting one here. It's quite believable to me that being seen to cut down a few tall poppies might have a positive impact on (mean) employee happiness in some cases.
gfodor 7y ago
In a world where various technology curves are going through exponential improvement, this seems like a false mental model. Scaling yourself out as a manager may offer some kind of linear multiplier over raw output, but hard to say without context. (For example, if you are a strong contributor managing weak contributors, the net effect may in fact be negative in terms of raw productive hours.) However, that linear multiplier doesn't mean jack in a world where technology can create exponential leverage. I'm pretty sure on a given day, the potential for a single or small set of individuals (without any centralized management) to produce products and systems that change the world is higher than any day previous.
TuringNYC 7y ago
Depends on your industry. In the investments industry, there are many ICs who do well both impact-wise and financially. That is because the input of scale is AUM (dollars being invested.) You work the same but pump more $ into your algo. That is why you see tiny hedge funds doing well, both for finance, quant, and tech workers.

geofft 7y ago

I don't know if that requires being a people manager, specifically. You can also scale your work by being able to work alongside other people to help them maximize their impact - you don't necessarily need to work above them, choose their work, direct their performance reviews, etc. If you do it right, this also scales well. If you can help a hundred people do their work 10% more productively, that is also more effective than helping four people do their work 50% more productively. Most tech companies that have separate engineering-IC and engineering-management ladders try to keep roughly similar expectations at each level about scope/breadth of impact, it's just that for engineering management, it's "how many people do you transitively manage," and for the IC ladder, it's not as obvious. I think this article does address that by pointing out that the design management career track generally expects you to manage both increasing numbers of people and increasing amounts of work, and those don't need to be the same thing: > Overlapping responsibilities between IC and managers is the most prominent issue I’ve observed, but it’s an easy one to resolve by looking at where the line is drawn between people and product on the team. (This sort of reminds me of a similar problem in academia: there are three separate skillsets, doing research, leading researchers/scaling a research lab, and instructing students, that tend to be conflated into one ladder. They don't need to be.)

BurningFrog 7y ago

You can also pair program. No better way to spread your skills to the whole team.

bcrosby95 7y ago

This just isn't true. A friend of mine is an IC and regularly ends up making original tools that solve his problems that everyone else at his company ends up adopting. The company recognizes this and awards him in kind. He makes around 1 million in regular salary. He has way more impact than any individual manager. If you want to have a huge impact at your company as an IC, solve the higher level problems that both you and your fellow developers are having.

bob33212 7y ago
It is simpler to manage a company without arrangements like this. It makes ICs and Level 1 managers more interchangeable. If you moved the 1M employee over to another group it would blow up that manager's budget. The more interchangeable employees are the better for some people in upper management who don't actually care about maximizing cost efficiency and productivity. They are maximizing other metrics.
- lbotos 7y ago
  You've hit the nail on the head for bigCo. It's alllll about what's being measured.
- herewego 7y ago
  That 1M employee is generally not “moved” to another group, in my experience. They are often already at a seniority level that is above the group. Also, like most VP’s, their compensation is not typically accounted for in a group/division/etc budget in the same way as their reports.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  > They are maximizing other metrics. Can not be customer satisfaction (by quality) or employee happiness or retention. I wonder what those other metrics are.
  - matfil 7y ago
    I wonder what those other metrics are. A big one is that managers are de facto judged by the size of their team (and, for more senior ones, the size of the tree underneath them, too). It seems to be really, really hard to have middle management in an organisation without "maximise headcount" becoming an unofficial goal. Edit: Employee happiness is an interesting one here. It's quite believable to me that being seen to cut down a few tall poppies might have a positive impact on (mean) employee happiness in some cases.

gfodor 7y ago

In a world where various technology curves are going through exponential improvement, this seems like a false mental model. Scaling yourself out as a manager may offer some kind of linear multiplier over raw output, but hard to say without context. (For example, if you are a strong contributor managing weak contributors, the net effect may in fact be negative in terms of raw productive hours.) However, that linear multiplier doesn't mean jack in a world where technology can create exponential leverage. I'm pretty sure on a given day, the potential for a single or small set of individuals (without any centralized management) to produce products and systems that change the world is higher than any day previous.

TuringNYC 7y ago

Depends on your industry. In the investments industry, there are many ICs who do well both impact-wise and financially. That is because the input of scale is AUM (dollars being invested.) You work the same but pump more $ into your algo. That is why you see tiny hedge funds doing well, both for finance, quant, and tech workers.