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I kinda disagree, Oracle/HP (personal experience) and Google/IBM (extremely good friends) both have career tracks for IC which go up to ‘Distinguished Engineer’

I kinda disagree, Oracle/HP (personal experience) and Google/IBM (extremely good friends) both have career tracks for IC which go up to ‘Distinguished Engineer’ level, and where compensation can be equivalent to a VP on the management track. What you might be trying to say is there are more available positions at VP than DE, so your chances of making it are better? Or that being promoted to VP is easier than to DE? I think having seen how the sausage is made, would agree with both of those.

peripitea 7y ago
Yes, that's exactly what he's saying -- the "just as well" part is key. Sure, there's an IC track that goes up to the SVP level at many companies, but it's statistically much harder to climb pretty much everywhere.
- enitihas 7y ago
  I think most companies do not even have IC roles analogous to SVP. Google has two Senior fellows, and those are two guys who are far too famous and responsible for too much of the Google backbone infrastructure.
  - peripitea 7y ago
    Yeah you're probably right that VP, rather than SVP, is the more common cutoff.
jedberg 7y ago
> both have career tracks for IC which go up to ‘Distinguished Engineer’ level, and where compensation can be equivalent to a VP on the management track. Sure, it exists. How many DEs do you know of, vs. VPs? How do you get a DE job? Usually you are the most well known person in your field. How you do you get a VP job? You have to be a pretty good manager. At Google, there are 100s of VPs. There are maybe 10 DEs, if that many. That's the BS. It's like saying "there is totally a path to getting really rich as an actor!". Sure, there is a path, but not a lot of people make it. And even the ones that do usually get there by also doing the management path (producer) at the same time. The lie is in the claim it's just as easy to climb the DE ladder as it is the VP ladder. It's not. Not even close.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  > At Google, there are 100s of VPs. There are maybe 10 DEs, if that many Fwiw, the number is significantly higher than 10, though still fewer than there are VPs. That said, things get tricky: there are DEs who have reports, and there are VPs with no (or trivial, like 3) reports. But either way, if your metric is DE/VP or if it's manager of a large org vs IC/TLM, the number of IC-track people is higher than you suggest.

peripitea 7y ago

Yes, that's exactly what he's saying -- the "just as well" part is key. Sure, there's an IC track that goes up to the SVP level at many companies, but it's statistically much harder to climb pretty much everywhere.

enitihas 7y ago
I think most companies do not even have IC roles analogous to SVP. Google has two Senior fellows, and those are two guys who are far too famous and responsible for too much of the Google backbone infrastructure.
- peripitea 7y ago
  Yeah you're probably right that VP, rather than SVP, is the more common cutoff.

jedberg 7y ago

> both have career tracks for IC which go up to ‘Distinguished Engineer’ level, and where compensation can be equivalent to a VP on the management track. Sure, it exists. How many DEs do you know of, vs. VPs? How do you get a DE job? Usually you are the most well known person in your field. How you do you get a VP job? You have to be a pretty good manager. At Google, there are 100s of VPs. There are maybe 10 DEs, if that many. That's the BS. It's like saying "there is totally a path to getting really rich as an actor!". Sure, there is a path, but not a lot of people make it. And even the ones that do usually get there by also doing the management path (producer) at the same time. The lie is in the claim it's just as easy to climb the DE ladder as it is the VP ladder. It's not. Not even close.

joshuamorton 7y ago
> At Google, there are 100s of VPs. There are maybe 10 DEs, if that many Fwiw, the number is significantly higher than 10, though still fewer than there are VPs. That said, things get tricky: there are DEs who have reports, and there are VPs with no (or trivial, like 3) reports. But either way, if your metric is DE/VP or if it's manager of a large org vs IC/TLM, the number of IC-track people is higher than you suggest.