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It's not about losing the building muscle. It's about losing the motivation to do so in tech companies. After many years of being IC, things can get boring. You

It's not about losing the building muscle. It's about losing the motivation to do so in tech companies. After many years of being IC, things can get boring. You keep doing the same things, even if you move companies and technologies change. And you always do it in a sub-optimal environment - things like working with tooling you don't like, under managers or with co-workers you don't really like, on projects you're not super excited about, etc. So moving to management is almost inevitable. Not to mention there are other reasons such as better salary and more visibility to change things. Also, people need change in their life. Moving to management is one way to change things. Some people go back to being IC, but most don't.

adamc 6y ago
IMO, management was worse. Talk about things I didn't like. Moved back to engineering and never regretted it.
- mjayhn 6y ago
  I loathe being in management and am totally aware that I'm probably a bad manager, so I've got a lot of respect for engineers who wind up being put in management roles, but the one thing that keeps pushing me to want to go back into management is getting put into a team with an abysmal or completely missing culture that I feel like mostly stems from terrible leadership. I'm finally to the point where I'm confident enough with my career to actually make noise and complain about things that I'm tired of dealing with which I wasn't in my 20s, but now I'm dealing with my complaints not causing any change in the end.
joeblau 6y ago
You know what's funny. I would not call the environment you're describing as a tech company. I would call what you're talking about a tech-enabled company. If you are working at a tech-enabled company, then I 100% agree with you about moving to management becoming inevitable. Tech-enabled IC's are basically rendering JSON/SQL/NoSQL in on Desktop/Web/Mobile. If you're company is just spinning up .Net Core/Node/Django/fill-in-framework-here to build a website to show some data, that's not a tech company to me. When I say tech company, I'm talking about companies where software engineering skills actually matter. where a O(n²) algorithm also will cost your business. In my definition of a tech company there are tons of new things happening. Look at the spaces like AR, self-driving, rocketry, and machine-learning, and computational photography — no one in any of those fields is doing the same thing they were doing even 2 years ago.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  Your definition of tech company excludes most projects at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple.
  - durovo 6y ago
    Yes, don't think that is wrong though. There are very few teams even in the FAANGs that are working on interesting problems. So instead of talking about tech companies, we should be talking about tech teams.
  - bestouff 6y ago
    These are ad companies.
    - varjag 6y ago
      Out of these, only Google has substantial share of revenue from the ads.
  - joeblau 6y ago
    You're absolutely correct. That's why if I applied to work at any of those companies (I've already worked at Amazon) I would be extremely particular about what project I work on.
- hellisothers 6y ago
  I dunno man, this sounds like some unnecessary exclusionary gate keeping on the really broad term of “tech company”. Instead of trying to take this broad term and scope it down for your own purposes why not use a narrow term for your narrow definition. This is like when CS graduates claim people without a CS degree aren’t software engineers and shouldn’t be hired into the same roles... to render JSON on a mobile device.
  - joeblau 6y ago
    It's just my own mental model that I use to separate companies like Hertz and Taxi's (both of whole have have apps) from Lyft and Uber. How would you describe the difference between those two types of companies?

adamc 6y ago

IMO, management was worse. Talk about things I didn't like. Moved back to engineering and never regretted it.

mjayhn 6y ago
I loathe being in management and am totally aware that I'm probably a bad manager, so I've got a lot of respect for engineers who wind up being put in management roles, but the one thing that keeps pushing me to want to go back into management is getting put into a team with an abysmal or completely missing culture that I feel like mostly stems from terrible leadership. I'm finally to the point where I'm confident enough with my career to actually make noise and complain about things that I'm tired of dealing with which I wasn't in my 20s, but now I'm dealing with my complaints not causing any change in the end.

joeblau 6y ago

You know what's funny. I would not call the environment you're describing as a tech company. I would call what you're talking about a tech-enabled company. If you are working at a tech-enabled company, then I 100% agree with you about moving to management becoming inevitable. Tech-enabled IC's are basically rendering JSON/SQL/NoSQL in on Desktop/Web/Mobile. If you're company is just spinning up .Net Core/Node/Django/fill-in-framework-here to build a website to show some data, that's not a tech company to me. When I say tech company, I'm talking about companies where software engineering skills actually matter. where a O(n²) algorithm also will cost your business. In my definition of a tech company there are tons of new things happening. Look at the spaces like AR, self-driving, rocketry, and machine-learning, and computational photography — no one in any of those fields is doing the same thing they were doing even 2 years ago.

freeone3000 6y ago
Your definition of tech company excludes most projects at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple.
- durovo 6y ago
  Yes, don't think that is wrong though. There are very few teams even in the FAANGs that are working on interesting problems. So instead of talking about tech companies, we should be talking about tech teams.
- bestouff 6y ago
  These are ad companies.
  - varjag 6y ago
    Out of these, only Google has substantial share of revenue from the ads.
- joeblau 6y ago
  You're absolutely correct. That's why if I applied to work at any of those companies (I've already worked at Amazon) I would be extremely particular about what project I work on.
hellisothers 6y ago
I dunno man, this sounds like some unnecessary exclusionary gate keeping on the really broad term of “tech company”. Instead of trying to take this broad term and scope it down for your own purposes why not use a narrow term for your narrow definition. This is like when CS graduates claim people without a CS degree aren’t software engineers and shouldn’t be hired into the same roles... to render JSON on a mobile device.
- joeblau 6y ago
  It's just my own mental model that I use to separate companies like Hertz and Taxi's (both of whole have have apps) from Lyft and Uber. How would you describe the difference between those two types of companies?