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If management isn't a promotion, then engineering isn't a demotion
- nickff 6y agoThis is an interesting instance of two HN tropes in conflict: Managers are able to ‘create’ more (by improving IC productivity) than any individual contributor (and thus more value), unless you believe in 10x engineers.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- joshuamorton 6y agoA senior IC who is a technical lead or area lead can do the same without formally leading anyone. I know of quite a few teams where there is a high level manager and an equal level IC who report to the same director. They're both responsible for the same scope of work, (and this is oversimplifying) just one is responsible for the tech and one for the people.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoYeah, I'm the technical lead and report to a director. My contributions are 50% personal, 50% "team acceleration" (ie: ensure your teammates are able to get things done quicker including pairing, code walkthroughs, documentation, last minute team changes to ensure a project succeeds)
- jgeada 6y agoIt is a meme that is largely self-fulfilling under the wrong organizational incentives: as managers control how and what information flows in an organization, managers in many organizations claim a lions share of credit for successes and delegate failures. What is more likely: that Musk is a genius electric car engineer, rocket engineer, battery engineer, tunnel boring machine engineer, ... ? Or that he takes credit from those people in his various teams? Don't get me wrong, there is certainly value from assembling the right team.
- Viliam1234 6y agoI think it is similar for managers and developers. There are 10x managers and 10x developers, but both are very rare. The are also net-negative managers and net-negative developers, both are a minority but sufficiently large that most people already met a few of them. That is, a manager can "create more than any individual contributor", but most of them don't.
- lallysingh 6y agoDoes anyone do the pendulum? How well does it work?
- analog31 6y agoI've done it. Like many people, I moved to the management track when my first kid was born. I realized that moving up as a manager required actually competing with the other managers and being better than them. It wasn't going to happen. As the low level project manager, I got the low level projects. I moved back to IC when they finally posted an opening to backfill my job. I went to my boss and said: "I can be a mediocre manager or a great engineer, you choose." Later on there was a big reshuffling of the department, and I was asked if I wanted to be a manager. I said yes. More reshuffling thinned my team down to 2 reports, and I kind of oozed my way back into IC by just doing IC work for people when I wasn't managing. All of these moves were promotions in both pay and title. One thing you learn by being through a few annual cycles at your business is how it really works. For instance, things like performance reviews, pay increases, promotions, etc. This knowledge will serve you in any career.
- commandlinefan 6y ago> project manager In every organization I've ever worked in, project management was very different than management management: project managers never ended up actually "managing" people as in hiring, firing, budgeting, setting direction for, etc.
- analog31 6y agoQuite true. I was a people-manager the second time around. And as an entry level manager I had very little actual discretion over those things. I'm just giving myself as an example of someone who went back.
- fatnoah 6y agoI've gone from IC to Manager and back a couple times. The first time was becoming "manager by default" in a growing startup. I then moved on to another startup as a tech lead, became "manager by default" again, and eventually VP of Engineering. That startup was acquired and the teams dispersed, and I eventually ended up back in an IC role (which, despite assurances from my boss, ended up being a demotion resulting in lower bonus and reduced stock awards). I sucked it up and worked as an IC for while and realized that, after 20 years, I have little interest in writing code for a living any more. I truly enjoyed the strategic and personal growth aspects of managing, so I left that company and have only taken manager roles. I find managing to be much more stressful, but supporting my people through these trying teams has been a highlight of my career.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago> The work done by a database engineer is different from the work done by a VP marketing, or a director of database engineering. It is not inherently better or worse, easier or harder, more or less deserving of praise and admiration. It is simply different. The big problem is that it is the VPs and directors who are getting together and deciding what everyone should be paid. And, lo and behold, somehow, they almost always decide that VPs and directors should get paid more than database engineers.
- jeffbee 6y agoEh, market forces are more influential than this. You can't simply decide how much to pay engineers, any more than you can decide what your rent is going to cost.
- bitdizzy 6y agoThere was a whole scandal about this, wasn't there?
- shuckles 6y agoThe supply of database marketing VPs seems harder to define than the supply of engineers who could build production features in large database projects. In particular, the former seems a lot more easily manipulated and dependent on who existing VPs consider qualified.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoThe rule of thumb is “the closer you are to the money, the more you make”. People rarely demand what they are worth since they usually value security over maximizing income, but if you are familiar with the numbers, then you are in a much better negotiating position. People should always keep applying to jobs, even if they don’t intend on accepting them just to keep a pulse on the value of the labor they are selling.
- seneca 6y agoI've been the Director. HR mostly sets salary bands. The recruiter, candidate (via negotiating), and hiring manager can only really move around within those bands. Those bands are largely based on market research.
- zepto 6y agoThis is great in principle, but it’s only a starting point - there are huge issues that are left unaddressed. The biggest issue is that it presents status as if it can be conferred independently of power, or as if we can change the dynamics purely by changing the way we think about this. Managers have power for many reasons - they generally do have a significant influence over subordinate’s career prospects, and they have access to all kinds of organizational information that ICs simply can’t obtain, at the very least because they can usually spend time in conversation with other managers or in meetings with people at higher levels in the organization. Engineers obtain power through indispensable or highly valued domain expertise or institutional knowledge. Both forms of power are real and confer status. If you move from management to engineering and your power as a manager is not replaced with corresponding power as an engineer then you have been demoted in status, irrespective of how the organization claims to value people. Organizations that want to deny this, even with the most positive intentions end up gaslighting their employees. I.e. saying things like “Our organization doesn’t see these moves as a demotion”, when manifestly the individual’s power and status has changed in a way they and everyone else can directly perceive.
- jgeada 6y agoICs largely wield informal power within organizations, managers have real formal power, codified in organizations charts, rules and regulations. Whenever there is conflict between the two, almost always formal power wins over informal. Not the least because managers control salaries and hire/fire decisions.
- zepto 6y agoAgreed, although on top of that there is usually an informal power structure within the formal one of the management hierarchy based on who is favored by those above them at a given time.
- mathgladiator 6y agoThe key for those with informal power is how to leverage it to leverage the formal. Get managers to trust you, and you can have both.
- luscious_t 6y agoI think the focus on "managers have power" is overstated. Places I've worked (as both an IC and a manager) there's also greater responsibility and higher ups hold the managers much more accountable than the ICs. I know many people who simply do not want the responsibility or accountability. Maybe the work is not better or worse, easier or harder, but often there is more pressure/stress.
- WalterSear 6y ago> Maybe the work is not better or worse, easier or harder, but often there is more pressure/stress. None of these are directly relevant to the power imbalance.
- commandlinefan 6y ago> managers have power Respect, too. I've lost count of how many times I've been stuck waiting for somebody in the network group to grant me access to some resource I need to do my job until somebody that they actually respect (that is, a manager) tells them that they have to.
- Kinrany 6y agoIsn't this normal? If they're not your manager, it's not their job to make sure you can do your job. Though arguably the manager should have arranged for an easier process if this happens more than a few times.
- nip180 6y agoToo much bureaucracy for access to internal resources (api access, repository access, requisition of servers, google doc permissions, w/e) slows down ICs and is a sign of bad corporate culture. There’s a difference between needing to ask for access to shared resources and asking for someone else to do work. So many corporations silo there teams so deeply that PRs from outside members aren’t even considered. Collaboration isn’t given anything more than lib service.
- zargon 6y agoIC = individual contributor. I was trying to figure that out till they defined it halfway through the article.
- paganel 6y agoThanks for that, I had seen the same acronym on that article from today of a (I think former) Salesforce staff engineer describing her experience there, and of course that I didn’t know what it meant.
- wjdp 6y agoI remember when we started using it at work, was the first time I'd seen the term, and then seeing it everywhere esp. on HN.
- thelean12 6y agoThey're promotions if you get paid more. They're demotions if you get paid less. People refuse promotions all the time because they don't want the role/responsibility and prefer other stuff besides money. Doesn't mean it wouldn't have been a promotion.
- sg47 6y agoYou get more power as a manager because you have influence over engineers and their careers, even the ones that get paid more than you unless they have been with the company for a long time and have built relationships with the higher ups.
- LanceH 6y agoAnd more access to bonuses and equity (typically).
- thelean12 6y agoIf your compensation isn't higher when switching ladders, then it doesn't matter how much influence you have. It's a demotion. To be clear, that's not necessarily bad. Imagine your boss coming to you to congratulate you on your promotion, and then mentioning that your pay will be reduced by 10% because now you're management. How'd you feel about them calling it a promotion?
- user5994461 6y ago> People refuse promotions all the time because they don't want a major change of role/responsibility for a 5% raise. There. Fixed it for you.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gamesbrainiac 6y agoI really hate these kinds of articles, primarily because they are trying to sugar-coat reality here. The fact of the matter is this, management _is_ a promotion, because you get paid more and you gain access to more powers. If it were _not_ a promotion within the company, no one would take it up. Management is a simple deal, you give up power _outside_ of the company for power _within_ the company. It is far easier to join another company as an Engineer than it is as an Engineering Manager. However, I agree that it should not be. It should not be there to create a sense of hierarchy. This is why, I believe that you should rotate your managers _within_ the team. Back at my old company, we had people who would go into a Team Lead position for a certain project, and then someone else would take over. Pay was already high, so no one really wanted to take up lead because it meant more responsibility. This is how power needs to be treated, you should not have it for too long. This is why we have term limits.
- coding123 6y agoI've never seen "team lead" as a management role. Team lead is more of technical tie-breaker role on technical decisions. It's not a management role if you can't fire someone.
- gamesbrainiac 6y agoI was a Team Lead, and I could fire someone, but that firing would be handled by HR. Also in Europe, you can't fire people at will like you can in the US, which is a lot more humane.
- gambiting 6y agoI am a team lead and I'm definitely a manager - 80% of my time is managing people, not making technical decisions, that's more for technical directors(who in turn do not manage anyone). And why would managers be able to fire people though? I can recommend that someone be let go to HR, but ultimately that's not up to managers. The process takes at least 6 months unless for gross misconduct anyway, it's far too complex to be up to a single person.
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- adrianmonk 6y agoIt doesn't matter how you define what is or isn't a promotion. The real issue is that there isn't one, single right answer about what role is right for everybody. It is not the case that being a manager is strictly better in every way for every person. That's the assumption that people need to let go of.
- dominotw 6y ago> That's the assumption that people need to let go of. Its not an assumption, its a fact that managers everywhere on average get paid more than IC. Unless you are working for a non profit or some cutting edge change the world stuff. Why would you work for less.
- dahfizz 6y ago> Why would you work for less. Because I am more than comfortable on my engineer salary and being a manager would make me miserable.
- dominotw 6y agoSure but by that logic no two jobs can ever be compared to each other. Someone can always say because I am comfortable doing X than Y, thats not something anyone can respond to.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kaspm 6y agoI think one thing that's missing from this article is what engineers at higher levels of IC status (up to VP) do. When a Sr. Engineer is choosing between a Manager and a "Principal Engineer" type role, I have to remind them that PEs also don't do much depth coding. They write proposals, discuss architecture, sit in meetings. Ultimately, the same mechanisms that Managers use. There's certainly SOME PEs that go deep in some areas but the majority I've worked with are broad owners of technology in large organizations. The difference between the two roles often has to do with what balance of time you want to spend influencing others for broad goals vs. building up jr. folks to accomplish your team's goal. In either case your authority is derived from whether people "under" you want to work with you. People who can't get a set of people to go a certain direction won't last long in either role.
- ses1984 6y agoThis article was on HN yesterday and I like the way that four different types of staff engineers are described: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24437715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24437715
- sciurus 6y agoOn the same topic, https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes
- robocat 6y agoOne fix could be to give managers a title that is of lower rank than an engineer e.g. a manager’s official title should be “support” and ensure that every part of their role is about supporting the engineers they are responsible to.
- bradgessler 6y agoOr give them a title like “collaboration engineer”
- entropicdrifter 6y agoI wouldn't give anyone in management the title of engineer, just for the sake of clarity to external collaborators
- mywittyname 6y agoAgreed, there has begun a huge overuse of the term engineer recently. It used to mean a person who made/built the adjective in their title. Now, sales people, recruiters, etc are all becoming engineers, it's becoming to tech what VP is to banking.
- ryall 6y agoI like it! "Team Support" would be the perfect job title to really drive this home
- theonemind 6y agoThat kind of reminds me of how military dogs usually outrank their handler: https://science.howstuffworks.com/military-dogs-outrank-handlers.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/military-dogs-outrank-hand... I've heard that if you abuse the dog, you can get charged with assaulting a superior officer.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoEngineer Handler job title wouldn't fly in the #metoo era
- b0rsuk 6y agoSeems like people instinctively associate status with having control over other people. Maybe engineers could fight back by calling their programs cute names or putting hats on servers? Cloud computing is not helping though.
- throwaway4715 6y agoIf you think there are a lot of bad managers now wait until they're explicitly paid less and aren't accountable for their team's impact (what happens when you shift all accountability of technical strategy to TL).
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoThere is another aspect of it: when you want to change from management to "lower" status jobs, the person hiring you will have a hard time understanding your decision. "You understand you're overqualified for this post, right"? They get suspicious even if you're a perfect candidate.
- mlthoughts2018 6y agoThis reads more like an attempt to extract “powers” that managers have and give them to staff / principal engineers, but I think this is a bad mistake. The people in those roles should influence those things, sure, but not “own” them, under some faulty idea that management doesn’t lead or own strategic and technical roadmaps or execution. An engineering manager is someone who takes inputs from their immediate team or staff, as well as cross-functional stakeholders like product managers, directors, staff/principal engineers, and more. Then you synthesize that into team or org investments: projects, roadmaps, staffing, resources, tools. An engineering manager is not someone who “just executes 1-1s and fills out HR feedback cycles.” They are more like a staff engineer or architect who takes an expanded point of view to include team dynamics, career growth, budgets, strategy and resources into the solution design process. This often just is a promotion above staff or principal IC roles because it usurps and supersedes a lot of that work while also involving additional new work managing career growth, hiring, training, resource investment, etc. I’d put product manager and engineering manager at the top of the promotion pyramid (excluding director / VP / executive roles). Staff and Principal ICs are next, then the rest of ICs.
- alexbanks 6y agoIf one group has firing power, and the other does not, they are not equal, regardless of what's written down.
- barrkel 6y agoIt's not that simple. First line managers rarely have the power to simply fire on a whim. There has to be cause, and it needs to be evidenced, and there will be multiple people involved in the decision. If you're a more senior engineer, you may report to a manager of managers, and line managers may be your peers organisationally, and probably not paid as well as you are. Engineers also get to make a different kind of decision to managers; and it's often the longer term, higher leverage, more strategic kind of decision. Line managers are much more operationally focused and rarely have the bandwidth or tasking for strategic decisions.
- microtherion 6y agoOne further complication is when a move back to engineering is coupled to a change in employer. As an interviewer, seeing somebody whose last job was in a management role apply for an IC position is a warning signal for me. Do they just apply for that position to get a foot in the door (especially for a move to a FAANG), and will they immediately angle for a move back to management? So this is generally an area where I would ask follow up questions (and probe a bit harder in the technical interview, to assess whether any rust has crept into the technical skills). It's not an automatic red flag; we've hired former managers for IC roles and it worked out, and leadership ambition can be a positive in any role, but it's worth some exploring.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ronyfadel 6y agoThis hit close to home. A manager at a previous company kept saying that his role was to support engineers and that management was a separate track, that he wasn’t my superior (probably from some internal training BS). He acted completely the opposite way. He obviously wielded more power by having more information, and, to add insult to injury, played tech lead as well. Suffice it to say, over the years almost all the original ICs have left his team, and he’s still wondering why he can’t get the team to run. Good riddance.
- giantg2 6y agoIf your company is like mine, then they'll combine the jobs and pay you the lower of the two salaries while selling it as a great opportunity. Simultaneous promotion and demotion.
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoSolution: take away some of the formal powers of management - for example the ability to assign resources on personal decisions. A manger wants X to happen so spends Y of her budget to hire a team to do it. That is power. Simply make all such decisions open, transparent and democratically elected - in other words have employees vote. We live in a world where we value democracy but spend our working lives in autocratic dictatorships. Yes Coase and efficient allocation, but really I think information revolution is changing that equation. Democracy in companies now! Struggle brothers !
- zepto 6y agoI upvoted you because the point about spending our working lives in dictatorships is very valid, but I don’t think for a second that voting would work.
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoBut ... let's look at GE. It's basically worth nothing at net now. And it was the great poster child for brilliant management decisions - that take any industry and run it using GE managers and allocate capital the GE way and it will win. Turns out not so. This is the lesson of history - great Kings and Emperors really do make great world beating decisions. But anything less than great leads to disaster whereas parliaments don't do great but they do keep growing and managing well for centuries. We need to stop relying on great CEOs and kings and look for ways to run a company well. PIRC has lots of research on the central founder risk to long term value. but just ask this - imagine Elon Musk retires tomorrow. Do we want to hope we hire his clone or do we want a strong driven community of engineers to keep knocking out battery improvements for 2 decades. I know which one i want my money in, and which one will make better headlines.
- zepto 6y agoEverything you just said is fine, however, nothing in your comment in any way suggests or supports the idea that voting would work. Agreeing on a problem is not the same as agreeing on a solution.
- somewhereoutth 6y agoInteresting to compare this with practices in other professions, eg Doctors, Architects, Scientists and so forth. Certainly management happens in those areas, but I believe that as your career progresses you would naturally be expected to take on more management activities - there isn't a dual track in quite the same way. In more recent times the waters appear to have become muddied somewhat, with the appearance (and glorification) of administrators, project managers, 'CEOs' of various kinds.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoMost of those people are independent entrepreneurs or senior ICs, not managers.
- mikenew 6y agoIn my opinion the best way to deal with the issue of hierarchy would be to make management an assignment, not a job. Someone takes on the role of "manager" for an upcoming project, at at the conclusion of that project they go back to engineering. Apparently this is how Valve does things. I've heard Gabe Newell say in an interview (that I can't find right now) that often times the management role is given to the newer employees. They see it as a big honor at first, but by the end of it they're pretty happy to go back to engineering and let someone else deal with the responsibilities of management.
- xxpor 6y agoMaybe this is why Valve can't seem to actually finish a project to save their lives at this point!
- mikenew 6y agoThey actually have admitted that that's an issue, although I'm not sure what they did about it. Recently they shipped the Valve Index and released Half Life: Alyx, both of which are excellent. They also released Artifact (it did terribly, but they did release it), and a UI overhaul for Steam along with a lot of new features. So in recent years they've been doing fairly well I think.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoThat's project management not people management. Very different and not a senior role.
- doonesbury 6y agoManagers do have some formal powers engineers don't. They are three: they have access to budget; they perform the management function which assigns resources to problems. Since demand on resources almost always exceed available resources, they must assign priorities well. They also have high input on hiring choice. Doing this well requires, - requiring internal service suppliers to be (internal) customer driven. Too often however things we'd never put up with an external supplier we'd pay money for are tolerated and even protected by management. Internal suppliers are required for use. It's hard to fire them. - cross functional management: reduce silos. Again my area and your area might be "clean" but users of both of our services are often left to die in the crummy alley way between our groups. That's a major source of frustration for engineers. - promote openness and honesty: there's too much happy talk and PC correctness at the office. - supply chain management: engineers are often confronted by too many point solutions that don't integrate. See above points. Managers need to cull and combine supply chains time to time. - be customer in not supplier out. Older companies often have organizational norms where what can be produced is more a function of what internal politics allow or company culture tolerates than what customers want. Managers need to be on top of this. - top management needs to give TLC to middle management perhaps the toughest job. Here they (middle mgmnt) cannot micromanage while they are held accountable for broad corporate goals like lean organizations, top line growth, reduce expenses, and better expense control. They neither are hands on nor are too far from the real work to be too abstract. - teamwork (see schutz's human element the best single read on this) namely that ridgid individuals are the single fastest way to break teams. Today's work depends more than ever on good teams. When managers do above well it's a pleasure to work with them. It's a difficult task.
- ilaksh 6y agoI am sure this is going to sound silly, but I honestly still have trouble figuring out what value is contributed by managers and executives at all. I can't get past the gut feeling that essentially the model hasn't changed for thousands of years: wealthy owner, boss with whip, wage slaves being watched over. I mean I imagine a group of people who are actually competent and intelligent working together. Some people would have more seniority and power, but everyone is actually a useful worker there involved in the day-to-day work. I feel like most managers I have had have spent the majority of their efforts trying to pretend that problems don't exist and reduce the amount of actual useful engineering work in order to push _anything_ out faster and cheaper. Or just basically telling people to hurry up. That's why I think we had the Boeing crapshow. The guy at the top was actually good at doing what management actually is for most companies, like I described above. He avoided doing real engineering and got a product out. And then hundreds of people died. And still they tried to blame the engineers. It actually comes down to a class struggle for me. Parasites without integrity have managed to work their way to the top while feeding off of the honest workers below. Sorry I know it's kind of extreme but I am just being honest.
- jonex 6y ago[Assuming good faith despite some inflammatory language.] In smaller teams everyone talking to each other and building a shared vision can be quite sufficient. It's indeed common to have startups that have very flat organisation, they might have a designated CEO that's in no actual way above the others. They can be plenty capable of producing amazing results despite the small team size. However such a small group can't handle larger challenges, like designing and building a commercial jet, they will need many more workers. 1000 workers can't just come together and agree on a shared vision, even ignoring the square law of communication paths just giving each person 10 minutes to present their view would take weeks. Hence, in the very least we will need some communication hierarchy to allow workers to do their job while still synchronising with relevant other teams. However, just communication is not sufficient, coordination is also important, if the jet is going to have the appropriate range, fuel tanks, engine efficiency and packing density needs to be designed to provide that range. Again, this would take quite some time if everyone should be involved in the process. This is mostly in the leadership side of course, but covers those who are attentive to the trade off between security and deadlines. It's not reasonable for the individual engineer to be solely responsible to make that tradeoff. In particular, a sloppy engineer might think security is not important at all, and another engineer might think that no risk at all is acceptable to the point where nothing can ever be produced to achieve their standards. It's leaderships role to make sure that standards are aligned between engineers so we don't get a ten year delayed jet with some key parts made out of brittle plastic. Now, managers can also have a people management role, and tom me those are the ones responsible to keep me as a worker happy and productive. They are also there to detect when some area is understaffed and find solutions to such issues, eg. talking with other teams for assistance, recruiting, decreasing scope, etc. If they weren't there, this job would fall on each individual worker, who would have to go out hunting for support instead of focusing on their actual tasks at hand.