> As an individual contributor, the impact of your decisions may be broad, but however broad your individual impact is, your manager's impact on you is [broad *

> As an individual contributor, the impact of your decisions may be broad, but however broad your individual impact is, your manager's impact on you is [broad * number of directs], so it's always "greater" (note: not better, just greater). But this is obviously false, right? If the IC is truly a spectacular IC, then it's likely that no matter which manager they're under, they will have large impact. The impact of the manager isn't the entire impact of their directs, but rather the relative difference between the impact of their directs and the impact their directs would have under a different manager. Which is substantially less, and could easily be less than the impact of a particularly strong IC.