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> t's not uncommon that, in terms of money anyway, IC tracks tend to cap out at lower levels than management This is pretty natural, at least in a big organiza
by ska 6y ago
> t's not uncommon that, in terms of money anyway, IC tracks tend to cap out at lower levels than management
This is pretty natural, at least in a big organization. At some point your IC tracks almost always have less impact. There are weird corner cases sure, but not enough that you can't deal with individually.
But that's ok; Almost every manager isn't going to eventually be C-level either. What's important is that there is some career track that makes sense for IC focused technical people to stay in throughout a normal career.
- alistairSH 6y agoThere are weird corner cases sure, but not enough that you can't deal with individually. I think that's where a lot of organizations fail. Take the "Technical Fellow" I mentioned earlier. This is the "weird corner case" - a technical IC who is capable of contributing strategically but has no interest in management. The people in this role generally have ~20 years in industry and most have advanced degrees. They're some of the smartest people I know. They have the people skills to manage, but little interest (or rather, prefer to stay purely technical). Without the technical fellow role, they would have likely moved into management after 10-15 years and moved into director positions, at a loss to the company. Or, they'd dead end as senior devs at a lower salary and not have a voice with senior management. My employer has 3500 employees (across all BUs). There are fewer than 10 technical fellows.
- ghaff 6y agoThat doesn't seem an unreasonable ratio. I was at an analyst meeting at IBM Research many years ago and one factoid I still remember is that IBM at the time had more general managers (i.e. a rather senior management position) than fellows; I think there were about 300 of the latter.