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My main frustration with IC levels is that the promotions often come down to questionable criteria like: - Have you worked on highly-visible, high-level, cross

by nfw2 5y ago

My main frustration with IC levels is that the promotions often come down to questionable criteria like: - Have you worked on highly-visible, high-level, cross-org projects? Are these efforts really needed? Should your organization be reinventing the wheel? I've seen staff IC's get unreasonably attached to their own pet projects and keep pushing them despite universally negative feedback from the engineers that would be affected. The right level of high-level abstraction should come from the actual requirements of the business, not artificially pumped up by engineers because it's required to get promoted. - Do you mentor other engineers? Do the engineers on your team actually need mentoring? Most of the people on my current team are not senior (IC2) and the best group of engineers I've ever worked with. We all have 5-10 years of experience. But the IC4 recently assigned to our team feels the need to give use engineering 101 lectures on every single topic, and it's been extremely frustrating. - Have you led projects? This one makes sense I know. But it's also often just a proxy for your time at the company if you need to patiently wait your turn to wear the tech lead hat. Glacial promotion opportunities often lead to the best engineers leaving

juancn 5y ago
High visibility sometimes is confused with strategic importance. Tech leadership roles in a sane org. focus more and more on the strategic than on the tactical. Help keep focus on needed projects that cannot be delivered in a short time frame, but are nevertheless needed, sometimes even essential. The ability to deliver short-term value while not derailing long-term goals takes experience to hone, and is one of the tells of a true staff+ engineer. Mentoring is complex. It's not giving lectures (although, sometimes it may help). It's usually more subtle and is typically related to delegation: pick the correct thing to delegate, choose wisely what to do yourself. The trick is to maximize learning and accomplishment of more junior engineers while at the same time not risking team/company objectives. Besides that, providing emotional support and guidance in a way that most managers cannot. You walked the walk, so you help them think on how improve and get where they want to get (even sometimes help figure out what they want). Leadership can also be subtle. Managers tend to equate it with project management (i.e. scrum/whatever, task assignment). On a tech ladder role, leadership is much more about influence than actually telling people what to do. You nudge them in the right direction so the goals are met and they grow (see: mentoring). The best tech leads (staff+ or whatever), get shit done in a way that's sometimes non-obvious, until you miss them. Which makes promotion hard.

by nfw2 5y ago

juancn 5y ago

High visibility sometimes is confused with strategic importance. Tech leadership roles in a sane org. focus more and more on the strategic than on the tactical. Help keep focus on needed projects that cannot be delivered in a short time frame, but are nevertheless needed, sometimes even essential. The ability to deliver short-term value while not derailing long-term goals takes experience to hone, and is one of the tells of a true staff+ engineer. Mentoring is complex. It's not giving lectures (although, sometimes it may help). It's usually more subtle and is typically related to delegation: pick the correct thing to delegate, choose wisely what to do yourself. The trick is to maximize learning and accomplishment of more junior engineers while at the same time not risking team/company objectives. Besides that, providing emotional support and guidance in a way that most managers cannot. You walked the walk, so you help them think on how improve and get where they want to get (even sometimes help figure out what they want). Leadership can also be subtle. Managers tend to equate it with project management (i.e. scrum/whatever, task assignment). On a tech ladder role, leadership is much more about influence than actually telling people what to do. You nudge them in the right direction so the goals are met and they grow (see: mentoring). The best tech leads (staff+ or whatever), get shit done in a way that's sometimes non-obvious, until you miss them. Which makes promotion hard.