4 ms·

I don't want to be a manager.

• warent 4y ago
  It's a short and sweet comment with a lot of understated power. A lot of people mistakenly conflate management with upward growth, and mistakenly believe you're not growing if you don't make this "career leap". Management is lateral. it's not for everyone, and it's not the definition of success
  • a_t48 4y ago
    While I agree with this, I’ve been at multiple companies that claim to have a management and a technical track, but neglect the technical track as it’s much more straightforward to define success and show progression as a manager.
  • jjav 4y ago
    > A lot of people mistakenly conflate management with upward growth It's not a mistake, if the company doesn't provide any growth opportunity for ICs beyond a level equivalent to a Sr.Director or so. If you want to make VP/SVP/EVP level comp, what other option do you have? In most companies, none.
    • sarchertech 4y ago
      Sure if you want to make it to VP it’s very hard to do it as an IC. But then again it’s hard to make VP as a manager as well (outside of title inflation or working at a very small startup). It’s just a numbers game. 50 engineers, 6 EMs, 2 directors and 1 VP. The amount of meetings a VP attends is insane. That coupled with the diminishing marginal utility of money makes me question anyone who sets that as their explicit goal though.
    • scruple 4y ago
      It's interesting to get a glimpse of these things inside of major corporations. At a former (BigTech Co) employer, Staff Software Engineer was equivalent to Director. I was not well received when I pointed out that we had a few dozen Directors in the engineering organization, but we only had less-than a dozen Staff Software Engineers, and half as many Principal Software Engineers. It didn't take me long to leave after having these conversations.
• pickledish 4y ago
  Did you read the article? Neither does the author, he’s being cheeky