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My experience is much the opposite: the managers who want to write a lot of code usually are so focused on their contributions they fail their other responsibi
by hiddencost 4y ago
My experience is much the opposite:
the managers who want to write a lot of code usually are so focused on their contributions they fail their other responsibilities.
The ones who are trying to set product direction are usually harmful, too.
The managers I've had the best experience with are the ones who focus on helping their ICs navigate the larger organization, dealing with human issues, and helping the ICs understand organizational priorities, and evaluate risks.
- zabzonk 4y agowhat's an IC? a piece of corporate-speak i haven't come across before.
- tejtm 4y agoobjectification of resource... “commoditizing your complement” for management. edit to add "in my experiences" I have also seen good evidence via HN that not all management/admin is as dilbert like as I have seen.
- xzel 4y agoIndividual contributor.
- eftychis 4y agoIndividual Contributor. Don't ask me why in heavens that term makes any sense outside one that is myopic or only works with extremely fresh out of school junior engineers and unskilled workers. Edit: P.S. Not sure why a couple of people decided to downvote this opinion. Also to other commenters: it sounds to me less as a be a team player title (like the soldier one suggested) and more like an isolated resource that makes interchangeable contributions. Anyways, I think that there is a distinction between "(Team) Lead" and Manager with the Team Lead usually classified as an IC says everything for most organizational approaches. I agree more with the Meta take here.
- zabzonk 4y agowhen did this appear? i literally have never seen it before i read this post, and it makes no sense at all to me.
- eftychis 4y agoI am not sure. It has been around for at least 5 years I would say. I guess at some point they needed a nice sounding alternative category to people not becoming managers.
- coliveira 4y agoThis is FAANG speak. They created this role for people who are not (directly) involved in management.
- zabzonk 4y agoso i guess that managers are not individuals and don't contribute? might be true. but i've been a manager and an individual and contributed code. well, who knows?
- capitalsigma 4y agoThe point is that ICs are judged based on their individual contributions, i.e. their own code, design docs, etc, whereas managers are judged based on their team's contributions
- zabzonk 4y agoi have never, ever come across a programmer working on a system of any complexity that did not depend on contributions from other programmers.
- newfriend 4y agoWhy are you being so pedantic? At this point it seems like you're trolling. > so i guess that managers are not individuals and don't contribute? > i have never, ever come across a programmer working on a system of any complexity that did not depend on contributions from other programmers. No one said non-ICs aren't individuals, and no one said they don't contribute. No one said that ICs don't work with others or depend on others. What has been said, several times, is that their contributions (i.e. the code they produce, artifacts they create, etc) are largely individual contributions. They are the ones creating the thing, and are not responsible for others. This gets a bit murky as you move up the IC chain, in that your contributions become less tangible and are in part measured on how you lead others and make those around you more efficient. But your performance is still largely judged on what you produced.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ssss11 4y agoIndividual contributor
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- LVB 4y agoIndividual Contributor
- ryanianian 4y agoIndividual Contributor. Line engineer. Has a manager and likely doesn't have direct-reports of their own.
- the_af 4y agoOthers have answered what the words "IC" mean, but let me add that this is the usual name for the technical career track, i.e. the not-management track, meant for people who do not want to manage teams of people. Strictly speaking, the roles of Engineer Manager and IC are incompatible; you cannot want to manage people and at the same time want to stay out of it. So in this particular context, "EM+IC" is a misnomer for "EMs who also need to be able handle tech/coding tasks themselves".
- Izkata 4y ago> this is the usual name I dunno if it's just me, but it seems like the term came out of nowhere just a couple years ago.
- the_af 4y agoTrue! I meant the usual name now. For me it's the same as Engineer Manager: it seems to have come out of nowhere but it's the standard now. Before we called them simply "managers" (or sometimes "team leaders" of the non-technical variety). PS: are you by any chance the same Izkata as the one in scifi.se?
- Izkata 4y agoYep I am. Haven't been very active there for a while though, usually just end up there from Hot Questions when procrastinating.
- georgemcbay 4y agoI also never saw this until pretty recently. At first I assumed people were talking about independent contractors because it was the first thing that came to mind, it possibly fit the context I saw the term used in and nobody explained the acronym they just dropped it there like I was supposed to know what it meant. Took a bit longer to realize they meant individual contributor.
- spc476 4y ago
- birdyrooster 4y agoIndividual contributor
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jdeibele 4y agoI'm guessing Individual Contributor. Someone who is not management but also not support (administrator, sales, HR, etc.)
- SkyPuncher 4y agoWriting code as a manager is my number 1 stressor. As a manager, I have to deal with so much random bullshit. I don't mind it, but it's extremely difficult to manage that bullshit alongside code and sprint commitments. "I couldn't deliver" is remembered far more clearly than "I couldn't deliver because I was helping the team with X other thing that was far more important.".
- thinknubpad 4y agoYou are very fortunate to have had that experience. Usually, when a manager/director/etc decides to write a lot of code, the result is barrages of rushed pull requests made between meetings. You will be lucky if the code in any of those PRs was actually run, and you can forget about enforcing test discipline, so you have to scrutinize them much more carefully and clean up when they get merged without incorporating your suggestions.
- superfrank 4y agoAgreed. I'm a manager who doesn't write code anymore (at work) and, at best I'm adding log statements or updating documentation. I'm still encouraged to write code if I can, but it just doesn't make sense. When I had a single digit number of developers on my team, writing code was still possible. When I started closing in on double digits, I realized that I had so many other things to do that, at best, I was only going to have a few scattered 30 minute or 1 hour blocks each day to write code. Also, a lot of my job is to handle the unknowns that come up, so I also couldn't really commit to any hard deadlines. That means, best case scenario, I could only pick up work that wasn't high priority and that didn't require long periods of uninterrupted time. I still love writing code, but my philosophy has always been to focus on the things that only I can do. Low complexity projects that no one is waiting for can be done by just about anyone. My "staying in touch with the code" time is better spent doing PR reviews or reviewing design docs.