4 ms·
what's an IC? a piece of corporate-speak i haven't come across before.
by zabzonk 4y ago
what'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.
- 4y ago
- com2kid 4y agoIt has been in common use for at least 15, if not 20 years. Very common phrase in the tech industry.
- zabzonk 4y agoi have worked in tech for over 40 years at all levels and, as i said, i have never come across the term before today.
- com2kid 4y agoJust in the past week "IC" has appeared in 2 front page stories on HN. Are you US based? Beginning my career in the mid 00s I was exposed to "IC" pretty much day 1 starting at Microsoft. Other people around me in adjacent sectors also use the phrase to refer to non-managers, it is pretty common daily parlance, I am 99% sure I can ask any of my knowledge worker friends and they'll know what I am talking about. Google trends show "individual contributor" has been a pretty popular phrase since at least 2011.
- zabzonk 4y agono, i am not us based, though i have worked there. but so what? is "knowledge workers" still a thing? it was meaningless when it was introduced in the 60s, even more so now. another bubble creature, i guess.
- com2kid 4y ago> no, i am not us based, though i have worked there. but so what? Every country, and even different regions of a country, has linguistic differences. This is true even if all the countries being talked about have the same national language. For example, nobody in the US tech sector is going to know what a Boffin is unless they read The Register. Even on the west coast of the US, vocabulary is different between California and the Pacific Northwest, although things started to merge together when the Silicon Valley based tech companies began opening offices up in Seattle.
- prepend 4y agoI actually like the term as it seems pretty accurate to me and I don’t know if a more accurate term. There’s many types of “managers” who are actually individual contributors (eg, sysadmin, project admin). When you get into principal engineer and architect titles, sometimes those positions manage people and sometimes they don’t. I think it also highlights how one version of contributor isn’t better than the others. Some people only produce value by being part of a team, some produce value by managing, and some produce value direct from themselves.
- hotpotamus 4y agoI've always like the term soldier. It's what organized crime syndicates, armies, and ant colonies all use. The worst is when someone gets called a "resource", but I can't get too exercised about IC.
- Moissanite 4y agoAs a consultant, I've become accustomed to being referred to as "the resource" by operations people. However, the day an engagement manager refers to me directly as "resource" is the day I openly start referring to them as my secretary.
- zabzonk 4y agoi keep envisaging what some of these uber stupid job names would look like on a business card i might have to give to a client: zab zonk the resource zab zonk individual contributor jesus wept
- tuckerman 4y agoNobody has IC as a title, it’s a whole class of job families that don’t require/revolve around managing other employees. Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Data Center Technician are all ICs. It’s just a more positive way of saying “not people manager”, especially when you are trying to build a culture that going into people management shouldn’t be the only career path.
- zabzonk 4y agowhy do you need to say "not manager"? most people are in the nature of things not managers. and if you do need, for bad, bad reasons want to differentiate them, how about NMs? oh, but that would be to obvious for the current crop.
- 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.)