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IMO the easiest way to solve this issue would be to normalize ICs making more than their managers. That way, only the people who really want to be managers are

• ncann 4y ago
  I agree. Too often people feel becoming manager is the easiest way to advance their career (which most of the time equates to making more money). In many cases becoming manager is the only way to advance their career in the current org.
  • knert 4y ago
    I interviewed for FB once and I don’t believe this is the case there. I was told the comp levels ran parallel for ICs and Managers. They do value their ICs it seems. This was one of the main reasons I was interested in working for them. You can see it on levels.fyi
    • loeg 4y ago
      The levels are parallel but it’s easier to get promoted to level 6+ on the management track.
      • donkey-hotei 4y ago
        There is M1 and there is M2, and then there's Director. There's no level 6+ on the management track. I'll disagree with this statement by saying that I think the step function in skills between managing people and managing people who manage people is huge. There are larger gaps between M1 -> M2 -> D than IC6 -> IC7 -> IC8... but, I think the answer depends. If you are a really strong individual contributor, I presume getting an IC promotion is easier. If you are just decent, getting an IC7+ promotion seems incredibly challenging because IC7 requires an very high level of competence. If you are just decent as a manager, you can get luckier.
        • loeg 4y ago
          > There is M1 and there is M2, and then there's Director. There's no level 6+ on the management track. M1 corresponds to the same pay band as IC6 and M2 corresponds to IC7. D1 corresponds to IC8. (By level 6, I am referring to IC6 / M1.)
          • jonathankoren 4y ago
            I think you’re off by one. M1 is not an IC6.
            • zdyn5 4y ago
              M1 is indeed the same level as IC6 at Meta
        • runnr_az 4y ago
          It me. I’m a good Dev but was never going to be one of the greats. Making the jump to manager seemed like the next logical step… and in sone ways it has been, but it’s a very different job. (Now that I evaluate other people’s dev work, I was actually a lot better than I thought I was)
          • grogenaut 4y ago
            I've noticed that many of the best devs are constantly worried about their output and quality and the worst not worried at all. This is as a Sr. IC who gets pulled in to other teams on the regular.
      • msikora 4y ago
        This is the case in my company. My boss reluctantly went to the manager track as it was quite difficult to move up on the SDE track (from the level he was on) but much easier on the manager track.
  • khazhoux 4y ago
    Management track is usually the only way to be in the room where decisions get made. Sure, the top engineers will be consulted and kept in the loop, but 99% of the strategy discussions and planning happens without them. So for people with an innate need to join in the steering of the ship, there’s only one career path.
    • antipaul 4y ago
      Is it possible to do both? I hear senior VPs like Craig Federighi, Jeff Dean, and others, still write code (maybe 1 day a week but still), but also call the big shots
      • khazhoux 4y ago
        I don't know about Jeff, but Craig runs an org with tens of thousands of engineers. If he were writing code, it'd be a waste of time. (and Craig doesn't waste his time)
        • sidibe 4y ago
          Jeff Dean also eventually managed a huge org (Sanjay Ghemawat managed to avoid this) It's not a waste of time if it makes them more effective at making decisions, gives them ideas, or keeps them abreast of what is actually going on.
          • khazhoux 4y ago
            Ideas, staying sharp, keeping up with swift and pytorch etc… sure, absolutely useful to code on weekends or a bit here and there. What I meant what that there’s literal zero way someone can be an SVP and still perform any actual IC work.
      • vdchuyen 4y ago
        [dead]
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
• brookst 4y ago
  It's an interesting thought, but I don't know how you "normalize" it if companies find that they are more profitable paying managers more.
  • likeabbas 4y ago
    The same way anything is normalized. One person/company does something, posts the outcomes of it, then other people follow. I don't think many companies have tested this logic out, as management style in tech is inherited from older corps. I think this could have great benefits. If a manager's job salary is directly capped to the average of their ICs, then it's their benefit to make the best engineers and show that these engineers deserve an increase in salary - ergo the manager's salary is increased. At the same time, no one will be rushing to management just to get a salary bump.
    • brookst 4y ago
      I still don't see how you beat the market-driven salary. Don't you have to pay market rate for good managers, and market rate for good IC's? If a company unilaterally cuts manager pay, they presumably won't get great managers, or at least not good managers who also want to be paid fairly. It also means managers will only want to manage more senior IC's, so as to benefit from the higher salary, while it's the junior IC's who need more capable management.
      • lmm 4y ago
        You could drop manager pay and accept that it will mean "worse" managers, and perhaps hope to make up the difference by using the savings to pay more for ICs and hope that this will get you "better" ICs and the result will be better team performance overall. I don't know how you'd ever make that change to a company structure though. The turkeys would have to vote for christmas.
  • cyanydeez 4y ago
    It's fascinating as it seems like most modern problems are the result of wrong arguments being just more convincing. Like, they're. A virus well designed to exploit the most number of human logical fallacies and heuristics.
• __turbobrew__ 4y ago
  Ken Thompson made more than his manager at Bell Labs.
  • chiefalchemist 4y ago
    Bell Labs is a special case (afaik). My father worked for Western Electric (and I actually did a couple summer internships there). In any case, BL / WE had a special rank and pay structure. They understood they had talent that was more valuable not as management. I don't remember the details but do remember there being certain "heavy weights" that didn't have anyone under them.
• facet1ous 4y ago
  Yes, absolutely this. Once you hit senior ranks in engineering at a big tech firm, it's actually very difficult to move upwards. Very few people are ever made principal engineers or senior staff or even staff level for that matter. The jump in technical ability for those levels is quite large as well and can take many years to get a single promotion since openings are pretty slim as well (some orgs will only get 1-2 staff engineers). If you switch to becoming a manager, your salary increases a lot and you have many more opportunities for promotion. So a lot of engineers hit senior and say "screw that, I can just be a manager" which is a much easier path to high salary. It's very common and we need to incentivize people to stay as ICs.
  • lumost 4y ago
    I really don't understand this pattern at companies. It seems entirely feasible to simply let IC's take on more responsibility. It's easier to shuffle responsibility amongst ICs compared to managers without rocking the boat - why would orgs incentivize a "fixed" management structure?
    • awa 4y ago
      It creates the problem of too many chefs but too few cooks. Too many people discussing how to best construct a thing vs actually constructing the thing.
  • Aperocky 4y ago
    > many more opportunities for promotion. Feels like this is generally true in the past few years where org sizes have ballooned. Is this still true today where hiring freeze and layoffs rule most of these companies? Is the reverse happening?
• jensensbutton 4y ago
  That's an easy way to have zero managers and more problems than you started with. The vast majority of ICs are like children. It's not fun dealing with them. The only way one voluntarily takes on that role is for equal or greater pay.
  • likeabbas 4y ago
    I disagree. The vast majority of managers are nothing more than people trying to climb the bureaucratic rank and are not truly helpful in multiplying the efforts of the mid-senior ICs below them.
    • noirbot 4y ago
      And that doesn't apply to ICs? I've worked with plenty of ICs just trying to show they "led a project" to make Staff or higher and did next to nothing to "multiply" any amount of effort from any other IC.
  • qwerpy 4y ago
    100% Tried management for a few years, dealing with the prima donnas and the deadweight on the team burned me out. Wasn’t getting paid more than I was as an IC, so it was not worth it for me by a long shot. As an IC I just have my own problems to worry about.
• ska 4y ago
  I think you are partially right, in that it should be normalized that some IC's may be delivering more value than their managers, and compensation should reflect that. The broad version, that managers just don't contribute as much as the IC's they manage, doesn't hold much water in general - but may in a dysfunctional organization.
• adriand 4y ago
  But do you want managers who are people who want to be managers? It seems to me that many people who want to be managers are motivated by wanting to boss people around, i.e. they want power, not necessarily money. And some don’t want to do “the work” whatever that work might be. I really think we need more “reluctant leaders”: people who are good at leadership but don’t want to lead, and yet can be relied upon to lead because of their sense of duty, especially their duty to the team. People who say, shit, I really don’t want to do this but damnit if I don’t step up, this will be a failure.
  • rg111 4y ago
    The kind of people that find pleasure in bossing people around also tend to have fragile ego. If you pay them less than the people they are managing, they will not tend to do take the job. So, paying managers less may weed out people on an ego trip, in theory.
    • noirbot 4y ago
      The problem is that then it tends to become a sort of charity work. I've had multiple managers who essentially felt like they were burnout martyring themselves into serious problems in their life to try to support my team. I've been blessed with generally good managers, but they've all worked way more and way harder than me for less pay and it's honestly made me feel pretty awful for them.
  • ethbr0 4y ago
    Middle management should be like jury duty -- something assigned randomly to a team member, then served for a set period. And company processes should be engineered so that a bad/ineffectual manager can't break them, with everything that can be devolved to the team itself. And hiring should be done on the basis that a new employee will likely be a manager at some point. The best managers I've had were all reluctant, so selecting against people who want to be managers seems like a great idea.
    • vkou 4y ago
• hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Not going to happen, fundamentally just due to supply and demand. I have been a senior/principal engineer, as well as a director/senior director. The fact is that being a manager or director is just fundamentally a much harder job than being an IC. It's not that it's inherently more difficult, it's just that the day-to-day is much more of a grind than being an IC. For people wondering why engineering interviews can be so obscure/difficult, it's often because the cost of a bad hire can be catastrophic to a manager. I had a great team of about 30 people, except for 1 person who just couldn't get along with others. I spent about 80% of my energy on that person, and it sucked. So for people wondering why managers get paid more, it's just that it's a shittier job that fewer people want to do than program.
  • Olreich 4y ago
    I find it far more plausible that managers are paid more because of the default fiefdom hierarchy that you find in most corporate systems than because of anything inherent to the day-to-day job. CEO doesn’t think people lower on the totem pole should be paid more than them, so they hire people at lower income levels. Same for the VPs and the Directors and the layers of middle management until you get down to the ICs.
    • hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
      I mean, just look at comments around this topic whenever it comes up. People want ICs to get paid more because they don't want to work as managers. Heck, I most definitely agree with them - again, I was a manager, and I won't do it again either. That means I have accepted that I'll make less money, but I'm fine with that. Someone else can have that shitty job.
      • lmm 4y ago
        I don't want to clean toilets or man a register either, but people who do those things don't get paid more than me. There's something else going on with how managers get paid.
• bithead 4y ago
  I wonder who makes more in a hospital - the doctor or surgeon, or their managers?
  • grogenaut 4y ago
    depends, in many hospitals the administrators have to keep their licenses (doctor one day a week) and are paid more overall... so what does that make them?
• noneeeed 4y ago
  That is pretty much the whole idea of the Staff+ Engineer track that mirrors the management track. The divergence normally happens after senior engineer level. Smart companies have been doing things like this for decades. The first company I worked for 20 years ago had distinct tracks for management and engineering staff once people got to a certain level.
• NikolaNovak 4y ago
  I don't know if it's the case that 1. All people who really want to be managers are good managers Or even 2. Best managers really want to be managers To put it another way, a lot of people would rather be IC than managers. Not all of those people would be bad managers. In fact some of those might be the best managers. Or to put it yet another way. Everybody wants to tinker. Managing is a pain. And the higher up, the fewer of the sane people would want it :-)
• zeruch 4y ago
  That already happens a fair amount. I've had two orgs where for stretches of time my top guys cleared more than I did, and I've known others in the same boat (they ran "rockstar" SME teams of various types). I wasn't offended by it either. I gave them air cover and they did exceptional work largely undisturbed, and periodically asked questions that made them not get too comfortable in the status quo. It was a fair trade off. But ICs making more than managers is not what should be normalized; building teams with structures that optimize for performance rather than "management by spreadsheet" will get you further than just one dimensional rules about comp, especially in larger orgs where the comp tiers are deep.
• SergeAx 4y ago
  We already have too few managers, let alone good ones.