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First level management is not a great place to be...these are the folks Zuck told to go back to IC or leave At the first level, you have zero actual power. All

First level management is not a great place to be...these are the folks Zuck told to go back to IC or leave At the first level, you have zero actual power. All you are doing is conducting perfunctory 1:1s and signing time-off forms. But you also aren't an IC and slowly fall out of the dev mindset and your skills atrophy My boss has been a first level manager for years...if he's ever laid off he is in big trouble...he never really managed anything and he no longer codes

fatnoah 4y ago
Fully agree. After getting to second and third level management at startups and larger companies, I chased the $$$ to a first-level management role at a FAANG. The pay was multiple of what I ever dreamed of making, but expectations were set making the assumption that I had literally nothing to offer other than to manage performance and to find ways to generate "org impact" by being on random committees. All of the other things I did, such as technical mentorship, helping my higher level ICs get greenfield projects off the ground (starting a new thing is a surprisingly uncommon activity at larger companies), etc. was not valued at all. I eventually bailed out and am now getting paid 1/3 as much to deliver 10x the value to startup.