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Silicon valley has benefited from a doubling of workers every x years for decades as the importance of software in the economy kept increasing. In that environ
by obblekk 3y ago
Silicon valley has benefited from a doubling of workers every x years for decades as the importance of software in the economy kept increasing.
In that environment, it's important to push smart people toward management to be able to keep scaling the company.
But clearly everyone in the economy cannot develop software. So if we start slowing down the employee growth within SV, it's completely rational to stop pushing smart people into management, and perhaps even pulling them out of management. Non-manager career paths are a way to indicate to smart people they should be spending their time here.
Finance is an industry to look at as an example of one where plenty of money can be made by ICs. There must be others as well.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago> it's important to push smart people toward management to be able to keep scaling the company nonsense. Apple is a perfect counterexample of your assertion. (disclaimer: worked there for years with an excellent role and what you said was then countercultural, in our engineering world at least).
- rogerkirkness 3y agoApple is a counter example in that it is not an academy company, it is more like the company where you have your last job once you idealize your craft skills.
- addaon 3y agoAs someone who had my first job at Apple (years ago), I can't think of a single reading of this that makes sense and lines up with my experience.
- ZephyrBlu 3y agoI think in the general case this makes sense. Most people at Apple did not start their career at Apple. They probably got a significant amount of experience before joining Apple.
- obblekk 3y agoApple headcount has increased from 37k in 2010 to 164k in 2022. Are you saying they only hire managers externally, they have dozens of reports per manager, or they prefer to push median employees into management instead of the best?
- jjtheblunt 3y agoCan only speak to my engineering division, so im not saying anything you asked.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoI’d like you to imagine a place where people are not pushed but where what they pull themselves towards is acknowledged. Because that fits how the engineering division i enjoyed and in which i and most others flourished was run.
- dylan604 3y agoI also agree it's non-sense. Some people are just not cut out to be a manager. Some people would just not enjoy being a manager if they were not not cutout for it. To expand on your Apple example, the Woz just wanted to be an engineer making things. Without trying to compare myself to Woz, but I too would rather just keep working on making things rather than managing people making things.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoAgreed. Many of us were like that while i was there. And such was encouraged as entirely strategically fine.
- idiotsecant 3y agoAgreed, I know plenty of highly competent technical people whose skills are utterly essential who I would not trust to run a doggie daycare. Technical skills and people skills are orthogonal to some degree.