6 ms·

I am sick and tired of pressure to get into management once you get older and lack of other opportunities to be rewarded. If I can do job of 5 other people, I c

I am sick and tired of pressure to get into management once you get older and lack of other opportunities to be rewarded. If I can do job of 5 other people, I can be compensated like two others and the company is still ahead. Or if that's just my arrogance talking, there can be an objective system to measure work accomplished and set rewards accordingly. Instead all of my questions about advancement are met with demands for me to write PRDs and nag people who refuse to do work to do it, but without me actually having authority to make them. I finally decided to just not sweat over it, do work that matches my pay in 2-3 days a week and spend the rest of my time teaching better programming skills to whoever is willing to learn and has a good attitude about it. With focus on general skills that they can take to their next job rather than internal proprietary tech. I don't care that I am not getting paid extra for that, at least it feels good to be in office.

mook 3y ago
Remember that all the people up the chain deciding compensation are managers. It's natural that they would perceive the management track as more important, because they're on it.
- re-thc 3y ago
  It's a vicious cycle. Someone needs to break the chain.
  - WJW 3y ago
    Be the change you want to see mate, don't wait for someone else to do it.
  - rjtavares 3y ago
    I've actually been in HR discussions telling people managers are overrated and we need to value ICs more. It's really difficult to explain to HR people that managing people isn't[1] a higher responsability job than being an expert at doing something... [1] Of course, sometimes it is. It depends on the team size and seniority, but also depends on the expertise. I'm just saying that a manager does not have to always have a higher grade than a person on his team.
    - re-thc 3y ago
      > and we need to value ICs more Maybe start by getting rid of the silly term - "IC". What's the difference between a product, project, sales and a people manager? They all manage something. It's people's egos and lust for power that makes this distinction.
      - rjtavares 3y ago
        The distinction is useful because people managers have some specific tasks related to HR processes. The fact that the distinction has an ego implication is the problem, not the distinction itself.
      - falcor84 3y ago
        I'm against euphemisms in general and don't think we should be changing this word either. As I see it, an IC is anyone whose main contribution is through artifacts or other actions they perform directly, and a manager is someone whose main contribution is through coordinating the actions of others. As such, I'm absolutely ok with "project manager" and "product manager" even if people don't report to them directly. If you have a better term, do go ahead and propose it, but let's not throw out this useful term just yet.
        willcipriano 3y ago
        If we are merely IC's when it comes time to get paid, why aren't we all IC's when it comes to returning to office?
        rjtavares 3y ago
        Again, the problem is the "merely". Sports stars are ICs and they're well paid.
        willcipriano 3y ago
        I've only seen people get upset when others act like ICs on sports teams. "Ball hog" and the like. I don't think that's a example of one.
  - gigatexal 3y ago
    Could it be (get ready to crack some eggs as I am about to fry some conspiracy-bacon) an effort by HR/companies to promote sr engineers into managers to then give HR reasons to cull the herd if they need to?
- dspillett 3y ago
  Another factor is that going to management to get more compensation is a given around many industries. You aren't going to get more where you are if you don't want to move into management, because you won't get more elsewhere either in the same state and they know that. They are not trying to pay you what will keep you happy, they are trying to pay you what will stop you taking your knowledge/experience elsewhere. You just have to be aware of the market you are locking yourself into. I'm well aware I could be making more as a manager, or even if I let myself be called a “senior” which often overlaps in terms of having some responsibility for people/things in a manager-y way, but I pootle along as I am anyway because I know while I'm not exactly happy ATM I'd be less so the other way and I don't think that the extra compensation would balance that. We may fall foul of AI in the not too distant future and end up stacking shelves for Tesco, but then again a lot of those management reports and decisions look rather automatable by the same LLMs too, if not more so…
- hajile 3y ago
  If management didn't pay well, qualified people simply wouldn't do it or you'd be limited to people who felt emotionally compensated by getting more power over other people (which is already bad enough).
  - smueller1234 3y ago
    Some of us enjoy helping other people. First bit of advice I give to new or would-be managers is to learn indirect gratification. Most common failure mode for new engineering managers IMO is the struggle to feel productive given that impact is achieved chiefly indirectly.
- smueller1234 3y ago
  For what is worth, I'm a fairly senior manager (a few hundred engineers) and I firmly believe and vocally point out the opposite. I'm sure the kind of self dealing you describe is not unheard of, but it's also pretty cynical to assume that as a default. If the culture in your work place has gone that far down the drain for real, maybe take some time to look for a new gig or reality check it with a manager you trust?
hintymad 3y ago
I grew up reading all kinds of articles and books about how engineering itself is a career track and I believed it. However, when I looked at the great engineers, it seems they eventually turned into executives. Jeff Dean, for instance, is one the greatest engineers. He has deep technical skills. He is versatile, as we can see that he made key contributions in storages, distributed systems, and machine learning. Yet his end game? SVP of Google. And how many people can really be Jeff Dean?
- resolutebat 3y ago
  LinkedIn says Jeff is currently Chief Scientist, an IC role. And Google famously added an extra rung to its IC ladder just to make room for him.
  - squokko 3y ago
    Whatever his title, he runs Google Brain.
  - unicornmama 3y ago
    Jeff has reports that means he's a manager.
- GoblinSlayer 3y ago
  Some say they work for money alone and measure it in bills paid, in which case they can promote to management position, because the only difference they see is salary.
- adwn 3y ago
  I suspect the reason for this is that even great engineers don't scale indefinitely: At some point, if you want to increase output, you have to delegate some part of your work. To increase output even further, you have to delegate even more. That also doesn't scale indefinitely, so you have to start delegating the delegating. And before you know it, you're an SVP and not really directly doing any technical work anymore.
  - 3y ago
andirk 3y ago
A couple jobs ago, when I realized I was doing all of the non-trivial front-end work at about the workload of ~4 of the other engineers, I just went golfing half the time. That way I was getting paid the same but for half the time at work! And a job before that, my boss told me that I was making the other engineers feel dumb so she wanted me to do less. So I started crocheting at my desk. She helped me with my technique a couple times too.
- TylerE 3y ago
  One of the best parts of WFH is not having to do a bunch of performative theater.
- another-dave 3y ago
  > And a job before that, my boss told me that I was making the other engineers feel dumb so she wanted me to do less. So I started crocheting at my desk. She helped me with my technique a couple times too. It's funny, I think I'd feel more dumb if the person beside me was crocheting half the time but still more productive than me!
tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
> there can be an objective system to measure work accomplished and set rewards accordingly. You’ve now undoubtedly made your life and that of those around you worse basically on the basis that you need to be proven wrong about being a “5x engineer”. Engineers hate the hand-wavey nature of labour markets almost as much as they hate any attempts to remotely objectively quantify their performance. The everybody-compromises happy medium is defined career tracks with largely qualitative and certainly subjective measures of actual responsibility. Nowhere in that are you going to get the reassurance that you’re after: that you’re worth 5 other engineers, or whatever. That’s just not how things work, even in IC roles. The fact that you pose this as a means of measurement in my eyes speaks volumes as to where you’d land on this imagined scale. Honestly 99% of professions out there wouldn’t get away with being as entitled as software engineers are. Which, yes, market forces and all that. But let’s not pretend that there are many if any unreasonable aspects of a typical dev job.
alkonaut 3y ago
For me there was a fork in the round around age 30 when I was pushed to take on managerial tasks/roles. This was at a company in traditional industry with basically no technical ladder, developers were line-work and the only way to climb was management. I stuck through it as an IC and at 45 I’m still not in management. I enjoy being an IC and hope to be for another 20 or 25 years. My only fear is that I have grown stuck in the company because seeking a developer job at 45 or 50 is probably subject to ageism more than a program/product manager job would.
black_13 3y ago
[dead]
jader201 3y ago
> met with demands for me to write PRDs > spend the rest of my time teaching better programming skills Are you an engineer or a product manager? If you’re a PM, sounds like you should switch roles. If you're an engineer, sounds like your manager/peers don’t know that. :) But in seriousness, it sounds like there may be a mismatch somewhere.
- rhtgrg 3y ago
  It doesn't look like a mismatch to me. Looks like L6+ engineering work.
matrix_overload 3y ago
Business likes predictability. The chance of 5 people deciding to leave all at once is exponentially lower than a chance of 1 person. Hence, unless you are the owner/founder, your replaceability will be valued more than your performance.
- re-thc 3y ago
  > The chance of 5 people deciding to leave all at once is exponentially lower than a chance of 1 person. And the chance of 5 random people producing something compared to the 1 you know is a huge contributor is exponentially lower too. > Business likes predictability. That's great. Then they should actually stick with it i.e. reward the 1 that's been contributing rather than gamble on something that might not work. It's common in sports teams, e.g. where you sell your star player and buy 5 others hoping to get more value. At the end of the day you're lucky to even get the same value.
  - psd1 3y ago
    Counterexample: sports teams that improve when they replace their star player. Football doesn't have great players in an absolute sense. For the last decade, the greatest player, depending on which tiresome fan you ask, had been either Ronaldo or Messi. Messi didn't pull up any trees at PSG, and Ronaldo's second stint at MU was underwhelming. In both cases, that's because the team tactics had to be shifted to accommodate these players, to the detriment of the other players. My old team lead was rated highly. But he stifled the rest of the ICs. From above he looked good, from below he looked shit. He should not have been developing software, he needed to be in a process-oriented role. I believe that our productivity would have increased - certainly morale and cohesion would have - if he'd fucked off and not been replaced.
    - squokko 3y ago
      Is it team tactics that had to shift or is it just that the team had to let go of good players to afford the salaries of Ronaldo or Messi?
    - 3y ago
f1shy 3y ago
I cannot believe I'm not the only one! Exactly this is what I'm doing... helping the ones who want. And use my knowledge to do the work of 1 week in 4 hours...
- evandale 3y ago
  You're far from the only! I love programming and I'm more than happy to work with juniors and solve junior tasks. I feel like this industry puts so much pressure on people to be an engineer or an architect or something more than a person who writes a little script to fix something and moves on. Everything built today seems to have to be architected and scalable and I hate it.
  - groestl 3y ago
    > Everything built today seems to have to be architected and scalable and I hate it. To have a rough idea on how to scale it, should it take off, is not a bad thing. To do all the work, before it actually takes off, is.
  - oneepic 3y ago
    > Everything built today seems to have to be architected and scalable and I hate it. I feel this pressure a lot b/c of big-tech promo culture.

mook 3y ago

Remember that all the people up the chain deciding compensation are managers. It's natural that they would perceive the management track as more important, because they're on it.

re-thc 3y ago
It's a vicious cycle. Someone needs to break the chain.
- WJW 3y ago
  Be the change you want to see mate, don't wait for someone else to do it.
- rjtavares 3y ago
  I've actually been in HR discussions telling people managers are overrated and we need to value ICs more. It's really difficult to explain to HR people that managing people isn't[1] a higher responsability job than being an expert at doing something... [1] Of course, sometimes it is. It depends on the team size and seniority, but also depends on the expertise. I'm just saying that a manager does not have to always have a higher grade than a person on his team.
  - re-thc 3y ago
    > and we need to value ICs more Maybe start by getting rid of the silly term - "IC". What's the difference between a product, project, sales and a people manager? They all manage something. It's people's egos and lust for power that makes this distinction.
    - rjtavares 3y ago
      The distinction is useful because people managers have some specific tasks related to HR processes. The fact that the distinction has an ego implication is the problem, not the distinction itself.
    - falcor84 3y ago
      I'm against euphemisms in general and don't think we should be changing this word either. As I see it, an IC is anyone whose main contribution is through artifacts or other actions they perform directly, and a manager is someone whose main contribution is through coordinating the actions of others. As such, I'm absolutely ok with "project manager" and "product manager" even if people don't report to them directly. If you have a better term, do go ahead and propose it, but let's not throw out this useful term just yet.
      - willcipriano 3y ago
        If we are merely IC's when it comes time to get paid, why aren't we all IC's when it comes to returning to office?
        rjtavares 3y ago
        Again, the problem is the "merely". Sports stars are ICs and they're well paid.
        willcipriano 3y ago
        I've only seen people get upset when others act like ICs on sports teams. "Ball hog" and the like. I don't think that's a example of one.
- gigatexal 3y ago
  Could it be (get ready to crack some eggs as I am about to fry some conspiracy-bacon) an effort by HR/companies to promote sr engineers into managers to then give HR reasons to cull the herd if they need to?
dspillett 3y ago
Another factor is that going to management to get more compensation is a given around many industries. You aren't going to get more where you are if you don't want to move into management, because you won't get more elsewhere either in the same state and they know that. They are not trying to pay you what will keep you happy, they are trying to pay you what will stop you taking your knowledge/experience elsewhere. You just have to be aware of the market you are locking yourself into. I'm well aware I could be making more as a manager, or even if I let myself be called a “senior” which often overlaps in terms of having some responsibility for people/things in a manager-y way, but I pootle along as I am anyway because I know while I'm not exactly happy ATM I'd be less so the other way and I don't think that the extra compensation would balance that. We may fall foul of AI in the not too distant future and end up stacking shelves for Tesco, but then again a lot of those management reports and decisions look rather automatable by the same LLMs too, if not more so…
hajile 3y ago
If management didn't pay well, qualified people simply wouldn't do it or you'd be limited to people who felt emotionally compensated by getting more power over other people (which is already bad enough).
- smueller1234 3y ago
  Some of us enjoy helping other people. First bit of advice I give to new or would-be managers is to learn indirect gratification. Most common failure mode for new engineering managers IMO is the struggle to feel productive given that impact is achieved chiefly indirectly.
smueller1234 3y ago
For what is worth, I'm a fairly senior manager (a few hundred engineers) and I firmly believe and vocally point out the opposite. I'm sure the kind of self dealing you describe is not unheard of, but it's also pretty cynical to assume that as a default. If the culture in your work place has gone that far down the drain for real, maybe take some time to look for a new gig or reality check it with a manager you trust?

hintymad 3y ago

I grew up reading all kinds of articles and books about how engineering itself is a career track and I believed it. However, when I looked at the great engineers, it seems they eventually turned into executives. Jeff Dean, for instance, is one the greatest engineers. He has deep technical skills. He is versatile, as we can see that he made key contributions in storages, distributed systems, and machine learning. Yet his end game? SVP of Google. And how many people can really be Jeff Dean?

resolutebat 3y ago
LinkedIn says Jeff is currently Chief Scientist, an IC role. And Google famously added an extra rung to its IC ladder just to make room for him.
- squokko 3y ago
  Whatever his title, he runs Google Brain.
- unicornmama 3y ago
  Jeff has reports that means he's a manager.
GoblinSlayer 3y ago
Some say they work for money alone and measure it in bills paid, in which case they can promote to management position, because the only difference they see is salary.
adwn 3y ago
I suspect the reason for this is that even great engineers don't scale indefinitely: At some point, if you want to increase output, you have to delegate some part of your work. To increase output even further, you have to delegate even more. That also doesn't scale indefinitely, so you have to start delegating the delegating. And before you know it, you're an SVP and not really directly doing any technical work anymore.
- 3y ago

andirk 3y ago

A couple jobs ago, when I realized I was doing all of the non-trivial front-end work at about the workload of ~4 of the other engineers, I just went golfing half the time. That way I was getting paid the same but for half the time at work! And a job before that, my boss told me that I was making the other engineers feel dumb so she wanted me to do less. So I started crocheting at my desk. She helped me with my technique a couple times too.

TylerE 3y ago
One of the best parts of WFH is not having to do a bunch of performative theater.
another-dave 3y ago
> And a job before that, my boss told me that I was making the other engineers feel dumb so she wanted me to do less. So I started crocheting at my desk. She helped me with my technique a couple times too. It's funny, I think I'd feel more dumb if the person beside me was crocheting half the time but still more productive than me!

tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago

> there can be an objective system to measure work accomplished and set rewards accordingly. You’ve now undoubtedly made your life and that of those around you worse basically on the basis that you need to be proven wrong about being a “5x engineer”. Engineers hate the hand-wavey nature of labour markets almost as much as they hate any attempts to remotely objectively quantify their performance. The everybody-compromises happy medium is defined career tracks with largely qualitative and certainly subjective measures of actual responsibility. Nowhere in that are you going to get the reassurance that you’re after: that you’re worth 5 other engineers, or whatever. That’s just not how things work, even in IC roles. The fact that you pose this as a means of measurement in my eyes speaks volumes as to where you’d land on this imagined scale. Honestly 99% of professions out there wouldn’t get away with being as entitled as software engineers are. Which, yes, market forces and all that. But let’s not pretend that there are many if any unreasonable aspects of a typical dev job.

alkonaut 3y ago

For me there was a fork in the round around age 30 when I was pushed to take on managerial tasks/roles. This was at a company in traditional industry with basically no technical ladder, developers were line-work and the only way to climb was management. I stuck through it as an IC and at 45 I’m still not in management. I enjoy being an IC and hope to be for another 20 or 25 years. My only fear is that I have grown stuck in the company because seeking a developer job at 45 or 50 is probably subject to ageism more than a program/product manager job would.

black_13 3y ago

[dead]

jader201 3y ago

> met with demands for me to write PRDs > spend the rest of my time teaching better programming skills Are you an engineer or a product manager? If you’re a PM, sounds like you should switch roles. If you're an engineer, sounds like your manager/peers don’t know that. :) But in seriousness, it sounds like there may be a mismatch somewhere.

rhtgrg 3y ago
It doesn't look like a mismatch to me. Looks like L6+ engineering work.

matrix_overload 3y ago

Business likes predictability. The chance of 5 people deciding to leave all at once is exponentially lower than a chance of 1 person. Hence, unless you are the owner/founder, your replaceability will be valued more than your performance.

re-thc 3y ago
> The chance of 5 people deciding to leave all at once is exponentially lower than a chance of 1 person. And the chance of 5 random people producing something compared to the 1 you know is a huge contributor is exponentially lower too. > Business likes predictability. That's great. Then they should actually stick with it i.e. reward the 1 that's been contributing rather than gamble on something that might not work. It's common in sports teams, e.g. where you sell your star player and buy 5 others hoping to get more value. At the end of the day you're lucky to even get the same value.
- psd1 3y ago
  Counterexample: sports teams that improve when they replace their star player. Football doesn't have great players in an absolute sense. For the last decade, the greatest player, depending on which tiresome fan you ask, had been either Ronaldo or Messi. Messi didn't pull up any trees at PSG, and Ronaldo's second stint at MU was underwhelming. In both cases, that's because the team tactics had to be shifted to accommodate these players, to the detriment of the other players. My old team lead was rated highly. But he stifled the rest of the ICs. From above he looked good, from below he looked shit. He should not have been developing software, he needed to be in a process-oriented role. I believe that our productivity would have increased - certainly morale and cohesion would have - if he'd fucked off and not been replaced.
  - squokko 3y ago
    Is it team tactics that had to shift or is it just that the team had to let go of good players to afford the salaries of Ronaldo or Messi?
  - 3y ago

f1shy 3y ago

I cannot believe I'm not the only one! Exactly this is what I'm doing... helping the ones who want. And use my knowledge to do the work of 1 week in 4 hours...

evandale 3y ago
You're far from the only! I love programming and I'm more than happy to work with juniors and solve junior tasks. I feel like this industry puts so much pressure on people to be an engineer or an architect or something more than a person who writes a little script to fix something and moves on. Everything built today seems to have to be architected and scalable and I hate it.
- groestl 3y ago
  > Everything built today seems to have to be architected and scalable and I hate it. To have a rough idea on how to scale it, should it take off, is not a bad thing. To do all the work, before it actually takes off, is.
- oneepic 3y ago
  > Everything built today seems to have to be architected and scalable and I hate it. I feel this pressure a lot b/c of big-tech promo culture.