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I have been a manager four times, twice at FAANGs. I disagree with a lot that the author says: - The ladder isn’t really taller. Most EMs end up clustered at t

by t8sr 3y ago

I have been a manager four times, twice at FAANGs. I disagree with a lot that the author says: - The ladder isn’t really taller. Most EMs end up clustered at the equivalent of L6/staff engineer. Promotions to senior manager and beyond are situational and rare. Meanwhile, my peers on the engineering ladder get promoted when ready, without needing to wait for the stars to align. (I made it to senior manager, but I was lucky to be in a growth area.) - The skills feel transferrable, but every pure EM I know who got laid off is still looking for work and ready to give up. Meanwhile, those of us happy to go back to IC roles have no trouble finding work. Corporate management cultures are actually incredibly variable across companies and not directly transferable. The single most transferable skill I know in this industry is Linux internals. - The idea that 5 years of experience is enough to solve most problems is crazy to me. 18 years in the industry, and I’m still very aware of things I don’t know and need to get better at. I know amazing engineers with 40 years of experience who are still learning and getting better. IMO the best thing about being a manager is that you get to spend a lot of your time thinking about the future, and you are more likely to be “in the room where it happens,” talking to and hearing from C-levels. It’s also the worst thing, because you see how the sausage gets made. I do agree with the things the author dislikes, but they get better. As a new manager, the author possibly hasn’t yet run into the thing you come to hate the most: senior management in many companies is basically a high school clique. Behavioral problems that would get normal people fired are sometimes tolerated in VP, C-levels, even directors sometimes, and working in such environments is trying.

shubhamjain 3y ago
Another point: there many more senior+staff engineer roles than EM roles. Once you become an EM, it's much harder to make a switch, because: a) the roles are fewer b) companies are wary of bringing in an EM for a team (prefer to promote within the ranks, in my experience). c) switching from EM to a senior engineer role is hard both because it feels like a downgrade and because I see companies not that willing to offer it. Of course, if the company is on the right course, you've hit a jackpot and can become an important leader few years down the line, but I know many EMs who are trapped in a bad org because of this. I believe engineers transitioning to a management role should keep these things in mind. I prefer making less bucks and keep my peace of mind about moving somewhere else.
- sorokod 3y ago
  companies are wary of bringing in an EM for a team (prefer to promote within the ranks, in my experience) In Band of Brothers TV series there is a plot line where an NCO is promoted to be an officer. Soon after he is moved to a different unit because the Army has a policy to distance such promotions from their organic units.
  - whiplash451 3y ago
    I’ve literally never seen this happen in the tech world
    - sorokod 3y ago
      Neither have I but it is an interesting point to consider - to what extent is the EMs thinking biased by their previous experience of the team as an engineer.
      - Fripplebubby 3y ago
        Doesn't this seem like a useful bias to have?
        sorokod 3y ago
        The word bias has a negative connotation so perhaps you mean something else. Given two EMs, one that came organically from a team and another that came "from the outside" and spent a few months working with a team - what advantages and disadvantages would the first EM have over the second?
        zeroonetwothree 3y ago
        IME internally promoted EMs are 4x better. They understand what problems the team is facing, how the product works, the various interactions with other teams, and the company processes. It takes at least a year for an external hire to ramp up to that level of familiarity. I will say that for very dysfunctional teams it could be valuable to get an outside perspective which can do more severe change but hopefully this is less common.
mytailorisrich 3y ago
Promotions on the engineering ladder "when ready without needing to wait for the star to align" is because very often those promotions only entail better title and pay. Periodic promotions keep people happy. But any promotions that entail a real step up in responsibility requires team/company growth for those positions to open up.
- t8sr 3y ago
  There are many different ways to grow beyond staff engineer: - Become an expert in something hard. Fix bugs nobody else can. This requires sticking around for longer than most people, maybe 10 years or more. - Have impact across the industry. Maintain a kernel subsystem, run a C++ subcommittee, etc. - Be a TL for multiple teams, because you have experience and a plan the other TLs can get behind. - Wear multiple hats, e.g. be a solid manager who is also a really good engineer. Be great at, e.g. Audio and ML, or some other rare combo. These archetypes are starting to get documented by some companies as part of their careers ladders, even. As a SWE, you have many options to create scope. As an EM, you really only have one.
  - gmfawcett 3y ago
    > Become an expert in something hard. Fix bugs nobody else can. This is risky advice. :) Context matters. It's going to sound very appealing to a self-motivated, mobile IC, and could work very well in orgs that value individual effort. But in many orgs, solo experts playing non-fungible roles are very big red flags, and can draw negative management attention. Maybe I could build a team around you... but I might not have the resources, or the problem might not warrant it. So I just might end up making your work life harder -- mitigating the risk by devaluing the service you're working on, just moving it to SaaS, or maybe keeping it but making you train up all your colleagues on the risk area (turning you into an unhappy tutor), etc.
    - surajrmal 3y ago
      It might be better to phrase it as an architectural expert. Being in a position where you understand how everything works together better than anyone else is valuable. You can't necessarily train any other person to have such diverse knowledge, nor outsource it. This might lead to you being able to solve otherwise unfixable bugs, but that's more of a side effect.
yodsanklai 3y ago
> The ladder isn’t really taller. In my company, I think it's roughly 2-3% at L7 or more. It takes really special skills to reach that level, not just years of experience. I don't know how it compares to EM though, but it's a tall ladder! > those of us happy to go back to IC roles have no trouble finding work My concern as an IC is ageism. I wish that I can say that when I'm 50+. I feel EMs are a little more immune to that (perhaps more so in Europe where SWEs aren't very well respected).
- t8sr 3y ago
  There were slightly more L7 EMs than L7 SWEs every time I looked, but there's nuance to that. If the company decides it needs an L7 EM and nobody is available to promote, they'll hire externally. Your chances of being promoted into that role are reduced by the proportion of L7 EMs who were external hires. The other nuance is that those numbers don't correct for overall tenure, but I don't know how that would change things. Finally, getting to L7 EM is maybe 30% in your control and 70% circumstances, but that ratio is IMO inverted for ICs. So even though there are more L7 EMs than SWEs, you might still have an easier time getting to L7 SWE, if you're ready to be an L7 SWE. Your point about ageism is well-taken. I'm not yet old enough to really feel it, but I have heard it's rough.
  - badpun 3y ago
    > Finally, getting to L7 EM is maybe 30% in your control and 70% circumstances, but that ratio is IMO inverted for ICs. That sounds like a positive. As an EM, there's a good chance you'll be promoted to L7 via pure luck - with no abnormal amounts of effort, and with no outstanding talent for management. It sucks if you're in the minority which "deserves" the promo (is super hard working and talented), but for everyone else, it's a free lottery ticket to a higher comp.
    - strgcmc 3y ago
      That's... not actually how that 30/70 statement is meant to be read. Imagine as a simplified analogy, applying to get into Harvard. Imagine Harvard has 1000 spots to fill, and that there are 10,000 applicants with roughly equivalent credentials (because they all have: near perfect test scores, high GPAs, strong extracurriculars, etc.). In that environment, one might conclude that, for people who successfully get into Harvard, it was 30% their own skill, and 70% "luck" that the they happen to be semi-randomly picked by the admissions committee who could've easily gone with a nearly-equivalent alternative. So sure, in that environment, "luck" is a factor, but this is by no means a "free lottery ticket" because the near-equivalent applicants had to work hard and be smart to reach the point of being near-equivalents of each other... So it is with promotions in competitive tech companies at least, where good talent is the norm.
thoughtspile 3y ago
Thanks for the feedback! I must say I've never worked in real big tech, and I've never worked with an IC beyond staff level. I'd imagine promotions to principal / fellow are quite rare as well? Besides, most "normal" companies don't have these grades, at all. By transferable, I mean skills that are useful outside of our big tech bubble. You might not want to go out as money is very nice, but still good to know you can do something beside computer beep bop.
- t8sr 3y ago
  Ah right, I tend to think the tech bubble is the default context for stuff posted on HN, but of course that's just my bias. I think staff engineers are slightly more common than first level EMs, but senior EMs are slightly more common than senior staff. Beyond that, it's small numbers and hard to draw conclusions. The nuance I've felt is that promotions to staff and up on the IC ladder are more in your control, while EM promotions are very much about being in the right place at the right time, in addition to being ready for the role. I have worked at "normal" companies as well, and I think the EM role there is slightly different? To me it seemed like it's people management + technical, while in the tech bubble, that would be called "TLM". "Pure" EMs are mostly doing people management only, with strategy and XFN alignment. Does that sound correct to you?
  - thoughtspile 3y ago
    Good point on the control over your promotions, it's something I experienced when moving into an EM role. Banging my head until hitting an actual growth team. I come from Russia, we're not exactly known for great people management, and I'd say management up to department head is expected to handle the tech part as well even in larger companies such as Yandex / VK. This fits your definition of normal companies perfectly.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    > I think staff engineers are slightly more common than first level EMs That’s going to depend a lot on company (and how they define staff vs senior; that varies quite a bit).
  - 3y ago
asQuirreL 3y ago
A couple of other points that struck me as different from my experience, and maybe more a function of where this person is working rather than some fundamental difference between the roles: The idea that your word is taken more seriously as an EM rather than an IC when it comes to (for example) needing to test more. I have to admit that this may have been one of the reasons I felt the need to switch to a management role myself (I was an IC that had recently been promoted to a staff level role and subconsciously I felt like I lacked credibility and hiding behind a title would help me get some). In practice that turned out not to be true -- I didn't need to do that at the time, and now as an IC in a different company, my thoughts and feedback are taken seriously at an organisational level and by my peers. The fact that you have to stack rank and pick an under-performer every half is just broken. I know it's a sad reality of performance management in a lot of places but it's not a universal truth that you will have to do that as a manager. Statistically, you can't avoid having difficult conversations about real performance problems, but there are companies where managers don't have to have the "everyone else on the team did better than you this half" conversation or the "I had to pick so this half you got the short straw" conversation.
- treflop 3y ago
  What you’re saying is true but being able to talk and convince people gets you wayyy further than any other method.
- fabianholzer 3y ago
  > The fact that you have to stack rank and pick an under-performer every half is just broken. I've sworn to myself, that the moment that this idiotic idea get introduced in the "performance management" process at the place I work, will be the day that I'll start to send out resumes. Even if it were handled lottery style ("the short straw") I would not cut slack to either manager or company for such an indignity.
  - rusticpenn 3y ago
    Yeah, I even asked my current employer if its there in the company. He said no. Its there under a different name. I realised why the team culture was so bad. I am sending resumes to other companies already.
jffhn 3y ago
>IMO the best thing about being a manager is that you get to spend a lot of your time thinking about the future In some places it's the opposite: domain-specific codebases far outlive the separate projects they are used for, and the devs are the ones thinking about what their product should be. Kind of like how Linux is a long-lived product made by devs, used in many short(er)-lived C-level projects.
dchftcs 3y ago
> The ladder isn’t really taller. Most EMs end up clustered at the equivalent of L6/staff engineer. Promotions to senior manager and beyond are situational and rare. Meanwhile, my peers on the engineering ladder get promoted when ready, without needing to wait for the stars to align. This sounds like an anecdote tainted with confirmation and survivorship bias. Most SWEs get stuck at senior (especially at Google), getting clustered at L6 is already a privilege relatively speaking. Promotions to L6 are not super rare but less than a majority get them. Promotion to a L7+ is a struggle, if you say most of your peers get there naturally maybe you discounted those who left because they can't get promoted, or you just didn't happen to make many friends with people below your job level ? Or, as a senior manager, are you really sure you see that more than half of the team you manage reach L6+ and a good number to L7 just by waiting? Now I do agree that the EM path doesn't open as many doors as some old school people think (especially since high level ICs tend to lead in some way too), but at least promotion opportunities doesn't seem to be thinner for EM than IC.
- t8sr 3y ago
  The expectation that everyone should reach these career levels is easily dispelled by basic math. L6 and EM can by definition exist at a ratio of, at best, 1:6 to the people at more junior levels. Most engineers might be “stuck” at L5, but most potential EMs are stuck before they even become EMs, due to the same math. But of the people at L6 on either ladder, who are ready to work at the next level, opportunities are definitely easier to find for ICs, than managers. An L7 IC, after all, doesn’t have to come with a team of 30-50.
  - aphexairlines 3y ago
    I've never seen a large company with more L7+ engineers than L7+ managers. Usually it's a ratio of drastically more managers hired/promoted into those levels than engineers, and some orgs don't have any engineers in those levels at all.
  - margorczynski 3y ago
    > L6 and EM can by definition exist at a ratio of, at best, 1:6 to the people at more junior levels And for the respective IC of that level the ratio is even worse as in many companies they help out with many projects consisting of 5-10 people. In short there are many more manager positions at a respective level than IC ones.
Eridrus 3y ago
I also found it weird that the author thought being an EM is a good path to being an entrepreneur. Going from zero to one has very little to do with engineering management. Being able to hack out code quickly and being comfortable talking to potential customers (preferably not in that order) are the most important things and not at all related to being an EM. It's no guarantee that you'll get to hire anyone to manage. And yeah, there are mechanically far fewer management roles than engineering roles, and since the boundary between lead engineer/first line manager is pretty porous in both directions, you're not actually competing with an equivalently smaller pool.
- ozr 3y ago
  > I also found it weird that the author thought being an EM is a good path to being an entrepreneur. This was the pitch from my manager that led to me moving into an EM role. He knew I was interested in doing a startup in the future, but I didn't have experience with people management. I don't think it's necessarily a great path to entrepreneurship, but if you are solid on the engineering side it's a good skillset to develop.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    If your company has any chance of success you will be managing other engineers.
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
>The single most transferable skill I know in this industry is Linux internals. I'm glad it's not just me who has noticed this!
- varrock 3y ago
  Would either of you mind expanding on this? What kind of roles have you held?
  - t8sr 3y ago
    I have worked on security, databases, some distributed systems, a couple of video games, AR/VR and some ML systems, mostly connected to database and data pipelines. Knowing what the kernel is likely doing underneath has been useful in all those domains. More than that, being able to set up a production environment by yourself is hugely useful. If you know the internals, the complexity of a lot of middleware kind of collapses, too. There are a million frameworks for doing threading, for example, but they basically all boil down to clone, a futex and some atomics. Similarly, you can figure out how almost anything works with strace. It demystifies so many things that you otherwise need years of experience to debug. As a practical matter, you can always find a job as a competent DevOps type who can code and talk to SWEs.
    - pipes 3y ago
      Are there any books etc that you could recommend on Linux internals. I am mostly write c# code, and I didn't do computer science, I mostly self taught. I recently set myself the task of learning some c as I was finding that I was hitting a brick wall when it came to trying to learn more lower level concepts. I want to work my way through computer systems a programmers perspective : https://www.amazon.co.uk/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspective-3/dp/9332573905/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=HYEVIRZCN58K&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.ig6QM9EoqauiX3dp8q9lvKtuD3mzgCXzRTApxXSDhC2lRBwiO88wAePdurjVA_8vUwicaSaCzshG43uvTGavBj37-sIxGtZqk0jfWT4EuRiknZaMM9xkORRVbvhBdYVOcy5flT87mBEwEsnEbqA3rzDXN3qZ_JYfjastSE-IyowxyPsBGGJniJEble_fDaB0HJWdQdZaYv3FB8VUxjJ6NA.M-lr_UyniswTgeJX3vI2wHnhkU_sjIdXyg8IROxUpis&dib_tag=se&keywords=a+programmers+perspective&qid=1708190577&sprefix=a+programmers+pecsoective%2Caps%2C163&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspe...
avensec 3y ago
> senior management in many companies is basically a high school clique. Behavioral problems that would get normal people fired are sometimes tolerated in VP, C-levels, even directors sometimes, and working in such environments is trying. I didn't see any other comments on this part, and want to give a huge +1. I use to wonder how overall cultures got so misaligned with what Sr. Leadership was saying in open sessions. The amount of contradiction in what they say in large groups, and what they *do* in reality, is the smart lower layers of the org seeing right through the BS. It was eye opening to be able to see behind the curtain.
jSully24 3y ago
> The idea that 5 years of experience is enough to solve most problems is crazy to me. 18 years in the industry, and I’m still very aware of things I don’t know and need to get better at. I know amazing engineers with 40 years of experience who are still learning and getting better. Recently retired engineering manager here. Manager I all the way to VP of Engineering at several successful startups and a few big companies. I was continually surprised that fresh and new challenges continually appeared, until I got wise enough to know there will always be something you not run into before. Be wary of anyone who think’s they’ve seen it all.
emeril 3y ago
omg so true re: terrible behavior of senior people (though thankfully not universal) I suspect people view these senior leaders are irreplaceably important and tolerate all sorts of terrible/pathological behaviors from them...
sleight42 3y ago
This guy gets it. Senior management often seems like a popularity contest. The ability to get along with others often seems to be more important than actually being a good manager, being aligned with the business, and delivering value.

by t8sr 3y ago

shubhamjain 3y ago

Another point: there many more senior+staff engineer roles than EM roles. Once you become an EM, it's much harder to make a switch, because: a) the roles are fewer b) companies are wary of bringing in an EM for a team (prefer to promote within the ranks, in my experience). c) switching from EM to a senior engineer role is hard both because it feels like a downgrade and because I see companies not that willing to offer it. Of course, if the company is on the right course, you've hit a jackpot and can become an important leader few years down the line, but I know many EMs who are trapped in a bad org because of this. I believe engineers transitioning to a management role should keep these things in mind. I prefer making less bucks and keep my peace of mind about moving somewhere else.

sorokod 3y ago
companies are wary of bringing in an EM for a team (prefer to promote within the ranks, in my experience) In Band of Brothers TV series there is a plot line where an NCO is promoted to be an officer. Soon after he is moved to a different unit because the Army has a policy to distance such promotions from their organic units.
- whiplash451 3y ago
  I’ve literally never seen this happen in the tech world
  - sorokod 3y ago
    Neither have I but it is an interesting point to consider - to what extent is the EMs thinking biased by their previous experience of the team as an engineer.
    - Fripplebubby 3y ago
      Doesn't this seem like a useful bias to have?
      - sorokod 3y ago
        The word bias has a negative connotation so perhaps you mean something else. Given two EMs, one that came organically from a team and another that came "from the outside" and spent a few months working with a team - what advantages and disadvantages would the first EM have over the second?
        zeroonetwothree 3y ago
        IME internally promoted EMs are 4x better. They understand what problems the team is facing, how the product works, the various interactions with other teams, and the company processes. It takes at least a year for an external hire to ramp up to that level of familiarity. I will say that for very dysfunctional teams it could be valuable to get an outside perspective which can do more severe change but hopefully this is less common.

mytailorisrich 3y ago

Promotions on the engineering ladder "when ready without needing to wait for the star to align" is because very often those promotions only entail better title and pay. Periodic promotions keep people happy. But any promotions that entail a real step up in responsibility requires team/company growth for those positions to open up.

t8sr 3y ago
There are many different ways to grow beyond staff engineer: - Become an expert in something hard. Fix bugs nobody else can. This requires sticking around for longer than most people, maybe 10 years or more. - Have impact across the industry. Maintain a kernel subsystem, run a C++ subcommittee, etc. - Be a TL for multiple teams, because you have experience and a plan the other TLs can get behind. - Wear multiple hats, e.g. be a solid manager who is also a really good engineer. Be great at, e.g. Audio and ML, or some other rare combo. These archetypes are starting to get documented by some companies as part of their careers ladders, even. As a SWE, you have many options to create scope. As an EM, you really only have one.
- gmfawcett 3y ago
  > Become an expert in something hard. Fix bugs nobody else can. This is risky advice. :) Context matters. It's going to sound very appealing to a self-motivated, mobile IC, and could work very well in orgs that value individual effort. But in many orgs, solo experts playing non-fungible roles are very big red flags, and can draw negative management attention. Maybe I could build a team around you... but I might not have the resources, or the problem might not warrant it. So I just might end up making your work life harder -- mitigating the risk by devaluing the service you're working on, just moving it to SaaS, or maybe keeping it but making you train up all your colleagues on the risk area (turning you into an unhappy tutor), etc.
  - surajrmal 3y ago
    It might be better to phrase it as an architectural expert. Being in a position where you understand how everything works together better than anyone else is valuable. You can't necessarily train any other person to have such diverse knowledge, nor outsource it. This might lead to you being able to solve otherwise unfixable bugs, but that's more of a side effect.

yodsanklai 3y ago

> The ladder isn’t really taller. In my company, I think it's roughly 2-3% at L7 or more. It takes really special skills to reach that level, not just years of experience. I don't know how it compares to EM though, but it's a tall ladder! > those of us happy to go back to IC roles have no trouble finding work My concern as an IC is ageism. I wish that I can say that when I'm 50+. I feel EMs are a little more immune to that (perhaps more so in Europe where SWEs aren't very well respected).

t8sr 3y ago
There were slightly more L7 EMs than L7 SWEs every time I looked, but there's nuance to that. If the company decides it needs an L7 EM and nobody is available to promote, they'll hire externally. Your chances of being promoted into that role are reduced by the proportion of L7 EMs who were external hires. The other nuance is that those numbers don't correct for overall tenure, but I don't know how that would change things. Finally, getting to L7 EM is maybe 30% in your control and 70% circumstances, but that ratio is IMO inverted for ICs. So even though there are more L7 EMs than SWEs, you might still have an easier time getting to L7 SWE, if you're ready to be an L7 SWE. Your point about ageism is well-taken. I'm not yet old enough to really feel it, but I have heard it's rough.
- badpun 3y ago
  > Finally, getting to L7 EM is maybe 30% in your control and 70% circumstances, but that ratio is IMO inverted for ICs. That sounds like a positive. As an EM, there's a good chance you'll be promoted to L7 via pure luck - with no abnormal amounts of effort, and with no outstanding talent for management. It sucks if you're in the minority which "deserves" the promo (is super hard working and talented), but for everyone else, it's a free lottery ticket to a higher comp.
  - strgcmc 3y ago
    That's... not actually how that 30/70 statement is meant to be read. Imagine as a simplified analogy, applying to get into Harvard. Imagine Harvard has 1000 spots to fill, and that there are 10,000 applicants with roughly equivalent credentials (because they all have: near perfect test scores, high GPAs, strong extracurriculars, etc.). In that environment, one might conclude that, for people who successfully get into Harvard, it was 30% their own skill, and 70% "luck" that the they happen to be semi-randomly picked by the admissions committee who could've easily gone with a nearly-equivalent alternative. So sure, in that environment, "luck" is a factor, but this is by no means a "free lottery ticket" because the near-equivalent applicants had to work hard and be smart to reach the point of being near-equivalents of each other... So it is with promotions in competitive tech companies at least, where good talent is the norm.

thoughtspile 3y ago

Thanks for the feedback! I must say I've never worked in real big tech, and I've never worked with an IC beyond staff level. I'd imagine promotions to principal / fellow are quite rare as well? Besides, most "normal" companies don't have these grades, at all. By transferable, I mean skills that are useful outside of our big tech bubble. You might not want to go out as money is very nice, but still good to know you can do something beside computer beep bop.

t8sr 3y ago
Ah right, I tend to think the tech bubble is the default context for stuff posted on HN, but of course that's just my bias. I think staff engineers are slightly more common than first level EMs, but senior EMs are slightly more common than senior staff. Beyond that, it's small numbers and hard to draw conclusions. The nuance I've felt is that promotions to staff and up on the IC ladder are more in your control, while EM promotions are very much about being in the right place at the right time, in addition to being ready for the role. I have worked at "normal" companies as well, and I think the EM role there is slightly different? To me it seemed like it's people management + technical, while in the tech bubble, that would be called "TLM". "Pure" EMs are mostly doing people management only, with strategy and XFN alignment. Does that sound correct to you?
- thoughtspile 3y ago
  Good point on the control over your promotions, it's something I experienced when moving into an EM role. Banging my head until hitting an actual growth team. I come from Russia, we're not exactly known for great people management, and I'd say management up to department head is expected to handle the tech part as well even in larger companies such as Yandex / VK. This fits your definition of normal companies perfectly.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  > I think staff engineers are slightly more common than first level EMs That’s going to depend a lot on company (and how they define staff vs senior; that varies quite a bit).
- 3y ago

asQuirreL 3y ago

A couple of other points that struck me as different from my experience, and maybe more a function of where this person is working rather than some fundamental difference between the roles: The idea that your word is taken more seriously as an EM rather than an IC when it comes to (for example) needing to test more. I have to admit that this may have been one of the reasons I felt the need to switch to a management role myself (I was an IC that had recently been promoted to a staff level role and subconsciously I felt like I lacked credibility and hiding behind a title would help me get some). In practice that turned out not to be true -- I didn't need to do that at the time, and now as an IC in a different company, my thoughts and feedback are taken seriously at an organisational level and by my peers. The fact that you have to stack rank and pick an under-performer every half is just broken. I know it's a sad reality of performance management in a lot of places but it's not a universal truth that you will have to do that as a manager. Statistically, you can't avoid having difficult conversations about real performance problems, but there are companies where managers don't have to have the "everyone else on the team did better than you this half" conversation or the "I had to pick so this half you got the short straw" conversation.

treflop 3y ago
What you’re saying is true but being able to talk and convince people gets you wayyy further than any other method.
fabianholzer 3y ago
> The fact that you have to stack rank and pick an under-performer every half is just broken. I've sworn to myself, that the moment that this idiotic idea get introduced in the "performance management" process at the place I work, will be the day that I'll start to send out resumes. Even if it were handled lottery style ("the short straw") I would not cut slack to either manager or company for such an indignity.
- rusticpenn 3y ago
  Yeah, I even asked my current employer if its there in the company. He said no. Its there under a different name. I realised why the team culture was so bad. I am sending resumes to other companies already.

jffhn 3y ago

>IMO the best thing about being a manager is that you get to spend a lot of your time thinking about the future In some places it's the opposite: domain-specific codebases far outlive the separate projects they are used for, and the devs are the ones thinking about what their product should be. Kind of like how Linux is a long-lived product made by devs, used in many short(er)-lived C-level projects.

dchftcs 3y ago

> The ladder isn’t really taller. Most EMs end up clustered at the equivalent of L6/staff engineer. Promotions to senior manager and beyond are situational and rare. Meanwhile, my peers on the engineering ladder get promoted when ready, without needing to wait for the stars to align. This sounds like an anecdote tainted with confirmation and survivorship bias. Most SWEs get stuck at senior (especially at Google), getting clustered at L6 is already a privilege relatively speaking. Promotions to L6 are not super rare but less than a majority get them. Promotion to a L7+ is a struggle, if you say most of your peers get there naturally maybe you discounted those who left because they can't get promoted, or you just didn't happen to make many friends with people below your job level ? Or, as a senior manager, are you really sure you see that more than half of the team you manage reach L6+ and a good number to L7 just by waiting? Now I do agree that the EM path doesn't open as many doors as some old school people think (especially since high level ICs tend to lead in some way too), but at least promotion opportunities doesn't seem to be thinner for EM than IC.

t8sr 3y ago
The expectation that everyone should reach these career levels is easily dispelled by basic math. L6 and EM can by definition exist at a ratio of, at best, 1:6 to the people at more junior levels. Most engineers might be “stuck” at L5, but most potential EMs are stuck before they even become EMs, due to the same math. But of the people at L6 on either ladder, who are ready to work at the next level, opportunities are definitely easier to find for ICs, than managers. An L7 IC, after all, doesn’t have to come with a team of 30-50.
- aphexairlines 3y ago
  I've never seen a large company with more L7+ engineers than L7+ managers. Usually it's a ratio of drastically more managers hired/promoted into those levels than engineers, and some orgs don't have any engineers in those levels at all.
- margorczynski 3y ago
  > L6 and EM can by definition exist at a ratio of, at best, 1:6 to the people at more junior levels And for the respective IC of that level the ratio is even worse as in many companies they help out with many projects consisting of 5-10 people. In short there are many more manager positions at a respective level than IC ones.

Eridrus 3y ago

I also found it weird that the author thought being an EM is a good path to being an entrepreneur. Going from zero to one has very little to do with engineering management. Being able to hack out code quickly and being comfortable talking to potential customers (preferably not in that order) are the most important things and not at all related to being an EM. It's no guarantee that you'll get to hire anyone to manage. And yeah, there are mechanically far fewer management roles than engineering roles, and since the boundary between lead engineer/first line manager is pretty porous in both directions, you're not actually competing with an equivalently smaller pool.

ozr 3y ago
> I also found it weird that the author thought being an EM is a good path to being an entrepreneur. This was the pitch from my manager that led to me moving into an EM role. He knew I was interested in doing a startup in the future, but I didn't have experience with people management. I don't think it's necessarily a great path to entrepreneurship, but if you are solid on the engineering side it's a good skillset to develop.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  If your company has any chance of success you will be managing other engineers.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

>The single most transferable skill I know in this industry is Linux internals. I'm glad it's not just me who has noticed this!

varrock 3y ago
Would either of you mind expanding on this? What kind of roles have you held?
- t8sr 3y ago
  I have worked on security, databases, some distributed systems, a couple of video games, AR/VR and some ML systems, mostly connected to database and data pipelines. Knowing what the kernel is likely doing underneath has been useful in all those domains. More than that, being able to set up a production environment by yourself is hugely useful. If you know the internals, the complexity of a lot of middleware kind of collapses, too. There are a million frameworks for doing threading, for example, but they basically all boil down to clone, a futex and some atomics. Similarly, you can figure out how almost anything works with strace. It demystifies so many things that you otherwise need years of experience to debug. As a practical matter, you can always find a job as a competent DevOps type who can code and talk to SWEs.
  - pipes 3y ago
    Are there any books etc that you could recommend on Linux internals. I am mostly write c# code, and I didn't do computer science, I mostly self taught. I recently set myself the task of learning some c as I was finding that I was hitting a brick wall when it came to trying to learn more lower level concepts. I want to work my way through computer systems a programmers perspective : https://www.amazon.co.uk/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspective-3/dp/9332573905/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=HYEVIRZCN58K&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.ig6QM9EoqauiX3dp8q9lvKtuD3mzgCXzRTApxXSDhC2lRBwiO88wAePdurjVA_8vUwicaSaCzshG43uvTGavBj37-sIxGtZqk0jfWT4EuRiknZaMM9xkORRVbvhBdYVOcy5flT87mBEwEsnEbqA3rzDXN3qZ_JYfjastSE-IyowxyPsBGGJniJEble_fDaB0HJWdQdZaYv3FB8VUxjJ6NA.M-lr_UyniswTgeJX3vI2wHnhkU_sjIdXyg8IROxUpis&dib_tag=se&keywords=a+programmers+perspective&qid=1708190577&sprefix=a+programmers+pecsoective%2Caps%2C163&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspe...

avensec 3y ago

> senior management in many companies is basically a high school clique. Behavioral problems that would get normal people fired are sometimes tolerated in VP, C-levels, even directors sometimes, and working in such environments is trying. I didn't see any other comments on this part, and want to give a huge +1. I use to wonder how overall cultures got so misaligned with what Sr. Leadership was saying in open sessions. The amount of contradiction in what they say in large groups, and what they *do* in reality, is the smart lower layers of the org seeing right through the BS. It was eye opening to be able to see behind the curtain.

jSully24 3y ago

> The idea that 5 years of experience is enough to solve most problems is crazy to me. 18 years in the industry, and I’m still very aware of things I don’t know and need to get better at. I know amazing engineers with 40 years of experience who are still learning and getting better. Recently retired engineering manager here. Manager I all the way to VP of Engineering at several successful startups and a few big companies. I was continually surprised that fresh and new challenges continually appeared, until I got wise enough to know there will always be something you not run into before. Be wary of anyone who think’s they’ve seen it all.

emeril 3y ago

omg so true re: terrible behavior of senior people (though thankfully not universal) I suspect people view these senior leaders are irreplaceably important and tolerate all sorts of terrible/pathological behaviors from them...

sleight42 3y ago

This guy gets it. Senior management often seems like a popularity contest. The ability to get along with others often seems to be more important than actually being a good manager, being aligned with the business, and delivering value.