13 ms·

Career Development: What It Means to Be a Manager, Director, or VP (2015)

545 points by AnhTho_FR 2y ago

pavlov 2y ago
> “It’s like saying with $3.65 I can buy either a grande non-fat latte or a head of organic lettuce” Ah, 2015.
- apwell23 2y ago
  i smiled at that too. miss those innocent times.
  - xandrius 2y ago
    Is it innocent because prices seem cheaper to us today?
    - Kenji 2y ago
      [dead]
  - lifty 2y ago
    Find a better unit to report your costs in. Like hours of work, or any other hard asset (real estate, gold, bitcoin etc.). Otherwise you are bound to be disappointed every year.
    - oez 2y ago
      I would like to know your definition of a hard asset if you consider bitcoin one.
      - lifty 2y ago
        Indeed I haven't used that term correctly. What I meant, is some kind of asset that is not easily inflated, something that in the long term can retain its exchange value better. Of course, nothing is guaranteed, and especially with bitcoin, it super volatile. But you have a better chance of judging your purchase power based on that.
        hnb2137 2y ago
        How many Big Macs?
        Thrymr 2y ago
        or grande non-fat lattes?
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
It is a good read. It is early so I can't help wondering if I am nodding, because it hits close to home or coffee did not hit yet, but I think I agree with the author here.
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  It's an interesting read an hard to disagree with. More interesting perhaps for the typical employee is how they would get to such a position, starting in a junior position. One key advice here is to stop behaving like an employee. By that I mean to start reflecting on what it is you are doing, what you are being asked to do, why you are being asked to do, etc. Apply some critical thinking. Ask questions if you don't understand something. Not to be obnoxious but to educate yourself. What would you do if you were in charge? Try to come up with ideas on how to your work better. Try to do those things. Get feedback on how you are doing. This is not about seeking conflict but simply seeking understanding and more control over what it is you do. You can't hope to manage others if you can't manage yourself. Once you are in control of what you do, the rest comes naturally. Whether that's via promotions, new jobs, or starting your own business. It all starts with challenging the notion that you are just there to do whatever it is you are told to do. That's what employees do. Don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with being a good employee. Good, loyal employees are great to have. If you run a team, company or whatever, you need those to get stuff done. But they'll never run things for you. That's your job. And having too many captains on the ship is also not great. Good to reflect on the next time you have a work conflict. It's not always about being right. Employees are mostly just reacting to inputs around them (from their boss, colleagues, whatever) but rarely act pro-actively. Reacting pro-actively, without being told, is the key difference. Some people do that naturally and can't stop themselves doing that, other people simply don't have that in them. Nothing wrong with that. Figure out which you are early and then act accordingly.
n4r9 2y ago
> [Leveling] conflates career development and salary negotiation. It encourages a mindset of saying, “what must I do to make L10” when you want to say, “I want a $10K raise.” It's not obvious to me why this is a bad thing. I agree that incentivising a box-ticking mindset discourages ownership and initiative. But for software engineers I feel like there has to be some methodical (and transparent) way for raises to be assigned, and for it to relate to skills and traits. Otherwise you can easily end up in a situation where people are rewarded for being bolshy and savvy rather than valuable to the company. Am I missing something here?
- WJW 2y ago
  I think that what you are missing is that "what must I do to make L10" and "what is valuable to the company" are typically somewhat orthogonal. A prototypical example is that almost every career ladder out there mentions things like "impact" and architect/systems design work rather than often more valuable maintenance work that keeps current systems running. In addition, measuring the contribution of any individual to a team effort is always difficult, in some cases pretty much impossible until years later. This means that it is always possible to game such career frameworks by focusing only on the things the framework rewards and skipping everything else. In short, encouraging people to get to the next career level in a well-defined framework is exactly the type of "situation where people are rewarded for being bolshy and savvy rather than being valuable to the company" that you mention as being undesirable.
  - hiatus 2y ago
    If following the framework does not provide value to the company, the framework is obviously flawed.
    - throwaway98797 2y ago
      the frameworks are always flawed the best leaders know this
      - 2y ago
darkwater 2y ago
> Yes, you might discover that a Senior FPA Analyst II earns the same as a Product Marketing Director I, but why does that matter? It’s a coincidence. It’s like saying with $3.65 I can buy either a grande non-fat latte or a head of organic lettuce. What matters is the fair price of each of those goods in the market — not they that happen to have the same price. Well, it infuriates me just the same. If a coffee shot costs the same or more that some other food that is healthy and gives you more calories and/or nutrients. And I say this as a coffee lover. But beside specific examples nitpicking, I understand the gist of it, and I understand the market reasons - you want to attract or retain talent and they/we look at compensations on a market level - but this still doesn't mean it is fair. Unless you believe in fairy tales and invisible hands.
- irjustin 2y ago
  > but this still doesn't mean it is fair You're trying to change which definition of fair is being used. It's fair in that it's "fair market value" because that's what the market is willing to pay. That's clearly the version the author is using given the example.
  - darkwater 2y ago
    "Fair" has many facets. It can be fairly compensated for the market value of a nominal role but still be unfairly compensated within the company according to the work executed and the "value"[1] created. [1] Value in this context can be not just only monetary value but creating a good working environment, help other to do better their job etc
    - irjustin 2y ago
      I'm not sure what to tell you. That words can have different meanings given the context? And this version of fair is using a specific one that you're unwilling to accept. It seems you wish the author used "market rate" and not "fair". But you're annoyed at the wrong thing because that usage is completely valid. That society has allowed "fair" to mean what the market is willing to pay regardless of its equality to fellow man. Because if that's the case - nothing is fair.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
apwell23 2y ago
i don't agree with any of these definitions. From my experience VPs and directors are so far removed from any actual work that most of their "plans" mean very little. Things get done not because of their "plans" but despite of them. In terms of career development. Ppl aren't promoted for their ability to make "plans" or execute them. Ppl are promoted into those promotions for being trustworthy by ppl above them . To get to that position, you should be 1. be people oriented. Genuinely like ppl around you from your heart ( not fake it) . Take the first step and build genuine love for ppl around you. Your first instinct towards anyone should be trying to make their work lives easier. This is super hard for nerdy coder types because we have mental depenendcy on being the "smart one", hard to let go of that part of identity. 2. consistenly deliver results and become the person that can be trusted by person that gave you the assignment. Building trust is the main job when you go work. Its not writing some badass code or being innovating or whatever.
- lstodd 2y ago
  this is why in my company the only VP is the company cat and the title is hereditary.
- throw12hhfhd 2y ago
  Having been in both situations in large organizations, I can say the connection between the plans and the work can be difficult to see sometimes, but the absence of such a plan is much worse in the long run. As the size of groups grow, people don't generally self organize. Great career development advice. This is absolutely the most reliable way to advance in an organization.
windward 2y ago
Out of scope for this article, but: >Most leveling systems are too granular, with the levels separated by arbitrary characterizations. It’s makework. It’s fake science. It’s bureaucratic and encourages a non-thinking “climb the ladder” approach to career development. (“Hey, let’s develop you to go from somewhat-independent to rather-independent this year.”) This is a funny, common requirement. Every junior developer is told they should feel free to ask questions - and now they have a financial incentive not to.
- ikerino 2y ago
  Asking questions and unblocking yourself is a required competency for acting independently. Developers should aim to be resourceful and respect others time, but I expect my reports to seek out help if they get genuinely stuck for more than 15 minutes (no clue what to do.) It's much better than waiting around for your manager to find out you were working on the wrong problems (or nothing, waiting for instructions.)
- joshstrange 2y ago
  > Every junior developer is told they should feel free to ask questions - and now they have a financial incentive not to. This is such a fine line though, encourage developers to ask questions, but they also need to try problem-solving before they immediately go asking for help. If I _consistently_ get asked for help on problems that I can solve it within 5-10 minutes using no “company knowledge“ (just plain debugging), then that cements someone as “junior” in my mind. Contrast that with the people who ask lots of questions but they are well thought out questions that require knowledge of the inner workings of the system. “This isn’t working” vs “I can’t figure out X works, I tried Y and Z but that gave me this error that I don’t understand but I did find….”
  - dnadler 2y ago
    I have a similar mindset though less focused on the type of questions being asked and more about how many times I have to answer the same question. Ideally, the number is one time. As in one conversation where the person walks away understanding the answer. If I have to have that conversation more than once it’s a problem. Obviously there’s nuance - it can take time to get your head around a new concept or hard problem. But in any case, I like that as one dimension when thinking about a person’s skill/level/potential.
austin-cheney 2y ago
US/NATO military equivalents to corporate titles: Team lead: E5-E6, W1 Manager: E7-E8, O2-O3 Associate Principal: W1-W2 Principal: W3-W4 Senior Principal: W5 Senior Advisor: E9 Associate Director: O4 Director: O5 VP: O6 SVP: O7-O8 COO O9 CEO/Diplomat O10 (4star) Chairman: O11 (5star) Conglomerate Chairman: 6star, Pershing The big difference is that in the military everything above team lead has an internal support staff and planning occurs independently at every level.
- mattbrewsbytes 2y ago
  I would add that typically the O levels there (officer in military) in corporate usually have bonus/equity as part of compensation, like a major element of comp, not some $1k petty cash bonus. These are also the levels where if there is a massive screw-up, you might be the person ousted so there is a fair amount of accountability.
joshstrange 2y ago
“Levels don’t matter except for these levels that I care about” :rolleyes: All titles are made up. No one fits a role/title perfectly. It’s all a bunch of bullshit. Normally it’s really just using salary ranges as the core thing people care about and people move up “titles” while not improving their skills one bit (seniority, playing politics better, etc). At my last company they made a big deal about becoming a “senior developer”, it was a lot more responsibly, work, _pay_, etc. Years later I (and another developer) was outperforming the “senior” developers by a good margin and the company gave us both title bumps, a 3% CoL raise, and… $1K bonus. That was probably the last time I believed in any sort of sanity in ranking/titles/etc. Ask for what you want, don’t wait for a “performance review”, yes it’s uncomfortable, get over it. No ranking system is going to accurately reflect skills.
- ryanjshaw 2y ago
  > All titles are made up Well yes, literally, but that's not the point. The author is saying that Lx titles inherently don't make sense and he sees more value in a model based on accountability and responsibility. My understanding: - manager: responsible for putting effort into execution - director: responsible for executing a plan, not accountable for its success - VP: responsible for the plan and accountable for its success
  - joshstrange 2y ago
    Those are great ideas in theory I guess but not at all how they are treated industry wide and often not how they are treated within the same company. 99% of the time titles have very little to do with what someone does day to day. It’s just not that simple and clear cut. All that to say, I don’t find one persons thoughts on what those titles mean very useful since that’s just what it means to that specific person. There is no, that I’m aware of, industry-wide agreement. Not to mention I find those definitions to be silly, overly simple, and not how anyone thinks of their job.
    - ryanjshaw 2y ago
      See what I said to the other guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43434093#43456611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43434093#43456611
gneray 2y ago
A classic
trentnix 2y ago
I’m had all three titles at various points in my career but the reality is that my responsibilities and operational altitude varied widely from company to company. I just completed a job search after being laid off and one of the challenges of finding a job in leadership is deciphering what each company actually wants from their managers or directors or VPs. Some roles are “hands on”. For others that’s a red flag. For some it’s all about managing people and emotional intelligence. For others it’s all about technical acumen and technical direction. Sometimes what they are really looking for is exactly what the last person in the role did. In other cases, they want the opposite of the last person to hold the role. The only thing you can really depend on when it comes to leadership titles in software, in my experience, is that one’s title explains which meetings one is expected to attend.
- thinkingtoilet 2y ago
  I've had a similar experience, however I found it tied to the size of the company. If you're a director at a large corporation, you will be very siloed and you most likely won't be doing much coding. If you're a directory at a small company, you're going to be coding, managing coders, and being part of leadership and strategic discussions.
  - _fat_santa 2y ago
    Can confirm. I currently work for an SMB (~150 employees) as a manager. Our VP doesn't write any code but the directors and managers are still IC's on projects. Right now I really like being an IC in addition to being manager cause I still have that coding itch to scratch, but I just know one day I will eventually graduate to role where I don't write any code. Long term it is the direction I want to go in but it's going to be bittersweet when I finally get to a role with no coding.
- re-thc 2y ago
  > The only thing you can really depend on when it comes to leadership titles in software It's not just leadership titles. Even if they list tech stack, responsibility or any of it it may not eventually be reality. Sometimes it's a wish list, sometimes it's planned and other times they "forgot" to update it.
aarghh 2y ago
Oh, sweet summer child... > But it’s the same standard to which the CEO is held. If the CEO makes a plan, gets it approved by the board, and executes it well but it doesn’t work, they cannot tell the board “but, but, it’s the plan we agreed to.”
sevensor 2y ago
The junior engineer asking “how can I become a VP?” is classic. Chances of you becoming a VP at the same place you worked as a junior engineer are slim. I know one person who did it, it took him 25 years, and he had been on the golf team in college, so he had a lot more exposure to company VIPs than most. Change employers while in middle management or you will spend a long time there. And that’s assuming you even like being a VP. Sure, the money’s good, but there’s a lot of accountability and you either need to be good at taking it or good at avoiding it.
- hylaride 2y ago
  Hilariously, in the 2010s you didn't need to become a VP to make that kind of money. You could go the principle or distinguished engineer route and still make bank. In many (more purely tech) companies it is not unusual for senior engineers to be making the same salary as directors or VPs, though that may now be starting to change.
- astrange 2y ago
  > The junior engineer asking “how can I become a VP?” is classic. How are they going to know what you just said without asking?
gsf_emergency_2 2y ago
Steve Jobs on a related topic, what it means to be a leader: https://youtu.be/rQKis2Cfpeo https://youtu.be/rQKis2Cfpeo Guess VPs (according to both) are it
- Nemi 2y ago
  I am not a big fan of Steve overall, but the one thing he inherently understood was “identity”. How I am using “identity” in this context is, how someone sees themselves. It is the story they tell themselves about themselves. I am a good leader. I and good at solving problems. I am a dog person. I am tidy or I am sloppy. And on and on. If you hire for identity rather than skillset, you don’t have to manage people. They self-manage. My best managers were ones where the product that they managed was a part of their identity. How it worked. How reliable it was. They weren’t always the smartest people. It often took them longer to solve problems. BUT, they solved them on their own, without me having to supervise. Because they would not give up on the problem until it was solved. To give up would be to admit that their identity was flawed, and that just was not an option. When you hire people like this effectively as a leader you must really allow them to own it. They must have the responsibility and the authority to make decisions, even when those decisions differ from what decision you would make. Results are what matters. Steve understood this.
  - chrz 2y ago
    thanks for putting into words what i realised but couldnt formulate. best workers were ones where the product that they managed was a part of their identity.
  - astrange 2y ago
    This is important, but you still have to manage those people because nothing lasts forever and they can burn out!
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  If we assume the natural time evolution of groups of people is to decohere (with sqrt t?), being a leader means keeping everyone roughly in phase?
alexpotato 2y ago
One thing that I learned from going to IC to manager: there is a LOT of activity at the manager level that you never see and therefore don't often think about when you are an IC. Case in point: trying to retain good people. Good people often times end up wanting to leave for a variety of reasons ranging from ludicrous to 100% legitimate. They often announce they are leaving to their direct manager and maybe one other person (E.g. head of another team they work with etc). Given that they are good and worth keeping, this triggers escalations, meetings with the employee and between managers, senior managers and HR. In the best case, this leads to a successful retention. However, the only people that know any of this happened are the employee and the manager tier. The other employees have zero idea any of this occurred unless someone shares/mentions it. I point this out b/c multiple times as an IC, I thought "no one will care if I leave b/c I never see managers actively trying to keep people". The point of this story is twofold: - managers do a lot of "unseen" work - it's worth researching this kind of thing if you are about to move from IC to manager.
- fader 2y ago
  I had the same experience moving from IC to manager. I didn't realize the amount of work that managers are doing that I didn't see and more importantly that they couldn't tell me about. Retention is definitely one, but there's the flip side of dealing with poor performance. You can't announce to everyone that one of the team is on a PIP or struggling with personal issues. But a poor performer means that I'm doing a _ton_ of work to figure out how to fix the issue (whether that's spending hours every week coaching them, building all the long-term documentation that HR requires before we can fire someone, picking up some of their slack myself in the meantime...) Coordination of people also takes way more time than I realized as an IC. If you meet with your manager once per week, that's an hour out of your week. But your manager is meeting with everyone on the team and a good manager is going to spend at _least_ as much time thinking and planning for each of those meetings as they spend in the meetings themselves even if everything is going well. They have to make sure nobody is accidentally working on the same thing or impacting someone else, talking to other teams, that sort of thing. That one hour out of your week is 1-2 days for your manager. Not to mention that they then have to go do the same sort of coordination with other teams. You have something that blows up your week that you need to escalate once per quarter? Multiply that by the number of reports your manager has and that's how much time they've spent fighting fires this quarter. And they need to explain to their leadership what happened and why it won't happen again. Etc. etc. It's not harder work, but it is very different work from being an IC. (On the other hand, being a manager has made me a better IC too. Everyone I've ever managed that was previously a manager themselves has this -- they know exactly what I need to know because they know what they needed to know, so our 1:1s go much faster :) ) One anecdote I have is that when I first moved to a management role, I told a colleague how happy I was that I'd finally have real control over my calendar. After he finished laughing (literally) he said "your calendar belongs to your team and you'll never be in control of that again". He was absolutely right: if something goes wrong or someone is unhappy, everything else moves aside so I can fix my team's problem.
skeeter2020 2y ago
Some of this seems a little simplistic; as a relatively new director who reports to the CTO I think everyone is "building the plan" but at different levels of granularity. Where we run into trouble is when the CTO gets too far away from defining the broad outcomes and veers deep into the "how". They get very prescriptive, but without the context of the implementation details or any real knowledge of the countless small problems that directors, then managers, then ICs deal with. It looks a lot like (and really is a falvour of) micro-managing. >> It conflates career development and salary negotiation I just went through this with an IC 2 levels below me. To the credit of the person's manager they communicated to the IC "don't ask me for a promotion when you want more money". The (easily said; harder to implement) solution is to build a management relationship with people that has an "agent-client" dynamic. The direct manager can't be viewed as the decision maker and needs to be the advocate for this to happen IME.
nine_zeros 2y ago
I think this post is excellent. It clearly describes the problem in many companies - granular levels/ladder climbing. It also describes another great problem that shows up in tech - non-technical/non-owner managers, directors, and VP. As described in this article, the VP is supposed to be the expert who created the plan of execution, the director is supposed to be the expert who executes it. But in big tech at least, this is not what happens. VPs and directors are clueless to the point of incompetence. They understand politics but not how to drive with leadership, deep technical understanding, planning, communication, and direction. They spend an enormous amount of time in BS like stack ranking and perf reviews instead of creating solid plans that move the company needle - externally. As a result, in large companies, you see the corporate hellhole decline. VPs and Directors are not respected at all. They can't answer much. They aren't clued in on the tech. They don't understand competition. They don't understand innovation. They do understand ladder climbing politics - so they create an empire of ladder climbers. It is almost hilarious how poor some tech management is. Would you join a ship where the captain does not how ship-steering works?
setgree 2y ago
> The biggest single development issue I’ve seen over the years is that many VPs still think like directors. > The VP’s job is to get the right answer. They are the functional expert. No one on the team knows their function better than they do. And even if someone did, they are still playing the VP of function role and it’s their job – and no one else’s — to get the right answer. > If the CEO makes a plan, gets it approved by the board, and executes it well but it doesn’t work, they cannot tell the board “but, but, it’s the plan we agreed to." Most CEOs wouldn’t even dream of saying that. It’s because CEOs understand they are held accountable not for effort or activity, but results. Part of truly operating at the VP level is to internalize this fact. Alas that I read this 6 years too late, because it perfectly explains what went wrong at my then-company. A member of the C-suite came up with (what sounded like) a good strategy, but it didn't work because the engineering team wasn't able to execute well enough; and rather than either modify the plan to account for this or shift his attention to fixing the engineering culture -- which might have been politically impossible, but was still his responsibility to try -- he doubled down and became more obsessed with implementing the details of a losing plan. In other words, he was thinking like a director. Meanwhile, another front-page item today is a reminder of why this stuff matters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43431675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43431675
- codemac 2y ago
  A great book is "Strategy and the Fat Smoker". It's written by a consultant but points out an obvious point: the quality of the strategy itself is not nearly as impactful as the ability to execute. The author compares this to being a fat smoker who won't change their habits - knowing the right strategy is insufficient.
  - snapcaster 2y ago
    Is there any point to reading it beyond the insight you shared in one sentence?
    - codemac 2y ago
      In my opinion, yes, it's a short book. A lot about how to actually change culture and habits of a team.
jakey_bakey 2y ago
This is an interesting way of thinking about it compared to the common definition that uses "scope" (which outside IC roles is a synonym for to headcount)
sage76 2y ago
The main job of these "managers" is repeatedly asking "when will this get done?" and "Why isn't it done yet?". You could hire a parrot to do these jobs.
alistairSH 2y ago
I found it interesting that the author mentioned tactical planning for manager and director, but not strategic planning for the VP. That seems like a useful differentiator to me (with extremely contrived examples)... C-level - sets highest level strategy (We're going to the moon!) VP - adds level of detail to strategy (draws a map from earth to the moon, decides we need a rocket ship to get there) Director - bridges strategy and tactics (creates high level requirements the rocket ship, makes sure there are enough gas stations on the way to the moon) Manager - ensures tactical success (ensures the team builds a rocket that meets the spec, makes sure the rocket stops for gas on the way) And of course, for a sufficiently large org, some of this gets offloaded to dedicated Product Managers, Program Managers, etc. But, that's orthogonal to the point of the article, I think.
- nyclounge 2y ago
  VP seems like just a title that corporation gives out when they run out of brownie points or something.
  - astrange 2y ago
    I think the impression comes from banks, because you need to be a VP to sign contracts for the company or something like that, so they just make everyone a VP.
- 110jawefopiwa 2y ago
  C-level - sets highest level strategy (We're going to the moon!) VP - Tells directors to work faster Director - Tells managers to work faster Manager - unblocks team ICs - do real work
  - jimnotgym 2y ago
    Or another way to put it is VP- protects their empire from the C level Director- protects their department from the VP Manager- protects their team from the director IC- can get real work done because they are protected from this political crap
stackedinserter 2y ago
If you want to be a VP, just come to a company where I work. It's not been growing in size for like 15 years, and these top ranks have been saturating with people who asked for promotions. Everyone is VP, director or head of something to the point that it just looks ridiculous when His Highness Head of QA and His Majesty CTO stay late in the office to fix that useEffect hook in the cancel subscription pop-up.
b800h 2y ago
Obligatory UK translation here: If you're reading this in the UK, when he writes "Director", the nuance is different. In the UK, this means Company Director most of the time, although the US influence is changing this.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
stego-tech 2y ago
Really appreciate this post as I try making the leap from Senior IC Engineer into a "next rung up" role (currently aiming for Enterprise Architect, Principal IC Engineer, or Management of ICs); it really helps explain what mindset I should be having for each phase, should I seek to continue upward growth. In the here and now, it seems like my "sweet spot" is to aim for Director in the next five years or so, regardless of the next role I eventually take (currently on the hunt due to RIF). I'm already at the point where I'm mentoring junior colleagues, delegating tasks among the team, and spending more time on tactics and strategy than daily engineering work - and that seems to fit with a Director role, albeit cross-function and cross-domain (which is what I already do, being an infra engie that can also do networking and storage and public cloud and collaboration - Senior jack of all trades). Above that (VP, etc)...I dunno, guess it depends on what kind of person I am in five years' time, after I've hit Director and had some experience in that role.
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  I think to be a manager, also 'read the room', or 'context'. Your response is just a bunch of "I this" , "I That". Nobody knows you. What does your current step in life have to do with anything, with anybody else. The "I" isn't important. At best someone that does this, could just bore everyone, or at worst could alienate, or give impression as arrogant, self centered, if you are only talking about yourself. (you didn't, but could lead to that). It is possible to phrase information in a non-self referential way. Talk about what others want to hear about.
  - apwell23 2y ago
    hah yea i have very low confidence that this person is going be sucessful at their goal the way they described it seemed like the opposite of what i suggested here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43434340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43434340
    - stego-tech 2y ago
      Ya'll be reading way too much into a potential management or leadership style based on one comment about what I specifically took away from the OP and how it affected me specifically. If anything, the vibe I'm getting back is that you're the types to make strong judgements based on single sources absent broader context, which is not something I'd want in either an engineer or a leader above me, as it demonstrates a degree of inflexibility or unwillingness to be wrong. The one above you at least challenged me in a way I could respond to, rather than resorting to an insult masquerading as critique based upon one comment. Take your own advice: > Genuinely like ppl around you from your heart ( not fake it) Folks who genuinely empathize with others aren't quick to resort to anonymized slights based on limited information, in my experience. Rather, it's the fakers who all too quickly devolve into brash and flippant comments when they feel they're safe behind some sort of shield. I'm aware this is a bit hypocritical on my part saying it this way, but sometimes you gotta wade into the mud to make your case.
throwaway-0101 2y ago
Wow, this post could not have come at a more welcome time. I'm a Solutions Architect, and after 4 years in-role am agitating for advancement; a 2-year merger put everything for everyone on hold until its resolution. It's become clear that there has been no plan for advancement. After unsolicited and vague promises of a director or even VP(!?) role before the merger resolution, they have since been talking of *maybe* a manager, or maybe *maybe* senior manager role. *Maybe* managing just two of my current developers, whom they are preparing to off-shore. This all while they have promoted another SA to a director position; a well-deserved promotion at that. Oh, they're also getting rid of the Solutions Architect job itself: soon I will be "Lead Analyst". This is all to say that the post and all your comments are very helpful! Love this site.
FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
In my experience: 1.) As a manager I was working tactically to facilitate the day-to-day plans of my leaders. I also functioned as a buffer between those leaders and my direct reports. I typically made a decent bit LESS than my direct reports as I was management, not development. 2.) As a director (I was responsible for an entire main product) I developed, negotiated, and implemented a long term (1 - 5 years) strategic plan for a product. I primarily interacted with team/focus managers and the directors of the company (Prez, VPs, etc.) to further those goals. I made considerably more than my direct reports and had options as part of total comp. 3.) As a (junior) VP I primarily did coordination between product line directors and the operational heads (EVP, Prez). Focused on long term corporate strategy which tended to be much more about finance than about product. Dealt a lot with VC/investor relations, corporate partnerships and market positioning.
taylorbuley 2y ago
Dave Kellogg is definitely someone worth listening to.
phendrenad2 2y ago
A lot of manager talk on HN lately. Time to start Manager News?
- Rooster61 2y ago
  Many times, the best managers are the ones that are good hackers in the first place. I get tired of the "eww, management is where engineers who can't hack it go to die" trope.
- phendrenad2 2y ago
  I was being serious... Managing is a distinct skill, and having a separate space to discuss it would be nice.
Havoc 2y ago
Also very dependent on sector. Noticed hn in general seems to consider VP pretty senior. In my day to day finance world it's basically middle management. i.e. People still pretty deep in the detail
- nilkn 2y ago
  In finance, this would be more like a managing director (e.g., in Two Sigma, one of the engineering leaders reporting directly to the CTO). You're totally right that "VP" just refers to more like a mid-level or senior engineer in that world.
- TeaBrain 2y ago
  >Noticed hn in general seems to consider VP pretty senior It's not that the position referred to is simply interpreted or "considered" as being senior, but that VP is the title for the highest seniority, or highest behind SVP, below c-suite at most tech and other non-finance companies. VP simply has a completely different meaning in finance, that has nothing to do with what other users here are referring to.
keeptrying 2y ago
This is also why starting your own thing will give you better experience at being a VP than working at a 9-5. (But it’s also harder than being a VP.) And if you’re going back to 9-5 after an unsuccessful startup stint, look for VP or GM like roles. Anything else won’t have enough degrees of freedom to keep you happy
game_the0ry 2y ago
Some advice to the managers and aspiring managers from the perspective an employee. Good qualities in managers: * I have a lot to learn from you * you reward me with promotions and bonuses when I do well * you can sell a vision, even a small one, and motivate me * you take my problems and concerns seriously and do not ignore them, rather than gas-lighting me and trying to paint my concerns as the problem * you have the awareness to figure out what my core motivations are, and have and skill to align your goals with mine, thus putting both of us on a path towards shared success * you are forthcoming and honest with your feedback, bc you see my blindspots and tell me about them so I can fix them * you understand that too much attrition is a bad signal for management success * you understand that as a leader you understand accountability -- you deserve a greater proportion of the success but also the downside when things go bad * I want to crawl over broken glass for you bc of all of the above bc you have earned my loyalty Bad qualities in managers: * there isn't much to learn from you, and the best thing I can learn is not how to be bad manager, bc you're a bad manager and I know it * if you leave and my performance does not suffer, it means your presence never had a positive effect (or any effect) in my role * you gas light me when I bring up problems and concerns, shifting any responsibly form you to me * you are neurotic and I need to work around your emotions to make you "feel good", and I get more reward for this than actually delivering work * you do not have the courage to give me difficult feedback that I need to hear bc you are afraid of having uncomfortable and awkward conversations * you are so preoccupied with making your manager happy that you sacrifice your employees to accomplish this * you do not care enough about attrition and underestimate the consequences of losing good employees, mostly bc your employees feel the consequences, not you * bc of your lack of skill as manager, the relationships you have with your employees end up being adversarial rather then a shared success..no one wants to crawl over broken glass to work for you and the employees who stick around do not want to be there * you do not understand accountability -- you repeatedly make poor decisions bc you never face the consequences, until its too late and then you get fired bc at that point, its obvious the problems was you all along * you were promoted bc you kissed the right ass at the right time, which does great damage to your world view bc now you assume this is just the way the world works I could keep going, but that should suffice for now.
yujzgzc 2y ago
This puts words over why I don't want to be promoted. I've watched enough VPs looking enviously at the seemingly stress free life (comparatively speaking) of lower level staff engineers, busy as they are shuffling from one escalation to another instead of actually building stuff.
- seneca 2y ago
  You're not wrong. Upper management is a very stressful grind with little glory. It used to be that it was paid very well to compensate for that, but staff engineer jobs are close enough in comp now that the difference in stress becomes really questionable.
  - astrange 2y ago
    …What do they actually do all day? I understand what line managers do just fine, but our company works on a process where important projects are supervised by a VP, which really leaves you with the feeling that you never see what the directors are doing. Presumably they're doing something. Although my last one got fired because everyone under him thought he was useless, so maybe not. Reading the article, it also makes them sound useless because it just says it's okay if they have an excuse for failing.
    - seneca 2y ago
      It very much depends on the company and size of the team. A lot of it is planning, filling gaps, coordinating with other teams, and endless meetings. I get that that can sound like valueless filler, but it's actually more important than you'd think if you've never seen the sausage made, so to speak. It's basically trying to turn ambiguous mandates from above into actionable plans.
runamuck 2y ago
When I had an IC role, I would recommend tech projects and execute them w/ my team (we can solve "problem X" with "tech stack Y"). I also had a lot of agency in creating solutions for tech proposals. When I had the director role, I made sure nobody wasted time. I would qualify deals to chase, recommend strategies and core competencies to pursue (AI and Cloud yes, Blockchain and Quantum no). Now, in my VP role I try to get people good at making these strategy decisions (we should follow shipley for capture, etc.). Also, a LOT more relationship capital building and external COMMs at the VP level.
jimnotgym 2y ago
Interstingly in a traditional British company directors are the most senior and VPs don't exist. A director would be a board level job, as in a statutory director. Obviously there are a lot of US companies in the UK and their influence spreads...
anthomtb 2y ago
Is it me or do attempts to generalize career development across companies seem futile? The concrete example here I can give is working at one company where "Manager" meant you had 10+ direct reports and were expected to do almost no technical work. Versus a second company where "Manager" meant you had 4-5 directs and were doing significant amount of technical work. The path from IC to Manager at company 1 had almost no commonalities with company 2 despite similar-sounding titles. I guess what I am saying is that promotion ladders are so tightly integrated with company norms that attempting to seek outside advice on "how do I get to the next level" seems useless. Edit: To rephrase more succinctly - Are articles like TFA useless or do I not know how to interperet them?
- Clubber 2y ago
  It's a data point. It's similar to the ridiculous titles given to ICs in the last 20 years. What does Senior Developer vs Senior Engineer mean? Do Architects code or not? I'm sure you have an answer, but someone else with different experience might have a complete different answer.
class3shock 2y ago
To be a good manager means to run a team well and get stuff done. To be a good VP means to increase shareholder value. To be a director means you are at some percentage of completion of the soul/morality extraction process that happens when transitioning from the first to the second.
balls187 2y ago
"I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." I vaguely remember a quote that goes "No kid ever dreamed about growing up to be a middle manager." I get that work is just a means to an end, but find something you love to do. If you love management, that's great. I love being an engineer, and prefer to be a player/coach over just a leader, and hate that as I get older my age is looked down on.
- pc86 2y ago
  IME the only time (higher) age is looked down on is when it's used a crutch by that person - whether its derision of others because they're not as old, or "I've been around longer than you so you should listen to me simply because of that" or whatever the case may be. I've worked with great people who were decades older than everyone else on the team, and nobody cared how old they were. I've also worked with people who sounded like a caricature of the worst parts of early 90's Usenet. That eyes almost universally rolled every time they opened their mouth had absolutely nothing to do with their age, although I'd bet my next paycheck they would insist that was why.
shermantanktop 2y ago
I always say being a manager is one of the toughest jobs around, tougher than most IC jobs. But at the same time, bad managers have many more avenues to escape accountability than ICs do. I greatly respect the good managers I know. But as a current example, one of their direct peers has spent several years driving off top talent, failing to deliver on goals, and is now encouraging others to quit in order to destroy their own team on the way out…and is currently on a multi month leave of absence! And their boss says “oh but you see I must follow process x” and “the problem has only recently gotten this bad.” All of which are bullshit lies to cover the fact that this toxic manager has been very effective at deflecting and avoiding. I have to wonder about a job function that cannot police its own ranks.
protonbob 2y ago
> I can’t tell you the number of times people have asked me for “development” or “leveling” conversations where I get excited and start talking about learning, skills gaps, and such and it’s clear all they wanted to talk about was salary. This seems to be a rather naïve response. In a paying job, the main impetus to increase your knowledge and performance is to gain more salary. Clearly the people that they are talking to want to know "what kind of value do I need to provide to the company in terms of knowledge or skills that will enable me to make more money". I don't see why this should be a disappointment.
- woodrow 2y ago
  The author is excited to talk about helping the employee grow and have more impact, which (if successful) should make them more valuable to the company, resulting in promotion and increased compensation. He perceives employees who want to talk with him about "leveling" as seeking the formula or checklist to get paid more, and not necessarily about growing or putting in the work. The latter is fine if your performance objectives are objective and directly aligned with company success (i.e. achievement of sales quotas). It's more fraught if your performance objectives are more subjective or defined in ways that are proxies for company success—it's easy to fall prey to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law where employees do the things that get them promoted, which may actually make them or the company more valuable.
asdfman123 2y ago
This article is good, but I want to complain about this argument (which the author is not responsible for): > CEOs understand they are held accountable not for effort or activity, but results IMO that's one of the biggest problems in the American business world. If you ruin the company long term to get "results," your plan is successful. If you harm the company short term for long term benefit, your plan has failed. No long term thinking, just watching number go up and down. It's practically a form of superstition.
- rexpop 2y ago
  > Nobody gives a hoot about profit. — W. Edwards Deming
- MuffinFlavored 2y ago
  Ruin is subjective, results are objective.
tflinton 2y ago
I might disagree a bit with this, I've had all three titles and from my experience: A manager is executing on plans, managing the work, aligning people on teams and enforcing policy & process. A director is creating the plans to solve problems, intaking work, aligning teams and creating good processes from policy. A VP is about defining the problem teams need to solve, managing capacity/budget for work, aligning on a strategy across a company and creating good policy.
lifeisstillgood 2y ago
Most of the work of “good” managers is about affecting culture, providing a sustainable work load, emotional intelligence, encouraging team work and sense of shared ownership Yet in outsider society and political discourse this is thrown into the trash under the weight of individual rewards and exploitation Perhaps we need a rethink
sota_pop 2y ago
I think differentiating roles between “effort” vs “results” is an interesting concept. I don’t have first-hand experience with a formal role ladder. I work in a small firm where I created my own role building a software platform internal to an org where no one else has any software engineering expertise. However, I’ve always ascribed to the notion that seniority is proportional to “social credit”. Where social credit is some combination of your perceived expertise at your craft, your ability to achieve results (on an arbitrary project/task) i.e. your professional competence, and the trust others put into you that you can/would help them if they ever needed. Social credit is built, and also spent. Failure is tolerated if you have social credit to spare, but is ultimately finite. People want to follow you if you have amassed more social credit than most.
bane 2y ago
I like this post, it's clear, well considered and concise. I'd caveat that with, "for certain kinds of companies". Two thoughts: 1) On his issue with levels. I don't disagree with most of the observations, but I've definitely experienced staff that are less concerned with the pay increase and just want the validation and pat on the back of the level bump. It's weird, because it usually comes with more responsibility and work. While just getting more money lets you go back to what you were doing and are already good at. But everybody has their own ideas at career progression. 2) In my personal career, the types of companies I've worked for have a slightly different flavor of this, and I've come up with my own internal shorthand ideas for what these titles mean. It's useful to consider this because as you rise in these ranks, you have to also train the next generation to be able to step into your shoes and do a good job: Manager - you are 85%/15% focused down/up. Down into your reports and tasks and up to receive new input from your manager (perhaps a director) and provide back status. You spend that 85% of the time taking somewhat vague directions and turning them into actionable tasks by your reports. You reports in turn should have well scoped tasks that when completed, build into a completed work unit that satisfies a directive from up your chain. You are a work breakdown structure and scheduling engine. Your performance is generally measured by delivering programs on-time, on-budget, and having a minimum of issues with your reports. Director - you are 50/50 focused down/up. You spend time refining vague business unit goals into vague programs. You rely on your Managers to turn those programs into work tasks. You have a lot of responsibility for driving revenue, have a budget, but in most companies are not specifically measured by P&L. Your performance is measured by revenue targets. You get pulled into sales and marketing projects that are already moving freight trains to provide grounding, and to mobilize resources under you to support specific efforts. You got into your position because you provided on-time, on-budget program successes repeatedly, and a few of them struck gold by chance. You also had a knack for working well with the sales/marketing people and maybe even straddled between worlds. VP - you are 15/85 down/up and spend that time turning impossibly vague corporate goals into merely vague business goals. You are responsible for P&L, and your performance is measured by both revenue and profit targets. You spend a lot of the day working with sales and marketing, and you conceive and initiate growth efforts. Depending on the company, you likely have your own subordinate sales and marketing team that reports directly to you, and is separate from the engineering team. You got into your position primarily because you are really good/lucky at growing revenue and can put together revenue growth strategies that have a higher probability of working than not. It's even possible you never spent time in the engineering organization, and worked up through the sales/marketing path. Source: Been all of the above at various times. Highest position was President of a very small startup, which I count as almost meaningless (where I also did a stint as a VP). "Biggest" position was half a decade as a Sr. Director of an 200+ head engineering organization in a several thousand person company till I was promoted out of it.
RayVR 2y ago
> I can’t tell you the number of times people have asked me for “development” or “leveling” conversations where I get excited and start talking about learning, skills gaps, and such and it’s clear all they wanted to talk about was salary. Disappointing. I mean…these people are rational and they want more money, which is an objective metric. In a confusing world of HR jargon, levels, lack of clear links between output and compensation, what else could you expect? It’s on you, the manager, to link the financial metric to specific tangible results, whether past or future. If high performers are having these “I want a raise” conversations, it’s because they know they are delivering, they want a sign of progress in their career. They may already be gathering market data of their real price through interviews or at least discussions/research. This means they are already at risk of moving. Lack of insight into this from managers is “Disappointing” In my own experience, and having guided others through these conversations, managers need to always have some clarity on what they could provide to the people reporting directly to them. The timing should be determined based on an understanding of what is best for the company. E.g., what maximizes retention or other key organizational metrics.
harrall 2y ago
Personally I think “…but we executed the plan…” is unreasonable at any level, at any job, at any task, and any point in anyone’s life. It’s never a way to go through any part of life. If you set out to complete a task, it should be to achieve your goal. Your should measure your success as achievement of your goal, not by whether you went through the motions.
black_13 2y ago
[dead]
Nifty3929 2y ago
Anybody have some book suggestions that describe what a Director or VP does, and what makes a good one, in the day-to-day sense?
- sethhochberg 2y ago
  I'm a bit late to respond here but in case you're checking replies: Camille Fournier's book The Manager's Path is enjoyable to read and covers exactly this
AbstractH24 2y ago
Quoting the blog post: >"I am talking about one of three levels at which people operate: manager, director, and vice president. Here are my definitions: >* Managers are paid to drive results with some support. They have experience in the function, can take responsibility, but are still learning the job and will have questions and need support. They can execute the tactical plan for a project but typically can’t make it. >* Directors are paid to drive results with little or no supervision (“set and forget”). Directors know how to do the job. They can make a project’s tactical plan in their sleep. They can work across the organization to get it done. I love strong directors. They get shit done. >* VPs are paid to make the plan. Say you run marketing. Your job is to understand the company’s business situation, make a plan to address it, build consensus to get approval of that plan, and then go execute it." As an IC at startups or consultant I frequently feel like I'm expected to do all of these things, and produce results.
Pozzi1 2y ago
[dead]
astrostl 2y ago
> Another practice I’m not hugely fond of is “leveling” > That said, I do believe there are three meaningful levels in management Cool!

545 points by AnhTho_FR 2y ago

pavlov 2y ago

> “It’s like saying with $3.65 I can buy either a grande non-fat latte or a head of organic lettuce” Ah, 2015.

apwell23 2y ago
i smiled at that too. miss those innocent times.
- xandrius 2y ago
  Is it innocent because prices seem cheaper to us today?
  - Kenji 2y ago
    [dead]
- lifty 2y ago
  Find a better unit to report your costs in. Like hours of work, or any other hard asset (real estate, gold, bitcoin etc.). Otherwise you are bound to be disappointed every year.
  - oez 2y ago
    I would like to know your definition of a hard asset if you consider bitcoin one.
    - lifty 2y ago
      Indeed I haven't used that term correctly. What I meant, is some kind of asset that is not easily inflated, something that in the long term can retain its exchange value better. Of course, nothing is guaranteed, and especially with bitcoin, it super volatile. But you have a better chance of judging your purchase power based on that.
      - hnb2137 2y ago
        How many Big Macs?
        Thrymr 2y ago
        or grande non-fat lattes?

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago

It is a good read. It is early so I can't help wondering if I am nodding, because it hits close to home or coffee did not hit yet, but I think I agree with the author here.

jillesvangurp 2y ago
It's an interesting read an hard to disagree with. More interesting perhaps for the typical employee is how they would get to such a position, starting in a junior position. One key advice here is to stop behaving like an employee. By that I mean to start reflecting on what it is you are doing, what you are being asked to do, why you are being asked to do, etc. Apply some critical thinking. Ask questions if you don't understand something. Not to be obnoxious but to educate yourself. What would you do if you were in charge? Try to come up with ideas on how to your work better. Try to do those things. Get feedback on how you are doing. This is not about seeking conflict but simply seeking understanding and more control over what it is you do. You can't hope to manage others if you can't manage yourself. Once you are in control of what you do, the rest comes naturally. Whether that's via promotions, new jobs, or starting your own business. It all starts with challenging the notion that you are just there to do whatever it is you are told to do. That's what employees do. Don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with being a good employee. Good, loyal employees are great to have. If you run a team, company or whatever, you need those to get stuff done. But they'll never run things for you. That's your job. And having too many captains on the ship is also not great. Good to reflect on the next time you have a work conflict. It's not always about being right. Employees are mostly just reacting to inputs around them (from their boss, colleagues, whatever) but rarely act pro-actively. Reacting pro-actively, without being told, is the key difference. Some people do that naturally and can't stop themselves doing that, other people simply don't have that in them. Nothing wrong with that. Figure out which you are early and then act accordingly.

n4r9 2y ago

> [Leveling] conflates career development and salary negotiation. It encourages a mindset of saying, “what must I do to make L10” when you want to say, “I want a $10K raise.” It's not obvious to me why this is a bad thing. I agree that incentivising a box-ticking mindset discourages ownership and initiative. But for software engineers I feel like there has to be some methodical (and transparent) way for raises to be assigned, and for it to relate to skills and traits. Otherwise you can easily end up in a situation where people are rewarded for being bolshy and savvy rather than valuable to the company. Am I missing something here?

WJW 2y ago
I think that what you are missing is that "what must I do to make L10" and "what is valuable to the company" are typically somewhat orthogonal. A prototypical example is that almost every career ladder out there mentions things like "impact" and architect/systems design work rather than often more valuable maintenance work that keeps current systems running. In addition, measuring the contribution of any individual to a team effort is always difficult, in some cases pretty much impossible until years later. This means that it is always possible to game such career frameworks by focusing only on the things the framework rewards and skipping everything else. In short, encouraging people to get to the next career level in a well-defined framework is exactly the type of "situation where people are rewarded for being bolshy and savvy rather than being valuable to the company" that you mention as being undesirable.
- hiatus 2y ago
  If following the framework does not provide value to the company, the framework is obviously flawed.
  - throwaway98797 2y ago
    the frameworks are always flawed the best leaders know this
    - 2y ago

darkwater 2y ago

> Yes, you might discover that a Senior FPA Analyst II earns the same as a Product Marketing Director I, but why does that matter? It’s a coincidence. It’s like saying with $3.65 I can buy either a grande non-fat latte or a head of organic lettuce. What matters is the fair price of each of those goods in the market — not they that happen to have the same price. Well, it infuriates me just the same. If a coffee shot costs the same or more that some other food that is healthy and gives you more calories and/or nutrients. And I say this as a coffee lover. But beside specific examples nitpicking, I understand the gist of it, and I understand the market reasons - you want to attract or retain talent and they/we look at compensations on a market level - but this still doesn't mean it is fair. Unless you believe in fairy tales and invisible hands.

irjustin 2y ago
> but this still doesn't mean it is fair You're trying to change which definition of fair is being used. It's fair in that it's "fair market value" because that's what the market is willing to pay. That's clearly the version the author is using given the example.
- darkwater 2y ago
  "Fair" has many facets. It can be fairly compensated for the market value of a nominal role but still be unfairly compensated within the company according to the work executed and the "value"[1] created. [1] Value in this context can be not just only monetary value but creating a good working environment, help other to do better their job etc
  - irjustin 2y ago
    I'm not sure what to tell you. That words can have different meanings given the context? And this version of fair is using a specific one that you're unwilling to accept. It seems you wish the author used "market rate" and not "fair". But you're annoyed at the wrong thing because that usage is completely valid. That society has allowed "fair" to mean what the market is willing to pay regardless of its equality to fellow man. Because if that's the case - nothing is fair.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

apwell23 2y ago

i don't agree with any of these definitions. From my experience VPs and directors are so far removed from any actual work that most of their "plans" mean very little. Things get done not because of their "plans" but despite of them. In terms of career development. Ppl aren't promoted for their ability to make "plans" or execute them. Ppl are promoted into those promotions for being trustworthy by ppl above them . To get to that position, you should be 1. be people oriented. Genuinely like ppl around you from your heart ( not fake it) . Take the first step and build genuine love for ppl around you. Your first instinct towards anyone should be trying to make their work lives easier. This is super hard for nerdy coder types because we have mental depenendcy on being the "smart one", hard to let go of that part of identity. 2. consistenly deliver results and become the person that can be trusted by person that gave you the assignment. Building trust is the main job when you go work. Its not writing some badass code or being innovating or whatever.

lstodd 2y ago
this is why in my company the only VP is the company cat and the title is hereditary.
throw12hhfhd 2y ago
Having been in both situations in large organizations, I can say the connection between the plans and the work can be difficult to see sometimes, but the absence of such a plan is much worse in the long run. As the size of groups grow, people don't generally self organize. Great career development advice. This is absolutely the most reliable way to advance in an organization.

windward 2y ago

Out of scope for this article, but: >Most leveling systems are too granular, with the levels separated by arbitrary characterizations. It’s makework. It’s fake science. It’s bureaucratic and encourages a non-thinking “climb the ladder” approach to career development. (“Hey, let’s develop you to go from somewhat-independent to rather-independent this year.”) This is a funny, common requirement. Every junior developer is told they should feel free to ask questions - and now they have a financial incentive not to.

ikerino 2y ago
Asking questions and unblocking yourself is a required competency for acting independently. Developers should aim to be resourceful and respect others time, but I expect my reports to seek out help if they get genuinely stuck for more than 15 minutes (no clue what to do.) It's much better than waiting around for your manager to find out you were working on the wrong problems (or nothing, waiting for instructions.)
joshstrange 2y ago
> Every junior developer is told they should feel free to ask questions - and now they have a financial incentive not to. This is such a fine line though, encourage developers to ask questions, but they also need to try problem-solving before they immediately go asking for help. If I _consistently_ get asked for help on problems that I can solve it within 5-10 minutes using no “company knowledge“ (just plain debugging), then that cements someone as “junior” in my mind. Contrast that with the people who ask lots of questions but they are well thought out questions that require knowledge of the inner workings of the system. “This isn’t working” vs “I can’t figure out X works, I tried Y and Z but that gave me this error that I don’t understand but I did find….”
- dnadler 2y ago
  I have a similar mindset though less focused on the type of questions being asked and more about how many times I have to answer the same question. Ideally, the number is one time. As in one conversation where the person walks away understanding the answer. If I have to have that conversation more than once it’s a problem. Obviously there’s nuance - it can take time to get your head around a new concept or hard problem. But in any case, I like that as one dimension when thinking about a person’s skill/level/potential.

austin-cheney 2y ago

US/NATO military equivalents to corporate titles: Team lead: E5-E6, W1 Manager: E7-E8, O2-O3 Associate Principal: W1-W2 Principal: W3-W4 Senior Principal: W5 Senior Advisor: E9 Associate Director: O4 Director: O5 VP: O6 SVP: O7-O8 COO O9 CEO/Diplomat O10 (4star) Chairman: O11 (5star) Conglomerate Chairman: 6star, Pershing The big difference is that in the military everything above team lead has an internal support staff and planning occurs independently at every level.

mattbrewsbytes 2y ago
I would add that typically the O levels there (officer in military) in corporate usually have bonus/equity as part of compensation, like a major element of comp, not some $1k petty cash bonus. These are also the levels where if there is a massive screw-up, you might be the person ousted so there is a fair amount of accountability.

joshstrange 2y ago

“Levels don’t matter except for these levels that I care about” :rolleyes: All titles are made up. No one fits a role/title perfectly. It’s all a bunch of bullshit. Normally it’s really just using salary ranges as the core thing people care about and people move up “titles” while not improving their skills one bit (seniority, playing politics better, etc). At my last company they made a big deal about becoming a “senior developer”, it was a lot more responsibly, work, _pay_, etc. Years later I (and another developer) was outperforming the “senior” developers by a good margin and the company gave us both title bumps, a 3% CoL raise, and… $1K bonus. That was probably the last time I believed in any sort of sanity in ranking/titles/etc. Ask for what you want, don’t wait for a “performance review”, yes it’s uncomfortable, get over it. No ranking system is going to accurately reflect skills.

ryanjshaw 2y ago
> All titles are made up Well yes, literally, but that's not the point. The author is saying that Lx titles inherently don't make sense and he sees more value in a model based on accountability and responsibility. My understanding: - manager: responsible for putting effort into execution - director: responsible for executing a plan, not accountable for its success - VP: responsible for the plan and accountable for its success
- joshstrange 2y ago
  Those are great ideas in theory I guess but not at all how they are treated industry wide and often not how they are treated within the same company. 99% of the time titles have very little to do with what someone does day to day. It’s just not that simple and clear cut. All that to say, I don’t find one persons thoughts on what those titles mean very useful since that’s just what it means to that specific person. There is no, that I’m aware of, industry-wide agreement. Not to mention I find those definitions to be silly, overly simple, and not how anyone thinks of their job.
  - ryanjshaw 2y ago
    See what I said to the other guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43434093#43456611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43434093#43456611

gneray 2y ago

A classic

trentnix 2y ago

I’m had all three titles at various points in my career but the reality is that my responsibilities and operational altitude varied widely from company to company. I just completed a job search after being laid off and one of the challenges of finding a job in leadership is deciphering what each company actually wants from their managers or directors or VPs. Some roles are “hands on”. For others that’s a red flag. For some it’s all about managing people and emotional intelligence. For others it’s all about technical acumen and technical direction. Sometimes what they are really looking for is exactly what the last person in the role did. In other cases, they want the opposite of the last person to hold the role. The only thing you can really depend on when it comes to leadership titles in software, in my experience, is that one’s title explains which meetings one is expected to attend.

thinkingtoilet 2y ago
I've had a similar experience, however I found it tied to the size of the company. If you're a director at a large corporation, you will be very siloed and you most likely won't be doing much coding. If you're a directory at a small company, you're going to be coding, managing coders, and being part of leadership and strategic discussions.
- _fat_santa 2y ago
  Can confirm. I currently work for an SMB (~150 employees) as a manager. Our VP doesn't write any code but the directors and managers are still IC's on projects. Right now I really like being an IC in addition to being manager cause I still have that coding itch to scratch, but I just know one day I will eventually graduate to role where I don't write any code. Long term it is the direction I want to go in but it's going to be bittersweet when I finally get to a role with no coding.
re-thc 2y ago
> The only thing you can really depend on when it comes to leadership titles in software It's not just leadership titles. Even if they list tech stack, responsibility or any of it it may not eventually be reality. Sometimes it's a wish list, sometimes it's planned and other times they "forgot" to update it.

aarghh 2y ago

Oh, sweet summer child... > But it’s the same standard to which the CEO is held. If the CEO makes a plan, gets it approved by the board, and executes it well but it doesn’t work, they cannot tell the board “but, but, it’s the plan we agreed to.”

sevensor 2y ago

The junior engineer asking “how can I become a VP?” is classic. Chances of you becoming a VP at the same place you worked as a junior engineer are slim. I know one person who did it, it took him 25 years, and he had been on the golf team in college, so he had a lot more exposure to company VIPs than most. Change employers while in middle management or you will spend a long time there. And that’s assuming you even like being a VP. Sure, the money’s good, but there’s a lot of accountability and you either need to be good at taking it or good at avoiding it.

hylaride 2y ago
Hilariously, in the 2010s you didn't need to become a VP to make that kind of money. You could go the principle or distinguished engineer route and still make bank. In many (more purely tech) companies it is not unusual for senior engineers to be making the same salary as directors or VPs, though that may now be starting to change.
astrange 2y ago
> The junior engineer asking “how can I become a VP?” is classic. How are they going to know what you just said without asking?

gsf_emergency_2 2y ago

Steve Jobs on a related topic, what it means to be a leader: https://youtu.be/rQKis2Cfpeo https://youtu.be/rQKis2Cfpeo Guess VPs (according to both) are it

Nemi 2y ago
I am not a big fan of Steve overall, but the one thing he inherently understood was “identity”. How I am using “identity” in this context is, how someone sees themselves. It is the story they tell themselves about themselves. I am a good leader. I and good at solving problems. I am a dog person. I am tidy or I am sloppy. And on and on. If you hire for identity rather than skillset, you don’t have to manage people. They self-manage. My best managers were ones where the product that they managed was a part of their identity. How it worked. How reliable it was. They weren’t always the smartest people. It often took them longer to solve problems. BUT, they solved them on their own, without me having to supervise. Because they would not give up on the problem until it was solved. To give up would be to admit that their identity was flawed, and that just was not an option. When you hire people like this effectively as a leader you must really allow them to own it. They must have the responsibility and the authority to make decisions, even when those decisions differ from what decision you would make. Results are what matters. Steve understood this.
- chrz 2y ago
  thanks for putting into words what i realised but couldnt formulate. best workers were ones where the product that they managed was a part of their identity.
- astrange 2y ago
  This is important, but you still have to manage those people because nothing lasts forever and they can burn out!
082349872349872 2y ago
If we assume the natural time evolution of groups of people is to decohere (with sqrt t?), being a leader means keeping everyone roughly in phase?

alexpotato 2y ago

One thing that I learned from going to IC to manager: there is a LOT of activity at the manager level that you never see and therefore don't often think about when you are an IC. Case in point: trying to retain good people. Good people often times end up wanting to leave for a variety of reasons ranging from ludicrous to 100% legitimate. They often announce they are leaving to their direct manager and maybe one other person (E.g. head of another team they work with etc). Given that they are good and worth keeping, this triggers escalations, meetings with the employee and between managers, senior managers and HR. In the best case, this leads to a successful retention. However, the only people that know any of this happened are the employee and the manager tier. The other employees have zero idea any of this occurred unless someone shares/mentions it. I point this out b/c multiple times as an IC, I thought "no one will care if I leave b/c I never see managers actively trying to keep people". The point of this story is twofold: - managers do a lot of "unseen" work - it's worth researching this kind of thing if you are about to move from IC to manager.

fader 2y ago
I had the same experience moving from IC to manager. I didn't realize the amount of work that managers are doing that I didn't see and more importantly that they couldn't tell me about. Retention is definitely one, but there's the flip side of dealing with poor performance. You can't announce to everyone that one of the team is on a PIP or struggling with personal issues. But a poor performer means that I'm doing a _ton_ of work to figure out how to fix the issue (whether that's spending hours every week coaching them, building all the long-term documentation that HR requires before we can fire someone, picking up some of their slack myself in the meantime...) Coordination of people also takes way more time than I realized as an IC. If you meet with your manager once per week, that's an hour out of your week. But your manager is meeting with everyone on the team and a good manager is going to spend at _least_ as much time thinking and planning for each of those meetings as they spend in the meetings themselves even if everything is going well. They have to make sure nobody is accidentally working on the same thing or impacting someone else, talking to other teams, that sort of thing. That one hour out of your week is 1-2 days for your manager. Not to mention that they then have to go do the same sort of coordination with other teams. You have something that blows up your week that you need to escalate once per quarter? Multiply that by the number of reports your manager has and that's how much time they've spent fighting fires this quarter. And they need to explain to their leadership what happened and why it won't happen again. Etc. etc. It's not harder work, but it is very different work from being an IC. (On the other hand, being a manager has made me a better IC too. Everyone I've ever managed that was previously a manager themselves has this -- they know exactly what I need to know because they know what they needed to know, so our 1:1s go much faster :) ) One anecdote I have is that when I first moved to a management role, I told a colleague how happy I was that I'd finally have real control over my calendar. After he finished laughing (literally) he said "your calendar belongs to your team and you'll never be in control of that again". He was absolutely right: if something goes wrong or someone is unhappy, everything else moves aside so I can fix my team's problem.

skeeter2020 2y ago

Some of this seems a little simplistic; as a relatively new director who reports to the CTO I think everyone is "building the plan" but at different levels of granularity. Where we run into trouble is when the CTO gets too far away from defining the broad outcomes and veers deep into the "how". They get very prescriptive, but without the context of the implementation details or any real knowledge of the countless small problems that directors, then managers, then ICs deal with. It looks a lot like (and really is a falvour of) micro-managing. >> It conflates career development and salary negotiation I just went through this with an IC 2 levels below me. To the credit of the person's manager they communicated to the IC "don't ask me for a promotion when you want more money". The (easily said; harder to implement) solution is to build a management relationship with people that has an "agent-client" dynamic. The direct manager can't be viewed as the decision maker and needs to be the advocate for this to happen IME.

nine_zeros 2y ago

I think this post is excellent. It clearly describes the problem in many companies - granular levels/ladder climbing. It also describes another great problem that shows up in tech - non-technical/non-owner managers, directors, and VP. As described in this article, the VP is supposed to be the expert who created the plan of execution, the director is supposed to be the expert who executes it. But in big tech at least, this is not what happens. VPs and directors are clueless to the point of incompetence. They understand politics but not how to drive with leadership, deep technical understanding, planning, communication, and direction. They spend an enormous amount of time in BS like stack ranking and perf reviews instead of creating solid plans that move the company needle - externally. As a result, in large companies, you see the corporate hellhole decline. VPs and Directors are not respected at all. They can't answer much. They aren't clued in on the tech. They don't understand competition. They don't understand innovation. They do understand ladder climbing politics - so they create an empire of ladder climbers. It is almost hilarious how poor some tech management is. Would you join a ship where the captain does not how ship-steering works?

setgree 2y ago

> The biggest single development issue I’ve seen over the years is that many VPs still think like directors. > The VP’s job is to get the right answer. They are the functional expert. No one on the team knows their function better than they do. And even if someone did, they are still playing the VP of function role and it’s their job – and no one else’s — to get the right answer. > If the CEO makes a plan, gets it approved by the board, and executes it well but it doesn’t work, they cannot tell the board “but, but, it’s the plan we agreed to." Most CEOs wouldn’t even dream of saying that. It’s because CEOs understand they are held accountable not for effort or activity, but results. Part of truly operating at the VP level is to internalize this fact. Alas that I read this 6 years too late, because it perfectly explains what went wrong at my then-company. A member of the C-suite came up with (what sounded like) a good strategy, but it didn't work because the engineering team wasn't able to execute well enough; and rather than either modify the plan to account for this or shift his attention to fixing the engineering culture -- which might have been politically impossible, but was still his responsibility to try -- he doubled down and became more obsessed with implementing the details of a losing plan. In other words, he was thinking like a director. Meanwhile, another front-page item today is a reminder of why this stuff matters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43431675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43431675

codemac 2y ago
A great book is "Strategy and the Fat Smoker". It's written by a consultant but points out an obvious point: the quality of the strategy itself is not nearly as impactful as the ability to execute. The author compares this to being a fat smoker who won't change their habits - knowing the right strategy is insufficient.
- snapcaster 2y ago
  Is there any point to reading it beyond the insight you shared in one sentence?
  - codemac 2y ago
    In my opinion, yes, it's a short book. A lot about how to actually change culture and habits of a team.

jakey_bakey 2y ago

This is an interesting way of thinking about it compared to the common definition that uses "scope" (which outside IC roles is a synonym for to headcount)

sage76 2y ago

The main job of these "managers" is repeatedly asking "when will this get done?" and "Why isn't it done yet?". You could hire a parrot to do these jobs.

alistairSH 2y ago

I found it interesting that the author mentioned tactical planning for manager and director, but not strategic planning for the VP. That seems like a useful differentiator to me (with extremely contrived examples)... C-level - sets highest level strategy (We're going to the moon!) VP - adds level of detail to strategy (draws a map from earth to the moon, decides we need a rocket ship to get there) Director - bridges strategy and tactics (creates high level requirements the rocket ship, makes sure there are enough gas stations on the way to the moon) Manager - ensures tactical success (ensures the team builds a rocket that meets the spec, makes sure the rocket stops for gas on the way) And of course, for a sufficiently large org, some of this gets offloaded to dedicated Product Managers, Program Managers, etc. But, that's orthogonal to the point of the article, I think.

nyclounge 2y ago
VP seems like just a title that corporation gives out when they run out of brownie points or something.
- astrange 2y ago
  I think the impression comes from banks, because you need to be a VP to sign contracts for the company or something like that, so they just make everyone a VP.
110jawefopiwa 2y ago
C-level - sets highest level strategy (We're going to the moon!) VP - Tells directors to work faster Director - Tells managers to work faster Manager - unblocks team ICs - do real work
- jimnotgym 2y ago
  Or another way to put it is VP- protects their empire from the C level Director- protects their department from the VP Manager- protects their team from the director IC- can get real work done because they are protected from this political crap

stackedinserter 2y ago

If you want to be a VP, just come to a company where I work. It's not been growing in size for like 15 years, and these top ranks have been saturating with people who asked for promotions. Everyone is VP, director or head of something to the point that it just looks ridiculous when His Highness Head of QA and His Majesty CTO stay late in the office to fix that useEffect hook in the cancel subscription pop-up.

b800h 2y ago

Obligatory UK translation here: If you're reading this in the UK, when he writes "Director", the nuance is different. In the UK, this means Company Director most of the time, although the US influence is changing this.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

stego-tech 2y ago

Really appreciate this post as I try making the leap from Senior IC Engineer into a "next rung up" role (currently aiming for Enterprise Architect, Principal IC Engineer, or Management of ICs); it really helps explain what mindset I should be having for each phase, should I seek to continue upward growth. In the here and now, it seems like my "sweet spot" is to aim for Director in the next five years or so, regardless of the next role I eventually take (currently on the hunt due to RIF). I'm already at the point where I'm mentoring junior colleagues, delegating tasks among the team, and spending more time on tactics and strategy than daily engineering work - and that seems to fit with a Director role, albeit cross-function and cross-domain (which is what I already do, being an infra engie that can also do networking and storage and public cloud and collaboration - Senior jack of all trades). Above that (VP, etc)...I dunno, guess it depends on what kind of person I am in five years' time, after I've hit Director and had some experience in that role.

FrustratedMonky 2y ago
I think to be a manager, also 'read the room', or 'context'. Your response is just a bunch of "I this" , "I That". Nobody knows you. What does your current step in life have to do with anything, with anybody else. The "I" isn't important. At best someone that does this, could just bore everyone, or at worst could alienate, or give impression as arrogant, self centered, if you are only talking about yourself. (you didn't, but could lead to that). It is possible to phrase information in a non-self referential way. Talk about what others want to hear about.
- apwell23 2y ago
  hah yea i have very low confidence that this person is going be sucessful at their goal the way they described it seemed like the opposite of what i suggested here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43434340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43434340
  - stego-tech 2y ago
    Ya'll be reading way too much into a potential management or leadership style based on one comment about what I specifically took away from the OP and how it affected me specifically. If anything, the vibe I'm getting back is that you're the types to make strong judgements based on single sources absent broader context, which is not something I'd want in either an engineer or a leader above me, as it demonstrates a degree of inflexibility or unwillingness to be wrong. The one above you at least challenged me in a way I could respond to, rather than resorting to an insult masquerading as critique based upon one comment. Take your own advice: > Genuinely like ppl around you from your heart ( not fake it) Folks who genuinely empathize with others aren't quick to resort to anonymized slights based on limited information, in my experience. Rather, it's the fakers who all too quickly devolve into brash and flippant comments when they feel they're safe behind some sort of shield. I'm aware this is a bit hypocritical on my part saying it this way, but sometimes you gotta wade into the mud to make your case.

throwaway-0101 2y ago

Wow, this post could not have come at a more welcome time. I'm a Solutions Architect, and after 4 years in-role am agitating for advancement; a 2-year merger put everything for everyone on hold until its resolution. It's become clear that there has been no plan for advancement. After unsolicited and vague promises of a director or even VP(!?) role before the merger resolution, they have since been talking of *maybe* a manager, or maybe *maybe* senior manager role. *Maybe* managing just two of my current developers, whom they are preparing to off-shore. This all while they have promoted another SA to a director position; a well-deserved promotion at that. Oh, they're also getting rid of the Solutions Architect job itself: soon I will be "Lead Analyst". This is all to say that the post and all your comments are very helpful! Love this site.

FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago

In my experience: 1.) As a manager I was working tactically to facilitate the day-to-day plans of my leaders. I also functioned as a buffer between those leaders and my direct reports. I typically made a decent bit LESS than my direct reports as I was management, not development. 2.) As a director (I was responsible for an entire main product) I developed, negotiated, and implemented a long term (1 - 5 years) strategic plan for a product. I primarily interacted with team/focus managers and the directors of the company (Prez, VPs, etc.) to further those goals. I made considerably more than my direct reports and had options as part of total comp. 3.) As a (junior) VP I primarily did coordination between product line directors and the operational heads (EVP, Prez). Focused on long term corporate strategy which tended to be much more about finance than about product. Dealt a lot with VC/investor relations, corporate partnerships and market positioning.

taylorbuley 2y ago

Dave Kellogg is definitely someone worth listening to.

phendrenad2 2y ago

A lot of manager talk on HN lately. Time to start Manager News?

Rooster61 2y ago
Many times, the best managers are the ones that are good hackers in the first place. I get tired of the "eww, management is where engineers who can't hack it go to die" trope.
phendrenad2 2y ago
I was being serious... Managing is a distinct skill, and having a separate space to discuss it would be nice.

Havoc 2y ago

Also very dependent on sector. Noticed hn in general seems to consider VP pretty senior. In my day to day finance world it's basically middle management. i.e. People still pretty deep in the detail

nilkn 2y ago
In finance, this would be more like a managing director (e.g., in Two Sigma, one of the engineering leaders reporting directly to the CTO). You're totally right that "VP" just refers to more like a mid-level or senior engineer in that world.
TeaBrain 2y ago
>Noticed hn in general seems to consider VP pretty senior It's not that the position referred to is simply interpreted or "considered" as being senior, but that VP is the title for the highest seniority, or highest behind SVP, below c-suite at most tech and other non-finance companies. VP simply has a completely different meaning in finance, that has nothing to do with what other users here are referring to.

keeptrying 2y ago

This is also why starting your own thing will give you better experience at being a VP than working at a 9-5. (But it’s also harder than being a VP.) And if you’re going back to 9-5 after an unsuccessful startup stint, look for VP or GM like roles. Anything else won’t have enough degrees of freedom to keep you happy

game_the0ry 2y ago

Some advice to the managers and aspiring managers from the perspective an employee. Good qualities in managers: * I have a lot to learn from you * you reward me with promotions and bonuses when I do well * you can sell a vision, even a small one, and motivate me * you take my problems and concerns seriously and do not ignore them, rather than gas-lighting me and trying to paint my concerns as the problem * you have the awareness to figure out what my core motivations are, and have and skill to align your goals with mine, thus putting both of us on a path towards shared success * you are forthcoming and honest with your feedback, bc you see my blindspots and tell me about them so I can fix them * you understand that too much attrition is a bad signal for management success * you understand that as a leader you understand accountability -- you deserve a greater proportion of the success but also the downside when things go bad * I want to crawl over broken glass for you bc of all of the above bc you have earned my loyalty Bad qualities in managers: * there isn't much to learn from you, and the best thing I can learn is not how to be bad manager, bc you're a bad manager and I know it * if you leave and my performance does not suffer, it means your presence never had a positive effect (or any effect) in my role * you gas light me when I bring up problems and concerns, shifting any responsibly form you to me * you are neurotic and I need to work around your emotions to make you "feel good", and I get more reward for this than actually delivering work * you do not have the courage to give me difficult feedback that I need to hear bc you are afraid of having uncomfortable and awkward conversations * you are so preoccupied with making your manager happy that you sacrifice your employees to accomplish this * you do not care enough about attrition and underestimate the consequences of losing good employees, mostly bc your employees feel the consequences, not you * bc of your lack of skill as manager, the relationships you have with your employees end up being adversarial rather then a shared success..no one wants to crawl over broken glass to work for you and the employees who stick around do not want to be there * you do not understand accountability -- you repeatedly make poor decisions bc you never face the consequences, until its too late and then you get fired bc at that point, its obvious the problems was you all along * you were promoted bc you kissed the right ass at the right time, which does great damage to your world view bc now you assume this is just the way the world works I could keep going, but that should suffice for now.

yujzgzc 2y ago

This puts words over why I don't want to be promoted. I've watched enough VPs looking enviously at the seemingly stress free life (comparatively speaking) of lower level staff engineers, busy as they are shuffling from one escalation to another instead of actually building stuff.

seneca 2y ago
You're not wrong. Upper management is a very stressful grind with little glory. It used to be that it was paid very well to compensate for that, but staff engineer jobs are close enough in comp now that the difference in stress becomes really questionable.
- astrange 2y ago
  …What do they actually do all day? I understand what line managers do just fine, but our company works on a process where important projects are supervised by a VP, which really leaves you with the feeling that you never see what the directors are doing. Presumably they're doing something. Although my last one got fired because everyone under him thought he was useless, so maybe not. Reading the article, it also makes them sound useless because it just says it's okay if they have an excuse for failing.
  - seneca 2y ago
    It very much depends on the company and size of the team. A lot of it is planning, filling gaps, coordinating with other teams, and endless meetings. I get that that can sound like valueless filler, but it's actually more important than you'd think if you've never seen the sausage made, so to speak. It's basically trying to turn ambiguous mandates from above into actionable plans.

runamuck 2y ago

When I had an IC role, I would recommend tech projects and execute them w/ my team (we can solve "problem X" with "tech stack Y"). I also had a lot of agency in creating solutions for tech proposals. When I had the director role, I made sure nobody wasted time. I would qualify deals to chase, recommend strategies and core competencies to pursue (AI and Cloud yes, Blockchain and Quantum no). Now, in my VP role I try to get people good at making these strategy decisions (we should follow shipley for capture, etc.). Also, a LOT more relationship capital building and external COMMs at the VP level.

jimnotgym 2y ago

Interstingly in a traditional British company directors are the most senior and VPs don't exist. A director would be a board level job, as in a statutory director. Obviously there are a lot of US companies in the UK and their influence spreads...

anthomtb 2y ago

Is it me or do attempts to generalize career development across companies seem futile? The concrete example here I can give is working at one company where "Manager" meant you had 10+ direct reports and were expected to do almost no technical work. Versus a second company where "Manager" meant you had 4-5 directs and were doing significant amount of technical work. The path from IC to Manager at company 1 had almost no commonalities with company 2 despite similar-sounding titles. I guess what I am saying is that promotion ladders are so tightly integrated with company norms that attempting to seek outside advice on "how do I get to the next level" seems useless. Edit: To rephrase more succinctly - Are articles like TFA useless or do I not know how to interperet them?

Clubber 2y ago
It's a data point. It's similar to the ridiculous titles given to ICs in the last 20 years. What does Senior Developer vs Senior Engineer mean? Do Architects code or not? I'm sure you have an answer, but someone else with different experience might have a complete different answer.

class3shock 2y ago

To be a good manager means to run a team well and get stuff done. To be a good VP means to increase shareholder value. To be a director means you are at some percentage of completion of the soul/morality extraction process that happens when transitioning from the first to the second.

balls187 2y ago

"I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." I vaguely remember a quote that goes "No kid ever dreamed about growing up to be a middle manager." I get that work is just a means to an end, but find something you love to do. If you love management, that's great. I love being an engineer, and prefer to be a player/coach over just a leader, and hate that as I get older my age is looked down on.

pc86 2y ago
IME the only time (higher) age is looked down on is when it's used a crutch by that person - whether its derision of others because they're not as old, or "I've been around longer than you so you should listen to me simply because of that" or whatever the case may be. I've worked with great people who were decades older than everyone else on the team, and nobody cared how old they were. I've also worked with people who sounded like a caricature of the worst parts of early 90's Usenet. That eyes almost universally rolled every time they opened their mouth had absolutely nothing to do with their age, although I'd bet my next paycheck they would insist that was why.

shermantanktop 2y ago

I always say being a manager is one of the toughest jobs around, tougher than most IC jobs. But at the same time, bad managers have many more avenues to escape accountability than ICs do. I greatly respect the good managers I know. But as a current example, one of their direct peers has spent several years driving off top talent, failing to deliver on goals, and is now encouraging others to quit in order to destroy their own team on the way out…and is currently on a multi month leave of absence! And their boss says “oh but you see I must follow process x” and “the problem has only recently gotten this bad.” All of which are bullshit lies to cover the fact that this toxic manager has been very effective at deflecting and avoiding. I have to wonder about a job function that cannot police its own ranks.

protonbob 2y ago

> I can’t tell you the number of times people have asked me for “development” or “leveling” conversations where I get excited and start talking about learning, skills gaps, and such and it’s clear all they wanted to talk about was salary. This seems to be a rather naïve response. In a paying job, the main impetus to increase your knowledge and performance is to gain more salary. Clearly the people that they are talking to want to know "what kind of value do I need to provide to the company in terms of knowledge or skills that will enable me to make more money". I don't see why this should be a disappointment.

woodrow 2y ago
The author is excited to talk about helping the employee grow and have more impact, which (if successful) should make them more valuable to the company, resulting in promotion and increased compensation. He perceives employees who want to talk with him about "leveling" as seeking the formula or checklist to get paid more, and not necessarily about growing or putting in the work. The latter is fine if your performance objectives are objective and directly aligned with company success (i.e. achievement of sales quotas). It's more fraught if your performance objectives are more subjective or defined in ways that are proxies for company success—it's easy to fall prey to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law where employees do the things that get them promoted, which may actually make them or the company more valuable.

asdfman123 2y ago

This article is good, but I want to complain about this argument (which the author is not responsible for): > CEOs understand they are held accountable not for effort or activity, but results IMO that's one of the biggest problems in the American business world. If you ruin the company long term to get "results," your plan is successful. If you harm the company short term for long term benefit, your plan has failed. No long term thinking, just watching number go up and down. It's practically a form of superstition.

rexpop 2y ago
> Nobody gives a hoot about profit. — W. Edwards Deming
MuffinFlavored 2y ago
Ruin is subjective, results are objective.

tflinton 2y ago

I might disagree a bit with this, I've had all three titles and from my experience: A manager is executing on plans, managing the work, aligning people on teams and enforcing policy & process. A director is creating the plans to solve problems, intaking work, aligning teams and creating good processes from policy. A VP is about defining the problem teams need to solve, managing capacity/budget for work, aligning on a strategy across a company and creating good policy.

lifeisstillgood 2y ago

Most of the work of “good” managers is about affecting culture, providing a sustainable work load, emotional intelligence, encouraging team work and sense of shared ownership Yet in outsider society and political discourse this is thrown into the trash under the weight of individual rewards and exploitation Perhaps we need a rethink

sota_pop 2y ago

I think differentiating roles between “effort” vs “results” is an interesting concept. I don’t have first-hand experience with a formal role ladder. I work in a small firm where I created my own role building a software platform internal to an org where no one else has any software engineering expertise. However, I’ve always ascribed to the notion that seniority is proportional to “social credit”. Where social credit is some combination of your perceived expertise at your craft, your ability to achieve results (on an arbitrary project/task) i.e. your professional competence, and the trust others put into you that you can/would help them if they ever needed. Social credit is built, and also spent. Failure is tolerated if you have social credit to spare, but is ultimately finite. People want to follow you if you have amassed more social credit than most.

bane 2y ago

I like this post, it's clear, well considered and concise. I'd caveat that with, "for certain kinds of companies". Two thoughts: 1) On his issue with levels. I don't disagree with most of the observations, but I've definitely experienced staff that are less concerned with the pay increase and just want the validation and pat on the back of the level bump. It's weird, because it usually comes with more responsibility and work. While just getting more money lets you go back to what you were doing and are already good at. But everybody has their own ideas at career progression. 2) In my personal career, the types of companies I've worked for have a slightly different flavor of this, and I've come up with my own internal shorthand ideas for what these titles mean. It's useful to consider this because as you rise in these ranks, you have to also train the next generation to be able to step into your shoes and do a good job: Manager - you are 85%/15% focused down/up. Down into your reports and tasks and up to receive new input from your manager (perhaps a director) and provide back status. You spend that 85% of the time taking somewhat vague directions and turning them into actionable tasks by your reports. You reports in turn should have well scoped tasks that when completed, build into a completed work unit that satisfies a directive from up your chain. You are a work breakdown structure and scheduling engine. Your performance is generally measured by delivering programs on-time, on-budget, and having a minimum of issues with your reports. Director - you are 50/50 focused down/up. You spend time refining vague business unit goals into vague programs. You rely on your Managers to turn those programs into work tasks. You have a lot of responsibility for driving revenue, have a budget, but in most companies are not specifically measured by P&L. Your performance is measured by revenue targets. You get pulled into sales and marketing projects that are already moving freight trains to provide grounding, and to mobilize resources under you to support specific efforts. You got into your position because you provided on-time, on-budget program successes repeatedly, and a few of them struck gold by chance. You also had a knack for working well with the sales/marketing people and maybe even straddled between worlds. VP - you are 15/85 down/up and spend that time turning impossibly vague corporate goals into merely vague business goals. You are responsible for P&L, and your performance is measured by both revenue and profit targets. You spend a lot of the day working with sales and marketing, and you conceive and initiate growth efforts. Depending on the company, you likely have your own subordinate sales and marketing team that reports directly to you, and is separate from the engineering team. You got into your position primarily because you are really good/lucky at growing revenue and can put together revenue growth strategies that have a higher probability of working than not. It's even possible you never spent time in the engineering organization, and worked up through the sales/marketing path. Source: Been all of the above at various times. Highest position was President of a very small startup, which I count as almost meaningless (where I also did a stint as a VP). "Biggest" position was half a decade as a Sr. Director of an 200+ head engineering organization in a several thousand person company till I was promoted out of it.

RayVR 2y ago

> I can’t tell you the number of times people have asked me for “development” or “leveling” conversations where I get excited and start talking about learning, skills gaps, and such and it’s clear all they wanted to talk about was salary. Disappointing. I mean…these people are rational and they want more money, which is an objective metric. In a confusing world of HR jargon, levels, lack of clear links between output and compensation, what else could you expect? It’s on you, the manager, to link the financial metric to specific tangible results, whether past or future. If high performers are having these “I want a raise” conversations, it’s because they know they are delivering, they want a sign of progress in their career. They may already be gathering market data of their real price through interviews or at least discussions/research. This means they are already at risk of moving. Lack of insight into this from managers is “Disappointing” In my own experience, and having guided others through these conversations, managers need to always have some clarity on what they could provide to the people reporting directly to them. The timing should be determined based on an understanding of what is best for the company. E.g., what maximizes retention or other key organizational metrics.

harrall 2y ago

Personally I think “…but we executed the plan…” is unreasonable at any level, at any job, at any task, and any point in anyone’s life. It’s never a way to go through any part of life. If you set out to complete a task, it should be to achieve your goal. Your should measure your success as achievement of your goal, not by whether you went through the motions.

black_13 2y ago

[dead]

Nifty3929 2y ago

Anybody have some book suggestions that describe what a Director or VP does, and what makes a good one, in the day-to-day sense?

sethhochberg 2y ago
I'm a bit late to respond here but in case you're checking replies: Camille Fournier's book The Manager's Path is enjoyable to read and covers exactly this

AbstractH24 2y ago

Quoting the blog post: >"I am talking about one of three levels at which people operate: manager, director, and vice president. Here are my definitions: >* Managers are paid to drive results with some support. They have experience in the function, can take responsibility, but are still learning the job and will have questions and need support. They can execute the tactical plan for a project but typically can’t make it. >* Directors are paid to drive results with little or no supervision (“set and forget”). Directors know how to do the job. They can make a project’s tactical plan in their sleep. They can work across the organization to get it done. I love strong directors. They get shit done. >* VPs are paid to make the plan. Say you run marketing. Your job is to understand the company’s business situation, make a plan to address it, build consensus to get approval of that plan, and then go execute it." As an IC at startups or consultant I frequently feel like I'm expected to do all of these things, and produce results.

Pozzi1 2y ago

[dead]

astrostl 2y ago

> Another practice I’m not hugely fond of is “leveling” > That said, I do believe there are three meaningful levels in management Cool!