re: new All-In Sacks may be a bit misguided that all-star ICs *want* to be managers. imo most all-star ICs want to stay as close to “doing” as possible while gaining more influence over the strategy. if the only growth path to do this at a company is to manage, then ICs are somewhat forced into a manager role.
Agreed. Kind of sounds like he was told this by someone at Twitter. Companies with strong engineering culture generally have parallel career tracks for ICs (including similar pay ranges for each level).
Yup, I my experience I have seen that out of a group of 10 great ICs maybe one decides to move to management. And that too, by some subtle coaching or hint by the immediate manager that they might be able to lead a team well.
What's interesting is that regardless of if management or IC track, it's challenging to align "career progress" to actual impact. EX: I've seen ppl are incentivized to do technically hard/notable projects for promotion and these smart people are capable of rationalizing the work (migrating to new fancy language, etc)
they don't "want" to but from personal experience after some years in you were only left with following options: 1. go from company to company at Staff+/Principal level 2. stay stagnant in current role 3. find a company like Netflix which has Director level IC position 4. become an investor or founder
Many ICs *absolutely* do not want to become managers because the nature of that role is not aligned with their preferences and/or because they realize they don't have the skills to do it as well as they perform their IC role. Companies want scale and leverage: ICs rarely can provide that by staying ICs.
At the point where you go from flat group of ICs to teams you inevitably have to convert some ICs to managers Seems like the more tech heavy the product the more dependent you are on converting ICs
This is my exact dilemma. I love coding and want more influence over strategy.
I have never met a stellar engineer who wanted to be an EM - hackers wanna hack
I am seeing more and more IC go anticareer, e.g become creators, mini saas, authors
I couldn’t agree more, when talking about ICs that fall in the missionary archetype — they believe in the mission, values, goals, and want to further them, so taking away that autonomy or restricting access to greater autonomy leads to this condition. Where I disagree is with the mercenary archetype — they can be
Agreed they don't *want* to be managers -- they got forced into management by bad incentives. The reason is that management is the path of least resistance to climbing the promo ladder. Much easier to become an M7 or M8 than an IC7 or IC8. High-level ICs are extremely rare. Seen it happen to multiple former coworkers