[marcinzm]

Being a technical leader is a set of skills that is distinct from being a great IC and those skills overlap management in many ways (meetings, dealing with people, diffusing conflict, getting buy in, etc.). Except you don't have resources to leverage directly except your own, now very limited, time so everything is 10x harder. I was in that boat, eventually I got tired and just got into management.

[lordfoom]

>Being a technical leader is a set of skills that is distinct from being a great IC

Sorry if I'm being dim - what's an IC?

[TuringNYC]

Individual Contributor (ie working without others under you in the org chart)

[lordfoom]

Okay that makes sense, thank you.

[arnarbi]

Individual contributor, i.e. a non-leadership role

[xxpor]

A non-managerial role*

If you're a senior IC and you're not exhibiting leadership in some way you're probably not going to be around for very long.

[arnarbi]

You're right, that's what it usually means. But gp was asking about it in the context of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21377401

Here it's being used to contrast with both TL-ship and management.

[heavenlyhash]

I agree with this and thus often find the term "IC" itself unfortunately prone to being misleading.

[lordfoom]

Ah, okay, thank you.

[techslave]

perhaps (perhaps!) you weren’t a good technical leader after all. the JD you put out there isn’t quite right. you do have other people to leverage...that is your job. you just don’t have hard authority over them. it’s challenging and you can’t get by on pure tech ability anymore. so many very very strong tech folks fail here because they don’t have the soft leadership skills.

your company and your boss have to support you (eg by not micromanaging, so that you can actually effect soft leadership), but the way you put it, failure is a foregone conclusion.