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by tom_b 2352 days ago
YMMV, but in my non-FAANG experience in the mid-/south- eastern US, tech managers seem to make at least 1.25X for X=senior dev salary. Maybe keep that in mind?

My dev friends over the last 10+ years have included people who made a management/dev track career decision and anecdotally speaking, those who chose management have earned more and seemed to have more employment stability. In a couple of cases, I have friends in my personal network earning 3X a senior dev salary managing dev teams.

Personally, I decided to stick with the dev track and have been somewhat dismayed to find (after 10+years with one employer) that I am often pulled into decision/management-type situations but am consistently evaluated as a lower-level employee because "coder." It's even more annoying when I chat with my peer group who made the mgmt track choice and I find that the overlap between what I do and they do is actually very large.

1 comments

> my non-FAANG experience

I think this is highly relevant. Traditional companies have a historically inherited structure where the talents to 'do things' are relatively easy to come by, allowing management to accrue larger influences and hence compensation with the organization. The practice has a lot of momentum as you would hire the same managers even for a software business, they'd come from one of these places.

The growth of FAANG and other new tech companies threatens to end this by driving up the scarcity of engineering talents, while creating an entirely new management class that used to be engineers. While they do make more than most engineers in those companies, they take on highly technical decisions that management in traditional industry mostly refrain (drive & initiate vs select from n things).