[JimboOmega]

I am financially comfortable (though not at 'fuck you money'), but also, personally, really want to be an EM. My passion has been people, process, and management for a decade or more at this point (I had my first tech internship 20 years ago, and have been full time in the industry for 15).

I initially didn't care about titles, but they do constrain what work you can do. The reality is that if your title is one of an individual contributor, even if you lead culture change at the company level, they will always look for the code. If they don't find it, you will be in trouble.

One thing I have learned over the last year of my life is that being "Shadow lead" - the one actually pulling the strings and making things happen, with no formal title/recognition - is the worst spot to be in. The work you are doing doesn't match what you should be doing on paper, so you are very vulnerable if somebody decides to take a closer look.

It's "glue work" but on a larger scale. It's important, but will go unrecognized. It's emotionally exhausting to build a team and get a head pat and told someone else will lead that now, thanks, and by the way how much code did you write recently?

Though I do wonder what you mean by "official" but without the title. It might be the case that "everybody knows" what you do, but if your lead is replaced or just changes their attitude, suddenly your IC work is under the microscope, and could be found lacking.

[heisenbit]

These pseudo manager positions are so exhausting because one gets the job to do some things but not the full required authorities to carry it out. It is the cognitive dissonance that makes it so stressful and exhausting. Managers delegating without really delegating. I try my best to avoid doing them, asking enough questions, having enough demands beforehand to either make sure the scope matches the authorities or the requester walks away frustrated.

[aprdm]

I feel you probably speak of experiences in very big companies.

If the software team is of a medium size, let's say, less than 50 people, then it surely isn't how you paint.

The CTO / Manager(s) for sure know the impact of the ICs and likely nobody is measured by LoCs. I personally have never worked in an organization (10 companies and counting) where LoC has ever been mentioned as something being measured.

[JimboOmega]

To be clear this isn't lines of code. Nobody is that bad. Somewhat hilariously my boss was looking at number of commits. His complaint was that there were weeks when I made no commits.

Though that was the stupidest way to come to that conclusion, it is true that I was doing less IC work than other members of my team. I had surfaced this several times in 1:1s and thought that was what he expected. For instance, some weeks I had literally 20 hours of meetings, with significant overhead attached to those; it is hard to make much progress coding in that environment.