[mcv]

The idea of management being the only road for advancement has always seemed extremely self-destructive to me. I recently quit my job as a senior developer at a company because they wouldn't even pay me one of the upper pay scales for developers, because a requirement for that was that I'd have to take some sort of organisational responsibility outside my team. The fact that I did a lot of organisation and steering inside my team, which was considered one of the best performing teams there, didn't matter.

My dad has also always refused managerial responsibilities, but he was very much appreciated at his company. He said he had nobody below him and only one person above him, and he made more money than his boss (until his boss was replaced and the new boss gave himself a raise so he made more). My dad did get responsibility for all sorts of projects, just not for the people on those projects. And he has always remained very hands-on, sometimes replacing an entire team on his own.

It's basically what I want, but a lot of companies are apparently structured too rigidly to allow this.

[frankincense]

I'm in a similar situation and it's really frustrating. As an individual contributor, the more senior and skilled that I become, the less of a chance I have to actually use my expertise and skills to lead projects or deliver features that make an impact and create value. I'm constantly steered towards absolute time-wasting activities. Recently my company has become convinced Kafka is going to solve all our problems, and executives have OKR's related to the number of queues teams implement and it's impossible to launch anything now without a queue. My boss is making me join this cross-team initiative to gratuitously add queues to services that receive a dozen requests per minute at PEAK throughput. Also, there's no functional benefit to adding queues to these services, if anything it only makes them more difficult to administer.

Sorry, I just needed to vent.

[allenu]

It’s unfortunate, but I’ve found that the people who end up running companies are the ones who do well with the hierarchical structure, so they end up biasing the company towards that model. Anyone who wants to “move up” or contribute in a more meaningful way is measured against this ideal. It’s definitely frustrating to see that you are having clear impact on the success and operation of a team but not be recognized for it.

[jspiral]

At my company we have recently rolled out a new framework where the IC track has rungs that run parallel to middle management roles.

we're calling it "advanced professional", and has 3 levels, the highest being equivalent to the leader of a function, if you're familiar with the domain / function / specialty paradigm. This is essentially a director level individual contributor which I think is a pretty cool.

We're just a medium sized services company (localization, AI training data production, digital marketing). so if we're doing this I expect a lot of people will be soon enough.

[_uy6i]

Did he work for Koch? They’re fairly famous for disconnecting compensation from supervision/leadership - I.e. individual contributors earning more than their bosses.

[mcv]

No, General Electric Information Services.