[cat_plus_plus]

I am sick and tired of pressure to get into management once you get older and lack of other opportunities to be rewarded. If I can do job of 5 other people, I can be compensated like two others and the company is still ahead. Or if that's just my arrogance talking, there can be an objective system to measure work accomplished and set rewards accordingly. Instead all of my questions about advancement are met with demands for me to write PRDs and nag people who refuse to do work to do it, but without me actually having authority to make them.

I finally decided to just not sweat over it, do work that matches my pay in 2-3 days a week and spend the rest of my time teaching better programming skills to whoever is willing to learn and has a good attitude about it. With focus on general skills that they can take to their next job rather than internal proprietary tech. I don't care that I am not getting paid extra for that, at least it feels good to be in office.

[mook]

Remember that all the people up the chain deciding compensation are managers. It's natural that they would perceive the management track as more important, because they're on it.

[dspillett]

Another factor is that going to management to get more compensation is a given around many industries. You aren't going to get more where you are if you don't want to move into management, because you won't get more elsewhere either in the same state and they know that. They are not trying to pay you what will keep you happy, they are trying to pay you what will stop you taking your knowledge/experience elsewhere.

You just have to be aware of the market you are locking yourself into. I'm well aware I could be making more as a manager, or even if I let myself be called a “senior” which often overlaps in terms of having some responsibility for people/things in a manager-y way, but I pootle along as I am anyway because I know while I'm not exactly happy ATM I'd be less so the other way and I don't think that the extra compensation would balance that.

We may fall foul of AI in the not too distant future and end up stacking shelves for Tesco, but then again a lot of those management reports and decisions look rather automatable by the same LLMs too, if not more so…

[smueller1234]

For what is worth, I'm a fairly senior manager (a few hundred engineers) and I firmly believe and vocally point out the opposite. I'm sure the kind of self dealing you describe is not unheard of, but it's also pretty cynical to assume that as a default. If the culture in your work place has gone that far down the drain for real, maybe take some time to look for a new gig or reality check it with a manager you trust?

[re-thc]

It's a vicious cycle. Someone needs to break the chain.

[rjtavares]

I've actually been in HR discussions telling people managers are overrated and we need to value ICs more. It's really difficult to explain to HR people that managing people isn't[1] a higher responsability job than being an expert at doing something...

[1] Of course, sometimes it is. It depends on the team size and seniority, but also depends on the expertise. I'm just saying that a manager does not have to always have a higher grade than a person on his team.

[re-thc]

> and we need to value ICs more

Maybe start by getting rid of the silly term - "IC". What's the difference between a product, project, sales and a people manager? They all manage something.

It's people's egos and lust for power that makes this distinction.

[falcor84]

I'm against euphemisms in general and don't think we should be changing this word either.

As I see it, an IC is anyone whose main contribution is through artifacts or other actions they perform directly, and a manager is someone whose main contribution is through coordinating the actions of others. As such, I'm absolutely ok with "project manager" and "product manager" even if people don't report to them directly.

If you have a better term, do go ahead and propose it, but let's not throw out this useful term just yet.

[willcipriano]

If we are merely IC's when it comes time to get paid, why aren't we all IC's when it comes to returning to office?

[rjtavares]

The distinction is useful because people managers have some specific tasks related to HR processes. The fact that the distinction has an ego implication is the problem, not the distinction itself.

[WJW]

Be the change you want to see mate, don't wait for someone else to do it.

[gigatexal]

Could it be (get ready to crack some eggs as I am about to fry some conspiracy-bacon) an effort by HR/companies to promote sr engineers into managers to then give HR reasons to cull the herd if they need to?

[hajile]

If management didn't pay well, qualified people simply wouldn't do it or you'd be limited to people who felt emotionally compensated by getting more power over other people (which is already bad enough).

[smueller1234]

Some of us enjoy helping other people. First bit of advice I give to new or would-be managers is to learn indirect gratification. Most common failure mode for new engineering managers IMO is the struggle to feel productive given that impact is achieved chiefly indirectly.

[andirk]

A couple jobs ago, when I realized I was doing all of the non-trivial front-end work at about the workload of ~4 of the other engineers, I just went golfing half the time. That way I was getting paid the same but for half the time at work! And a job before that, my boss told me that I was making the other engineers feel dumb so she wanted me to do less. So I started crocheting at my desk. She helped me with my technique a couple times too.

[another-dave]

> And a job before that, my boss told me that I was making the other engineers feel dumb so she wanted me to do less. So I started crocheting at my desk. She helped me with my technique a couple times too.

It's funny, I think I'd feel more dumb if the person beside me was crocheting half the time but still more productive than me!

[TylerE]

One of the best parts of WFH is not having to do a bunch of performative theater.

[matrix_overload]

Business likes predictability. The chance of 5 people deciding to leave all at once is exponentially lower than a chance of 1 person. Hence, unless you are the owner/founder, your replaceability will be valued more than your performance.

[re-thc]

> The chance of 5 people deciding to leave all at once is exponentially lower than a chance of 1 person.

And the chance of 5 random people producing something compared to the 1 you know is a huge contributor is exponentially lower too.

> Business likes predictability.

That's great. Then they should actually stick with it i.e. reward the 1 that's been contributing rather than gamble on something that might not work. It's common in sports teams, e.g. where you sell your star player and buy 5 others hoping to get more value. At the end of the day you're lucky to even get the same value.

[psd1]

Counterexample: sports teams that improve when they replace their star player.

Football doesn't have great players in an absolute sense. For the last decade, the greatest player, depending on which tiresome fan you ask, had been either Ronaldo or Messi.

Messi didn't pull up any trees at PSG, and Ronaldo's second stint at MU was underwhelming. In both cases, that's because the team tactics had to be shifted to accommodate these players, to the detriment of the other players.

My old team lead was rated highly. But he stifled the rest of the ICs. From above he looked good, from below he looked shit. He should not have been developing software, he needed to be in a process-oriented role. I believe that our productivity would have increased - certainly morale and cohesion would have - if he'd fucked off and not been replaced.

[re-thc]

> Messi didn't pull up any trees at PSG, and Ronaldo's second stint at MU was underwhelming. In both cases, that's because the team tactics had to be shifted to accommodate these players, to the detriment of the other players.

Messi nor Ronaldo were the star player of these teams that you mention.

The fans at PSG booed Messi. Kylian Mbappe was the main star and maybe Neymar. Messi always wanted to stay at Barcelona but it didn't work out. He more played his part and wasn't trying to be the star.

Ronaldo was well past his peak even in his Juventus days. He definitely wouldn't be a star player in any top team. No, it's not the team's fault.

> My old team lead was rated highly. But he stifled the rest of the ICs. From above he looked good, from below he looked shit. He should not have been developing software, he needed to be in a process-oriented role. I believe that our productivity would have increased - certainly morale and cohesion would have - if he'd fucked off and not been replaced.

I don't see this as a counter example. You assume there's some god neutrally working towards the greater good of the organization. Often there isn't. If the above, i.e. those paying the salaries like it - that's all that matters. It's a different problem if management gets their priorities, metrics or whatever wrong. This team lead is the way they are because of such incentives. They are rewarded for it.

[quetzthecoatl]

Both Messi's and Ronaldo's last stints were underwhelming because they are well past their prime. They are in their late thirties, and they started their professional first team career at extremely young ages (15/16). It's a testament to modern medical science that they are still not retired. Most professional striker/midfield players either retire by 32/33 or drop deep, or go to US/Middle east for a good pay day that isn't very physically demanding. The other players who started playing along with them retired years ago or moved to less demanding leagues (Rooney, Fabregas, Van persie, Robben all retired years ago. Even iniesta who started years after these, is in Japan for the last few years). Ronaldo didn't help at all acting like a primadonna instead of showing age and leadership in his second stint at MU, but that is him.

[squokko]

Is it team tactics that had to shift or is it just that the team had to let go of good players to afford the salaries of Ronaldo or Messi?

[matrix_overload]

>And the chance of 5 random people producing something compared to the 1 you know is a huge contributor is exponentially lower too.

When a customer presses a button to book a taxi ride, they don't care whether the underlying database query takes O(log N) or O(N^2). As long as the price is good and they get a response within 3-5 seconds, they're cool.

This works for the absolute majority of real-world projects. Technical excellence has very little impact on the revenue, compared to other factors (product/market fit), so people making business decisions don't care about it.

>That's great. Then they should actually stick with it i.e. reward the 1 that's been contributing rather than gamble on something that might not work.

Business is always a gamble. You don't know how the market will take your product before you launch it. You don't know what the competitors will do, how the sentiment will change, let alone global events like the COVID money printing followed by an interest rate squeeze. It's like you are trying to navigate a ship in a storm, and the mechanic keeps telling you how he can shove coal 5x faster than others and hence needs to be paid more. Except, you never need it that fast, and need to have 2 onboard anyway, in case one gets sick.

[re-thc]

> As long as the price is good and they get a response within 3-5 seconds, they're cool.

You're so amazing aren't you. You even know precisely what the customer wants. Are you saying that if I offered a service with a 2 second response they're not going to take it? Nah they only want 3-5 seconds!?

> Technical excellence has very little impact on the revenue, compared to other factors (product/market fit), so people making business decisions don't care about it.

If you don't care about it how do you know it doesn't impact? If you don't care you don't know the details. So problem is, maybe if you cared it'd make a difference?

Also what does this have to do with technical excellence or whatever you're referring to? The whole point was the 1 person that could do a job better than potentially 5. It is about delivering business value.

> Business is always a gamble.

And? It was the poster above that said business preferred predictability and I responded to that. You're now taking it out of context and trying to derive other meaning from it.

So is it predictability or a gamble?

> It's like you are trying to navigate a ship in a storm, and the mechanic keeps telling you how he can shove coal 5x faster than others and hence needs to be paid more. Except, you never need it that fast, and need to have 2 onboard anyway, in case one gets sick.

Again we're back to assumptions. How do you know this mechanic that shoves 5x faster will get sick? Maybe they never get sick? So it'll be better than hiring 2 that might get sick. Again, that was the original argument. If you change it - then whatever. You might as well say those 2 you have onboard ALWAYS get sick so I still prefer the 1 that can shove coal faster.

[Rexxar]

It would be true if leaving probability were uncorrelated but in reality they are correlated so it's not such a big improvement than people usually expect.

[hintymad]

I grew up reading all kinds of articles and books about how engineering itself is a career track and I believed it. However, when I looked at the great engineers, it seems they eventually turned into executives. Jeff Dean, for instance, is one the greatest engineers. He has deep technical skills. He is versatile, as we can see that he made key contributions in storages, distributed systems, and machine learning. Yet his end game? SVP of Google. And how many people can really be Jeff Dean?

[adwn]

I suspect the reason for this is that even great engineers don't scale indefinitely: At some point, if you want to increase output, you have to delegate some part of your work. To increase output even further, you have to delegate even more. That also doesn't scale indefinitely, so you have to start delegating the delegating. And before you know it, you're an SVP and not really directly doing any technical work anymore.

[cowsandmilk]

In Amazon terms, great engineers “are right a lot”. That is key in SVP type roles. An SVP isn’t typically managing ICs, they have a very different role than the manager role described in Charity’s article.

[resolutebat]

LinkedIn says Jeff is currently Chief Scientist, an IC role. And Google famously added an extra rung to its IC ladder just to make room for him.

[unicornmama]

Jeff has reports that means he's a manager.

[squokko]

Whatever his title, he runs Google Brain.

[squokko]

Ultimately even Jeff Dean is not so great that 1000 Google engineers doing what he tells them to isn't even more impactful

[GoblinSlayer]

Some say they work for money alone and measure it in bills paid, in which case they can promote to management position, because the only difference they see is salary.

[tmpX7dMeXU]

> there can be an objective system to measure work accomplished and set rewards accordingly.

You’ve now undoubtedly made your life and that of those around you worse basically on the basis that you need to be proven wrong about being a “5x engineer”.

Engineers hate the hand-wavey nature of labour markets almost as much as they hate any attempts to remotely objectively quantify their performance.

The everybody-compromises happy medium is defined career tracks with largely qualitative and certainly subjective measures of actual responsibility. Nowhere in that are you going to get the reassurance that you’re after: that you’re worth 5 other engineers, or whatever. That’s just not how things work, even in IC roles. The fact that you pose this as a means of measurement in my eyes speaks volumes as to where you’d land on this imagined scale.

Honestly 99% of professions out there wouldn’t get away with being as entitled as software engineers are. Which, yes, market forces and all that. But let’s not pretend that there are many if any unreasonable aspects of a typical dev job.

[alkonaut]

For me there was a fork in the round around age 30 when I was pushed to take on managerial tasks/roles. This was at a company in traditional industry with basically no technical ladder, developers were line-work and the only way to climb was management. I stuck through it as an IC and at 45 I’m still not in management. I enjoy being an IC and hope to be for another 20 or 25 years. My only fear is that I have grown stuck in the company because seeking a developer job at 45 or 50 is probably subject to ageism more than a program/product manager job would.

[jader201]

> met with demands for me to write PRDs

> spend the rest of my time teaching better programming skills

Are you an engineer or a product manager? If you’re a PM, sounds like you should switch roles. If you're an engineer, sounds like your manager/peers don’t know that. :)

But in seriousness, it sounds like there may be a mismatch somewhere.

[rhtgrg]

It doesn't look like a mismatch to me. Looks like L6+ engineering work.

[f1shy]

I cannot believe I'm not the only one! Exactly this is what I'm doing... helping the ones who want. And use my knowledge to do the work of 1 week in 4 hours...

[evandale]

You're far from the only!

I love programming and I'm more than happy to work with juniors and solve junior tasks. I feel like this industry puts so much pressure on people to be an engineer or an architect or something more than a person who writes a little script to fix something and moves on. Everything built today seems to have to be architected and scalable and I hate it.

[oneepic]

> Everything built today seems to have to be architected and scalable and I hate it.

I feel this pressure a lot b/c of big-tech promo culture.

[groestl]

> Everything built today seems to have to be architected and scalable and I hate it.

To have a rough idea on how to scale it, should it take off, is not a bad thing. To do all the work, before it actually takes off, is.