[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.