[mjr00]

> I refuse to believe that there are people whose purpose in life is to be be a manager/VP, and, if they are, they might as well be walking corpses for all I know.

You could say the same thing about ICs though -- "I refuse to believe there are people whose purpose in life is to spend 5 days a week for 3 years building an enterprise line-of-business app to automate an obscure legacy business process that will be used by 10 people in total, and all 10 of those people will complain about the new app and wish they could go back to doing things the old way"

[ponector]

And as VP you can make a ton of money and spend it wisely, make a difference to your extended family or even a community you live.

That is a real meaning and sense of purpose for your earned money!

[paganel]

The very fact of calling "computer programmers" as "ICs" is part of this syndrome, I'm not sure exactly when it started showing up, I'd say it was popularised by FAANGs, so maybe 2015-2016-ish?

[mjr00]

ICs aren't just computer programmers, they're designers, sales, marketing, customer support, etc. It's just an easier term for people who aren't managers than "not a manager".

[Ancalagon]

Is IC offensive? I’ve never considered it to be. “Resources”, on the other hand, feels very offensive.

[frmersdog]

Well, taken at face value, it is a bit of an oxymoron. To contribute is to be part of a group; by definition, a contributor can't be wholly independent, because they're adding to a corpus, not producing it by themselves.

[dullcrisp]

Oh, I take it the other way. To me it implies that management doesn’t contribute anything on their own, which is kind of true but also kind of a funny phrasing.

[reshlo]

It stands for Individual Contributor, not Independent Contributor.

[xboxnolifes]

I don't read it negatively, but to play devil's advocate here... Managers are also individuals who are contributing to the group corpus. They just do it by interfacing with people instead of code.

Though, that's just semantics on the naming. IC just means not having direct reports.

[cudgy]

True. Who is not an individual contributor? I find the term meaningless.

[sokoloff]

I've heard the term (or "individual contributor") since at least the first dotcom boom in the late 90s.

[bitwize]

It's been in use in engineering for decades now. My father was familiar with the term in his career, and he's pre-boomer.