You may get paid the same while working as an individual contributor, at least for a while, but over time your power in the org suffers a slow decay.

For example, you may not be able to direct your work towards that which generates the most revenue, people you passed on in the interview process suddenly appear next to you and you're required to mentor them, projects that seem dumb get assigned to you from on high without your input, compute resources appear or disappear from under your control, etc.

It's like death by a thousand cuts. And in my experience, the only way to actually get paid on this track over the long term is to create something so valuable that you are the single point of failure.

At least for programming, the only real 'Individual Contributor' career track that makes any sense to consider is one where you're a lead developer, that is you still code, but you manage a team of other people as well.

I've seen multiple ICs with more power than their direct manager. They are basically immune to being fired because higher-level leaders understand their value and respect their track record.

Unless there is some power of the purse-strings, the two-tracks thing is always going to be biased in favor of the managers.

In the world of early and middle stage startups, you're probably right. However, in massive tech companies or more legacy-type tech companies, it seems like you're a lot more likely to find managers who are trained as managers and not engineers (MBAs, etc.)

Many specialists don't get this opportunity and require certain character traits to go out of their way to make it known. If they maintain a key product but don't need to interface with group of people often, then they get ignored for "employee of the month" and other accolades that would translate into more clout

The first few days, I stayed until a couple minutes after he left, to let him know I supported him. Then one day, I walked out with him. He looked at me and said, "but you got in at 10." I looked right back at him and said, "I know. I stayed late the last few days in case you needed me." Then it was back to old habits.

He was going to need all the help he could get to manage the political situation. In the end he couldn't cut the knot, he left not long after I did.

Any ideas he had were welcomed but at the end of the day, they were going to throw it all out anyway. I was hoping they'd let me build the new platform, but they picked a consulting company to build them a Magento solution. To recognize my efforts, I got like a year and a half of half-salary to get on the phone if they ever needed me.

My next role paid 33% more.

I strongly believe in technical tracks and I've seen them work. Every place I've worked had technical positions that are peers to managers, at every level. They worked alongside managers, and did not report to them.

Progression on both managerial and technical tracks requires skills in leadership. Whether that is people leadership or effective technical leadership, the principal's are the same. You need effective communication, clear articulation of ideas and an ability to influence and lead.

If you focus solely on your technical skill and implementation ability, then it is going to get harder and harder to progress. At a certain point an exceedingly skilled individual starts adding less value to the team they are in, unless they can demonstrate real leadership.

I work at an organization like square. My manager could probably fire me. Not today, but should he desire he could manage me out, at least of his team. I have the autonomy to move elsewhere.

But I am working with ICs right now who have more organizational I influence than my manager. Certainly he decides the priorities for his direct reports, but these ICs influence the priorities for our organizing as a whole, much more strongly than my manager does. And he certainly can't fire them.

So sure, my manager is senior to me, but that's because he's senior to me. There are equally, and more, senior ICs in our org who he has to defer to in practice.

It almost like you telling incident happen in my team last month where a guy was hired exactly in similar fashion. Now I am supposed to mentor him.

The best thing you can do, if you find yourself replacing whole teams of people due to your experience , is to start your own company or be the CTO of a company.

That sucks though, it's high risk, low reward. The safer bet is to just be a manager.

In which case you’d be a manager. There’s no getting around the value multiplier of making other people more valuable. Even traders and movie stars have a ceiling as compared to the people that run hedge funds and movie studios.

Sometimes. I've seen orgs where middle management was not allowed to delegate enough, either by culture or by tools. The net effect was a schedule full of catch-ups and backlogs full sign-offs without much actual input into what they spent their days doing or thinking about.

Good engineers are always hard to hire, bring up to speed, and retain. Especially ones who want to deal holistically with the existing team and system instead of narrowing in on certain approaches.

There are far more ways to measure success in life than your paycheck or where you fall in an org chart.

Management comp paths tend to be more linear.

50% raises are a sign of company growth and a competitive market. Once a business is well established, growing slowly, and there are enough developers to go around compensation will settle down.

We're in the first few decades of Internet technology companies. This is the industrial revolution all over again. If you look at the first factory workers in the early-1800s, and the first steam engine engineers, and the first factory production foremen, they were quite well paid relative to other jobs. Later, when rural folk saw what was happening and moved to the cities and mill towns for work, and the supply of workers boomed, the wages stopped growing (and actually fell). The factory owners made hundreds of millions in today's money. They built towns for their workers to live in (Bournville, Rowntree, Port Sunlight here in the UK). Now Google is looking to do the same sort of thing. Its all playing out in a very similar way.

Give it another 20-30 years and things will look very different in tech.

I wish. Where in middle American or whatever you call the equivalent in Britain is Google or any other tech company building towns for their workers?

Nope, Google and the other FAANGs are all still focused on 4-5 large urban areas, almost all of them on the West Coast.

This depends on your org. Also there are individual contributors literally and individual contributors who function like a force multiplier and, although not managing, provide a lot of value beyond just their commits. I’ve seen this with wizard architects and sysadmins who just a percentage of their time is great on a project.

For most people, salary correlates with measurable influence, and there’s nothing more measurable than head count. So maybe you’re right about certain orgs, but I wouldn’t advise any young turks to bet on it.

Basically, every nerd thinks they’re gonna be Jeff Dean...but there’s only one Jeff Dean, and his job is taken.

absolutely this

Just as in how sales people can be on commission but no one puts fifty developers on commission the ability to measure is as important as the metric itself

Most managers don't set their own salary, and are dependent on someone else noticing and respecting their "contribution" (like "headcount" metrics) for their compensation consideration. It is entirely possible to be sidelined as a manager, just as it is anywhere else.

Everyone should have clear, communicated, consistent, meaningful, deliverable, pragmatic metrics that they are subject to in their evaluations.

Jeff was an IC. He no longer is. Under the naive assumptions that many people in this thread are making, that means the IC position he was in should be available.

It's not. I leave why as an exercise to the reader.

"History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all."

In my experience, a management role has typically come with 10-20% more compensation versus a comparable individual contributor role, but 100% more responsibility and accountability. I wouldn't worry too much about parity between the two tracks, focus on what you truly enjoy doing. Besides, the money guys can fire us all ;-)

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Lessons-History-Will-Durant/dp/143914...

As a Junior Power Ranger, I had three terrific jobs. Work hard, do well, get rewarded. Good experiences that completely screwed me for the shark infested waters of corporate america.

I wish I had read The Prince earlier.

The more senior you get and the higher your compensation gets, the greater the expectation is that you accelerate the work of others around you.

Historically, this has been easiest to do through management. If I make a team of 10 each 10% more effective, then I've effectively doubled my (individual) output.

Software engineering is different than most traditional roles. It offers other ways to accelerate the velocity of others; ways that don't require being a manager.

This is why compensation can be decoupled from management in these roles and why parallel tracks can truly exist in this role.

But the tracks remain parallel only as long as you're continually scaling your output. This takes effort and discipline. It happens more automatically through management promotion (though not for managers that never get promoted to lead larger teams).

But a large part of me tells me this would just make things worse. The only people who would opt to transfer to the manager track would be those who are really career politicians, who can take credit for every success but blame every failure convincingly on someone else. Ideally with management thinking all the time that this guy is a loyal contributor and not a politician. This is what seems to happen in practice.

So what can you do? Hire only people who are strong engineers and who don't have any ambitions to management? Hire excellent engineers and mediocre management? This last seems to be the approach of many tech companies. Frustrating though it is for the engineers, this explains one reason companies may go for this approach.

Agreed. You'd end up with more of the folks who just want power for power's sake, instead of growth/validation.

Maybe it just feels good but there's something that feels right about your manager working for you, getting you the resources, answers, and commitments from others that you need. And in return they get to boast all the cool shit you make to their boss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership

https://planet-lean.com/spotify-agile-leadership-lean/

The root poster is absolutely correct. The responses that say you can have a great life without climbing to the top of the highest ladder are also correct, but they aren’t refuting what the root post says.

Also, while things look pretty rosy for senior ICs right now, I wonder how many people lauding that path are in their forties or older. It’s one thing to be a respected principal engineer in a strong economy but what about if we hit another recession and your third wave tech company gets bought out by IBM?

Exclude the CEO because it’s a singular position. Only one person can be CEO. There’s no IC equivalent to it because it’s a unique position.

> The root poster is absolutely correct. The responses that say you can have a great life without climbing to the top of the highest ladder are also correct, but they aren’t refuting what the root post says.

> Also, while things look pretty rosy for senior ICs right now, I wonder how many people lauding that path are in their forties or older. It’s one thing to be a respected principal engineer in a strong economy but what about if we hit another recession and your third wave tech company gets bought out by IBM?

I was with you until the very last part of the very last sentence. In my experience, often times where there is management duplication they will trim management (we don't need _all_ of these engineering managers do we?) but keep performing ICs.

Age discrimination in this industry is very real (notwithstanding the tired excuses we see in every thread on the subject.)

People that are in their late 20s or early 30s need to start thinking about this. Right now you’re the age that the industry loves for “senior” ICs but mid 30s come on fast.

If there actually is a parallel track, this doesn't happen. Directors sit on meetings with sr. staff engs and principles - directors think about the resource allocation, principles think about the technology direction. The technical track is just management of and responsibility for larger and larger technical areas.

the question was about "parallel track", and i don't see how you can conclude that they're parallel: it seems to me that the IC path is circuitous and takes a lot longer to get anywhere on.

put another way: imagine that you had no preference over the work, were equally good as both IC and manager, and wanted to optimize for career progression. you would _always_ prefer management. and in fact even if you'd make a better IC than a manager, to a large extent you'd still profit more in management.

i agree that it isn't necessarily a promotion to move from IC to manager. but it also _isn't_ a parallel track: by moving, you've moved to a track which is much more direct.

If I ignore or undermine the choices made by manager I will be fired. But vice versa is not true.

Next question is - is manager the only logical progression for a dev at some point?

But that keep in mind you don’t have to keep progressing your career. There are risks to not doing so, but also rewards.

Since you mention "Outside of the top of the IC ladders at the giant tech companies" which is about $600k or thereabouts, I am guessing this means they are billing for about $500/hr-$600/hr? So a week's rate is roughly $20k+. What kind of place is paying software engineer contractors that much?

But there’s also the more classic knows-where-to-put-the-screw consultant. Something is broken and bleeding money and after being jerked around by underlings for a few weeks some director is desperate to fix it.

There’s are many many companies out there that can be losing tens of thousands of dollars a day or more because something isn’t working.

The bottom line is some folks in the company do have firing authority -- or at least have broad say in initiating the process to have someone fired. Rarely are these folks not on the management track or its equivalent.

But see that I am talking about "last word"; if a Team Leader and a Tech Leader disagree in a decision to fire someone. If both of them agrees, it doesn't scale up

It’s not true that manager know your salary, nor that they can fire you. Managers there controlled projects and investments but almost no one knew salary unless you were HR. Raises and bonuses were always in percentages and only your local mega partner who didn’t actually manage you knew real numbers.

Profitability was based on averages and bands to discourage minmaxing profitability on projects as that was detrimental to delivery and to clients. Markup and overhead was so high it was pretty difficult to be unprofitable.

So maybe in some orgs there’s strict boss type ladders. But there are many orgs where parallel is real.

I think it will be hard to find another job at director level without any reports. I have witnessed the struggle of my friends with this exact setup.

We are also significantly smaller than Square though, with 40+ employees. We want to keep it this way up until sustainable, then figure out something else. We don't want managers to ever be able to single handedly fire people.

Who does have firing powers, and how does one get there without being in the management track?

I'd be curious the size and type of company the OP is talking about where managers get that much power?

I remember early in my career meeting a very senior and experienced manager from another company on the same project who said he intentionally didn't become too friendly with people in case he had to sack them - which I thought must be a miserable way to live. NB I have sacked people for poor performance and laid off people I considered friends (and who are still friends).

Also, I'm glad that you believe that we will get to 10k employees. Currently beyond the scope of my own ambition.

If you have a team of engineers rangining from L3-L7 (on Square's scale), and you want to hire a new engineer you'll interview, and then decide on a level based on the person's skills & experience. Probably you knew up front that you were targeting a 4/5 or a 6/7, but generally, you don't go looking for a L7 IC, you look for an experienced engineer and then put them at the level that is appropriate.

But if that same team needs a manager then your policy is that they need to be a L8 or above (otherwise you'll need to do a big reshuffle to move all the L7 ICs out). So now you interview looking for a L8+ EM, and you hire the best person you can find, and you make them a L8. Maybe they're at the lower end of the L8 scale, and you know this role will be a stretch for them, but that's OK because it's good to stretch people into new roles and you think they'll step up.

But, you would have made a different decision when deciding what level to give an IC. My experience has been that for ICs, companies (rightly) err on the side of caution and if they think that the new hire is on the lower end of the scale they'll bring them in at the lower level, and let them prove themselves.

So if you're asking Is this engineer a N or (N+1)? you'll be more likely to bring them in at N. But for a manager, there are incentives to bring them in at N+1 so that they can maange the members of the team who are N.

And now your standards for an (N+1) IC are higher than your standards for (N+1) EM. And when it comes to promotion time, the new hires form part of the benchmark. And your existing Level-N EMs are performing just as well as your new N+1 EMs, so they're good candidates for promotion. But your existing Level-N ICs are really only performing at the same level as your new Level-N ICs, so things seem to be balanced.

I don't think there are any easy solutions to this problem. If you have a policy of ICs reporting to higher-leveled EMs then you create a system that makes it easier to be promoted on the management track. But if you have ICs reporting to a same-(or lower)-leveled manager, then you have a perception (and possibly an reality) that being a manager gives you more organisational power than the same level IC.

   the good ones will soon become managers of managers, and then managers of managers of managers.

On the other hand, I've worked hard to get IC's on my teams promoted up and out of my team because good directors rely on their Sr. Staff/Prinicpal engineers so there's room for them to grow (even if it's difficult).

If you are at level N in a company and (capable of) operating at level N+1, then your choices are to wait and hope that is recognised by your completely fair, impartial managers and you get promoted, or interview elsewhere and take your career path into your own hands. The second option is more reliable and likely to result in higher comp too!

Anyone wonder why IC starts at level 3 but managers start at level 5? It's not because they're separate but equal.