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.
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.