Re:Where do individual contributors go once they peak?
by geofft on Friday December 27, 2019 @12:19PM
(#21892570)
I don't know if that requires being a people manager, specifically. You can also scale your work by being able to work alongside other people to help them maximize their impact - you don't necessarily need to work above them, choose their work, direct their performance reviews, etc.
If you do it right, this also scales well. If you can help a hundred people do their work 10% more productively, that is also more effective than helping four people do their work 50% more productively. Most tech companies that have separate engineering-IC and engineering-management ladders try to keep roughly similar expectations at each level about scope/breadth of impact, it's just that for engineering management, it's "how many people do you transitively manage," and for the IC ladder, it's not as obvious.
I think this article does address that by pointing out that the design management career track generally expects you to manage both increasing numbers of people and increasing amounts of work, and those don't need to be the same thing:
> Overlapping responsibilities between IC and managers is the most prominent issue I’ve observed, but it’s an easy one to resolve by looking at where the line is drawn between people and product on the team.
(This sort of reminds me of a similar problem in academia: there are three separate skillsets, doing research, leading researchers/scaling a research lab, and instructing students, that tend to be conflated into one ladder. They don't need to be.)
If you do it right, this also scales well. If you can help a hundred people do their work 10% more productively, that is also more effective than helping four people do their work 50% more productively. Most tech companies that have separate engineering-IC and engineering-management ladders try to keep roughly similar expectations at each level about scope/breadth of impact, it's just that for engineering management, it's "how many people do you transitively manage," and for the IC ladder, it's not as obvious.
I think this article does address that by pointing out that the design management career track generally expects you to manage both increasing numbers of people and increasing amounts of work, and those don't need to be the same thing:
> Overlapping responsibilities between IC and managers is the most prominent issue I’ve observed, but it’s an easy one to resolve by looking at where the line is drawn between people and product on the team.
(This sort of reminds me of a similar problem in academia: there are three separate skillsets, doing research, leading researchers/scaling a research lab, and instructing students, that tend to be conflated into one ladder. They don't need to be.)