* At least at Facebook and Google. At Apple I have heard that people are encouraged to stay in one area and become experts in that area. Mobility seems to be less of an emphasis.

I think this ability to quickly move around is heavily underrated.

Bad manager is just incentivized to lodge preemptive mild performance reports against his best performers. Not enough to become a stain on the team members, just enough to prevent them from switching teams. Bonus to the bad manager: they are rewarded for keeping compensation plans from expanding as much as other teams because the mild performance reports help curve down pay adjustments.

The only practical way I've seen to counter this response is strong leadership over such a manager that recognizes what is actually happening and has a quiet talk with the manager. That rarely happens. I'd like to hear what policies others have seen that mitigate this dynamic.

Hear me out. Why is the entire IT culture trying to do whatever Google and the FAANG companies are doing? Its ridiculous. The rest of the world have completely different needs, completely different skill levels, and completely different management. There is literally nothing the rest of the world has incommon with FAANG.

What they do will not work for the rest of us. I'm super tired of hearing about what they do. I do not look up to them and I'm not impressed by them.

Remember tech before FAANG? If you don't, you probably think I'm a raving lunatic because today, it sure seems every single engineer loves whatever FAANG does.

Anyone have a success story surrounding this they’d like to share? Asked another way: has anyone ever stepped down from leadership and gone on to be an IC within the same company?

I tried this at last job. Without pouring out all the details, the way the company handled it was poor, and shortly after I departed the company so did three other managers. One of which never wanted to be in a management or leadership position in the first place.

I did this because my team was immediately starved for engineering resources upon my appointment, I was asked to continue my IC product management responsibilities while managing the team, and I kept getting PMs that were the problem children of the group.

I went on to run product management for tooling and ops processes around that tooling in the post-manager PM role. I never looked back.

However, I got the bug so bad I left to start my own company, so now I manage everyone?

That said, in my experience when there is a mass exodus of the kind you talk about, the underlying symptom is some flavor of poor management and toxic culture. Doesn't matter if that organization incidentally happens to implement something which would otherwise qualify as "best practices of management" - in that environment it is simply putting lipstick on a pig.

I actually have seen the reverse. All the TLs I saw that stepped down to be ICs left their team shortly. It's obviously anecdotal, so I wouldn't generalize from that. On the otherhand, the TLs that switched to be a manager tend to stay in the teams much longer. Many of them openly said they don't enjoy managing, but that didn't seem to affect their decision to stay.