when did this appear? i literally have never seen it before i read this post, and it makes no sense at all to me.

It has been in common use for at least 15, if not 20 years.

Very common phrase in the tech industry.

i have worked in tech for over 40 years at all levels and, as i said, i have never come across the term before today.

Just in the past week "IC" has appeared in 2 front page stories on HN.

Are you US based? Beginning my career in the mid 00s I was exposed to "IC" pretty much day 1 starting at Microsoft.

Other people around me in adjacent sectors also use the phrase to refer to non-managers, it is pretty common daily parlance, I am 99% sure I can ask any of my knowledge worker friends and they'll know what I am talking about.

Google trends show "individual contributor" has been a pretty popular phrase since at least 2011.

no, i am not us based, though i have worked there. but so what?

is "knowledge workers" still a thing? it was meaningless when it was introduced in the 60s, even more so now.

another bubble creature, i guess.

* * *

as a matter of interest what, as vaguely as you like, do you work on? because you seem uninformed to me and it is not obvious to me that you know what you are talking about. there is one tech giant that has always been based in seattle. well, make that two.

You seem to be the one who is uninformed, considering you've never heard the term IC.

Yes, everyone knows there are two tech giants based in Seattle. What this person was saying is that other large companies have also opened/grown Seattle offices in the past decade and vice versa, which has caused usage of corporate vocabulary to merge.

Maybe you should reflect on the fact that you don't seem to understand what people in this thread are talking about and stop acting like you do.

Naw, knowledge workers have developed into a real thing.

The labor group that requires significant creativity and autonomy to be effective. The artifacts they create are a minority of the value they create.

Mostly they became a real thing because traditional management techniques fail to work well with knowledge workers.

you said 20 years, now it seems to be down to 12

By "tech industry", a lot of people here tend to mean internet ad companies and/or startups designed to be acquired by them.

> It has been in common use for at least 15, if not 20 years.

I've been in the industry since 1998. The first time I saw it was on HN a few years ago (maybe 3 or 4).

I just searched HN and found references 12 years ago.

> I just searched HN and found references 12 years ago.

Hah!

I would just love to see that thread - may it is also filled with "What's an IC?" :-)

I am not sure. It has been around for at least 5 years I would say. I guess at some point they needed a nice sounding alternative category to people not becoming managers.

This is FAANG speak. They created this role for people who are not (directly) involved in management.

so i guess that managers are not individuals and don't contribute? might be true. but i've been a manager and an individual and contributed code. well, who knows?

As usual, "it depends." Many individual contributors don't actually contribute, either. Some actually have negative net contribution.

The point is that ICs are judged based on their individual contributions, i.e. their own code, design docs, etc, whereas managers are judged based on their team's contributions

i have never, ever come across a programmer working on a system of any complexity that did not depend on contributions from other programmers.

Why are you being so pedantic? At this point it seems like you're trolling.

> so i guess that managers are not individuals and don't contribute?

> i have never, ever come across a programmer working on a system of any complexity that did not depend on contributions from other programmers.

No one said non-ICs aren't individuals, and no one said they don't contribute. No one said that ICs don't work with others or depend on others.

What has been said, several times, is that their contributions (i.e. the code they produce, artifacts they create, etc) are largely individual contributions. They are the ones creating the thing, and are not responsible for others.

This gets a bit murky as you move up the IC chain, in that your contributions become less tangible and are in part measured on how you lead others and make those around you more efficient. But your performance is still largely judged on what you produced.

the nuance you are missing is that individual contributors are responsible for their own work and judged based on that. they are not responsible for the work of others. managers are of course responsible for the work of those they supervise

Or managers are individuals who contribute non-individually, making them non-ICs?

A->B != !A->!B

Lots of people who aren't part of the "working class" do plenty of work but that's the nomenclature society uses for some reason so if you want to communicate with everyone else, you have to go along with it.

I actually like the term as it seems pretty accurate to me and I don’t know if a more accurate term.

There’s many types of “managers” who are actually individual contributors (eg, sysadmin, project admin).

When you get into principal engineer and architect titles, sometimes those positions manage people and sometimes they don’t.

I think it also highlights how one version of contributor isn’t better than the others. Some people only produce value by being part of a team, some produce value by managing, and some produce value direct from themselves.

I've always like the term soldier. It's what organized crime syndicates, armies, and ant colonies all use. The worst is when someone gets called a "resource", but I can't get too exercised about IC.

As a consultant, I've become accustomed to being referred to as "the resource" by operations people. However, the day an engagement manager refers to me directly as "resource" is the day I openly start referring to them as my secretary.

i keep envisaging what some of these uber stupid job names would look like on a business card i might have to give to a client:

zab zonk

the resource

zab zonk

individual contributor

jesus wept

Nobody has IC as a title, it’s a whole class of job families that don’t require/revolve around managing other employees. Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Data Center Technician are all ICs. It’s just a more positive way of saying “not people manager”, especially when you are trying to build a culture that going into people management shouldn’t be the only career path.

why do you need to say "not manager"? most people are in the nature of things not managers. and if you do need, for bad, bad reasons want to differentiate them, how about NMs? oh, but that would be to obvious for the current crop.