I like to think I'm a good fit, but of course, I need to improve my skills, like anyone else. At the end of the day, we are working with people, and there's no one-size-fits-all solution. Sometimes the most skillful engineer is the best fit for the EM position. However, I truly believe that to get the best output, you want team members to commit as a group and to feel that it's rewarding to achieve goals and have personal development. Unfortunately, not everyone has the luxury of a long-term perspective.
If you want to build a decent team, you really have to relax your grip on the tech part.
You don't fix every problem yourself, but have someone who can fix it available. Otherwise, people don't grow, and you can't take a vacation. You totally need a general (middle / senior level) understanding of technology, but having a separate person with strong technical chops is key.
> In which company does this happen, I wonder!
As a staff engineer on a design system for a top 50 website, roughly half my job was detailing a tech roadmap and identifying what can break across the codebase, something you can do perfectly well on grass.
Yes indeed. My point was more that to make more money as a IC there are
niches but there is no general track, but as a manager you stay at your crud webapp company and can manage more and more people.
Thanks for the feedback! I must say I've never worked in real big tech, and I've never worked with an IC beyond staff level. I'd imagine promotions to principal / fellow are quite rare as well? Besides, most "normal" companies don't have these grades, at all.
By transferable, I mean skills that are useful outside of our big tech bubble. You might not want to go out as money is very nice, but still good to know you can do something beside computer beep bop.
Ah right, I tend to think the tech bubble is the default context for stuff posted on HN, but of course that's just my bias.
I think staff engineers are slightly more common than first level EMs, but senior EMs are slightly more common than senior staff. Beyond that, it's small numbers and hard to draw conclusions. The nuance I've felt is that promotions to staff and up on the IC ladder are more in your control, while EM promotions are very much about being in the right place at the right time, in addition to being ready for the role.
I have worked at "normal" companies as well, and I think the EM role there is slightly different? To me it seemed like it's people management + technical, while in the tech bubble, that would be called "TLM". "Pure" EMs are mostly doing people management only, with strategy and XFN alignment. Does that sound correct to you?
Good point on the control over your promotions, it's something I experienced when moving into an EM role. Banging my head until hitting an actual growth team.
I come from Russia, we're not exactly known for great people management, and I'd say management up to department head is expected to handle the tech part as well even in larger companies such as Yandex / VK. This fits your definition of normal companies perfectly.
Beyond being in the right place at the right time, the higher EM promotions are also more obviously zero-sum, since there is a clear number of roles and only one person can get a role. Dynamics for ICs at higher levels are somewhat similar but not as clear cut
Quite a lot of smaller companies do have some sort of staff/principal level, though arguably it’s largely an excuse to pay people they want to retain more, and isn’t _that_ similar to staff/principal roles in Big Tech(TM).
Of course, companies on that scale don’t really have senior EMs in the Big Tech sense, either.
Not saying management is harder than engineering, at all. It's just another nice big area to learn something new.
Big companies tend to be quite prescriptive about role boundaries, so if you're an FE engineer, you can learn design and provide input as much as you want, but you won't likely get to design a new screen from scratch instead of your regular designer.
I mean, over the last few years as an IC I fiddled with CI setups and automated QA, wrote some CLI codegens, but after some time you really notice you start inventing problems to have some fun.
You're mostly right, but: depends on your manager.
I do let my FE engineers do mockups when they want. It is often objected by other people who wanted to do it (but didn't) or wanted someone else to do it (but didn't have time). But whoever is trying to make me and my team's job hell, will get the same treatment from me.
For sure. It's absolutely NOT the expectation, but there definitely exist people whose talent is in people-managing with little to no domain expertise.
IMO, whether one of these individuals can be used is the distinction of whether a role is line supervisor or management. Line supervisors need the subject knowledge to teach fresh hires and know how to identify and fix problems caused by slackers. Management would rely on the senior employees for mentorship and keep their ear to the rumor mill to identify suspect underperformers.
Well, it's well known that to become a team lead you must eat the previous team lead)
To be fair, some managers over-optimize to protect against people undermining them, not sharing knowledge and responsibility and even actively removing top performers with leadership ambitions
Not necessarily! You can just hang in tight and let someone else eat the team lead. In my experience it is often product people wishing to cosplay as tech lead (and they will promptly proceed trying do the same to you), or a middle manager/CTO (ditto).
Something I’ve noticed in the company I work for is that team leads which still write code is that they will take for themselves the high visibility projects.
I even think this is sometimes in good faith, as in "this is some serious shot, better handle it myself to avoid failure".
My favorite pattern is what I call "code sheriff" lead, who does all code reviews himself to prevent bad code from reaching trunk. Then proceed to complain how you can't go on a vacation because all processes stop.
I haven't had any luck applying to leadership positions without prior experience. Your best bet is finding a fast-growing product: when the team triples, you'll need some new managers. I got to move around 2 months into my IC job, and now my team has grown to have another 3 leadership slots.
But also make sure you're going to be happy if it doesn't work out. It's actually more likely at a larger company with established tracks IMO - hit the bullet points for next level/sideways move, say you think you've done so and that's what you want to do, be recommended for or apply internally for such thing. If you were considering leaving as an alternative plan then you presumably won't mind if that's in a different part of the org anyway.
Note this is not a map of people or sub-teams, but of roles seen in a product team.
In an organization, you typically have several product teams, some infrastructure teams (like security or dev tooling) that don't directly ship to users, and a management structure of EMs and C-levels on top.
