This is kind of the main problem. You should't have employees at IC2 if they are IC4 worthy. They will just try to find another job, instead of waiting 5 years before reaching a level of someone who is performing same or worse.
That seems ridiculous. All while ICs are getting fired for having 2 jobs and making squat at either. I find it hard to believe that someone can hold so many positions and actually provide meaningful value to any of them.
This seems really out of touch. ICs absolutely despise interviewing. Half of my current team has expressed that they want to quit but isn't going to because they are so afraid of interviewing again. Many are coming up on 1-yr tenure and still want to leave but they'll be there for 2+ years because they hate interviewing that much. They're deathly afraid of it.
The rest who want to stay are only there because they're making incredibly high amounts of money thanks to being at the company just before it went public. (They joined 5+ years after the company was founded - hardly part of the original gang)
That's an easy way to have zero managers and more problems than you started with. The vast majority of ICs are like children. It's not fun dealing with them. The only way one voluntarily takes on that role is for equal or greater pay.
you get fired if you dont make it to IC3 or 4 (depending on company) eventually, and getting promoted to those levels does require leadership. sounds like bob just wants to work on bug fixes forever, there is no path to promotion there.
The problem is that there isn't really a well-defined or stable career path upwards from IC that isn't some variation of role handling politics/delegation/process improvement, and because you're expected to "age out" of being an IC you really have no choice.
You don’t want too many incompetent people in management. This will result in your competent ICs becoming incredibly frustrated, leaving you with only the incompetent remaining. Good luck fixing that.
I used to work for another company where it's acceptable for people to move from management to IC roles (and I wish it were possible everywhere).
They're going to do it anyway, whether it's going back to being an IC at the same company or by leaving to do it elsewhere. If it's not possible to stay they're just going to go (and presumably these are the people considered good enough to promote into management).
IMO the easiest way to solve this issue would be to normalize ICs making more than their managers. That way, only the people who really want to be managers are managing.
You seem to have some axe to grind about this, but it's not really helpful. Engineering management is hard, and a number of skills and traits are necessary. If ICs are willing and able to be promoted that's great, but it's not a panacea. When it comes to early scaling, even with the best of intentions the bottom line is you may be growing faster than existing folks can acquire the requisite skills. Of course hiring from outside runs the risk of cultural damage, but promoting from within runs the risk of dysfunction via the Peter principle. Choose your poison, but at least you're growing right?
A fair number of people get "stuck" at the senior level because they enjoy being ICs more than they enjoy being managers, but their company promotion track doesn't support having high leveled ICs so they either have to accept less money and prestige, or force themselves into a role that they don't like.
In every startup I've been in, there was undue deference to long-time ICs. They didn't normally stir up public fights with execs but they would openly undercut line managers and then move around in the org as people tried to stop being responsible for them.
It's not really clear what you do with a staff+ long-term IC. A lot of them don't want to manage or be involved in leadership, but they want to pull down a huge salary and just do work that is frankly replaceable by a senior eng.
To be clear I do believe there are levels of IC experience above staff, but being 21 and joining a startup doesn't make you a Principal Engineer just because you hung around until you're 30. Especially if you've only worked at that one startup.
I'll add that if a good manager works with an underperforming IC and makes a meaningful difference, it is VERY UNLIKELY the IC will acknowledge this in a timely way, or perhaps even know it happened. The best case scenario I've ever experienced is several years after the fact. That's a long time to wait for some positive external validation.
My main frustration with IC levels is that the promotions often come down to questionable criteria like:
- Have you worked on highly-visible, high-level, cross-org projects?
Are these efforts really needed? Should your organization be reinventing the wheel? I've seen staff IC's get unreasonably attached to their own pet projects and keep pushing them despite universally negative feedback from the engineers that would be affected. The right level of high-level abstraction should come from the actual requirements of the business, not artificially pumped up by engineers because it's required to get promoted.
- Do you mentor other engineers?
Do the engineers on your team actually need mentoring? Most of the people on my current team are not senior (IC2) and the best group of engineers I've ever worked with. We all have 5-10 years of experience. But the IC4 recently assigned to our team feels the need to give use engineering 101 lectures on every single topic, and it's been extremely frustrating.
- Have you led projects?
This one makes sense I know. But it's also often just a proxy for your time at the company if you need to patiently wait your turn to wear the tech lead hat. Glacial promotion opportunities often lead to the best engineers leaving
To add to that, if you have a senior IC with leadership skills and a manager without, the senior IC won't last long, either through rage quitting or slow-walking out the door by the manager who's threatened by the senior IC.
Most companies have no use for very senior ICs. They don’t have much difficult work and a lot of managers want to involve themselves in technical decisions so once you have reached a certain level there is no room to grow. Either go into management or stagnate.
Interesting perspective. I kind of agree with you. I have a follow up question. Even within IC, there are different levels. One may want to keep a low profile ( for less stress, job security etc) and remain at the same level. But others around (including juniors) can get promoted to the higher IC levels. Due to this, people may perceive you as not good enough. How does one handle this?
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