The problem with dedicated IC career paths are that they aren't respected outside of core tech companies. At some point if you want to switch industries you could be looking at a massive pay cut. I noticed this in FAANG. Okay, you get to IC8, you're a master of the universe. Realistically you can only take that credibility with you to other FAANG. If you're a manager/director, you can take that with you anywhere and the comp bands will be more comparable.
There are of course exceptions if you are a true rock star and have worked on/led household-name projects as an IC. But again, if you jump ship, you might end up in a manager-esque role anyway. Once you reach a certain level of seniority/experience you are just way more valuable in the force-multiplying role of "leader" than anything you can do with your hands on the keyboard.
Uhhh no...? On the contrary in big tech u can stay ic up to even director level. Manager level ics are very common. It's the opposite of what you described
Just to clarify when you say IC you mean literally an IC as opposed to the leadership path in an IC vertical? Many companies expect hither level ICs to be leaders in one way or another, you don’t need to go down the management path.
The problem is that it's not really treated as a different career path by many people.
Lots of people leave management roles and try and apply for IC roles at other companies. It's also really difficult to go from management at one company to management at another for many people.
Exactly. IC career is not as sexy as HN makes it to be. People pursuing IC careers are doing it for personal reasons, definitely not for growth. Compared to management it takes an order of magnitude more time, influence and energy to get promoted in the IC ladder beyond staff.
I mean the essence of the problem comes down to people management. If you mean the pure technical role, then yes that's what I am referring to which has far less positions. And usually your competition would be the elites. Because many ICs try to avoid people management.
I am not talking about whether there is a such a path for ICs. I am talking about the numbers problem. The unfortunate truth is that there are far more positions involves people management. Engineering manager is good example because ICs can wield their technical skills. But still, this roles still requires you to do substantial people management.
I would argue the high-end IC career path isn't really respected in general at F500. I have worked for multiple large public companies. Most of the time the highest tier IC role consisted of the grizzled veteran engineers who were there forever, but disliked managers (and management in general). They were usually a bit dis-disgruntled as well (probably because they were stuck in that role!). They were never promoted or moved into management, because they were too highly compensated to make it work.
Basically if you dont "hop" to management in the first 1-6 years into your career, it quickly becomes too late.
After years of discussion about this with my manager, I recently accepted a low level managerial role at my current company. It was a large step down title wise (from highest level IC title to low level manager title). The only reason I did this was because HR agreed to let me keep my current salary (albeit "frozen" until I get promoted)..
I found that in general the pay for entry level tech manager was a large pay-cut for me , but I was also under qualified for type of Director role.
I am a senior IC transitions to management. I think these articles leave out a very significant part of the equation and that is compensation and career mobility. Generally the management track at higher levels has more openings. If you stay in the IC track, there are going to be much fewer openings at that level with appropriate compensation. This is particularly true the more specialized your knowledge is. Moving to management track provides more opportunity at the same/similar or greater compensation. The exception to this are the FAANG companies but in my experience it’s way easier to get in through the leadership ladder than through the senior IC ladder. At least that was my experience in the 2 I’ve worked for. In one of the FAANG I worked for, I joined as a senior IC but was given a very non-senior manager and was effectively treated as a junior engineer during the 1st year.
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.
All of your points are valid. But here is the catch which many ICs might not realize. There are far more management positions thank pure ICs. It's the unfortunate that you be disadvantaged if you stick to strict ICs path. The competition is also fierce. The talented ICs are so far above the rest (the 10x/100x engineers).
It's a simple supply and demand problem. The company needs a lot more of above average managers/hybrids. It's not good for average ICs to stuck to their little world if they want better promotions.
Well I guess the difference is that the top of the technical leadership track is ostensibly CTO, which is a “higher” role than you’d typically see on the IC side.
That said I totally agree with you overall and think the argument you are responding to is a little silly. You can have an absolutely fantastic career staying IC forever. The fact that you might cap out at “staff/principal/whatever engineer,” a hugely influential and generally very well paid role, should not be viewed as a downside to that track.
I used to manage teams and missed engineering too much, so I quit to be a freelance engineering consultant. It felt like the best way to progress as an IC for me.
Bigger tech companies do a better job of IC career paths than others, but it still feels like your influence is muted compared to managers.
There are more openings for managers at higher levels with the same or higher compensation than for high ICs simply because there are fewer problems that have the scope for such a senior engineer. A FAANG I worked at might have a need in an org for a few director level ICs. These ICs in my experience are few and far between. ICs at this level make same money as management track. In my experience not many teams within an org have scope for an IC at that level Making it more difficult to transfer within the organization. Yet at the same time there are many director level managers because there are many teams and lower level managers to manage within those orgs. Additionally, a director level manager is considered somewhat generic and has an easier time moving around in the company with things that are tangential to their domain. My current company is not a FAANG but I can tell you that I see the same thing there.
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.
A lot of tech companies have figured out pushing ICs into management is counter-productive and have IC tracks with very high ceilings. Until you're a principal/fellow pulling down $500k+ you haven't hit the IC asymptote yet. And yes this exists outside of just FAANG.
The corollary is that you often will have to stick around more than a year or two to get promoted into the senior+ ranks due to the scope of work and actually seeing large initiatives through.
Or you can bounce around every 18 months from senior dev role to senior dev role and hit a ceiling with small marginal gains a lot sooner.
> t's not uncommon that, in terms of money anyway, IC tracks tend to cap out at lower levels than management
This is pretty natural, at least in a big organization. At some point your IC tracks almost always have less impact. There are weird corner cases sure, but not enough that you can't deal with individually.
But that's ok; Almost every manager isn't going to eventually be C-level either. What's important is that there is some career track that makes sense for IC focused technical people to stay in throughout a normal career.
There are many ways to be an IC. You could just write code all day with minimal interaction with the rest of the team. But you can also mentor your teammates or be a technical lead for a component or entire project, even without becoming a manager with direct reports.
In general I don’t think there is anything wrong with “peaking” at a point in your career where you feel fulfilled without feeling pressured to always take on more responsibility and stress. If you want to lead projects or manage people, go ahead. If you just want to write code, that’s fine too. Of course depending on the company your compensation might top out after a certain point, which you may or may not be happy with. But at least in the bigger FAANG-type companies, you can go pretty far as a “tech lead” style of IC, without directly managing people.
After having worked at a FAANG and having friends who still do, the way I've seen it is that with your YOE to work basically solely as an IC with less mentorship responsibilities you have to be in a highly specialized, challenging area (AI, ML, etc.). If you're in a more common area like web dev, backend engineering, data ingestion, etc etc. then you're more likely going to have those mentorship responsibilities.
For that kind of person even IC1 is not a good fit instead I usually recommend they will do better as a QA Engineer, Support Engineer etc. in FAANG or software engineer at a non-tech company (gov contractor, healthcare etc.). At least at FAANG companies IC is not just coding, it’s mentoring, providing technical leadership, writing design docs, oncall, etc. This is not leadership in the sense of a people manager it’s being able to provide constructive feedback to other teammates and positively influence your team’s codebase, architecture and product. Basically being able to lead technical decisions and technical strategy.
There are of course exceptions if you are a true rock star and have worked on/led household-name projects as an IC. But again, if you jump ship, you might end up in a manager-esque role anyway. Once you reach a certain level of seniority/experience you are just way more valuable in the force-multiplying role of "leader" than anything you can do with your hands on the keyboard.
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