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An IC can definitely have and maintain more control than managers, they just need to produce visible value to the company.

I've seen multiple ICs with more power than their direct manager. They are basically immune to being fired because higher-level leaders understand their value and respect their track record.

Same here. Not only are they immune to being fired, they can more or less switch teams whenever they want.

Were those higher-level leaders managers? I mean I agree with your exact statement, but in my direct experience, the higher-level leaders tend to be less and less engineers.

Unless there is some power of the purse-strings, the two-tracks thing is always going to be biased in favor of the managers.

That's the beauty of working in a tech company compared to a non-tech company. Every single manager in my org is a former engineer. Every single manager above them is a former engineer. Heavy majority of directors in the org are former engineers.

That's not necessarily a good thing. Sometimes ex-engineer managers are the worst kind of manager due to their own misconceptions or arrogance.

I feel like that's really gonna depend on what part of the tech sector you're working in.

In the world of early and middle stage startups, you're probably right. However, in massive tech companies or more legacy-type tech companies, it seems like you're a lot more likely to find managers who are trained as managers and not engineers (MBAs, etc.)

I agree with you in general. However, my specific experience with this comes from working at one of those massive tech companies. And there are definitely orgs within the company that fall under the "MBA-types-running-the-show" umbrella, but, I think, I just got very lucky with my org.

Yeah, the experience probably varies a ton across the industry and even within orgs. I'm sure most people around here who've been in tech for a while can tell stories about both types of company.

> they just need to produce visible value to the company

Many specialists don't get this opportunity and require certain character traits to go out of their way to make it known. If they maintain a key product but don't need to interface with group of people often, then they get ignored for "employee of the month" and other accolades that would translate into more clout

Until the company is bought.

I think they tend to be anomalies. Mostly ICs don’t have as much power/authority/autonomy as people in managerial positions.

At my last company, I went through three managers in the 3 years I was there. The last guy in there, I was comfortable enough in my position to make a statement. At the time, I was getting into the office around 10 and leaving at 3 or 4, basically whenever I felt like it.

The first few days, I stayed until a couple minutes after he left, to let him know I supported him. Then one day, I walked out with him. He looked at me and said, "but you got in at 10." I looked right back at him and said, "I know. I stayed late the last few days in case you needed me." Then it was back to old habits.

He was going to need all the help he could get to manage the political situation. In the end he couldn't cut the knot, he left not long after I did.

Something about this comment really unsettles me. I can’t tell if it’s thinking that what was a “statement”, if it’s the underlying attempt at some lame kind of power play on a new member of your team or if it’s something else entirely.

What I'm reading in it is that the poster is a lot more comfortable in their position than the manager, knowing the manager is under a lot more stress and pressure than the poster themselves. After you've seen a few managers start and leave you kinda get the picture.

More or less. It wasn't intended to be malicious. I made it known I was there to support him in his Herculean task of moving the needle with his department with this wholly intransigent political environment. But I'd already spent some 2 1/2 years building up goodwill and clout in the company and there wasn't going to be any bowing and scraping.

Any ideas he had were welcomed but at the end of the day, they were going to throw it all out anyway. I was hoping they'd let me build the new platform, but they picked a consulting company to build them a Magento solution. To recognize my efforts, I got like a year and a half of half-salary to get on the phone if they ever needed me.

My next role paid 33% more.

The brutal reality is that a single individual contributor cannot, and should not, contribute as much value as a team of people.

I strongly believe in technical tracks and I've seen them work. Every place I've worked had technical positions that are peers to managers, at every level. They worked alongside managers, and did not report to them.

Progression on both managerial and technical tracks requires skills in leadership. Whether that is people leadership or effective technical leadership, the principal's are the same. You need effective communication, clear articulation of ideas and an ability to influence and lead.

If you focus solely on your technical skill and implementation ability, then it is going to get harder and harder to progress. At a certain point an exceedingly skilled individual starts adding less value to the team they are in, unless they can demonstrate real leadership.

I think the difference is between organizations like square, and those that aren't.

I work at an organization like square. My manager could probably fire me. Not today, but should he desire he could manage me out, at least of his team. I have the autonomy to move elsewhere.

But I am working with ICs right now who have more organizational I influence than my manager. Certainly he decides the priorities for his direct reports, but these ICs influence the priorities for our organizing as a whole, much more strongly than my manager does. And he certainly can't fire them.

So sure, my manager is senior to me, but that's because he's senior to me. There are equally, and more, senior ICs in our org who he has to defer to in practice.

> people you passed on in the interview process suddenly appear next to you and you're required to mentor them,

It almost like you telling incident happen in my team last month where a guy was hired exactly in similar fashion. Now I am supposed to mentor him.

Yeah. These are all things that happened to me as an IC over the last 13 years. I'm jaded.

The best thing you can do, if you find yourself replacing whole teams of people due to your experience , is to start your own company or be the CTO of a company.

That sucks though, it's high risk, low reward. The safer bet is to just be a manager.

> to start your own company or be the CTO of a company.

In which case you’d be a manager. There’s no getting around the value multiplier of making other people more valuable. Even traders and movie stars have a ceiling as compared to the people that run hedge funds and movie studios.

> Managers have more autonomy and more control.

Sometimes. I've seen orgs where middle management was not allowed to delegate enough, either by culture or by tools. The net effect was a schedule full of catch-ups and backlogs full sign-offs without much actual input into what they spent their days doing or thinking about.

I'm guessing that working as an engineer at one of these orgs would have been far worse. (Unless it's one of those rare cases where management's so tied up in its own bureaucracy that the tech team gets to run itself.)

I've seen it go both ways. Being able to change teams or projects without a lot of drama seems to help a lot.

Good engineers are always hard to hire, bring up to speed, and retain. Especially ones who want to deal holistically with the existing team and system instead of narrowing in on certain approaches.

Show me how long an engineering manager can live within an organization that where their senior ICs don’t support them. It’s basically zero. Yeah you can fire the senior ICs who won’t take your word as gospel but that’s not exactly a great strategy. You as an EM need to rely on your senior ICs to do both of your jobs. It’s a team sport. And yeah if your EM kicks you to the curb for no reason, no doubt, they’re next.