The Evolution of Management: Transitioning Up the Ladder
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Certainly the mobility from engineer to manager is something that I haven't witnessed "in the wild" ever, after 10 years in the business and having seen half a dozen organizations; neither with myself, nor with my peers.
What I predominantly see is a caste system where engineers are the lower caste and MBA-types are the higher caste, and members of the lower caste aren't taken seriously when voicing suggestions and opinions regarding business direction and management and also certainly don't stand a chance of being moved into any positions where they would meaningfully influence business direction on an ongoing basis.
There is an exception, though, which is that female engineers may still get promoted into management (...not going to speculate on reasons right now).
Also, what I've sometimes seen work is a lateral move followed by a vertical move, say from engineering to sales, and then from sales into management.
In some companies, that was a promotion (with a pay increase), in others, it was a lateral transition (and of course, at some it was a promotion but the company pretended it was a lateral transition).
Ironically, I did get an MBA but after graduating I was coding before transitioning into management, and I'm not sure the MBA degree had much to do with that transition.
Dual-ladder type systems for technical people are pretty common in the software industry, and, when applied correctly, one of the things I love most about it. I wrote about that: https://hackernoon.com/why-all-engineers-must-understand-man...
For example I have worked in a top-tier investment bank. One year, they had a particularly bad year (because markets were just bad), so while traders in some cases still got bonuses, nobody in the entire Technology Division (since they were seen as being more replaceable) got a bonus. They made up for it by giving everybody a bump in their title (with no bump in pay). That kind of BS is my primary association of what it looks like in practice when people climb the "technical" ladder (rather than the "management" ladder).
In my mind, a carreer progression would have to imply that, as time goes by, your options of things you might do in the organization expand and, since you get to pick and choose from a wider pool, you make choices that are in your best interest meaning more money and more opportunity to influence the direction of the business and all that.
It works that way for management, as the relationships you build with people become an asset that starts paying dividends over time.
For engineering, it works in reverse: Your options become less with time, not more. The determinant of any move you might make within the organization is not so much the opporunity around you doing something new, but the risk around you no longer continuing with what you leave behind. (Or at least that's the way that organizations will mistakenly see it). Say you've built a database that underlies reporting infrastructure that underlies all decision-making in the entire company. Bringing in somebody else to look after the database is a risk that a company usually won't want to take. Ramping up somebody else to learn about the system is a cost they won't want to incur. Congratulations: You're stuck looking after that database for the rest of your time at that organization. That's the reward you get for having done a good job at building that database.
In addition, I would say that over the 10 years that I've been in industry I have seen a cultural change around non-engineering professions moving in on decision-making-territory that would have previously been an engineer's. I'm talking about business managers, designers, product managers, product designers, it infrastructure architects, what have you. 10 years ago, you would have been presented with a problem which, at the face of it, was technical in nature like "build a database and some reporting infrastructure around it". You would have picked a database management system, built the data ingestion infrastructure, created e-mail reports which you designed yourself, etc. etc. Nowadays, you go to person X enterprise IT architect to have them decide which database you can use. You go to a designer to tell you which font to use on the report. You go to a product manager to tell you how often to send the e-mail reports and what the signup-flow should look like, etc. etc. -- Congratulations you have just been reduced to a mere machine executing a business process, not making a single meaningful decision for yourself, and as a result your social standing is barely above that of a machine.
There's definitely a tendency to stasis in organizations - if the benefit of new software doesn't outweigh the loss of older, working software, there's no way anyone would want to encourage new software to be made.
FWIW my experience at top tech company is very different. If an engineer did this and was unable to communicate, cross-train, and scale themselves beyond their direct ability to maintain, they would never make it to principal -- or any other coveted technical career path promotion.
Look at the growth of Agile (the reality of what it is, not the manifesto, confuse those two at your peril) and the growth of the Product Manager role in tech. As engineering groups have ceded their position and complained about having to be in meetings, only being responsible for the systems running and not much else, having others tell them exactly what they want done, those responsibilities and tasks have either been picked up by existing groups or had new groups created to handle them.
What we're seeing today is the natural growth of that. That's one of the reasons why we're seeing the huge interest in the no-code space. Engineering has managed to turn itself back into a cost center and is being viewed by the business side of the house as a necessary pain vs a beneficial resource.
This sounds exactly like my experience at Morgan Stanley. Your entire post sounds a lot like my cynicism after working at IBs for a few years.
Get out as soon as you can. Seriously- I went to a tech company and it literally changed my life. I was in a "prestigious" role but still felt absolutely like a second class citizen to anyone in the "business." I have never felt like that since I left, not even for a moment. DM me if you want more details/encouragement.
The same thing happened where I work (as a developer), but a funny thing is, since most of the upper people are a bit clueless about the domain (it's formalized in the code, they don't read code, and their turnover is high), when my team asks questions about specifications, they can be redirected back to us, from people that know we know the details. We also often don't waste time with questions and just have meetings with specification people to explain them what they should actually have asked us to do.
That said, things don't always work out as nicely, and every few years we still have to brace ourselves to survive architectural tidal waves from astronaut architects who seduced credulous management, which we do by fighting to keep our module purely domain-oriented and independent from any particular stack (other than its language).
Not sure why you'd expect a bonus in a down year? That's the point of bonuses - they are not guaranteed, and you won't get them if the firm doesn't do well. Individual traders might still get them if their desk did well despite overall poor firm performance, but that cuts both ways - traders can get zeroed if their desk has a bad year even if the firm overall did well.
> For engineering, it works in reverse: Your options become less with time, not more. The determinant of any move you might make within the organization is not so much the opporunity around you doing something new, but the risk around you no longer continuing with what you leave behind.
This is an important lesson in any role: If you are indispensable in your current role, you can't move up. Don't make yourself indispensable. Cultivate a team, and help junior engineers on your team grow to take on tasks that you're currently responsible for. Don't take on solo projects that you're working on by yourself - they're a career dead-end for multiple reasons, and they're probably not even very valuable to the firm (otherwise they would have a team).
In the corporate world, I've seen both. However, the better managers that I've worked for have had recent engineering experience or at least can follow a technical discussion.
I’ve had sw team managers open up to me and admit they didn’t want to be managing at all and hate it but that’s the only way to advance in your career so they do it. I’ve also seen mediocre engineers who have great personal and presentation skills (or potential) languish as “3rd engineer from the left” because they weren’t Wizard enough to be promoted to management. There’s a huge skill/function mismatch.
That’s Why I recommend people to try to work for a company where the CEO has some understanding and appreciation of your work and doesn’t see it just as a cost factor that better get offshored and outsourced. There are always exceptions but in general you will have a much better life and career in such companies.
> where they would meaningfully influence business direction on an ongoing basis
If your business is "customer led", as lots are, then it's the people nearest to the customer in the sales and account management pipeline that are directing it.
I used to get to code. Now I spend half my time running projects, pushing back on specs, interviewing people, mentoring juniors, running meetings, discussing team structure, and all sorts of things that aren’t coding.
This is one of those things I'd not go out of my way to bring up, for obvious reasons, but yes, I've noticed this too. Best I can tell it's because more of them (as a percentage) have entering management as a primary goal and actively work toward it from day one, which just means that, for most non-FAANG companies, they're playing the making-money-and-gaining-status game smarter than their male peers, so it's not even a dig, really—kinda the opposite.
I work for a Silicon Valley based company with 10k employees.
If you are talking more about executives this has also been true at places I’ve been. Engineering VPs mostly were also engineers at one point, although likely long ago. Conversely I’ve known very few engineering managers / directors / VPs with MBAs.
In tech companies the path is from dev to management. Here the BAs and the like are seen as cogs.
But it´s always from individual contributor to middle manager. From there and up the class system seems to be at work as it has always been.
I'm a manager. I was originally an IC. My boss, his boss, and his boss were all originally ICs. Past that I don't know their background well enough to know whether they were originally ICs or not.
Then don't bring it up. Just suggesting this seems unnecessary and seems to be begging a misogynist interpretation.
What more do you want? To allow charged topics to infect more and more otherwise non charged topics, and bring every conversation down to their level?
I think I can guess which camp you fall into. I don't think I have given any indication on this thread as to which camp I fall into. I have absolutely no idea which camp parent falls into, and I don't see how anyone could infer from their short post on this thread (I haven't looked through their history, nor do I intend to).
Parent made an anecdotal observations. You are free to argue that the observation is wrong (as other responders have)..
I suppose you could even engage with the underlying issue that parent specifically avoided. Although I suspect that you would, unfortunately, run into precisely the issue that parent was afraid of.
At this point, I think it is clear that this subject is toxic. That is very unfortunate, but probably one of the only things all sides can agree on. Given that, we should do our best to quarantine the toxicity and not let it infect adjacent topics.
In the case of parent, what other options did they have? If they must omit the observation entirely, we are ignoring an entirely on-point observation for fear that it has polically incorrect implications for an unrelated or tangentially related subject. If they omit the problamatic condition, they are outright lieing, and introducing a false anecdote into the discourse.
So please stop justifying the parents intentions. I do not care about them, or his freedom to express his non-explicit but actually really misogynistic interpretation.
If my comment conveyed to you any such meaning it is either your own biases coloring your interpretation, or a shortcoming of my own writing ability.
> It is not unfortunate that the parent cannot talk openly about his misogynistic interpretation of the success of the few women in tech he’s observed
How do you know that his interpretation is misogynistic?
Also, what I intended to call out as unfortunate was not that he could not talk about misogynistic interpretation; but rather that he could not talk about any interpretation, be it misogynistic or not.
> If the parents interpretation of the success of women in tech is reverse discrimination...
Is this his interpretation?
> The very real numbers that we see today are that women are severely underrepresented in tech
I do not see how this point is relevant to anything I said; and I have made it explicitly clear that I have no intention of discussing this topic on this thread.
> his freedom to express his non-explicit but actually really misogynistic interpretation.
If this was his intention, he failed miserably at it. As I said above, I have no idea what his interpretation is.
Sorry, but this is a lie. As hard as you might try to be an unfair adjudicator of this conversation, the parent has made it pretty clear what his intent was, as you point out in your desire to avoid engaging in it:
> and I have made it explicitly clear that I have no intention of discussing this topic on this thread.
And there it is. You don't have to say something explicitly to mean it. I've repeatedly tried to tell you that this isn't something you can just mention and pretend to not engage in. The very mention of that anecdote was a nod in the direction of misogyny. You don't need to go through the history of the parent to make a confirmed, attested judgement on the parents character, that one statement he made is good enough to prove that.
I work for a Fortune 10 company. This is the path almost all of my peers followed. Some version of this track existed in every company I've worked for.
Change companies? Or accept some open minded mentorship from the people who succeeded in this track at your company. (I encounter a fair amount of folks who want leadership roles but are going about it super wrong...)
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
In my experience it's been dead on accurate.
Do you just talk to your direct supervisior and lay out your career path wants or do you need to look for another position at some other shop or what's a working strategy here?
In my case, it was a sort of give and take in both directions. They needed a PM, and I had been doing some product work, mostly in the open source world, and wanted to give it a try professionally. They were explicit that being a first time PM was okay, and I was that I would be one.
I've been enjoying it a lot so far.
Disclosure: I'm a dev at Microsoft, on the Windows accessibility team.
Camille Fournier's book, The Manager's Path, is a good read for learning about some of the common transitions from IC to manager to executive in software engineering.
If you don't let them know, once a manager role opens in your org, even if your name comes up as a potential person, anyone else who has asked for it and is being groomed to become a manager will probably get ahead of you. So, be that person instead.
You don't.
You build management experience.
1. Manage an intern.
2. Manage a junior's project.
3. Lead a three-person project.
4. Fill in for your manager's organizational work (planning meetings, higher level status syncs, etc) when they are on vacation.
Talk to your manager about doing these things, and why you want to do them. If the conversation doesn't go well, then you're in the wrong org to make it work.
Keep in mind that organizations will virtually always want to promote from within. The easiest way to show that you're capable of moving from Senior Eng to Staff Eng, or Senior Eng to Management is by meaningfully showing that you both understand what is expected in those roles, and that you're actively trying to incorporate those expectations into your every day work.
You should discuss the various roles / directions available to you with your manager, learn the expectations involved in those roles and work together to find opportunities that will help you move into those roles.
One thing, regardless of the direction you go in, that you can start working on right away is communication skills.
2. Many people will never become managers because they don't seem "managery." They don't dress right, they don't use the right buzzwords, they have a speech impediment, they speak too truthfully. There are all sorts of cultural factors too that people don't admit. For example, no manager would ever say this point 2 to you, because it's too honest and potentially upsetting.
3. A lot of people will only promote you to manager if they think you'll be able to make them look good, and that's the end of it.
Nobody is born a manager.
It reeks of the self-importance of a director who reassures himself, "Well I got this far, so I must be doing things right." Is this author the kind of person who'd fail to buy google for 1bn, while "ensuring alignmnet with managers" and other PHB concerns? We'll never know.
But what we do know is that less that 5% of this article is actually about making the right decisions happen. That to me is a red flag.
How is that "denial of the Peter Principle"?
Not even mentioning that the Peter Principle can be criticized in itself, as it's based on suppositions that are dubious and do not necessarily hold. For example the fact that you might not end up actually keeping the position at which you become "incompetent".