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Comment by bcrosby95 | Hacker News Reader

This just isn't true. A friend of mine is an IC and regularly ends up making original tools that solve his problems that everyone else at his company ends up adopting. The company recognizes this and awards him in kind. He makes around 1 million in regular salary.

He has way more impact than any individual manager. If you want to have a huge impact at your company as an IC, solve the higher level problems that both you and your fellow developers are having.

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Hm what company / subfield is this in?

I definitely think tools can have a lot of leverage, and an experienced IC could easily develop a tool that would save time for the whole team. And I've seen it happen.

But IME this is the exception rather than the rule. The experienced engineer usually gets the credit for building the system with the tool (for which it was essential), but not building the tool itself. The tool is considered useless until someone has proved it on a important, shipping project.

The tool can be a library that software made by other teams depends on (directly or indirectly).

This often doesn't mean much because when there are tons of highly capable engineers, anyone could write that library and it's only a question who had a chance to do it.

With that argument, nobody can ever have high impact on anything.

^ Yep!

I'm a manager and I have a member of my team that does exactly this. They have built tools and process that has allowed everyone else to be more efficient. Anyone on my team can, but they gravitate towards it. It's up to a manager to make sure they are paid appropriately and make sure that they are given space to actually do this type of work.

My experience as a builder of such tools is… meh thanks.

It is simpler to manage a company without arrangements like this. It makes ICs and Level 1 managers more interchangeable. If you moved the 1M employee over to another group it would blow up that manager's budget. The more interchangeable employees are the better for some people in upper management who don't actually care about maximizing cost efficiency and productivity. They are maximizing other metrics.

You've hit the nail on the head for bigCo. It's alllll about what's being measured.

That 1M employee is generally not “moved” to another group, in my experience. They are often already at a seniority level that is above the group. Also, like most VP’s, their compensation is not typically accounted for in a group/division/etc budget in the same way as their reports.

> They are maximizing other metrics.

Can not be customer satisfaction (by quality) or employee happiness or retention.

I wonder what those other metrics are.

I wonder what those other metrics are.

A big one is that managers are de facto judged by the size of their team (and, for more senior ones, the size of the tree underneath them, too). It seems to be really, really hard to have middle management in an organisation without "maximise headcount" becoming an unofficial goal.

Edit: Employee happiness is an interesting one here. It's quite believable to me that being seen to cut down a few tall poppies might have a positive impact on (mean) employee happiness in some cases.

I was not expecting such a Machiavelic answer, but yes, your explanation looks quite possible. Indeed, it is possible that the expertise ceiling that goes on a lot of companies is due to misaligned incentives (plus some dishonesty) for management. That seems worth taking a better look.

> It's quite believable to me that being seen to cut down a few tall poppies might have a positive impact on (mean) employee happiness in some cases.

This again... I dread to imagine going through the day around people that think like this. But people that think like this exist, and I imagine they concentrate somewhere. If some place makes them happy (and everybody else unhappy as a consequence), you'll probably find them there. This is really believable.

No IC is going around making a million dollars for creating internal tools. If he's making a million it's for something else - he's a founder, he was acquihired, he is related to the founder, etc.

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