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Comment by eppp | Hacker News Reader

How many times do people who are good at their jobs get promoted just because there isnt anywhere else to go? You cant make any more money at the level you are without switching companies so you get stuck going into management.

I got promoted to being a manager of a small group just because there wasn't anyone else to do it and I am completely incompetent as a manager of people. I don't enjoy it and didn't ask for it. It is only a source of my continued disappointment in my lack of competence. It does however pay better.

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It is even worse. For companies without SME tracks, SMEs find themselves getting almost no raises or comp despite contributing to more and more revenue and/or important/complex work. Then you see stupid things happen, like they find need for and hire 2 or 3 people just so they can justify a 5% raise. Then they find need for and hire more people to justify another 10% raise.

Suddenly you have a company with many FTEs doing almost no meaningful work, existing just to justify tiny increases in the manager's comp. This is really an HR issue -- ultimately they set a set of rules and people play by those rules.

Forward thinking companies I've seen have SME IC tracks where you can grow comp by contributing to more and more influential projects w/o forcing a management track.

What does SME, FTE and IC mean?

Subject Matter Expert, Full Time Equivalent, Individual Contributor

Yeah, I have been a manager. Acronyms, acronyms, everywhere!

Generally: subject matter expert, full-time equivalent and individual contributor, respectively.

Surface Mount Electronics, Field Transistor Effect, Integrated Circuit

I'm at a company that does a good job of presenting a branching ic track that compensates at or above management. The issue is no one wants to become a team lead now. Worse work, more annoying responsibility, similar pay

Sounds like a good policy. But i'm surprised by the outcome -- generally different people are attracted to different routes. Not everyone deserves to be a senior IC/SME.

A creative way to handle that situation is...nepotism. Hire all the buddies of the essential individual contributor instead of giving them a raise or promoting them.

> I got promoted to being a manager of a small group just because there wasn't anyone else to do it and I am completely incompetent as a manager of people.

I could also easily see someone in that situation, and fully aware of it, accept the promotion purely to avoid getting managed by whoever would be the next in line.

Yes, that's unsurprising.

I've also been asked to take on work in engineering because it needed doing and no one better was available.

I'm in the exact same boat as you. I'm currently interviewing for individual contributor roles and trying to accept the fact that I'm going to have to take a pay cut. I think it will be worth it, though, to feel like I'm doing something worthwhile again.

I dont think I understood or appreciated how unpleasant being a manager is. I like working and doing actual work.

What does "incompetent" even mean. Dealing with personnel issues or actually doing valuable work? You get pulled away from doing things of value by having to deal with the interpersonal things that you don't want to do. But you have to do them because people are people. As a result, some of those same people get slighted simply because you can't possibly please everyone simultaneously while also trying to be valuable.

Management is a morass and I admire anyone that is actually "competent" at it. I don't envy them.

I remember talking about this with a business coach when I first managed folks. She said it was an entirely new discipline than what I did before as an IC (software developer), and that I should treat it as such.

No one is born a good manager, the same way no one is born a good software engineer. Ya gotta study.

But it isn't permanent. See also:

https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pe...

Yeah, most days I am therapist/coach/mom, and while I think I'm actually pretty decent at it, it's not what I want to be doing. It's emotionally exhausting and rarely rewarding.

I couldn’t take the daily crying. Individuals would come to my office, close the door and break down in tears. There was too much emotion over trivial things.

Where are you working that there is daily crying ? oO

Amazon?

I'm curious if your male/father co-worker managers think of themselves (or are thought of) as "dads" at work, or if there are gender biases here.

Ugh, please spare us

I'm not sure if that's quite what you asked, but I for one found that becoming a dad made me a better manager. It's very different, but there are parallels, particularly around learning to let go.

I had a similar experience when I went from being an IC to a hybrid IC/Manager role at a smaller company. My day went from designing, coding and testing to babysitting, bird-dogging HR and Payroll issues, running interference to keep the executives out of my developers' hair and about 10% of my day coding. I'm glad I have the experience but 10/10 would not do it again.

Where I work ICs make a lot more than mid level managers. Directors and above, however, have substantial benefits not only limited to salary.

> How many times do people who are good at their jobs get promoted just because there isnt anywhere else to go?

Sometimes, yes. I also saw terrible developers being promoted into management to get them out of the technical work.

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