Hacker News Reader

> Promotion isn't co-extensive with moving into management; we have senior IC tracks, too, including in engineering, and many remote engineers happen to be senior ICs. (IC = "individual contributor", meaning "has no people reporting to them." I am an IC at Stripe.)

This sounds great, and I wish more organisations did this - for most, it seems there is an absolute limit at which your career path stops dead.

View on HN

Unfortunately, this is largely a fundamental issue. It is outrageously hard for an IC to have impact that is orders of magnitude more than their peers. Volume maybe. But in terms of impact? Really hard.

Managers get to cheat, to some degree. They instead are tasked with organizing a whole bunch of people - who can achieve things that a single person never could. So a manager has a much easier "I made the company 10% more money" story than an IC.

Some organizations try to fight this bias, but it is hard and takes a clear framework for promotion guidelines and constant vigilance.

High-level IC roles (in the companies that have them) are still leadership roles. They are just technical leadership roles instead of people management roles. They may not have direct reports, but they are still responsible for getting big projects done, usually by organizing a large number of engineers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com