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Comment by richardwhiuk | Hacker News Reader

> the upper rungs of Stripe’s engineering individual contributor (IC) ladder put a lot of emphasis on cross-team coordination and other, managerial-like activities that I didn’t enjoy and felt I wasn’t very good at.

That's just the reality of senior IC engineering positions. At some point, there's a limit to the amount that you can contribute by sheerly by your own work - to have a bigger impact, you'll need to need influence/improve/impact others

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I'd argue that it's the reality of most senior IC engineering positions. As a Googler (opinions are my own), to get higher ranks, you need to lead larger projects that are cross team (it's even in our engineering ladder description) and do leadership type work.

BUT, I've met a few people where that is not always true. They tend to be people that can come up with unique solutions to difficult problems that are actually useful in the long run. They tend to be people that have PhD's and thrive in that type of work (and are actually good at it, while also being able to work as a team).

The problem with Google's promo/perf process for years is that this trajectory towards upper level positioning was essentially mandatory. When I started they used to say that if you didn't get to L5 in 4 years or so, you would start getting scrutiny applied to you. L5 is sort of "team-lead light" and does require inter-team collaboration, project/code leadership/ownership, etc. I always felt like this process is corrosive towards individual contributors, and doesn't recognize long-standing committed but less-ambitious or less-social people.

This policy was eventually dropped, thankfully, but among some managers I feel like the attitude has remained.

The policy was not dropped, the terminal level was just moved to L4.

This is true. It takes a while for some people to really accept this, as it breaks the lone coder myth. There are some people who consider communication and influence to be politics, and think they can do their job solely by programming.

you can also lead by example instead being verbal and deliberate in your communication.

The people downvoting you are likely those you reference. Which is painfully ironic as this comment is should at the top of the thread: work is fundamentally a social endeavour, and if you expect to be promoted, you need to demonstrate the ability to think/talk/socialize/synthesize challenging problems that almost always require cooperation if not collaboration with others.

Not every place is so enlightened. Plenty of places will focus on your individual contributions at review time, essentially devaluing any communication or force multiplication work you've done.

Gee it's too bad you saved everyone on the team 8 hours of work a week because you only got 80% as much work done as they did (ie, we're actually punishing you for making everyone else more productive by comparing you to the yard stick that you just changed).

I can imagine this happens due to malicious-ness, but it seems unlikely.

Individual contributions are necessarily easier to measure and easier to attribute than force-multiplication or communication, so it's going to be easier / less work for managers to pull them out at review time.

Sadly, that means that you need to highlight your own work (in a vaguely PR/Marketing) way that you don't have to for individual contributions.

That means that you both have to communicate well to other engineers "look at this easy way to save 10% of your time", but also communicate the effects of that to management so they'll a) reward you for it and b) invest in making it happen.

None of that is "easy".

Does anyone else find it kind of funny that a lot of companies' "Individual Contributor" roles so many times involve contributions of others once they get past a certain point? Doesn't that mean it's no longer an "Individual Contributor" position?

The IC/manager distinction is a useful false dichotomy, not an absolute rule.

You can also quit working for other people and pursue your own projects or seek out contract work. Yes yes, easier said than done, but so is advancing along a company’s career path.

a) Contracting definitely requires huge amounts of communication - you need to constantly ramp up on new areas, and handover to people once you are done.

b) A contractor who can only provide a single headcount is extremely limiting, and will get treated like a capped IC.

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