Comment by lucifersam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucifersam | Hacker News Reader

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I have this dilemma at the moment. My company has a management and non-management track. I feel like the company is pushing me up the levels and that all focus across engineering is on getting promoted to the next level. My problem is now that I've got to Staff level I feel like I'm a manager even though my manager insists I'm not. I hardly ever get to code, and my calendar is full of meetings. I spend a lot of time writing planning documents and having meetings about spreadsheets and OKRs and to be honest I absolutely hate it. I've been trying to work out if it's like this everywhere, or if this is specific to my company. I spoke to a few people and they pretty much said "Yeah, the more senior you get the less you get to code". The articles I read about Staff Engineer level seem to imply it's more about architecture and planning. I'm really tempted to demote myself back to Senior and just stick there, but I'd probably take a salary cut and I also feel like I'd taint my career and be viewed as a failure. I thought we'd move forwards by creating twin tracks that means engineers don't automatically have to go into management to get ahead, but it feels like it hasn't changed that much. I know some people are great at that level of engineer role, and I can see why companies need it. I keep coming back to the question: why do we take people who are good at coding and say "OK, you're great at that so I'm going to promote you into a role where you hardly ever get to do it"?

For what it's worth, I enjoy mentoring and explaining things, writing docs, and being involved in design of systems and influencing technical strategy. It's nice to be making technical choices. But when you're more familiar with a spreadsheet than an IDE, something has gone wrong.

> I enjoy mentoring and explaining things, writing docs, and being involved in design of systems and influencing technical strategy

One of the great dilemmas is that these things are always interwoven with the non-technical aspects of being a manager. There is some aspect in which it is essential - "how long will this work take" depends intimately on the technical complexity, exactly how skilled the available resources are in the necessary areas etc. Other aspects are completely non-essential - "responsibility for staff completing health and safety training lies with line management". I would really like to see a model where these are disentangled.

At the companies that I've seen that have a good IC track, including some of the FAANGs, the staff+ level engineers are measured by impact. There are many ways to have that impact, and that could be by architecture, design and influencing technical strategy, or it could be by churning out tons of code, or it could be by highly specialized domain knowledge. It's fairly normal for staff-level engineers to spend a lot of time in meetings, but there are also staff engineers who spend most of their time coding.

>the staff+ level engineers are measured by impact.

That's a good description. And the reality is that while, as you say, there are master engineers who can crank out great inventions largely autonomously, the vast bulk do so in large part by mentoring and guiding others. I know many distinguished engineers and SDEs who are ICs. But at least the ones I know spend most of their time communicating and working with others. Open source project maintainers often describe themselves as primarily editors.

Some are actually managers (which carry more formal administrative responsibilities) and some aren't. But almost none of them are largely working on their own because it's really hard (especially outside of a research context and even then) to have maximum impact that way.

> like I'd taint my career and be viewed as a failure

My old boss said: "on the way to work in the morning, you should be whistling". I'm from The Netherlands, and I'm not sure if it translates well. But that's the point where I thought that I love engineering, stopped caring about what others may think, and put my management ambitions in the freezer.

Five years further, and I'm slowly coming back to that decision, but in a much more natural way. I started freelancing, took on an apprentice, and slowly I'm getting more responsibilities. But in a natural way, not an all-or-nothing choice.

I really wouldn’t worry about “being viewed as a failure”. I think it’s admirable if you choose your passion over normality. You’ll be better at your work and at life, you’ll be happier and live longer. Job titles are, in my humble opinion, a trap.

So my advice is to set boundaries. If you don’t want to be sitting in meetings, then stand your ground or come to a compromise. If they don’t understand then quit! Find the path for you, life is too short to be unhappy and someone else’s pencil pusher.

Seniority to some degree is about enabling others and having the overview. The big problems are rarely the precise code being written (it /can/ be the case when working on a specific algorithm or something) but large parts are about architecture, code review, ... and understanding the business needs aside from core technical skills. If a senior shares their experience with 5 juniors it is (especially long-term) better spent than them hacking something alone.

But as always: ymmv

This is exactly how I feel, except I also have technical responsibilities, meetings dominate my day. Some technical meetings sure, but a lot of status and syncs, and a lot of email. I'm lucky to get an hour a day between 9 and 5 to engineer. I've often fondly remembered when I had 3 meetings a week and the rest was just productive time and I could churn out code or work on workflow improvements, automation, etc.

As a FAANG Staff engineer, yes my days are full of meetings (with coding breaks in the middle). I view the meetings as a way to solve technical problems beyond one person to solve alone, a way to scale my own impact - not LOC I wrote, but LOC I enabled. Fully agreed though that even as an IC, I feel like a manager, especially in COVID times, when a lot of junior engineers I work with need more TLC from their "leadership".

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