Ask HN: Have you switched from management to IC?
If you've been in a management role and switched (back) to an IC role, what's your story? Why did you make the switch?
1. I wanted more flexibility in hours and working remotely. I have elderly parents in another state and want the flexibility to support them, as an only child.
2. Level of support. Most directors talked about taking all their vacation at once to relieve pressure to constantly check messages during vacation. For me, it was a < 1 hr response, much like lawyers. I was constantly pinged if I ever slacked on checking.
3. I felt like line management was much less emotionally supported than ICs. It was pretty common practice to give any positive praise to the IC and negative feedback to the manager, regardless of any sensical attribution. This was fine for optics, but frustrated me that it extended to internal reviews.
4. The power dynamics mean that any of your IC friends now have at least a minor level of suspicion towards you. Other managers also have hostility because advancing feels more zero-sum unless the company is hypergrowth.
In the end, my advice to other people would be: try to find a job you really like, something you're passionate about if you can, and avoid politics and drama (well, unless that's your passion of course).
I truly enjoyed being both an IC and a manager. At the company I am referring to, although I was an IC, we were small enough to require any individual to wear more than one hat, which led to gaining skills in project management / organization / collaboration early on in my career.
As I grew in that role and transitioned to management, I gained plenty of value in learning how people work, and how they are so much more difficult than systems! I spent many hours reading all the usual people management books and doing my best to optimize my team in a people-first way.
Unfortunately, I have a knack to over work myself. I would easily work 60 hours a week and because I was in management at a fast growing company, there was always something to do
This led to full burnout in 2019, just after I was promoted to a more senior leadership position. I should have said no, but it took the pandemic for me to make a switch. The pandemic triggered layoffs across the company and with that, my morale and will to rebuild depleted. I left the company half way through 2020.
With that departure, I decided to try IC again. I missed writing code and I had incredible fears that I'd lose the one thing that got me into this career in the first place.
The switch was a bit bumpy at first, I feel like the first 2 months I had forgotten how to write any code, but it all quickly came back, and the 40-hours a week of practice helped :-) Finally, I had the benefit of management experience which has allowed me to easily collaborate with others, build rapport in a remote environment, work past a few staffing issues that affected my immediate team, and be a mentor to my peers (at varying levels).
And the biggest change was how much time I spend working. I don't work 60 hours a week anymore, in fact some weeks I work less than 40. I spend more time on myself and that has allowed me to not only be better at my job, but be a better husband and father.
I can't fault my manager too much, because although he was not very effective, he was pretty supportive. It was the VP level and up where the failings really showed up.
I asked for and got the OK to give up the team lead role while retaining my title and salary, transitioned the team lead role off to a person with fewer years of experience total but much more time at the company. After that was done, I worked for a couple of months longer to see if the project-related problems would get better. No fault of my replacement, really. They didn't, so I left voluntarily.
I have to be careful to stay in my lane sometimes. I have a lot more experience than the leadership I report through, so I generally just leave them to it, and sometimes offer the odd little nudge.
It is obviously hugely dependent on the organization's culture, but I've encountered more politics as an IC dev than any management role. The shift to IC is much more how can you make a low-mid manager seem like what obviously should be done is their brilliant, novel idea in addition to actually implementing the tasks at hand-- so overall productivity of the group is exponentially lower.
I started out as a Java-by-the-yard consultant, but I was at a "fast-paced" consulting company and so was very quickly given as much responsibility as I could handle, which as it turned out was a lot. I never set out to be a manager as such, but the opportunities were there, and I climbed the ladder and did well w/ external accolades.
At about the decade mark in my career and a location and employer jumps later, I was a manager-of-managers w/ about 75 reports, and making a lot of money, in a highly visible position at my company where I got a lot of support and accolades. And I was miserable! I mean, I can only use that word in hindsight -- it took a lot of introspection to pick apart my circumstances and really dig into what I truly wanted out of life.
I did a serious course correction here -- I did a lot of self-learning to ramp back up on modern coding, and I was very fortune to land a technical (but not "developer") FAANG job. I learned as much as I could there, and even took a (much more junior) management role, but I quickly realised that even at a more "technical" company I was still miserable if I wasn't the one building things.
I'm currently 1.25 years into a GREAT job, and although it's not perfect, I'm delighted every day to open up Vim and write Python, C, and some other fun stuff. It took me nearly 3 years to go from "I think I want to be a developer again" to actually working full time as a developer, but I also stayed employed (and had 2 children!) during that time, so you could certainly make the switch faster if you really wanted to.
I left, did a project management course as I had had the opportunity to lead small-ish projects throughout these roles and enjoyed it, and have been a PM for ~7 years.
I don’t know what the future holds but I enjoy this more than the management. I also have had some big life events (kids, mortgage etc) and being able to de-stress has been a huge win for quality of life and time with loved ones.
Had I stayed in management, my skillset would have ended at "light Ruby scripting and deep Asterisk VOIP knowledge."