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Comment by elgar1212 | Hacker News Reader

The thing about the IC -> management path that bothers me (and makes me skeptical of people who take it) is that programming and getting PRs merged is so god damn satisfying

Going from this to just having meetings, training people, looking at dashboards... I can't imagine anyone doing this who genuinely likes programming. Even if the pay is better

The people who are the most inspiring (and also the best at getting shit done) are the ones who make it very far in the IC path and become team leads. Team leads are the best managers, the actual managers are just there to do boilerplate shit and politicking that team leads aren't interested in

(disclaimer: not talking about all managers or all companies, just the ones I've personally experienced)

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As someone who went from IC to management, my perspective is that getting PRs merged is still that satisfying. I just don't have to be the author of the PR.

More generally, I think some ICs do think that if managers and meetings went away, ICs could just write code distraction-free. But as anyone who's rushed to merge a PR before a colleague so that they have to deal with the merge conflict can tell you, engineers often don't get along, actually. Managers keep the company from getting stuck or thrashing when the engineers don't agree, and most of managing is brokering agreements of one kind or another.

I miss it so much. But there’s a different satisfaction with seeing a big team happy, motivated and successful (and hopefully the team taking all the credit rather than you!).

I’m hoping I can go back and IC for a bit…

It’s a different reward that’s more subtle than coding.

yes its awesome to have my work merged, even though Im not supposed to be doing a lot of coding. But what is equally awesome is when the junior developer who I manage does the implementation work I laid out and gets her PR merged. Even better if it can get through with her defending all of the choices she made (even if we pair on it) versus coming to me to help in the comments.

I sympathize because even being a team lead has reduced my coding enough I sometimes code in my free time to make up for it cuz I enjoy it.

But I think your mistake is saying only those who love coding are “most inspiring” and most “get shit done”. There’s definitely lots of people who love to get shit done who are indifferent about coding.

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