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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

what's an IC? a piece of corporate-speak i haven't come across before.

Others have answered what the words "IC" mean, but let me add that this is the usual name for the technical career track, i.e. the not-management track, meant for people who do not want to manage teams of people.

Strictly speaking, the roles of Engineer Manager and IC are incompatible; you cannot want to manage people and at the same time want to stay out of it. So in this particular context, "EM+IC" is a misnomer for "EMs who also need to be able handle tech/coding tasks themselves".

> this is the usual name

I dunno if it's just me, but it seems like the term came out of nowhere just a couple years ago.

True! I meant the usual name now. For me it's the same as Engineer Manager: it seems to have come out of nowhere but it's the standard now. Before we called them simply "managers" (or sometimes "team leaders" of the non-technical variety).

PS: are you by any chance the same Izkata as the one in scifi.se?

Yep I am. Haven't been very active there for a while though, usually just end up there from Hot Questions when procrastinating.

I've been hearing it for about 5-7 years now, usually in the context of career paths. I think it became popular when companies realized that non all developers are made for management and you need a separate career track for people who want to advance, but don't want to be a manager.

Principal engineer, architect, etc all fall into the IC career path, while, manager, director, VP of eng, etc all fall into the management track.

principal eng, architect et al must rely on managing devs for any meaningful project.

It's more project management than people management. You likely have to lead projects and maybe a team, but you're usually not responsible for anyone's career growth (other than your own).

I also never saw this until pretty recently. At first I assumed people were talking about independent contractors because it was the first thing that came to mind, it possibly fit the context I saw the term used in and nobody explained the acronym they just dropped it there like I was supposed to know what it meant.

Took a bit longer to realize they meant individual contributor.

> At first I assumed people were talking about independent contractors because it was the first thing that came to mind

Mine was "integrated circuit" which was like a really dystopian version of "human resources".

And it sounds better than "assembly line worker."

Same; I saw an interview with Steve Jobs in the 80s or 90s where he used it. I was surprised.

To clarify, EM stands for Engineering Manager not Engineer Manager. EMs are generally expected to be technical, but not be engineers writing code on top of being a manager.

Yes, agreed: Engineering Manager.

I often make this mistake because English is not my first language, and I confuse "engineer" with "engineering": in both cases it sounds to me "a manager who manages engineers", not "a manager who is an engineer him/herself". Kind of like a "Product Manager" is a manager who manages the product, not a manager who is a product!

No worries, just wanted to make sure people didn't get confused and think it was a dual Engineer/Manager role :).

TLM is the term I've heard for that more often.

what does TLM mean? i wish that all you folks out there would understand that nobody outside your bubble knows what these daft abbreviations stands for, much less mean.

TLM (at Facebook) stands for Tech-Lead Manager - it’s a hybrid role, with engineering duties and people management duties.

From what I remember, it wasn’t intended as a long-term position, but was used in stop-gap circumstances (manager quits, tech lead temporarily takes on some people management duties) or for when an engineer was considering transitioning to the management track.

Yeah, it's an "M0" role. Generally folks who transition from senior engineer into management become TLMs. Staff engineers transition to "M1" or a full-fledged manager.

TLMs still have individual contributor responsibilities. M1s don't. The reason for that is generally that (especially junior) ICs aren't likely to push back against poor technical decisions knowing that the person they're pushing back against is also in charge of their rating. This feels quite fair based on my experience and as such I'm quite skeptical about TLMs in general.

> Yeah, it's an "M0" role.

Not true, TLMs can be D1+ level too at FB/Meta. Higher level TLMs more often than not tend to occur in more research-oriented organizations though (where the TLM is effectively a "principal investigator" type for some research area).

Oh that’s interesting; I haven’t heard of that at Google. Makes sense though as it maps well to a PI role in a large research org.

Tech Lead Manager is my guess. I'm familiar with the term "tech lead," at least.

It’s honestly getting out of hand. It’s almost as if one requires a dictionary to communicate these days. Even though I know these abbreviations it’s just off putting.

Transfer length method :)

Too little motivation?

Ever heard of Google?

Individual Contributor.

Don't ask me why in heavens that term makes any sense outside one that is myopic or only works with extremely fresh out of school junior engineers and unskilled workers.

Edit: P.S. Not sure why a couple of people decided to downvote this opinion.

Also to other commenters: it sounds to me less as a be a team player title (like the soldier one suggested) and more like an isolated resource that makes interchangeable contributions.

Anyways, I think that there is a distinction between "(Team) Lead" and Manager with the Team Lead usually classified as an IC says everything for most organizational approaches.

I agree more with the Meta take here.

I actually like the term as it seems pretty accurate to me and I don’t know if a more accurate term.

There’s many types of “managers” who are actually individual contributors (eg, sysadmin, project admin).

When you get into principal engineer and architect titles, sometimes those positions manage people and sometimes they don’t.

I think it also highlights how one version of contributor isn’t better than the others. Some people only produce value by being part of a team, some produce value by managing, and some produce value direct from themselves.

I've always like the term soldier. It's what organized crime syndicates, armies, and ant colonies all use. The worst is when someone gets called a "resource", but I can't get too exercised about IC.

As a consultant, I've become accustomed to being referred to as "the resource" by operations people. However, the day an engagement manager refers to me directly as "resource" is the day I openly start referring to them as my secretary.

i keep envisaging what some of these uber stupid job names would look like on a business card i might have to give to a client:

zab zonk

the resource

zab zonk

individual contributor

jesus wept

Nobody has IC as a title, it’s a whole class of job families that don’t require/revolve around managing other employees. Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Data Center Technician are all ICs. It’s just a more positive way of saying “not people manager”, especially when you are trying to build a culture that going into people management shouldn’t be the only career path.

why do you need to say "not manager"? most people are in the nature of things not managers. and if you do need, for bad, bad reasons want to differentiate them, how about NMs? oh, but that would be to obvious for the current crop.

when did this appear? i literally have never seen it before i read this post, and it makes no sense at all to me.

It has been in common use for at least 15, if not 20 years.

Very common phrase in the tech industry.

> It has been in common use for at least 15, if not 20 years.

I've been in the industry since 1998. The first time I saw it was on HN a few years ago (maybe 3 or 4).

I just searched HN and found references 12 years ago.

> I just searched HN and found references 12 years ago.

Hah!

I would just love to see that thread - may it is also filled with "What's an IC?" :-)

i have worked in tech for over 40 years at all levels and, as i said, i have never come across the term before today.

Just in the past week "IC" has appeared in 2 front page stories on HN.

Are you US based? Beginning my career in the mid 00s I was exposed to "IC" pretty much day 1 starting at Microsoft.

Other people around me in adjacent sectors also use the phrase to refer to non-managers, it is pretty common daily parlance, I am 99% sure I can ask any of my knowledge worker friends and they'll know what I am talking about.

Google trends show "individual contributor" has been a pretty popular phrase since at least 2011.

no, i am not us based, though i have worked there. but so what?

is "knowledge workers" still a thing? it was meaningless when it was introduced in the 60s, even more so now.

another bubble creature, i guess.

> no, i am not us based, though i have worked there. but so what?

Every country, and even different regions of a country, has linguistic differences. This is true even if all the countries being talked about have the same national language.

For example, nobody in the US tech sector is going to know what a Boffin is unless they read The Register.

Even on the west coast of the US, vocabulary is different between California and the Pacific Northwest, although things started to merge together when the Silicon Valley based tech companies began opening offices up in Seattle.

as a matter of interest what, as vaguely as you like, do you work on? because you seem uninformed to me and it is not obvious to me that you know what you are talking about. there is one tech giant that has always been based in seattle. well, make that two.

You seem to be the one who is uninformed, considering you've never heard the term IC.

Yes, everyone knows there are two tech giants based in Seattle. What this person was saying is that other large companies have also opened/grown Seattle offices in the past decade and vice versa, which has caused usage of corporate vocabulary to merge.

Maybe you should reflect on the fact that you don't seem to understand what people in this thread are talking about and stop acting like you do.

Naw, knowledge workers have developed into a real thing.

The labor group that requires significant creativity and autonomy to be effective. The artifacts they create are a minority of the value they create.

Mostly they became a real thing because traditional management techniques fail to work well with knowledge workers.

you said 20 years, now it seems to be down to 12

By "tech industry", a lot of people here tend to mean internet ad companies and/or startups designed to be acquired by them.

This is FAANG speak. They created this role for people who are not (directly) involved in management.

so i guess that managers are not individuals and don't contribute? might be true. but i've been a manager and an individual and contributed code. well, who knows?

Lots of people who aren't part of the "working class" do plenty of work but that's the nomenclature society uses for some reason so if you want to communicate with everyone else, you have to go along with it.

The point is that ICs are judged based on their individual contributions, i.e. their own code, design docs, etc, whereas managers are judged based on their team's contributions

i have never, ever come across a programmer working on a system of any complexity that did not depend on contributions from other programmers.

Why are you being so pedantic? At this point it seems like you're trolling.

> so i guess that managers are not individuals and don't contribute?

> i have never, ever come across a programmer working on a system of any complexity that did not depend on contributions from other programmers.

No one said non-ICs aren't individuals, and no one said they don't contribute. No one said that ICs don't work with others or depend on others.

What has been said, several times, is that their contributions (i.e. the code they produce, artifacts they create, etc) are largely individual contributions. They are the ones creating the thing, and are not responsible for others.

This gets a bit murky as you move up the IC chain, in that your contributions become less tangible and are in part measured on how you lead others and make those around you more efficient. But your performance is still largely judged on what you produced.

the nuance you are missing is that individual contributors are responsible for their own work and judged based on that. they are not responsible for the work of others. managers are of course responsible for the work of those they supervise

As usual, "it depends." Many individual contributors don't actually contribute, either. Some actually have negative net contribution.

A->B != !A->!B

I am not sure. It has been around for at least 5 years I would say. I guess at some point they needed a nice sounding alternative category to people not becoming managers.

Individual Contributor. Line engineer. Has a manager and likely doesn't have direct-reports of their own.

I'm guessing Individual Contributor. Someone who is not management but also not support (administrator, sales, HR, etc.)

objectification of resource... “commoditizing your complement” for management.

edit to add "in my experiences" I have also seen good evidence via HN that not all management/admin is as dilbert like as I have seen.

Individual contributor.

Individual Contributor

Individual contributor

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