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Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

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".

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> 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 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.

And it sounds better than "assembly line worker."

> 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".

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).

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.

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

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.

Transfer length method :)

Too little motivation?

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.

Ever heard of Google?

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