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Comment by ditonal | Hacker News Reader

First, moving from an engineering role to a management role is not "career progression", it's a lateral career switch.

Secondly, you don't have to explain anything. Smart hiring managers will understand that you focused your career mastering a craft and that you're still working on that craft you mastered. As for the dumb hiring managers, it's best if you can avoid working for them. One thing you'll learn as you get older is that you can't please everyone all the time and if someone is foolish enough to hold stupid things against you, good riddance to bad rubbish. If you look around a bit, you'll find there's far, far more opportunities for intelligent old coders than unintelligent old managers.

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> First, moving from an engineering role to a management role is not "career progression", it's a lateral career switch.

That's a cool sentiment, but it's not what hiring managers and many many other managers think. They'll just flag you as "something wrong with that guy if hes not managing by now" and you're still out of job.

This.

I'm an EM, and going from an IC to a TL or EM isn't a career progression. It's a career change.

I've known some amazing ICs with terrible managerial skills, they are adept at what they do, but they lack the skills needed to handle people, or to constantly context shift all day, every day.

Now what happens when you suddenly get that IC into a managerial role, and force them to context shift, or manage people's needs, and balance the team dynamics?

They quit, or others under then quit. Perhaps both.

I very much dislike this article for two reasons;

1. She outlines EM as part of a career progression that ICs go on. 2. She was part of two absolute rocketships and didn't realise the reasons she got where she was is at least partially because of that.

Any EM should be aware that not everyone can do their job.. and any EM should be part of a hiring process and keenly know that when you see a FAANG on someone's resume, people tend to have a bias either for or against it. Usually for.

You don’t think not even progressing to a senior engineering role or lead engineer role after two decades in the profession would be a red flag? These are still IC roles, just more senior. I would sure have a lot of questions at least.

not a red flag at all..as long as they are competent at dev work. Many devs just want to dev and have no interest in taking on lead responsibilities, architecture, negotiating with product owners, attending lots of unproductive meetings, etc.

Sr Engineer is a terminal role for most people. If you can build quality software and are a somewhat pleasant human being then I don’t see anything wrong with it. If everyone’s a director then who’s getting the work done? There aren’t that many leadership roles compared to IC roles.

That's your personal bias showing, I'd never be questioning anyone who decided they found a good role where they feel competent and secure about their job and craft, much the contrary as Peter's Principle usually apply very quickly to the careerists.

Senior engineer is usually where a lot of competent folks stop, the role of Staff/Principal starts to become quite different, some people just want to be good at helping the business to build things. A good senior will be the necessary glue between team and the larger org (including the Staff/Principal layer), facilitating a lot of stuff that isn't immediately visible but is definitely felt when you miss it.

On top of that, there's not even close to enough positions to promote every single senior engineer to a higher level in most companies. Not everyone wants to play the career game.

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