I know a lot of older workers, myself included, who don't want a seat at that table anymore.
I've also had peers become my manager, and vice versa, and that's the dynamic that seems quite successful.
Now if your manager is so bad that they can't recognize you are an extremely low touch employee...well, it doesn't matter the experience level, you'll be in for a bad time.
I make it pretty clear during hiring that I don't have aspirations beyond IC anymore. Been there done that kind of vibes, I like to build. I say my value add is that I can add a vote for whatever policy or method would improve an org, people seem to like that.
But I'm currently on a team where leadership is doing everything outside of the sprint cycle, random demos in the middle of the week that nobody ever heard of before that day and so we must have all these features ready for right then, so I asked - I thought - a light question in the middle of the standup "are we using the sprint cycle?" because we have 2 week sprints and standups. and that was the.biggest.deal I've ever seen, all the leadership was convulsing amongst each other because they all have to show face to each other, instead of addressing their incompetence. "We- we- we'll take this offline!"
the meeting offline never happens. leadership can't be reached throughout the day. and the other IC's I do talk to (who don't know I've been in other non-IC roles before) act like I asked the biggest boat rocking question ever and I'm putting a target on myself.
To me, thats funny because the biggest boat rocking question would have been "why don't you do a demo from the staging branch that you're supposed to merge from dev in a schedule that's parallel and independent of the sprint" "why don't we have a staging branch, do you know what you're doing?" "why are you merging our pull requests in any order, not knowing the code base, and then yelling at us when there are merge conflicts, we should be reviewing each other's PRs"
Its actually a tolerable position,
but maybe there is a reality that I do have other jobs and maybe more comfortable about my prospects than other ICs there, and also have management experience that is impossible to hide.
Maybe I'm projecting from my own experiences but this usually is because the leadership has a "top down" mentality, "we know better because we are in this role" and your other team members who are likely less experienced than you can't tell the difference between "dissenting with evidence" vs. "being contrary".
Seems like the best plan is to keep your eyes open for other opportunities when it's no longer tolerable.
We’ll see.
I work for other people right now
These were not the same roles
and its not an early stage company
I want fresh IC references and thats been successful
I want subsidized health insurance / contribute to an HSA and that's been successful, at least I have COBRA again and can keep contributing to an HSA uninterrupted
I want professional validation on stacks I want to use, get paid to do that
I want structure because doing side projects on my own schedule didn't have the same motivation for me
why does being versed in other parts of the industry dilute the point, need me to log in with an alt to be relatable?
But I think it's fair to say you have to pick a lane. You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you haven't succeeded as a founder, it rings ironic to proclaim "4 year vesting with 1 year cliff is just simulating what FAANGs were doing 10 years ago but out of touch tech wannabes are imagining is normal now" or that "we only took non-dilutive capital, nothing that converts to shares - people need to use their imagination."
Do you think it's fair for someone would to ask whether if you were really serious about succeeding as a founder, you should've invested a little less imagination into the capitalization strategy and a little more imagination towards identifying the ideal customer problem to be solved? After all, it's not like there's any dearth of founders who have built successful businesses with the standard VC backed approach. Especially those who were facing bear markets for what they were building.
Lord knows VC could use some competition. The issue I've observed is that everything else (except bootstrapping for very specific kinds of businesses) is purely worse for a founder who isn't already independently wealthy, which is ultimately just a different kind of bootstrapping.
I'd love to be proven wrong if there is, empirically, an alternative.
okay
following my business successes - which can include passing through profits outright, and or exits - I’ve done “thought leadership” and advisory to other companies, I’ve travelled around Europe for extended periods of time half way doing advisory but mostly living out a dream I wanted and enjoyed, I’ve formed funds and managed capital with great legal counsel, fund administrators, the works. I’ve had periods of illiquidity, even periods where liabilities were greater than assets, right now I like to get paid to do nextjs, and rust, and a couple other stacks.
turns out, you don't have to pick a lane. people take the linkedin and resume I choose to show at face value, which only shows IC roles and an Engineering Manager role.
If we're being frank, if the idea of picking a lane is doing something well, by choosing both lanes, you've actually chosen neither lane.
1. You are clearly not independently wealthy enough to have to never work again; otherwise you wouldn't care about "subsidized health insurance / contribute to an HSA" (both of which are things that the independently wealthy couldn't care less about), so either you are a) making up achieving outsized exits as a financier and you never actually achieved it, or b) worse, you made the outsized exit, became independently wealthy, and due to fiscal irresponsibility lost your position of independent wealth
2. You clearly aren't in a stable career position at a company with a long tenure steadily moving upward seeing as how you ended up having to take a job at a company with incompetent leadership that ultimately ended up firing you for making ultimately a reasonable suggestion
If anything, I think you have proven my point which is that you very much do need to pick a lane. There's the old saying that "startups don't die of starvation, they die because of indigestion" owing to the common and real risk of overly broad scope and dilution of focus. I think that same warning applies equally to careers -- your dilution in long-term focus may have played a role in you not achieving the success you might otherwise have been able to achieve. But I can't tell you for sure. Only you will be able to figure out that answer. And in order to figure out that answer, you have to be willing to be honest with yourself.
Best of luck.
so I did in fact put a target on myself for asking anything
all happened at the end of yesterday, thought I was in the clear but they were conferring. My weekend post and reflection ironically turned out to be foreshadowing.
(hm all the time stamps are wrong, I originally posted the observation two days ago. I posted this sunday or so and got fired on monday afternoon)
That tells you much about the culture of the place. The other ICs know that you can't ask questions like that - they know that not only is the place dysfunctional as far as the sprint cycle, but it's vengefully dysfunctional - management will get you if you point out their dysfunction.