Career Development: What It Means to Be a Manager, Director, or VP (2015)

Retention is definitely one, but there's the flip side of dealing with poor performance. You can't announce to everyone that one of the team is on a PIP or struggling with personal issues. But a poor performer means that I'm doing a _ton_ of work to figure out how to fix the issue (whether that's spending hours every week coaching them, building all the long-term documentation that HR requires before we can fire someone, picking up some of their slack myself in the meantime...)

Coordination of people also takes way more time than I realized as an IC. If you meet with your manager once per week, that's an hour out of your week. But your manager is meeting with everyone on the team and a good manager is going to spend at _least_ as much time thinking and planning for each of those meetings as they spend in the meetings themselves even if everything is going well. They have to make sure nobody is accidentally working on the same thing or impacting someone else, talking to other teams, that sort of thing. That one hour out of your week is 1-2 days for your manager. Not to mention that they then have to go do the same sort of coordination with other teams.

You have something that blows up your week that you need to escalate once per quarter? Multiply that by the number of reports your manager has and that's how much time they've spent fighting fires this quarter. And they need to explain to their leadership what happened and why it won't happen again.

Etc. etc. It's not harder work, but it is very different work from being an IC. (On the other hand, being a manager has made me a better IC too. Everyone I've ever managed that was previously a manager themselves has this -- they know exactly what I need to know because they know what they needed to know, so our 1:1s go much faster :) )

One anecdote I have is that when I first moved to a management role, I told a colleague how happy I was that I'd finally have real control over my calendar. After he finished laughing (literally) he said "your calendar belongs to your team and you'll never be in control of that again". He was absolutely right: if something goes wrong or someone is unhappy, everything else moves aside so I can fix my team's problem.

Word. IMO, one of the most important, yet underrated duties, of a good manager.

As a leader, you want people to crawl over broken glass to want to be by your side. If not, you end up like North Korea, where you have to sell why people should stay, sometimes eve being dishonest and intimidating in the process. Seeing the latter happen is always a sad sight.

Well run engineering organizations are like a well running engine. They need to have solid parts but they also need constant attention and fine tuning. The best managers do this well.

A huge amount of management effort goes into being proactive so you don't even need to get to the point in the conversation where they voice wanting to leave. Or when they do, you've seen it coming, have plans in place and they move on with your blessing.

* Creating a culture where employees (and managers) feel valued and have autonomy.

* Ensuring employees are clear about where they are headed, giving them something to work towards.

* Proactively identifying and unblocking issues before they become crises, often across functions.

* Identifying areas of frustrations for teams and individuals.

That's just a small number of the things you'll be doing, and whilst scope varies massively by company size (though until you get to the large corp environment most of this is still covered up to the VP / CTO level), you'll be juggling it all alongside technical input, cross functional leadership responsibilities (VP may well be in the SLT if the company isn't huge), horizon scanning, constant process refinement.. The pillars of people, process and technology all need to be constantly considered..

Having done this repeatedly from IC all the way through Head, Director and VP level (and up to CTO), I can say that being a proactive problem solver is always required of a good manager / Director / VP.

Edit: Having read the actual article ;)

IC paths map this quite well too..

Tech Lead maps to manager, Staff maps to Director, Principal to VP

Cancer/long-term illness, death in the family, miscarriages, etc all weigh heavily on my mind when something happens to one of my direct reports.

Not asking for pity, but being a manager has a heavy emotional toll if you have even the slightest bit of empathy that I don't think most ICs appreciate fully.

That's what most bad managers I have worked tend to overestimate -- they think they are doing real work tanking the team from "bad" things when they are actually the one not communicating with the team and just cave to upper management every time when protecting your team really counts.

Most people I have worked with are aware that their average-to-good managers have to deal with things that they don't see, and when that understanding is mutual and respectful, then great work happens. When the manager always thinks that they are shielding bad things (when they are not) and the team isn't getting the communication they need, that's when bad things happen (and the manger ends up getting promoted and the rest of the team gets laid-off anyway).

> Case in point: trying to retain good people.

It's actually not that difficult: just be honest to people, treat them fairly, and be considerate.

If you spend more time arguing/reasoning why they don't deserve to be promoted/get a raise than thinking about/making planning for ways to get them promoted or fight for their salary, you're just a bad manager. Sorry (assuming they even have the awareness) is not good enough when you have screwed up someone's career progression by half a year, let alone more. It happens too often.

It baffles me that people think there is some sort of art or science in retaining good people. If good people want to try something completely and they can only do so by leaving, then let them. Otherwise, if good people want to leave it's always the company's fault (bad managers, insane colleagues who hurts culture, and many other bad things).

> Good people often times end up wanting to leave for a variety of reasons ranging from ludicrous to 100% legitimate. They often announce they are leaving to their direct manager and maybe one other person (E.g. head of another team they work with etc).

Good people usually want to leave because the company is not treating them well enough, it's as simple as that. If they leave for reasons that you can't comprehend that doesn't make them "ludicrous", you're just not good enough to understand what's really pushing them to leave.

Bad people, on the other hand, would leave for a variety of reasons, including ludicrous ones.

Assuming we are on the same page, good people are also often professional. So of course they will announce they are leaving to their direct manager, that's just the right, professional thing to do. Not sure what you point is there.

> Given that they are good and worth keeping, this triggers escalations, meetings with the employee and between managers, senior managers and HR. In the best case, this leads to a successful retention.

Successful retention in this case is very rare (unless they're they are not as good as you think they are). By the time good people want to leave, they have already made up their mind and it would take some pretty drastic changes or life-changing kind of money to keep them. It's rare that companies can make drastic changes like that when they have already screwed up for so long so that good people are pushed out. It's also rare that, by the time someone has made up their mind on leaving, that they genuinely want to stay even if the (new) price is right -- most management doesn't realize that the implication is that they have treated people unfairly for too long, and people are not just going to forget about it when you offer them more money now (what about all the time they have been underpaid?).

> However, the only people that know any of this happened are the employee and the manager tier. The other employees have zero idea any of this occurred unless someone shares/mentions it. I point this out b/c multiple times as an IC, I thought "no one will care if I leave b/c I never see managers actively trying to keep people".

That's just bad company policy and most likely management is silencing people for some downright stupid reasons. If good people are leaving, their leaving usually already says it all, and silence actually makes other good people even more suspicious of the management.

In most cases, other employees who have good working relationship with good people actually have a better idea than management. If you're talking about people who don't know/haven't worked with those good people then... they wouldn't have cared either way.

So yes, the only reason people don't know is because it's now common practice to get people leaving to agree to NDAs -- especially when they aren't just leaving on normal terms/compensation -- even when there is absolutely no reason for them to sign any NDAs. It's not because nobody wants to tell, it's because people have been scared into not talking/literally gagged.

In the end, if you're not a narcissist, why do you want anyone you're not close to care about you leaving anyway? As long as you get well-compensated where necessary, chances are the people who really care about you already know what's happening anyway.

> The point of this story is twofold: - managers do a lot of "unseen" work - it's worth researching this kind of thing if you are about to move from IC to manager.

"Unseen" is overrated in my opinion. In the context of moving from IC to manger, the word "unexpected" is more apt then "unseen".

Alternatively, if there is a lot of "unseen" work, then the manager is basically work that they aren't communicating to the reports AND their reports can't hold them accountable to those "unseen" work, which is clearly a sign of broken communication and cultural problem. You can argue about most managers don't actually see the work that good reports do equally well.

This is what needs to be discussed in standups, yet strangely never is.

There are lots of reasons people resign, but a lot of the time it comes back to feeling bored, under appreciated, or that their career has stalled. If you’re actively managing a team, you should be balancing these things, _and it should be obvious_ at least to people who are paying attention. Both developing someone’s career and signaling that you want to help are fundamental in a manager building good relationships with their reports.

Or as Rands in Repose points out in his post on “Diving Save” [1]:

> Diving Saves are usually a sign of poor leadership. People rarely just up and leave. There are a slew of obvious warning signs I’ve documented elsewhere, but the real first question you have to ask yourself once you get over the shock of an unexpected resignation is: “Did you really not see it coming? Really?”

If you routinely don’t see it coming, maybe your reports have a legit gripe about what you’re spending your time on.

[1] https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-diving-save/

And most importantly, plan for their departure. Do you have any internal candidates to take their position? What would it take to hire somebody and bring them to the IC's level?

When they finally decide they want to move on, you have hopefully laid the groundwork to keep them at the company (they move to a different group with an opportunity that matches their ambitions), or you don't have the arduous task of replacing them all of a sudden.

Or are you saying your company treats/pays employees so poorly that there is significant turnover throughout the organization? And instead of generally treating/paying employees better they rather have middle management spend a significant amount of their time discussing retention?

And you are choosing to highlight this as something IC's should appreciate that management has to deal with?

Locking, barn, horses etc.

I've done this 3 times in 20+ years as a manager. It's not exactly super-common.

When it happened, it took maybe a day total. (Seriously, one of your jobs is to have good relations with your execs. If somebody wants to leave due to a better offer, you need to be able to go to your exec and say "hey, we need to counter this offer, make it so please", and they trust you - you can't have endless runarounds at that point)

Yes, there's a lot of unseen work, but active retention measures is so tiny a blip, it doesn't even matter.

They can try to make people happy so they stay in the team, but I find that they aren't very good at that either. When the team has issues, I don't find them effective to solve any problem.

They do administrative work, communicate with leadership, hire, 1:1 which are more or less useful, help with roadmapping and alignement, attend calibration meetings for evaluation.

I'm not saying they're not useful or that they don't work, but I find they leave the hard parts to the team to figure out. The hard part would be things like pushing backs on leadership demands, helping prioritizing tasks in the team.

Concrete example: right now, everybody is overworked in my team, oncall is hard because we're pushed to ship new features, not work on reliability. Manager pretends to be empathetic, "always happy to help". But practically does nothing.

My criteria for a good manager is that they're not harmful and don't add friction and stress (and those ones aren't appreciated by higher management). More than that, I've never seen it. But maybe i wasn't lucky.

The one single thing that keeps repeating is something along the line of "we don't know what your doing".

Not as in we don't believe in you, or we haven't seen you in the office for past few weeks, but they don't understand where my focus goes.

And that's on purpose. I've been battling with myself for very long time about it. I'm past "I identify with the company" credo, but I always wanted to shield my teams from distractions and bullshit. I don't feel comfortable coming back to my team saying that I just had the conversation with CTO and he's so toxic that I have to wash myself, or that I've fighting for the last two weeks to not get the team fired, or any other usual corporate machiavellian schemes that happens on a daily basis.

FYI, there is a concept of a reportable event that some employees (managers and officers) are required to report, resignation usually being one of them. I.e. don't ask your manager.

In this case, if it becomes known, you’ll find that there’s a big todo about retaining some people but not others? Why? The lack of understanding there leads to rumors, and that perception becomes reality… and it’s always bad.

1. Keep everyone on the same page 2. Keep things humming along 3. Keep shit from rolling downhill

It can be very easy as a manager to get caught up in putting out fires related to the second two and let the thrid happen or not happen on its own. But that's where ICs see them or notice their absence the most.

The thing I run into more is I often see managers as part of the machine, someone who I need to protect myself from rather than someone there to support me. This is likely as much a me problem as anything else, but its also something I've see good managers overcome.

It's not just leadership titles. Even if they list tech stack, responsibility or any of it it may not eventually be reality. Sometimes it's a wish list, sometimes it's planned and other times they "forgot" to update it.

A “vp” at a startup with 20 people under them will likely have very different responsibilities than a faang director with 200.

I believe this is why you get asked how many people are under you when interviewing at these roles. The titles - as far as I’ve seen - are mostly meaningless. It’s about the scale of your decisions. I know the article talks about the type of influence/decisions you’ll be making. (Executing others decisions vs making the decisions) But I find it’s rare for these bigger companies to really give a shit about that. They care more about how many people you’ve had under you. It’s rare to see someone be VP at startups with a few people (and that’s their only experience) and then be VP at faang in their next role.

In short, encouraging people to get to the next career level in a well-defined framework is exactly the type of "situation where people are rewarded for being bolshy and savvy rather than being valuable to the company" that you mention as being undesirable.

I do agree with you that clear progression frameworks are a necessity for transparency and goals for developers, but some may feel daunted by a jump up meaning they don't get to write as much code if L39 (or whatever) starts including responsibilites that pushes you into meetings and convincing.

What is the value of your work? Is your impact worth millions to the company? Is it worth just your salary? Are you in an overhead function that enables the rest of the business? Do you work on just new business ideas that have no value now but maybe a lot later? Can you do things that others can not or will not?

The answers to these questions and your ability to negotiate will dictate your pay. The fact is that being savvy and being able to navigate politics/being well liked, intentionally or otherwise, is hugely important. Most companies don’t make it particularly clear how to progress or how a manager should compensate the team aside from a rough rubric on how to get there. Most years an HR BP says to me “you have a X% budget, we recommend an (X - 2)% COLA and the rest is for your merit raises.” At some places they just ask for a stack rank and come up with the number. In either system, demonstrated effectiveness and willingness to work well with people (aka being savvy, political, likable, full of BS, etc - pick your favorite) affects your ability to get more than that Cost of Living Adjustment. When it’s promotion time, a good manager will make sure your skills fit the role. A bad one just picks someone based on their biases - positive in your favor in the short term, bad for your career if you never catch up to what is needed to do the job.

Now this is the time to draw the line at pay vs rank. Most of leveling and rank is about org design and you can be a Director making 70K or a Director making 300K in the same type of software role in the same vertical.

Leveling is an HR and management thing. Value is what you provide and should be compensated for. Bands are there to keep things from being completely insane. Levels are a guide for what should be.

If you were able to change your title at work to “Professional Enthusiast” and your level to L-1, but did all the same work and were just as effective, would you want your pay to be any different? Again, let’s differentiate value and compensation from the rest of the structural stuff.

These management constructs are checks and balances on both good and bad managers alike. Even if you do a great job as a manager and someone is ready to be promoted, your HR BP can have the bad news that there is no money for that promotion and to assign no new responsibilities (“no free consulting” as I have had to tell my reports in this situation). Conversely the money could be there but the space for the role is not. Do you really want to work somewhere that has 1000 people and 100 VPs? Who exactly is in charge? Is it VP Tom who is a peer of VP Jimmy who reports to VP Marry who reports to SVP Sarah? Heck no, just break the bands. Every time I’ve had a long tenured Staff/Principle engineer they’re sitting at 25% over what the band says they should make and no one in HR or the SLT ever complains. They see that and they know exactly who that person is.

In turn, all of this exists to solve the problem of org design and hierarchy. Leveling is a tool against title inflation. Need to restrict movement into senior management? Get pickier in your leveling. Need to retain people? Give them a bonus structure or widen bands. Titles are nice and all but they don’t buy private school tuitions, sports cars, and fancy vacations. My L4 employees that could afford a new condo and a vacation to Bali were never all that upset they were never going to see L3 and L2 due to org design constraints.

I myself am a slightly funny example. I moved from a multinational based in Europe to a small software company in California. My title went from Director (L3 there, Senior directors and in between to VP got point numbers) to Senior Manager (L4.X on the old scale but an effective L3) and my span of control from 30-60 to 6. My job is basically the same except for the number of people in my span of control (in the former job the same number of Managers and Staff engineers reported to me directly). We don’t have a CTO and there are two VPs where one has a “Head of” title. There are a couple Directors as well (call them effective L2 here). Effectively my title has changed but my level has not. The pay also went up a little bit with the move.

There is really no where for me to go in this hierarchy since we’re pretty small. If/when they add a CTO, down the ladder I go, a CTO level is added, and more restrictions are placed to stratify the leveling to match the stratification of the jobs. What will a CTO do over the current Head of Tech? Not sure as my skip level does everything all the other CTOs I’ve worked for has done. I’m sure they’ll come up with something for my current Skip Level to stop doing though.

In some companies I’ve worked and famously at Google, you have ICs that are at the VP level, by either title or level, that aside from having to go to a few mandatory Senior Management type meetings are exceptionally well paid Staff/Principle engineers. There’s nothing wrong with this so long as the title is not abused and the value is there. It tends to look crazy though. Why do these situations exist? Someone needed to pay them X to get into the business and X happened to be in the band for VP. Or, they were part of an acquisition and actually stuck around. They needed some significant title and to report to the CEO and it happens that VP is the currency available for that even though they’re not doing that work. At my last job we didn’t do this and at one point a CTO of an acquisition actually reported to me, a Director.

It’s the holes in the way things work that best betray that value and title are not directly connected but management come as close as possible just to make it possible to figure out what the heck is going on at a glance. In turn, ask for that 10k if you think you’re worth it. It may be easier to get it than to get the level bump.

This is how it works though. If you have someone that is quiet and does amazing work but doesn't seek out promotions and doesn't actively market their accomplishments then it could happen that they will lag on salary over time. If there are good managers advocating for their people then this will happen less.

Its a really simple conversation for a manager to have with their mgmt and HR about person X's salary is behind market, Y and Z are in same title so I think we need to bump them up a little to keep pace. A good organization will recognize that and help make something happen. Bad organizations will have an attitude of not doing anything until its too late. If you work in a bad organization then the path to get raises there is to do the work yourself, go out to the market, interview and get offer(s) and bring them back and/or just leave. I say good/bad organizations but really its not binary, there are situations companies may be in where raises or market based increases aren't possible, there might be bad executives but good managers, etc. YMMV.

> It's not obvious to me why this is a bad thing.

In most cases, level isn't the gaming type level. Level these days is more like different jobs. What used to be analyst, architect, tech lead etc are all disguised as "level".

As you rise in levels you might code less and focus on system design, coordinating, mentoring or something else. Is it really "career development"? It's moving sideways.

> Am I missing something here?

Yes, reward people for ownership, and getting better at their job. That's not what the current level system is.

— W. Edwards Deming

Developers should aim to be resourceful and respect others time, but I expect my reports to seek out help if they get genuinely stuck for more than 15 minutes (no clue what to do.)

It's much better than waiting around for your manager to find out you were working on the wrong problems (or nothing, waiting for instructions.)

This is such a fine line though, encourage developers to ask questions, but they also need to try problem-solving before they immediately go asking for help. If I _consistently_ get asked for help on problems that I can solve it within 5-10 minutes using no “company knowledge“ (just plain debugging), then that cements someone as “junior” in my mind.

Contrast that with the people who ask lots of questions but they are well thought out questions that require knowledge of the inner workings of the system.

“This isn’t working” vs “I can’t figure out X works, I tried Y and Z but that gave me this error that I don’t understand but I did find….”

It’s not about not asking questions, it’s about knowing which questions are appropriate to ask, and if you don’t know the answer to that it’s my job to guide you to finding it out.

I’ve never held back on a promotion because someone asked too many questions, but I have recommended we don’t promote because they’re asking questions that they should be answering themselves. The gauge of skill is “do you know what you don’t know”, basically.

In many (more purely tech) companies it is not unusual for senior engineers to be making the same salary as directors or VPs, though that may now be starting to change.

How are they going to know what you just said without asking?

The "I" isn't important. At best someone that does this, could just bore everyone, or at worst could alienate, or give impression as arrogant, self centered, if you are only talking about yourself. (you didn't, but could lead to that).

It is possible to phrase information in a non-self referential way. Talk about what others want to hear about.

He perceives employees who want to talk with him about "leveling" as seeking the formula or checklist to get paid more, and not necessarily about growing or putting in the work.

The latter is fine if your performance objectives are objective and directly aligned with company success (i.e. achievement of sales quotas). It's more fraught if your performance objectives are more subjective or defined in ways that are proxies for company success—it's easy to fall prey to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law where employees do the things that get them promoted, which may actually make them or the company more valuable.

VP - Tells directors to work faster

Director - Tells managers to work faster

Manager - unblocks team

ICs - do real work

If you hire for identity rather than skillset, you don’t have to manage people. They self-manage. My best managers were ones where the product that they managed was a part of their identity. How it worked. How reliable it was. They weren’t always the smartest people. It often took them longer to solve problems. BUT, they solved them on their own, without me having to supervise. Because they would not give up on the problem until it was solved. To give up would be to admit that their identity was flawed, and that just was not an option.

When you hire people like this effectively as a leader you must really allow them to own it. They must have the responsibility and the authority to make decisions, even when those decisions differ from what decision you would make. Results are what matters.

Steve understood this.

These are also the levels where if there is a massive screw-up, you might be the person ousted so there is a fair amount of accountability.

It's not that the position referred to is simply interpreted or "considered" as being senior, but that VP is the title for the highest seniority, or highest behind SVP, below c-suite at most tech and other non-finance companies. VP simply has a completely different meaning in finance, that has nothing to do with what other users here are referring to.

Well yes, literally, but that's not the point. The author is saying that Lx titles inherently don't make sense and he sees more value in a model based on accountability and responsibility. My understanding:

- manager: responsible for putting effort into execution

- director: responsible for executing a plan, not accountable for its success

- VP: responsible for the plan and accountable for its success

I've worked with great people who were decades older than everyone else on the team, and nobody cared how old they were. I've also worked with people who sounded like a caricature of the worst parts of early 90's Usenet. That eyes almost universally rolled every time they opened their mouth had absolutely nothing to do with their age, although I'd bet my next paycheck they would insist that was why.

Great career development advice. This is absolutely the most reliable way to advance in an organization.

More interesting perhaps for the typical employee is how they would get to such a position, starting in a junior position.

One key advice here is to stop behaving like an employee. By that I mean to start reflecting on what it is you are doing, what you are being asked to do, why you are being asked to do, etc. Apply some critical thinking. Ask questions if you don't understand something. Not to be obnoxious but to educate yourself. What would you do if you were in charge? Try to come up with ideas on how to your work better. Try to do those things. Get feedback on how you are doing. This is not about seeking conflict but simply seeking understanding and more control over what it is you do. You can't hope to manage others if you can't manage yourself.

Once you are in control of what you do, the rest comes naturally. Whether that's via promotions, new jobs, or starting your own business. It all starts with challenging the notion that you are just there to do whatever it is you are told to do. That's what employees do.

Don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with being a good employee. Good, loyal employees are great to have. If you run a team, company or whatever, you need those to get stuff done. But they'll never run things for you. That's your job. And having too many captains on the ship is also not great. Good to reflect on the next time you have a work conflict. It's not always about being right.

Employees are mostly just reacting to inputs around them (from their boss, colleagues, whatever) but rarely act pro-actively. Reacting pro-actively, without being told, is the key difference. Some people do that naturally and can't stop themselves doing that, other people simply don't have that in them. Nothing wrong with that. Figure out which you are early and then act accordingly.

You're trying to change which definition of fair is being used.

It's fair in that it's "fair market value" because that's what the market is willing to pay.

That's clearly the version the author is using given the example.

Some functional skills are rarer than others, some are simply harder to master than others, and some are both.

To me it would be unfair to force equal pay for very unequal work.

I get tired of the "eww, management is where engineers who can't hack it go to die" trope.