Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Most places I've worked had no career path above Senior Software Engineer that did not involve moving into management, which as you point out, is not necessarily a skills match with "that smart individual contributor who you'd like to reward".

I've heard some larger companies "solve" this by providing some title advancement past "3rd Senior Engineer from the left". But is it satisfying to you folks on these tracks? When you go from Senior Software Engineer to Staff Software Engineer to Super Staff Software Engineer to Super Duper Staff Software Engineer, do you consider it to be real career growth? Do you find that this is truly a _parallel_ path with management, or does it eventually plateau (i.e. the management path ultimately ends up reaching farther)?

View on HN

At the teams I have managed at larger companies (Stamps.com, TrueCar) the technical track had official equivalents to management roles (Sr. Engineer -> Manager, Architect -> Director, Sr. Architect -> VP) for determining compensation, equity and any other role defined "perks."

Each of those roles also came with leadership expectations: Architects were responsible for the overall technical health of the systems they were responsible for, with Sr. Architects being responsible for multiple. They were empowered to reject system changes and were expected to review code and designs on a regular basis. Really good engineers that weren't system thinkers or didn't want responsibility for other people's code, could increase in compensation but weren't considered part of the leadership team.

What does it matter? If you're having real impact on the decisions you care about, and your pay goes up who cares about "career growth"? What is a career these days? There's no loyalty, no gold watch coming.

The titles and the career track matter because that's how you get to have real impact and that's how your pay goes up. If you don't want to be thrown a spec and told to just implement it we need more developers who have better job titles and who can play the political game well.

If you're a dev you're more likely to have to bow to pressure from marketing or other departments and won't have any real impact.

While the idea of separate IC track looks like common sense, I don't think it plays well with traditional top-down structure (i.e. the structure of every single company out there). In top-down structure "resources" are allocated to "projects". The nature of the "projects" and details of allocation are carved out by "management". If you work as an IC on somebody else's project then he is your boss and you can't get much freedom beyond freedom in technical matters (usually Senior Developer title already implies this). If you work on the project of your own choosing that means you are a manager with really constrained resources and either you get more resources (usually it starts with a junior developer to help you with chores) and gradually become a real manager or your project risks to slide into irrelevance as you are outmaneuvered by real managers with big headcounts and budgets.

What I would like to see is a working scheme for more fluid resource allocation scheme than fixed tree-like structure. This holacracy thing promises exactly that but I am not sure if it is really viable.

Is it literally just the titles that you're talking about? I don't see why companies couldn't max out the title with "Senior Software Engineer" but continue giving rewards like more money, vacation, creative leeway, etc.

I've heard (second hand) that VMWare has a good parallel track.

That said, it makes sense for a company in which individual contributions can revolutionize the business.

There are cases where being an individual contributor is only so valuable (though that "so valuable" number may be very high.) There comes a point where there is only so much impact you can have on your own, which is why _great_ managers absolutely deserve higher compensation.

It's hard to individually make a larger contribution than a manager making every one of their 5 teammates 10% better.

So to answer your question, I believe it plateaus. Where it plateaus is relative to how much individuals can impact the course of the business.

At Boeing (and the other major aerospace companies), they have 5 levels of engineering, then the Technical Fellow track with 3 levels. Level four requires you be a team lead, and level 5 even higher level of responsibility. That was a more recent requirement, and we were told they corresponded with manager and senior manager, which slowed down promotions significantly.

The Tech Fellow track was created to grant executive level compensation to retain subject matter experts. Beyond a graduate degree, becoming a Tech Fellow requires demonstrating your subject matter expertise within the company, with a key measure being that other groups seek out your help, so it does require some politics and networking. At the highest level, you pretty much have to be a national authority. A lot of work, but executive compensation at a megacorp is significant.

That said, unless your specialty is avionics or CFD, I don't recommend aerospace companies for software engineers.

Outside perhaps 'architect', what does a reasonable progression look like? I struggle with this personally so very curious what others think.

While Management usually the only thing equated with "soft" (hate that word beeteedubs) skills, moving up the IC ladder also requires good inter-personal skills.

Above senior you are allowed and expected to go "heads down" (by yourself or a small group) and knock out solutions to technical problems. However you are also expected to identify cross-cutting problems, rally the right people, coherently frame your arguments, etc to move the "implementing solutions to technical problems" needle (even if you don't directly write a lot of that code).

Management also get's the "fun" things like "let's talk salary!" or "you need to improve along X, Y, Z axis!" :P

Just my two cents :)

Oh, I agree with everything you just said. I was just wondering what it looks like from a career progression standpoint. If it's just titles, it's tough.

What you said about those cross-cutting problems and all that is spot on and that is basically what I see sr. engineers and architects. However, how do we or should we even further delineate career progression and responsibilities? And what does that look like? What is beyond those things?

I don't know :) titles are inherently political. They don't exist in some platonic vacuum. So some part of the progression is about broadcasting the status change to the larger organization. Beyond that I think the ladder becomes about company wide cross-cutting concerns, enough success to be an internal rallying flag. Things like that.

But I've never been in the position to either be promoted or do the promoting to that level :)

What' I've encountered:

Senior S/W Engineer -> Tech Lead/Specialist -> Architect -> Senior Architect -> CTO/VP-Technology

Reply on news.ycombinator.com