This kinda brings up a question I've often thought about. Why is it that we structure growth in a company to be so biased towards moving into management roles?

I mean there is the obvious part of the answer in that managers are the ones that are given the power to define that growth ladder, but I'm not sure this fully explains things. If people are transferring from technical positions to managerial positions then should they also not be aware that there is a lot of advantages to allowing people to keep climbing the ladder through technical positions? That institutional knowledge can be incredibly valuable. It's often what leads to those people being such wizards. They've been with the code for so long that they know where things will fail and what are the best parts to jump in to make modifications (and where not to!). But every time you transfer one of these people to a non-technical role that knowledge "rots". More in that code just keeps evolving while their knowledge of it remains mostly frozen.

Which what you say sounds like maybe the worse end of that. Taking that person with institutionalized knowledge and hyper focusing their capabilities on one aspect. That doesn't sound like an efficient use of that person. Though the knowledge transfer part sounds important for a company's long term success, but also not helpful if it's narrowly applied.

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tayo42 5 days ago | parent [-]

This hasn't been true in a lot of companies for like my entire career. You can move up as an ic. Titles like Staff, senior staff principal. A Staff and Sr manager would be paid the same

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jjav 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> This hasn't been true in a lot of companies for like my entire career. You can move up as an ic.

You can, but it's a dead end ultimately. I've been a distinguished engineer which is about as far as one can go (some companies have Fellows, but it's just a few people so basically impossible). If you have any desire to grow beyond that, management track is the only possibility.

Also, moving to management from a DE level is harder because you're basically around a Sr.Director level (give or take, depending on company) but have no management experience.

If you care about career growth (and I'm not saying you have to, geeking out on the IC ladder is way more fun), I suggest as soon as you are at the equivalent level of a manager on the numeric ladder, switch to management.

	▲	tayo42 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Your making 7 figures? What is left in career growth. You beat the corporate game at that point.

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eigen 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> A Staff and Sr manager would be paid the same

do they report to the same level? every place I've seen a "technical track" and "management track" it seems the higher level technical people report to someone on the same or even lower level in management. I.E. a manager can have technical reports that are equal level or higher. that obviously doesn't happen in the management track.

not that these are first level managers but if a principal engineer not reporting to a VP, the it doesnt seem like the tracks are equal.

	▲	tayo42 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Why does the reporting chain matter? They're separate roles and jobs so the manager is leveled differently. If I'm a jr engineer reporting to a director does that give me more authority then a staff engineer reporting to a manger? Management is a different job, it would be leveled differently. Maybe a high level IC needs to work closely with a team for a bit so they just report to the manager of the team.

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mook 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What do those roles do? Where I work there's a managerial track and a technical track, but if you actually read the job descriptions the technical track is basically either the same as management track, or a devrel role (effectively managing people outside the company).

	▲	tayo42 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Ic role has bigger scope of projects. Makes technical decisions. They're not writing performance reports or doing any people management tasks.