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Throughout my first two years working at Meta, I used to be a person contributor (IC) engineer. Then, after an encouraging evaluate, my supervisor requested if I’d begin managing a group of my very own. I had obtained sturdy efficiency rankings and earned belief amongst my colleagues and the management group, and the group’s headcount was persistently rising annually.
That is the usual origin story for engineers who transition to administration. However the abilities required to succeed as an engineer and those a supervisor has to have are considerably totally different. Robust engineers succeed by means of rigorous analytical means and deep work. Robust managers (whose work is decidedly un-analytical!) inspire and develop individuals’s careers, whereas additionally being ready to leap into points at a second’s discover.
The perfect motivation to turn out to be a supervisor is straightforward: You care about individuals. Administration is inherently a people-oriented job, which implies managers ought to develop their experiences by means of optimistic and constructive suggestions. A great supervisor cares about discovering every particular person’s zone of genius after which assigning work that greatest matches that engineer’s profile. The byproduct of that is the flexibility to scale affect, however that shouldn’t be the first motive.
A typical, but misguided, motive to change to administration is to earn extra money. At the very least inside Huge Tech corporations, managers and ICs on the similar stage are paid the identical quantity. In reality, some corporations intentionally pay their managers much less, merely to discourage mercenary engineers who’re optimizing for compensation relatively than individuals.
Nevertheless, there’s nuance right here that’s value calling out. At extra senior ranges, managers are promoted at sooner charges in comparison with ICs. A supervisor’s affect is basically derived from their affect in an org, which incorporates the variety of individuals of their reporting chain. A director with 50 engineers of their org can successfully “declare credit score” for the individuals on their group.
Then again, a person contributor on the director stage should produce output that has the same scale of affect to what the 50 engineers shipped. As you’ll be able to think about, that is a lot more durable. IC promotions at these ranges require a stage of technical brilliance that’s tough to reliably reproduce.
Managers typically get promoted as they accumulate extra individuals beneath them. This course of can occur by means of re-orgs or worker departures, not essentially by means of the distinctive contributions of the supervisor. The result’s that managers who stick round lengthy sufficient will naturally develop their careers. Empirically, that is apparent within the information. At an organization like Meta or Google, there are way more VP-level managers than there are IC engineers of the equal stage.
In the long run, due to this fact, managers do earn extra money than particular person contributors. This isn’t essentially improper, however you must mirror in your incentives and decide what is going to make you fulfilled past the cash.
I ended up saying sure to the administration alternative I used to be supplied, and I’m very glad I did. Like several job, there have been elements that I liked and elements that I didn’t, and I ended up switching again to the IC ladder inside a 12 months.
—Rahul
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