One thing that I learned from going to IC to manager:
there is a LOT of activity at the manager level that you never see and therefore don't often think about when you are an IC.
Case in point: trying to retain good people.
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).
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.
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".
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.
I agree about the hidden work, but you describe it in a reactionary manner.
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
You can only be so proactive. At a ginormous company, the pace of change is glacial. You can push really hard and get buy-in from leaders with hundreds of people under them and still get blocked trying to improve things about the office/culture that are simply beyond one's control - even with VP buy-in. Big companies need to federate out more if they want this type of proactive management - or just accept it and maybe that makes sense too.
Indeed, don't ignore obvious issues like team morale, career paths for ICs, but there's a certain zen to the balance between proactive and reactive. Don't do too much proactive work if there isn't incremental return on it. Don't burn yourself out or set yourself up for deep disappointment.
Mid-pandemic I saw another manager go from enthusiastic to despondent overnight when his upcoming hiring headcount was cut to zero and his lovingly cultivated recruiting pipeline was basically worthless. He left shortly after, unsurprisingly. It was painful to watch and taught me a lesson in contingent value in management. I don't mean to say I know better though, he was definitely a better manager than me lol.
If you are a manager, would you accept that from a subordinate who failed to do their job successfully?
The nature of work is that it's not a cleanroom lab or a business school case study; lots of difficult and unfair obstacles exist, and your job is to overcome them. To me, that defines 'job' like the sea defines 'sailor'. You're very lucky when that isn't the case.
Realistically, there is some judgment involved and matters of degree, and there are limitations, but the best people find a way using the resources they have.
I had the same experience moving from IC to manager. I didn't realize the amount of work that managers are doing that I didn't see and more importantly that they couldn't tell me about.
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.
I moved from IC to manager to director. Meetings in general are a huge time suck, and by the end of my tenure, I was basically triple-booked for the entire day every day. Every evening was an exercise in deciding who to piss off. And the emails! <Marvin/Android Voice>Don't get me started on the emails! :-) Finishing the twilight of my career as an IC consulting, and it's much better for me.
Bezos used to (supposedly, didn't work for him) have the habit to forward emails to reports (direct and further down), with just an added comment of "!" or "?"
"!" was "Do something about this"
"?" was "Can you please explain WTH?"
> 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
Could you provide some examples of what managers need to know?
It's less about what I need to know and more about how I need to organize it. I get the same information from all of my reports, but the ones who were managers hand it to me ready to go where the others I get it from a conversation.
When I'm talking to my team, I need to know things like:
* Anything that is blocking them (and what they think will solve that)
* Any unexpected events, fires that are about to start/have started
* Progress on their tasks and any timeline updates
* Things they've heard from meetings with other teams that might impact what they're working on or other people on the team
The ICs who were managers previously tend to come to 1:1s with this already sitting in our shared document outlined roughly like I have above when we start our meeting. E.g.
* I'm waiting for Joe Bloggs to finish his API work before I can build the user workflow for X. He was supposed to be done last week but I'm still waiting. He's being very vague about the timeline and I need to know when this will be done so I can start work. Can you talk to him for me?
* Mary was out sick last week so didn't finish the design for Y. We're working on it now and she'll be done by Tuesday. I've put my work on Y on hold until then and am focusing on Z instead. It should still be done by the deadline.
* Status of Project Foo is...
* I had a sync with the database team yesterday. Did you know that they're planning to move everything to paper tape next quarter?
All of that would come out in a conversation anyway, but having it like this focuses it and puts it in context already (which is normally what I would need to do with that info).
The real difference is that folks who have been managers before tend to have a better understanding of what will impact the larger team or project, not just their part of it. I care about the individual too, but some of my brain is always on the bigger picture.
To add on to this I like things organized as:
- things you need my action on
- things you need my input on
- things you think I need to be aware of that may need my input/action later
Given that there are plenty of people on the spectrum working in IT a promotion can be a devastating blow to some.
The thing you've mentioned about poor performance resonates a lot with an unfinished text I have about generation lost to covid.
For me shaping a new team is all about forming bonds between teammates. Living in eastern europe it usually involves a lot of drinking together. :)
The end result is that you have a team that cares about each other, and if someone has a bad day for whatever reason (sick cat, kid misbehaving at school, hangover or divorce) the rest of the team will be happy to fill out and carry on as a unit. If something bad will happen the team will indicate the bad apple and you'll know when to step in.
Even though my first daily job in 2006 was an online first company I was very sceptical when covid started. It takes a lot of thought and preperation to have your org ready for an online work, and setting up zoom calls is simply not enough. I took hiatus as I felt I was not able to form a functional team based on skype calls. I missed some money but I think the history somehow proved me right.
I'm not going to lie, this is what I feel work from home and distributed teams has made hardest.
It's not that it can't be overcome, but it has to be done intentionally rather than organically. And that's a whole task a manager needs to add to their list of responsibilities.
> I missed some money but I think the history somehow proved me right.
Maybe, but I will say that having the norm be "unless you hang out in person your team can't bond" is an out for some people to excuse not being friendly or empathetic. Friendly people are friendly no matter the medium.
I've had managers hand-wring over getting people to hang out, and it's like: okay, I've drank beer with this difficult person that you hired, can they stop being an asshole in chat now?
My point is, if you're forming a new team from people that never seen each other and they communicate during random zoom calls the chances they will grow a real bond are very slim.
People will join the stand up call saying routine like "hello yesterday no blockers", proceed to grab a random task from the backlog and call it a day.
Meanwhile in the office people will have a casual chat over a coffee, go for a smoke, grab a lunch together and maybe even hang out after work on their own accord. When someone shows up late for office saying "crap my kid is really sick" it's more likely that someone else steps in and say "hey, it's fine, I'll do the deploy for you today".
When someone asks for that in a group chat people may miss it, and honestly, who cares about random set of pixels on your screen.
Not to mention that in the office, if you're not an asshole, people will stay with you after work and be willing to teach you how to work with that new library or system. I'm not seeing that organically happening in full remote structure where you can't really put a face behind a name.
Like I've said, I worked for fully remote companies long before covid happened, but everytime those companies invested a lot of time and money to get people together and do random meaningless stuff. Heck, when I joined Wikia in 2006 they flew us all from all around the world for basically two weeks vacation so we just could spend the time together and to get to know each other.
> My point is, if you're forming a new team from people that never seen each other and they communicate during random zoom calls the chances they will grow a real bond are very slim.
This is very true and I learned this quickly when moving to a management role. As an IC, when someone is out for some life event, it might mean more work for you to pick up the slack. As a manager, everyone on your team's problems become your problems.
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.
> 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.
I've been a manager, and I've also been a volunteer firefighter for many years. I've seen a lot of things no person should see.
My relatively brief stint in management kept me awake at night more than the shotgun vs face suicide, or fatal motor vehicle accidents that I attended in the same period. I think it was because the fate of those people was well out of my hands, but the livelihood of my direct reports was not.
you sound like a very empathetic person. But hear me out - at end of the day, it's all just business. I was let go on Thursday, 1 hour before end of shift, in a 60 seconds zoom call. Got told that core team is working hands on in the office, has high velocity, and me being remote is slowing them down. I strongly suspect it was also about the fact that this week they had me work on a project I haven't touched yet, and I got no support to set the dev env properly even. So I was developing blind, while also working overtime to push changes to backend I joined to work on. My wife just lost a kid, this was first job I had in 8 months, just started on new year. We are in small debt. I worked from 6 in the afternoon to 5 in the morning (timezone difference) to output a lot, so they keep me and raise my rate. Company raised 16mm but they're still startup, yknow. So when push comes to shove you get let go without them asking about any of that, or concern themself with it. CEO almost bitterly thanked me for working with them and notified me my contact is over and that's it, hung up and left to work on their launch. Team didn't even notice I m gone. I still went to coworking space today to send CVs because I didn't have heart to tell wife we are cooked again. But look, it happened before, I chose to do this job. I'll deal with the fallout, find new one. It is O.K., I'm not entitled to anyone's pitty. Like I said, that is the risk of business. As manager you cannot set rules of the company. And even if you could, sometimes you still need to make hard decisions. You're not a rock in the stream they can latch on, you are another man floating downstream. Don't lose sleep.
People use those as magic words to absolve people of responsibility, humanity, and guilt. Nothing about 'business' mitigates those, IMO. Why would it?
I think it's laziness and irresponsibility to just elminiate essential requirements and responsibilities because you don't want to put in the effort.
At the same time, the risks of 'business' are affordable to some people: They can get another job, can afford the layoff, etc. But for many people, especially in the US with a poor workers comp situation for very many people and where health care, housing, education, and nutrition (for many) depend on income, it's not affordable.
I wouldn't call them magic words to absolve people of responsibility, but rather a cliche name for situations like that. Of course you can have ethical business, I mean business ethics were first class we had in economy. But in real world you WILL get bulldozed sooner or later by "it's just business". Read the geravis principle. It's not condoning, it's observing.
Another cliche or magic word is 'reality' - as in, 'my point is reality' and therefore anything that disagrees must be fantastical. It's also the old rhetorical tactic of claiming inevitability.
The reality is that everyone acts with ethics; it's a matter of degree: businesses don't murder people, for example. Another reality is that we make reality the way we want it; to say we can't make it otherwise is simply to fold.
I don't quite understand your point. It's not about bending spoons, but about the arrogance of certainty.
And why not be your own boss? It might take some work to get there, but I think the most important requirement for being your own boss is the drive and adaptability to overcome all the challenges.
I'm very sorry to hear that. I hope you'll find new, better work soon. Where I work, we do not have any open positions I'm aware of at the moment. But if you like we can connect. I'm trying to start my own start-up rn. But can't promise anything.
In addition to me being terrible at not taking my reports personal problems home with me, what did me in was pouring large amounts of time and effort in getting people to improve (e.g. if they were on a PIP, but just in general as well), and that effort not being reciprocated.
It was a great learning experience and fun track to be on, but I'm a happy IC again.
I'm not trying to make light of your experience, and I do appreciate that you care about people you have to look after deeply.
However, I also don't think what you described is professional with respect to being a manager. A manager's job is to balance the interest between stakeholders and their reports, make sure things happen as promised (and adjust scope when promise can't be met), and make sure everyone in their team grows (skill, remuneration, etc.).
> 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.
These are not things that would affect you from being a good manager. That's just part of the job of being a manager. It's a different kind of problem, it's not necessarily heavier problems. It's unhelpful, or even narcissistic, to think that you're actually quietly taking on more burden for everyone without being appreciated.
You should absolutely have empathy as a manager, but if your empathy is weighing on you instead of enabling you to be a better manager, then you're probably not doing a very good job as a manager.
> 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.
I disagree. That's just an excuse of not doing what you should be doing as a manager: manage things. See above.
If you are an empathetic person, if you work in a team where people have/had "cancer/long-term illness, death in the family, miscarriages, etc.", then it's emotionally just as taxing whether you're an IC or a manager. In fact, if you can't manage your emotions and get what needs to be done done (damage control, repriortization, etc. to get things shipped), then you're not doing your job as a manager.
Edit: feel free to downvote if you don't agree but much appreciated if you also leave a response to say why you disagree. Otherwise, I hope you feel good "punishing" people just because you feel differently but don't actually have a concrete argument against.
> You should absolutely have empathy as a manager, but if your empathy is weighing on you instead of enabling you to be a better manager, then you're probably not doing a very good job as a manager.
That sounds... very peculiar, un-empathetic a point of view, like you are blaming someone for facing a difficult moment.
Case in point, if you were to manage managers, and you had to tell that to one of your report facing such a situation... that would be, in that case, a fail in management on your part.
You don't tell people in a tough spot to "toughen up", "not good for that role", not even in corporate environments.
That's plain toxic. And inefficient (whereas you should be looking for a way to improve the situation/morale in some way, short term, and long term).
So you give them the space to explore the situation, their feelings, and you support them to find their solutions. That's how you lead by example. Not by jumping to conclusion "oh... looks like someone's not fit for the role".
You make some good points, but it's important to keep in mind that as a manager, when you are task allocating and reprioritizing employee work, you need to keep your team's individual challenges in mind. The same way that a developer might need to manage server resources, or consider the impact of a new feature on future maintenance, a manager needs to solve the problem, except the resources available to solve the problem happen to be human.
If a teammate has a sick parent, everyone on the team may choose to empathize. For the manager, every challenge that comes up, the parent sickness is one of your constraints to be dealt with. You need to compartmentalize sufficiently that you can think about this without stopping your work to solve the problem, but not so much that you treat the worker as a non-human resource. It can get a little tough.
> then it's emotionally just as taxing whether you're an IC or a manager
Speaking from experience, at least for me that's not true. For me the largest emotional toll is knowing that I'm responsible for dealing with whatever is happening. Sure, I might wind up taking the exact same actions as an IC. But as an IC I don't *have* to. And that helps, even if just enough.
I don't see anything narcissistic about being a normal human being with natural empathy for the people they work with. Managing people does require emotional stability and self control, though. ICs tend to automatically defer to their managers. Sometimes, this leads the ICs to misinterpret tiny reactions from their managers in completely unintended ways. I find that negative, emotionally charged reactions from managers are especially likely to lead to unintended reactions from their ICs. As an IC you try to not bring your personal life ups and does to the job. This is even more important as a manager.
> I don't see anything narcissistic about being a normal human being with natural empathy for the people they work with.
I agree but that's not what I said. What I said was it's "unhelpful, or even narcissistic", for a manager to think that being empathetic as a manager is more emotionally taxing than an IC.
> Managing people does require emotional stability and self control, though.
It does. That's just being professional though. Being a good coworker in general requires emotional stability and self control. I'm not sure if you're trying to argue that a manager has to have much greater ability to do those than an IC since you seem to avoid saying that directly.
> ICs tend to automatically defer to their managers. Sometimes, this leads the ICs to misinterpret tiny reactions from their managers in completely unintended ways. I find that negative, emotionally charged reactions from managers are especially likely to lead to unintended reactions from their ICs.
Uh, the reverse sounds just about as true? I'm honestly not sure what the argument there is.
> As an IC you try to not bring your personal life ups and does to the job. This is even more important as a manager.
It's unclear from what you said why it's more important as a manager -- that's just what every professional should do at a workplace. Can you please elaborate?
As a manager, you are always implicitly communicating from a position of power. That changes what you can and cannot say. It's not very hard to understand once you experience it from a manager's perspective, but I don't think that I would have truly understood this exclusively from an IC's perspective, though.
It's truly frightening for people who don't understand that well to be given the opportunity to mange people.
As yobbo said it much better than me, "the part that is narcissistic is believing your empathy is uniquely taking a toll on you."
It's impossible to have a conversation with people who only make reasonable-sounding statements that are irrelevant to the actual conversation. I'm out.
Maybe you mean something else? Narcissism is the condition of a very vulnerable ego, and insisting that nothing around you can threaten your ego - everyone has to be 'perfect'.
> These are not things that would affect you from being a good manager. That's just part of the job of being a manager. It's a different kind of problem, it's not necessarily heavier problems.
The crux of the issue is here I think. You, as a manager, a report, anything, have no say as to what anyone feels and how, and how it affects them. That’s purely on them. You may only be there for them.
You may think for yourself, that these are not heavier problems than other ones. Others may think differently, and feel differently. That’s not more, or less professional (whatever that word has ever meant).
Being a good manager is how one does manage their team, in the end and what the outcomes are. Not how one feels/struggles to do it internally or within the confidentiality that you have with your own manager. Manager to whom you should be able to openly share how you struggle yourself internally. Which requires trust.
If, ever, your manager did retort « you’re showing you’re not fit for this » or came to moral judgement for just expressing your thoughts to them, this becomes a Whiplash situation you better get out of, because that manager will not have your back, ever.
(of course, if the personal issues of the manager/report turn into problematic actions or omissions, that’s another topic)
In my experience the inverse is also true. Dealing with performance and behavioral issues can take a huge amount of time, and it something that is never discussed with parties who are not involved.
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.
> Dealing with performance and behavioral issues can take a huge amount of time, and it something that is never discussed with parties who are not involved.
This is true. I feel like there needs to be a better solution to it which isn't wearing your heart on your sleeve or airing dirty laundry in public.
Recently, I saw some emails from the manager two levels up form me that shouldn't have been in our CRM where he was standing up for my manager and his paycheck not going through properly. It seems like it was just an oversight because this one paycheck is run differently than others, but the director was clearly triggered because he said to payroll, "if we need to withhold anyone's paycheck, don't just do it. I need to know first because I need to know how to figure it out."
I just quietly deleted the email and made sure similar ones wouldn't get logged. But I was also impressed at how quickly this director just stood up for someone under him. And if not for this chance stumble upon I never would have known of this side of his work.
Maybe the recognition of managers is something that has to be done publically by those above them to get their teams to hear it?
This is a perfect example of the silent work managers do.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to remind someone on the people/finance side that their systems work for the employees and not the other way around is astounding. “No we cant ask them to wait another month to get paid, no I don’t care our system doesn’t support it, fine pull out your check book and write them a physical check…”
In my (big tech) company, managers have little leverage to retain people. Salary/bonus aren't in their control. Even evaluation aren't decided by them.
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.
- Listen to their team. Issues arise, complexity may be higher than appears. Being receptive to reality and not being obstinate.
- Manage priorities, when there is too much to do everything, so progress can continue instead of gridlock by stakeholder updates, changes, and context switches leaving you feeling like a husk
- Not an expectation, but I find the good ones almost play the role of team therapist. I had a very kind manager stay up until midnight with me being supportive when it got really bad. The opposite of this is the not-my-problem people
- Really really good managers understand the pressures you are under, and give suggestions on how you can work smarter.
I do think sometimes there is pressure and they get in the way of work to produce visible artifacts to have something to point to that they did. I’m empathetic, a lot of their work is invisible.
Oh, that explains a thing.
A decade or so ago, I was a well regarded engineer at a FAANG who got an offer from a startup. I told my manager I was probably going to take it, as it sounded fun.
He and his lead tried to talk me into staying, showed me other departments I might find more fun.
Really, they could've offered me a trivial raise and I probably would've stayed, but I was too meek to ask for money, and they didn't bring up money at all.
That always struck me as very strange; I assumed it was either a mistake, or a "if they're going somewhere that is a pay cut, clearly it isn't money, and if you offer them money they'll leave in 6mo anyway". But, if they don't have that level to pull, that's a much simpler answer.
Do you mind sharing what big tech company? I've worked at both small companies and big tech. Managers do not have full control, but they can influence very significantly comp and evaluations. If your manager isn't doing it then it is a performance problem.
If you are a very senior IC, managers may consult you in these situations as well. Fishing for interesting projects or possibly even trying to have you talk to the person leaving as well. You generally would have context and an ability to connect with the other IC in a way a manager may not. I've never been in management but have on many occasions been roped into these scenarios.
Part of being a manager is to be proactive in trying to retain the good people. Increasing their visibility within the leadership and across the organization, paying keen attention to their career goals, selling these goals in advance to your manager and others within the organization, clearing hurdles that may be affecting their work etc.
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.
Its a good example to call out but it should be obvious to anyone genuinely considering the transition. Managers are there to manage people, the job is easy when the teams awesome and the jobs hard when the team isn't awesome. This includes poor performance, attrition, and people drama. All things that come with the territory of managing humans.
There's also a huge part of "managing moods" to prevent people from thinking about leaving in the first place.
And all of that within the constraints of the department budget and company policies.
Crisis management is a big part of the job, and the more people you have the higher the chance there is a crisis at any given point in time. Around 100 devs there's usually at least 1-2 things going on at any given time.
Does anyone tell their manager they are leaving and still expecting anything nowadays? I thought dive-and-save is very rare since the flattening trend happened (esp. in big tech)
Never experienced the dive-and-save myself. Usually a wince and a sigh, followed by "oh... when's your last day?" Your first line supervisor is upset, but resigned that he's powerless to do anything substantive that might retain you. The MBAs at corporate HQ couldn't care less, and it'll take them weeks/months to get around to approving a new job req.
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.
One thing I discovered: almost everything a manager does has a big lag between input and observed impact. Retention is one of the slowest, it's like steering a cruise ship!
I can't say I agree with this bc I have felt the immediate impact of a key employee leaving, usually in the form of me taking up their responsibilities. Even with a two-week, sometimes even four-week, hand off, this turns into real pain the moment that employee is gone.
People leaving is definitely a step-function of negatives as the responsibilities get shared between the (now smaller!) team.
I think GP was more saying that improving retention, at a % level, is a slow ship to steer. (At least what is available at the manager level.) Decreasing retention across the org in the long term doesn’t happen overnight, and it can take a while to observe whether the effect is trending downwards or upwards. (And also depends on what signal you use - people actually leaving, or people talking about leaving!)
Personally I think spending huge amounts of time on retention _after_ someone resigns indicates huge, possibly org-wide, problems with communication and career development.
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.
If the majority of your retention work is escalations and meetings at the time they want to leave, you're really holding this management thing wrong.
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.
Are you saying you, as a manager, are running a group so poorly that you have enough churn to where retention makes up a large percentage what you work on day to day?
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?
You’re getting downvoted, it seems, but you raise a very real point: you need to have a high turnover, or rough span of control ratios, in order for this to be a common interrupt.
Especially given it’s well known that people don’t leave companies, they leave bad managers… it’s a bit telling.
Anecdotally: I spent 6-7 years managing at various levels (manger/sr mgr/director) before going back to an IC role, and I had a single regrettable attrition (+2 non-regrettable) in that time.
> Especially given it’s well known that people don’t leave companies, they leave bad managers…
I know this is an old saw because it’s usually true, but I’ve left companies where I had a good relationship with my manager because I lost confidence in leadership at some level above them.
Sometimes you can see the train wreck coming and it’s time to go.
I recently went through the retention process, and before resigning the first thing I did was ask around to figure out exactly how the process worked (I wanted to stretch my end date for various reasons). The knowledge was definitely there among the longer tenured ICs, and I've shared notes on my case.
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.
Sounds like pretty bad point to intervene though? If I decided to leave, and even announced it I'm probably pretty pissed off already. I probably raised my concerns before - or if I haven't, it is an indication of dysfunction of its own, I just had no space for that. In the best case you give me something that convinces me not to leave - and my takeaway will be that things are only going to change if I threaten with leaving.
Alot of leadership in general is keeping drama away from the troops. A sure sign of a toxic workplace is when stuff like this and other high level drama at the management level is well known.
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.
I've been gathering anonymous feedback from teams I've worked with as a lead or eng mgr. I usually ask the scrum master or someone neutral to talk to the team and gather a few bullet points. I always talk to the team first and ask them for willingness and permission.
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.
I think smaller companies do think this way of retaining good people. Large corporations believe anyone is replaceable. Again I am an IC & don’t see/hear any extra work done for retention. This proves your point though.
> Large corporations believe anyone is replaceable.
This is definitely true. By design, large corporations are structured so that there is no single point of failure.
> Again I am an IC & don’t see/hear any extra work done for retention.
Even in large corporations, extra work definitely happens for retention (I have experienced it myself as an IC). Even though everyone is by design replaceable, the organization has some incentive to work on retention:
a) Bad retention hurts the organization's reputation and future hiring (horror stories spread very fast)
b) Within the team, losing a great teammate hurts morale and output and managers know it will result in a hit on their metrics at least for the next half.
c) Managers may not always be able to backfill, and losing an employee can reduce the size of their "empire" that they are often trying so hard to establish at whatever cost.
There's also a constant tension between using fear as a motivator to squeeze more work out of employees, but not squeeze so hard that they quit. Different companies find their own spot on this continuum. For example, Amazon is famously in the sweatshop part of the scale and they could care less about their reputation. They seem to be doing OK though.
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 looks like the conclusion on that page supports my claim.
> Conclusions
The notion, at least, behind the expression "there is honor among thieves" is ancient, and it is expressed (inexactly) by English writers as far back as Daniel Defoe in 1723. A pamphlet published in 1782 describes "there is honour among thieves" as an "adage," so the familiar wording must be considerably older than that date.
The counter-proverb, "there is no honour among thieves" is somewhat younger—at least in Google Books search results, with an exact occurrence in 1828 after earlier instances in which writers denied the assertion that honor did exist among thieves.
I read you as claiming that the idiom used the word "amongst". That wasn't true when the word existed and it still isn't true now.
The concept of honor among thieves has been used in many ways. Whether you emphasize that it's present in certain contexts or that it's absent in other contexts doesn't change the way you refer to it.
Not always true. I've coached people to stay before and they are still at the company. Sometimes they have concerns that actually could be fixed from management. People are complex and have many different reasons for wanting to leave, some fixable some not.
If someone puts in a resignation then sure, let them go. But if they come to you, their manager, and say "I'm thinking about leaving" it's a different situation. They may have a legitimate reason that you can solve to their satisfaction.
> there is a LOT of activity at the manager level that you never see and therefore don't often think about when you are an IC.
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.
You make it sound like employees are perfect and communicate transparently at all times. Many people lack the ability to be self critical and want to avoid confrontation. That often leads to surprises, a managers worst friend.
Not op. But to refute 'You make it sound like employees are perfect and communicate transparently at all times' and 'surprises, a managers worst friend'.
Modern workplaces forced quarterly reviews, thus there should be no surprises.
In practise reviews actively prohibit employees from communicating transparently.
Your last sentence makes me think we agree. In my experience employees perceive they have much more to lose from transparency. If they are low agency, not actively bad and defer when asked what they want, you may be surprised when they finally quit.
The issues with any of these things is bad companies/managers burn lots more people than good companies, hence creating large numbers of people with zero trust in things like reviews.
This is, if you've been burned by a company getting rid of you after being transparent, you are never going to be transparent again even if it would be in your favor. Then when you look at most companies thinking the most important thing is how much profit they are going to make next quarter that quarterly meeting stops looking like an event to see how you are doing, into one where the company determines how much blood they can extract from your withered corpse.
I’m had all three titles at various points in my career but the reality is that my responsibilities and operational altitude varied widely from company to company. I just completed a job search after being laid off and one of the challenges of finding a job in leadership is deciphering what each company actually wants from their managers or directors or VPs.
Some roles are “hands on”. For others that’s a red flag. For some it’s all about managing people and emotional intelligence. For others it’s all about technical acumen and technical direction. Sometimes what they are really looking for is exactly what the last person in the role did. In other cases, they want the opposite of the last person to hold the role.
The only thing you can really depend on when it comes to leadership titles in software, in my experience, is that one’s title explains which meetings one is expected to attend.
I've had a similar experience, however I found it tied to the size of the company. If you're a director at a large corporation, you will be very siloed and you most likely won't be doing much coding. If you're a directory at a small company, you're going to be coding, managing coders, and being part of leadership and strategic discussions.
Can confirm. I currently work for an SMB (~150 employees) as a manager. Our VP doesn't write any code but the directors and managers are still IC's on projects.
Right now I really like being an IC in addition to being manager cause I still have that coding itch to scratch, but I just know one day I will eventually graduate to role where I don't write any code. Long term it is the direction I want to go in but it's going to be bittersweet when I finally get to a role with no coding.
Isn’t the most effective way to find out what you’ll be doing is by measuring how many people are going to be under you overall?
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.
The "number of people you've had under you" does provides insight into what a role entails, but there's still a lot of variance. What does seem to be uniform is that the "number of people you've had under you" determines whether a hiring company will think you’re qualified for a job. Companies simply aren't likely to take a "risk" hiring an outsider that hasn't been in a role with a similar perceived scope of responsibility. And since actual here's-what-you're-doing-day-to-day responsibility can vary so much, the "number of people you've had under you" becomes a proxy for that.
I understand the reasoning for why they put so much weight on the number of reports you’ve been previously responsible for, but it also explains why big companies stagnate. The people change but the thinking and strategy doesn’t.
> The only thing you can really depend on when it comes to leadership titles in software
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.
And it's not necessarily a bad thing. I should think adaptive roles would be a benefit, not a hazard. At my company we simply list "software engineer, all levels" in our postings.
> The biggest single development issue I’ve seen over the years is that many VPs still think like directors.
> The VP’s job is to get the right answer. They are the functional expert. No one on the team knows their function better than they do. And even if someone did, they are still playing the VP of function role and it’s their job – and no one else’s — to get the right answer.
> If the CEO makes a plan, gets it approved by the board, and executes it well but it doesn’t work, they cannot tell the board “but, but, it’s the plan we agreed to." Most CEOs wouldn’t even dream of saying that. It’s because CEOs understand they are held accountable not for effort or activity, but results. Part of truly operating at the VP level is to internalize this fact.
Alas that I read this 6 years too late, because it perfectly explains what went wrong at my then-company. A member of the C-suite came up with (what sounded like) a good strategy, but it didn't work because the engineering team wasn't able to execute well enough; and rather than either modify the plan to account for this or shift his attention to fixing the engineering culture -- which might have been politically impossible, but was still his responsibility to try -- he doubled down and became more obsessed with implementing the details of a losing plan. In other words, he was thinking like a director.
A great book is "Strategy and the Fat Smoker". It's written by a consultant but points out an obvious point: the quality of the strategy itself is not nearly as impactful as the ability to execute. The author compares this to being a fat smoker who won't change their habits - knowing the right strategy is insufficient.
> [Leveling] conflates career development and salary negotiation. It encourages a mindset of saying, “what must I do to make L10” when you want to say, “I want a $10K raise.”
It's not obvious to me why this is a bad thing. I agree that incentivising a box-ticking mindset discourages ownership and initiative. But for software engineers I feel like there has to be some methodical (and transparent) way for raises to be assigned, and for it to relate to skills and traits. Otherwise you can easily end up in a situation where people are rewarded for being bolshy and savvy rather than valuable to the company.
I think that what you are missing is that "what must I do to make L10" and "what is valuable to the company" are typically somewhat orthogonal. A prototypical example is that almost every career ladder out there mentions things like "impact" and architect/systems design work rather than often more valuable maintenance work that keeps current systems running. In addition, measuring the contribution of any individual to a team effort is always difficult, in some cases pretty much impossible until years later. This means that it is always possible to game such career frameworks by focusing only on the things the framework rewards and skipping everything else.
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.
Well, that's sort of the author's point -- every framework is focused on something other than simple salary numbers, which definitionally means it is focused on something other than the dollar value provided to the company.
We recognize that they can still be a useful tool, because 1) assigning dollar values to employees is an inexact science that's hard to standardize over an organization and 2) ICs like at least some direction about what they need to do to be eligible for more money aside from just "provide more value"
Sure, but does that mean the framework shouldn't exist? Something can be flawed and still provide some value.
In the case of leveling, I'd suggest the levels are guidelines and not policy. As soon as they become policy, management cannot work around them adequately, and they begin to detract value.
For example, at my employer, we have levels (within job families, I haven't seen a level grid that has engineers and personal assistants). But, I've never had to tick every single box to get an employee promoted. I have to make my case, and I do use the levels as a guideline, but I've never felt it necessary to absolutely follow every item.
> Otherwise you can easily end up in a situation where people are rewarded for being bolshy and savvy rather than valuable to the company.
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.
> 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.
This is a win from the business's perspective. They are getting greater value for lower cost.
In my more cynical moments, I sometimes suspect that tech companies deliberately target the sort of low self-esteem perfectionist types for which this behavior is common specifically because the company sees an arbitrage opportunity between what the employee is worth and what the employee believes they are worth.
They absolutely do, but those companies end up getting labelled "burnout factories" like Applied Intuition or Scale AI and as a result have trouble both recruiting good seniors or retaining their juniors long enough for them to become senior.
At the end of the day, companies run by adults treat their employees like adults and don't try to stiff them out of a misguided desire to save $100k over three years.
I think the problem that developers may feel is that they want to earn more money for being a better developer, but not nessicarily accept more responsibility or spend less time developing code.
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.
> I think the problem that developers may feel is that they want to earn more money for being a better developer, but not nessicarily accept more responsibility or spend less time developing code.
Well the problem is some people don't get there is a limit of how much impact and additional revenue you can create for the company by writing better/more code. And that would serve as a basis for paying you more.
The thing is a guy helping out via mentoring 10 other people or recruiting better talent will create much more impact on how the company functions than if he wrote 2x better code or 2x faster. There is simply in almost all engineering effort a hard limit of how much a single person can contribute.
> The thing is a guy helping out via mentoring 10 other people or recruiting >better talent will create much more impact on how the company functions than if he wrote 2x better code or 2x faster. There is simply in almost all engineering effort a hard limit of how much a single person can contribute.
Very debatable. Not at all true where I work ( worked ). Better code clearly larger impact on larger timeframes ( think 5+ year ) that perpetually retraining incoming juniors.
This line of thinking applies to creating widgets on the assembly line but writing code combined with solving the right problems can totally have 10/20 even 50x impact. Automation can be levered up quite well with the right setup.
in this context 'your boss' is usually a level or two above your direct manager on org chart
Take it as the most senior person you can get regular face time with, this also needs to be gamed.
> It encourages a mindset of saying, “what must I do to make L10” when you want to say, “I want a $10K raise.”
> 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.
At my employer, we have several job families that encompass "software developer"... software engineer, cloud engineer, architect, and technical fellow.
With the two engineering roles, there are levels... software engineer I, II, III, Lead, Principal. Architect starts with more seniority... architect (roughly equivalent to to Lead), principal architect. And technical fellow is "director level" - basically a terminal spot for ICs who are really good at building software but have no desire to manage people - they typically report to a VP or director - they do have lots of meetings, but they're also setting the technical direction of the company for the long haul.
I guess it depends on where you work. I’ve moved up four “levels” since I started and I basically just do the same thing. You could argue I should have been the higher level from the start and it took a while to get recognized.
Pay and rank have a connection but not a direct connection.
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 article is good, but I want to complain about this argument (which the author is not responsible for):
> CEOs understand they are held accountable not for effort or activity, but results
IMO that's one of the biggest problems in the American business world. If you ruin the company long term to get "results," your plan is successful. If you harm the company short term for long term benefit, your plan has failed.
No long term thinking, just watching number go up and down. It's practically a form of superstition.
Find a better unit to report your costs in. Like hours of work, or any other hard asset (real estate, gold, bitcoin etc.). Otherwise you are bound to be disappointed every year.
Indeed I haven't used that term correctly. What I meant, is some kind of asset that is not easily inflated, something that in the long term can retain its exchange value better. Of course, nothing is guaranteed, and especially with bitcoin, it super volatile. But you have a better chance of judging your purchase power based on that.
>Most leveling systems are too granular, with the levels separated by arbitrary characterizations. It’s makework. It’s fake science. It’s bureaucratic and encourages a non-thinking “climb the ladder” approach to career development. (“Hey, let’s develop you to go from somewhat-independent to rather-independent this year.”)
This is a funny, common requirement. Every junior developer is told they should feel free to ask questions - and now they have a financial incentive not to.
I’ve managed a few people who have come to the same conclusion as you did there, and had a mixed success rate there.
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 big tech these overly-granular, arbitrary systems are designed specifically to avoid this kind of variance in promotability from how managers infer the rules. If they're designed badly, you have to lie to get your example through the pipeline.
> If they're designed badly, you have to lie to get your example through the pipeline.
Agreed
> If the spec says 'doesn't ask questions', it is!
It's not. At anywhere I've ever worked, it's about meeting enough of the criteria and your manager coming to bat for you. If the spec says don't ask questions and your manager backs you, you're getting promoted. If the spec says you must make 3 widgets a day and you make 4 widgets a day more than anyone else, but your manager won't back you, you're not getting the promotion.
If your manager is a rule stickler, follow the rules. If they value breaking the process, then break the process.
But dogmatically pointing to the rules, and saying "but the rules say this" is unlikely to get you very far. To quote Geoffrey Rush - "They're more like guidelines"
> Every junior developer is told they should feel free to ask questions - and now they have a financial incentive not to.
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….”
I have a similar mindset though less focused on the type of questions being asked and more about how many times I have to answer the same question.
Ideally, the number is one time. As in one conversation where the person walks away understanding the answer. If I have to have that conversation more than once it’s a problem.
Obviously there’s nuance - it can take time to get your head around a new concept or hard problem. But in any case, I like that as one dimension when thinking about a person’s skill/level/potential.
> I have a similar mindset though less focused on the type of questions being asked and more about how many times I have to answer the same question.
Yes, I completely agree and do that as well.
The focus on “type of question” has been something I’ve done more recently after helping someone out. Just reflecting on “what type of problem did I just help solve and how can I make it easier for them to solve on their own in the future”. Very often the answer is “more documentation” or similar, getting things only in my head down where everyone can benefit. On the other hand I walk away from some problems I’ve helped with frustrated that the answer was 1-2 Google searches away and the issue had nothing to do with “our stack”.
I mostly agree with you, but there’s another angle that is similar. How many times does the person come to you with a similar question but on a slightly different topic and you need to guide them through _how to find_ the answer. I’ve supervised mid level engineers in the past who will just drop a stack trace in a slack DM and expect me to tell them what’s wrong - I didn’t write the code so why do you expect me to figure it out for you. But when I have the conversation of “we’ve talked about how to dxooore these kinds of problems a few times now, next time you need to apply these techniques”,it often doesn’t land.
Asking questions and unblocking yourself is a required competency for acting independently.
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.)
I always say being a manager is one of the toughest jobs around, tougher than most IC jobs. But at the same time, bad managers have many more avenues to escape accountability than ICs do.
I greatly respect the good managers I know. But as a current example, one of their direct peers has spent several years driving off top talent, failing to deliver on goals, and is now encouraging others to quit in order to destroy their own team on the way out…and is currently on a multi month leave of absence! And their boss says “oh but you see I must follow process x” and “the problem has only recently gotten this bad.” All of which are bullshit lies to cover the fact that this toxic manager has been very effective at deflecting and avoiding.
I have to wonder about a job function that cannot police its own ranks.
I might disagree a bit with this, I've had all three titles and from my experience:
A manager is executing on plans, managing the work, aligning people on teams and enforcing policy & process.
A director is creating the plans to solve problems, intaking work, aligning teams and creating good processes from policy.
A VP is about defining the problem teams need to solve, managing capacity/budget for work, aligning on a strategy across a company and creating good policy.
The junior engineer asking “how can I become a VP?” is classic. Chances of you becoming a VP at the same place you worked as a junior engineer are slim. I know one person who did it, it took him 25 years, and he had been on the golf team in college, so he had a lot more exposure to company VIPs than most. Change employers while in middle management or you will spend a long time there.
And that’s assuming you even like being a VP. Sure, the money’s good, but there’s a lot of accountability and you either need to be good at taking it or good at avoiding it.
Hilariously, in the 2010s you didn't need to become a VP to make that kind of money. You could go the principle or distinguished engineer route and still make bank.
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.
Is it me or do attempts to generalize career development across companies seem futile?
The concrete example here I can give is working at one company where "Manager" meant you had 10+ direct reports and were expected to do almost no technical work. Versus a second company where "Manager" meant you had 4-5 directs and were doing significant amount of technical work. The path from IC to Manager at company 1 had almost no commonalities with company 2 despite similar-sounding titles.
I guess what I am saying is that promotion ladders are so tightly integrated with company norms that attempting to seek outside advice on "how do I get to the next level" seems useless.
Edit: To rephrase more succinctly - Are articles like TFA useless or do I not know how to interperet them?
It's a data point. It's similar to the ridiculous titles given to ICs in the last 20 years. What does Senior Developer vs Senior Engineer mean? Do Architects code or not? I'm sure you have an answer, but someone else with different experience might have a complete different answer.
Really appreciate this post as I try making the leap from Senior IC Engineer into a "next rung up" role (currently aiming for Enterprise Architect, Principal IC Engineer, or Management of ICs); it really helps explain what mindset I should be having for each phase, should I seek to continue upward growth.
In the here and now, it seems like my "sweet spot" is to aim for Director in the next five years or so, regardless of the next role I eventually take (currently on the hunt due to RIF). I'm already at the point where I'm mentoring junior colleagues, delegating tasks among the team, and spending more time on tactics and strategy than daily engineering work - and that seems to fit with a Director role, albeit cross-function and cross-domain (which is what I already do, being an infra engie that can also do networking and storage and public cloud and collaboration - Senior jack of all trades). Above that (VP, etc)...I dunno, guess it depends on what kind of person I am in five years' time, after I've hit Director and had some experience in that role.
I think to be a manager, also 'read the room', or 'context'. Your response is just a bunch of "I this" , "I That". Nobody knows you. What does your current step in life have to do with anything, with anybody else.
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.
Ya'll be reading way too much into a potential management or leadership style based on one comment about what I specifically took away from the OP and how it affected me specifically. If anything, the vibe I'm getting back is that you're the types to make strong judgements based on single sources absent broader context, which is not something I'd want in either an engineer or a leader above me, as it demonstrates a degree of inflexibility or unwillingness to be wrong. The one above you at least challenged me in a way I could respond to, rather than resorting to an insult masquerading as critique based upon one comment.
Take your own advice:
> Genuinely like ppl around you from your heart ( not fake it)
Folks who genuinely empathize with others aren't quick to resort to anonymized slights based on limited information, in my experience. Rather, it's the fakers who all too quickly devolve into brash and flippant comments when they feel they're safe behind some sort of shield. I'm aware this is a bit hypocritical on my part saying it this way, but sometimes you gotta wade into the mud to make your case.
When I was younger engineer. I did 'I' self reference speech a lot. It was years later I realized it was alienating people. Now really focus more time on listening, and only speaking about what the other person is interested in. Now when others are always using "I", it just stands out at me.
People really are simple, and want to talk about themselves, so if you realize this, and talk about what others want to talk about, you get along better.
I picked it up from Dale Carnegie, 'How to Win Friends and Influence People'.
Yep its very for almost everyone because so much of our identity is tied around I and its very hard to let that go. I personally struggle with that a lot.
...yeah, I get that, and have been articulating that better through career coaching, leadership skills development, and actual work. My comment on this piece was self-referential, though, in an attempt to explain what I got from the piece, and how it affected me. Hence the extensive use of I/Me/first-person-perspective.
In an actual leadership role, my role is to build and maintain the bridge between our team, their expertise, and the agendas of those above us. I champion their successes, and shelter them from unwarranted blame. I set the tone, and in order for them to be successful, it needs to be a tone they resonate positively with. It's a role that's part translator, part leader, part firewatcher, and part strategist, all on top of the usual IC stuff - at least initially, or as needed (e.g., headcount reductions, RIFs).
At least for initial management roles, it's about maintaining balance - ensuring the team is productive and can succeed, without letting them burn themselves out or get dragged into "makework"/"busywork".
> I can’t tell you the number of times people have asked me for “development” or “leveling” conversations where I get excited and start talking about learning, skills gaps, and such and it’s clear all they wanted to talk about was salary.
This seems to be a rather naïve response. In a paying job, the main impetus to increase your knowledge and performance is to gain more salary. Clearly the people that they are talking to want to know "what kind of value do I need to provide to the company in terms of knowledge or skills that will enable me to make more money". I don't see why this should be a disappointment.
The author is excited to talk about helping the employee grow and have more impact, which (if successful) should make them more valuable to the company, resulting in promotion and increased compensation.
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.
1.) As a manager I was working tactically to facilitate the day-to-day plans of my leaders. I also functioned as a buffer between those leaders and my direct reports. I typically made a decent bit LESS than my direct reports as I was management, not development.
2.) As a director (I was responsible for an entire main product) I developed, negotiated, and implemented a long term (1 - 5 years) strategic plan for a product. I primarily interacted with team/focus managers and the directors of the company (Prez, VPs, etc.) to further those goals. I made considerably more than my direct reports and had options as part of total comp.
3.) As a (junior) VP I primarily did coordination between product line directors and the operational heads (EVP, Prez). Focused on long term corporate strategy which tended to be much more about finance than about product. Dealt a lot with VC/investor relations, corporate partnerships and market positioning.
I found it interesting that the author mentioned tactical planning for manager and director, but not strategic planning for the VP. That seems like a useful differentiator to me (with extremely contrived examples)...
C-level - sets highest level strategy (We're going to the moon!)
VP - adds level of detail to strategy (draws a map from earth to the moon, decides we need a rocket ship to get there)
Director - bridges strategy and tactics (creates high level requirements the rocket ship, makes sure there are enough gas stations on the way to the moon)
Manager - ensures tactical success (ensures the team builds a rocket that meets the spec, makes sure the rocket stops for gas on the way)
And of course, for a sufficiently large org, some of this gets offloaded to dedicated Product Managers, Program Managers, etc. But, that's orthogonal to the point of the article, I think.
I think the impression comes from banks, because you need to be a VP to sign contracts for the company or something like that, so they just make everyone a VP.
This puts words over why I don't want to be promoted. I've watched enough VPs looking enviously at the seemingly stress free life (comparatively speaking) of lower level staff engineers, busy as they are shuffling from one escalation to another instead of actually building stuff.
You're not wrong. Upper management is a very stressful grind with little glory. It used to be that it was paid very well to compensate for that, but staff engineer jobs are close enough in comp now that the difference in stress becomes really questionable.
I understand what line managers do just fine, but our company works on a process where important projects are supervised by a VP, which really leaves you with the feeling that you never see what the directors are doing. Presumably they're doing something. Although my last one got fired because everyone under him thought he was useless, so maybe not.
Reading the article, it also makes them sound useless because it just says it's okay if they have an excuse for failing.
It very much depends on the company and size of the team. A lot of it is planning, filling gaps, coordinating with other teams, and endless meetings.
I get that that can sound like valueless filler, but it's actually more important than you'd think if you've never seen the sausage made, so to speak. It's basically trying to turn ambiguous mandates from above into actionable plans.
I am not a big fan of Steve overall, but the one thing he inherently understood was “identity”. How I am using “identity” in this context is, how someone sees themselves. It is the story they tell themselves about themselves. I am a good leader. I and good at solving problems. I am a dog person. I am tidy or I am sloppy. And on and on.
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.
thanks for putting into words what i realised but couldnt formulate. best workers were ones where the product that they managed was a part of their identity.
I think this post is excellent. It clearly describes the problem in many companies - granular levels/ladder climbing.
It also describes another great problem that shows up in tech - non-technical/non-owner managers, directors, and VP.
As described in this article, the VP is supposed to be the expert who created the plan of execution, the director is supposed to be the expert who executes it.
But in big tech at least, this is not what happens. VPs and directors are clueless to the point of incompetence. They understand politics but not how to drive with leadership, deep technical understanding, planning, communication, and direction. They spend an enormous amount of time in BS like stack ranking and perf reviews instead of creating solid plans that move the company needle - externally.
As a result, in large companies, you see the corporate hellhole decline. VPs and Directors are not respected at all. They can't answer much. They aren't clued in on the tech. They don't understand competition. They don't understand innovation. They do understand ladder climbing politics - so they create an empire of ladder climbers.
It is almost hilarious how poor some tech management is. Would you join a ship where the captain does not how ship-steering works?
If you want to be a VP, just come to a company where I work. It's not been growing in size for like 15 years, and these top ranks have been saturating with people who asked for promotions.
Everyone is VP, director or head of something to the point that it just looks ridiculous when His Highness Head of QA and His Majesty CTO stay late in the office to fix that useEffect hook in the cancel subscription pop-up.
I would add that typically the O levels there (officer in military) in corporate usually have bonus/equity as part of compensation, like a major element of comp, not some $1k petty cash bonus.
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.
I think differentiating roles between “effort” vs “results” is an interesting concept. I don’t have first-hand experience with a formal role ladder. I work in a small firm where I created my own role building a software platform internal to an org where no one else has any software engineering expertise. However, I’ve always ascribed to the notion that seniority is proportional to “social credit”. Where social credit is some combination of your perceived expertise at your craft, your ability to achieve results (on an arbitrary project/task) i.e. your professional competence, and the trust others put into you that you can/would help them if they ever needed. Social credit is built, and also spent. Failure is tolerated if you have social credit to spare, but is ultimately finite. People want to follow you if you have amassed more social credit than most.
This is also why starting your own thing will give you better experience at being a VP than working at a 9-5.
(But it’s also harder than being a VP.)
And if you’re going back to 9-5 after an unsuccessful startup stint, look for VP or GM like roles. Anything else won’t have enough degrees of freedom to keep you happy
Interstingly in a traditional British company directors are the most senior and VPs don't exist. A director would be a board level job, as in a statutory director.
Obviously there are a lot of US companies in the UK and their influence spreads...
Noticed hn in general seems to consider VP pretty senior. In my day to day finance world it's basically middle management. i.e. People still pretty deep in the detail
>Noticed hn in general seems to consider VP pretty senior
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.
In finance, this would be more like a managing director (e.g., in Two Sigma, one of the engineering leaders reporting directly to the CTO). You're totally right that "VP" just refers to more like a mid-level or senior engineer in that world.
>"I am talking about one of three levels at which people operate: manager, director, and vice president. Here are my definitions:
>* Managers are paid to drive results with some support. They have experience in the function, can take responsibility, but are still learning the job and will have questions and need support. They can execute the tactical plan for a project but typically can’t make it.
>* Directors are paid to drive results with little or no supervision (“set and forget”). Directors know how to do the job. They can make a project’s tactical plan in their sleep. They can work across the organization to get it done. I love strong directors. They get shit done.
>* VPs are paid to make the plan. Say you run marketing. Your job is to understand the company’s business situation, make a plan to address it, build consensus to get approval of that plan, and then go execute it."
As an IC at startups or consultant I frequently feel like I'm expected to do all of these things, and produce results.
“Levels don’t matter except for these levels that I care about”
:rolleyes:
All titles are made up. No one fits a role/title perfectly. It’s all a bunch of bullshit. Normally it’s really just using salary ranges as the core thing people care about and people move up “titles” while not improving their skills one bit (seniority, playing politics better, etc).
At my last company they made a big deal about becoming a “senior developer”, it was a lot more responsibly, work, _pay_, etc. Years later I (and another developer) was outperforming the “senior” developers by a good margin and the company gave us both title bumps, a 3% CoL raise, and… $1K bonus.
That was probably the last time I believed in any sort of sanity in ranking/titles/etc.
Ask for what you want, don’t wait for a “performance review”, yes it’s uncomfortable, get over it. No ranking system is going to accurately reflect skills.
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
Those are great ideas in theory I guess but not at all how they are treated industry wide and often not how they are treated within the same company.
99% of the time titles have very little to do with what someone does day to day. It’s just not that simple and clear cut.
All that to say, I don’t find one persons thoughts on what those titles mean very useful since that’s just what it means to that specific person. There is no, that I’m aware of, industry-wide agreement.
Not to mention I find those definitions to be silly, overly simple, and not how anyone thinks of their job.
Unfortunately, shit will always roll downhill. I can tell your understanding is an ideal scenario, because it's the opposite of how the real world works.
Wow, this post could not have come at a more welcome time.
I'm a Solutions Architect, and after 4 years in-role am agitating for advancement; a 2-year merger put everything for everyone on hold until its resolution. It's become clear that there has been no plan for advancement.
After unsolicited and vague promises of a director or even VP(!?) role before the merger resolution, they have since been talking of *maybe* a manager, or maybe *maybe* senior manager role. *Maybe* managing just two of my current developers, whom they are preparing to off-shore. This all while they have promoted another SA to a director position; a well-deserved promotion at that.
Oh, they're also getting rid of the Solutions Architect job itself: soon I will be "Lead Analyst".
This is all to say that the post and all your comments are very helpful! Love this site.
When I had an IC role, I would recommend tech projects and execute them w/ my team (we can solve "problem X" with "tech stack Y"). I also had a lot of agency in creating solutions for tech proposals. When I had the director role, I made sure nobody wasted time. I would qualify deals to chase, recommend strategies and core competencies to pursue (AI and Cloud yes, Blockchain and Quantum no). Now, in my VP role I try to get people good at making these strategy decisions (we should follow shipley for capture, etc.). Also, a LOT more relationship capital building and external COMMs at the VP level.
Some of this seems a little simplistic; as a relatively new director who reports to the CTO I think everyone is "building the plan" but at different levels of granularity. Where we run into trouble is when the CTO gets too far away from defining the broad outcomes and veers deep into the "how". They get very prescriptive, but without the context of the implementation details or any real knowledge of the countless small problems that directors, then managers, then ICs deal with. It looks a lot like (and really is a falvour of) micro-managing.
>> It conflates career development and salary negotiation
I just went through this with an IC 2 levels below me. To the credit of the person's manager they communicated to the IC "don't ask me for a promotion when you want more money". The (easily said; harder to implement) solution is to build a management relationship with people that has an "agent-client" dynamic. The direct manager can't be viewed as the decision maker and needs to be the advocate for this to happen IME.
"I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
I vaguely remember a quote that goes "No kid ever dreamed about growing up to be a middle manager."
I get that work is just a means to an end, but find something you love to do. If you love management, that's great. I love being an engineer, and prefer to be a player/coach over just a leader, and hate that as I get older my age is looked down on.
IME the only time (higher) age is looked down on is when it's used a crutch by that person - whether its derision of others because they're not as old, or "I've been around longer than you so you should listen to me simply because of that" or whatever the case may be.
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.
i don't agree with any of these definitions. From my experience VPs and directors are so far removed from any actual work that most of their "plans" mean very little.
Things get done not because of their "plans" but despite of them.
In terms of career development. Ppl aren't promoted for their ability to make "plans" or execute them. Ppl are promoted into those promotions for being trustworthy by ppl above them .
To get to that position, you should be
1. be people oriented. Genuinely like ppl around you from your heart ( not fake it) . Take the first step and build genuine love for ppl around you. Your first instinct towards anyone should be trying to make their work lives easier.
This is super hard for nerdy coder types because we have mental depenendcy on being the "smart one", hard to let go of that part of identity.
2. consistenly deliver results and become the person that can be trusted by person that gave you the assignment.
Building trust is the main job when you go work. Its not writing some badass code or being innovating or whatever.
Having been in both situations in large organizations, I can say the connection between the plans and the work can be difficult to see sometimes, but the absence of such a plan is much worse in the long run. As the size of groups grow, people don't generally self organize.
Great career development advice. This is absolutely the most reliable way to advance in an organization.
Most of the work of “good” managers is about affecting culture, providing a sustainable work load, emotional intelligence, encouraging team work and sense of shared ownership
Yet in outsider society and political discourse this is thrown into the trash under the weight of individual rewards and exploitation
To be a good manager means to run a team well and get stuff done. To be a good VP means to increase shareholder value. To be a director means you are at some percentage of completion of the soul/morality extraction process that happens when transitioning from the first to the second.
It is a good read. It is early so I can't help wondering if I am nodding, because it hits close to home or coffee did not hit yet, but I think I agree with the author here.
It's an interesting read an hard to disagree with.
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.
This is an interesting way of thinking about it compared to the common definition that uses "scope" (which outside IC roles is a synonym for to headcount)
I'm a bit late to respond here but in case you're checking replies: Camille Fournier's book The Manager's Path is enjoyable to read and covers exactly this
> I can’t tell you the number of times people have asked me for “development” or “leveling” conversations where I get excited and start talking about learning, skills gaps, and such and it’s clear all they wanted to talk about was salary. Disappointing.
I mean…these people are rational and they want more money, which is an objective metric. In a confusing world of HR jargon, levels, lack of clear links between output and compensation, what else could you expect? It’s on you, the manager, to link the financial metric to specific tangible results, whether past or future.
If high performers are having these “I want a raise” conversations, it’s because they know they are delivering, they want a sign of progress in their career. They may already be gathering market data of their real price through interviews or at least discussions/research. This means they are already at risk of moving. Lack of insight into this from managers is “Disappointing”
In my own experience, and having guided others through these conversations, managers need to always have some clarity on what they could provide to the people reporting directly to them.
The timing should be determined based on an understanding of what is best for the company. E.g., what maximizes retention or other key organizational metrics.
> Yes, you might discover that a Senior FPA Analyst II earns the same as a Product Marketing Director I, but why does that matter? It’s a coincidence. It’s like saying with $3.65 I can buy either a grande non-fat latte or a head of organic lettuce. What matters is the fair price of each of those goods in the market — not they that happen to have the same price.
Well, it infuriates me just the same. If a coffee shot costs the same or more that some other food that is healthy and gives you more calories and/or nutrients. And I say this as a coffee lover.
But beside specific examples nitpicking, I understand the gist of it, and I understand the market reasons - you want to attract or retain talent and they/we look at compensations on a market level - but this still doesn't mean it is fair. Unless you believe in fairy tales and invisible hands.
"Fair" has many facets. It can be fairly compensated for the market value of a nominal role but still be unfairly compensated within the company according to the work executed and the "value"[1] created.
[1] Value in this context can be not just only monetary value but creating a good working environment, help other to do better their job etc
I'm not sure what to tell you. That words can have different meanings given the context? And this version of fair is using a specific one that you're unwilling to accept.
It seems you wish the author used "market rate" and not "fair". But you're annoyed at the wrong thing because that usage is completely valid. That society has allowed "fair" to mean what the market is willing to pay regardless of its equality to fellow man.
Personally I think “…but we executed the plan…” is unreasonable at any level, at any job, at any task, and any point in anyone’s life. It’s never a way to go through any part of life.
If you set out to complete a task, it should be to achieve your goal. Your should measure your success as achievement of your goal, not by whether you went through the motions.
I like this post, it's clear, well considered and concise. I'd caveat that with, "for certain kinds of companies". Two thoughts:
1) On his issue with levels. I don't disagree with most of the observations, but I've definitely experienced staff that are less concerned with the pay increase and just want the validation and pat on the back of the level bump. It's weird, because it usually comes with more responsibility and work. While just getting more money lets you go back to what you were doing and are already good at. But everybody has their own ideas at career progression.
2) In my personal career, the types of companies I've worked for have a slightly different flavor of this, and I've come up with my own internal shorthand ideas for what these titles mean. It's useful to consider this because as you rise in these ranks, you have to also train the next generation to be able to step into your shoes and do a good job:
Manager - you are 85%/15% focused down/up. Down into your reports and tasks and up to receive new input from your manager (perhaps a director) and provide back status. You spend that 85% of the time taking somewhat vague directions and turning them into actionable tasks by your reports. You reports in turn should have well scoped tasks that when completed, build into a completed work unit that satisfies a directive from up your chain. You are a work breakdown structure and scheduling engine. Your performance is generally measured by delivering programs on-time, on-budget, and having a minimum of issues with your reports.
Director - you are 50/50 focused down/up. You spend time refining vague business unit goals into vague programs. You rely on your Managers to turn those programs into work tasks. You have a lot of responsibility for driving revenue, have a budget, but in most companies are not specifically measured by P&L. Your performance is measured by revenue targets. You get pulled into sales and marketing projects that are already moving freight trains to provide grounding, and to mobilize resources under you to support specific efforts. You got into your position because you provided on-time, on-budget program successes repeatedly, and a few of them struck gold by chance. You also had a knack for working well with the sales/marketing people and maybe even straddled between worlds.
VP - you are 15/85 down/up and spend that time turning impossibly vague corporate goals into merely vague business goals. You are responsible for P&L, and your performance is measured by both revenue and profit targets. You spend a lot of the day working with sales and marketing, and you conceive and initiate growth efforts. Depending on the company, you likely have your own subordinate sales and marketing team that reports directly to you, and is separate from the engineering team. You got into your position primarily because you are really good/lucky at growing revenue and can put together revenue growth strategies that have a higher probability of working than not. It's even possible you never spent time in the engineering organization, and worked up through the sales/marketing path.
Source: Been all of the above at various times. Highest position was President of a very small startup, which I count as almost meaningless (where I also did a stint as a VP). "Biggest" position was half a decade as a Sr. Director of an 200+ head engineering organization in a several thousand person company till I was promoted out of it.
Obligatory UK translation here: If you're reading this in the UK, when he writes "Director", the nuance is different. In the UK, this means Company Director most of the time, although the US influence is changing this.
> But it’s the same standard to which the CEO is held. If the CEO makes a plan, gets it approved by the board, and executes it well but it doesn’t work, they cannot tell the board “but, but, it’s the plan we agreed to.”
Some advice to the managers and aspiring managers from the perspective an employee.
Good qualities in managers:
* I have a lot to learn from you
* you reward me with promotions and bonuses when I do well
* you can sell a vision, even a small one, and motivate me
* you take my problems and concerns seriously and do not ignore them, rather than gas-lighting me and trying to paint my concerns as the problem
* you have the awareness to figure out what my core motivations are, and have and skill to align your goals with mine, thus putting both of us on a path towards shared success
* you are forthcoming and honest with your feedback, bc you see my blindspots and tell me about them so I can fix them
* you understand that too much attrition is a bad signal for management success
* you understand that as a leader you understand accountability -- you deserve a greater proportion of the success but also the downside when things go bad
* I want to crawl over broken glass for you bc of all of the above bc you have earned my loyalty
Bad qualities in managers:
* there isn't much to learn from you, and the best thing I can learn is not how to be bad manager, bc you're a bad manager and I know it
* if you leave and my performance does not suffer, it means your presence never had a positive effect (or any effect) in my role
* you gas light me when I bring up problems and concerns, shifting any responsibly form you to me
* you are neurotic and I need to work around your emotions to make you "feel good", and I get more reward for this than actually delivering work
* you do not have the courage to give me difficult feedback that I need to hear bc you are afraid of having uncomfortable and awkward conversations
* you are so preoccupied with making your manager happy that you sacrifice your employees to accomplish this
* you do not care enough about attrition and underestimate the consequences of losing good employees, mostly bc your employees feel the consequences, not you
* bc of your lack of skill as manager, the relationships you have with your employees end up being adversarial rather then a shared success..no one wants to crawl over broken glass to work for you and the employees who stick around do not want to be there
* you do not understand accountability -- you repeatedly make poor decisions bc you never face the consequences, until its too late and then you get fired bc at that point, its obvious the problems was you all along
* you were promoted bc you kissed the right ass at the right time, which does great damage to your world view bc now you assume this is just the way the world works
I could keep going, but that should suffice for now.
One thing that I learned from going to IC to manager:
there is a LOT of activity at the manager level that you never see and therefore don't often think about when you are an IC.
Case in point: trying to retain good people.
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).
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.
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".
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.
I agree about the hidden work, but you describe it in a reactionary manner.
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
You can only be so proactive. At a ginormous company, the pace of change is glacial. You can push really hard and get buy-in from leaders with hundreds of people under them and still get blocked trying to improve things about the office/culture that are simply beyond one's control - even with VP buy-in. Big companies need to federate out more if they want this type of proactive management - or just accept it and maybe that makes sense too.
Indeed, don't ignore obvious issues like team morale, career paths for ICs, but there's a certain zen to the balance between proactive and reactive. Don't do too much proactive work if there isn't incremental return on it. Don't burn yourself out or set yourself up for deep disappointment.
Mid-pandemic I saw another manager go from enthusiastic to despondent overnight when his upcoming hiring headcount was cut to zero and his lovingly cultivated recruiting pipeline was basically worthless. He left shortly after, unsurprisingly. It was painful to watch and taught me a lesson in contingent value in management. I don't mean to say I know better though, he was definitely a better manager than me lol.
If you are a manager, would you accept that from a subordinate who failed to do their job successfully?
The nature of work is that it's not a cleanroom lab or a business school case study; lots of difficult and unfair obstacles exist, and your job is to overcome them. To me, that defines 'job' like the sea defines 'sailor'. You're very lucky when that isn't the case.
Realistically, there is some judgment involved and matters of degree, and there are limitations, but the best people find a way using the resources they have.
"Reactive" - reactionary is a popular political alignment
Well I hope it's not a popular one. A populist one?
Have you looked around?
Yes, I'm a big fan of it. Mostly what you learn is things you see online aren't real. Also that people love free parking.
Have you?
Yes
And to your point what sort of reactionary behavior do you see offline vs online? Which of the political parties is more reactionary?
I had the same experience moving from IC to manager. I didn't realize the amount of work that managers are doing that I didn't see and more importantly that they couldn't tell me about.
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.
I moved from IC to manager to director. Meetings in general are a huge time suck, and by the end of my tenure, I was basically triple-booked for the entire day every day. Every evening was an exercise in deciding who to piss off. And the emails! <Marvin/Android Voice>Don't get me started on the emails! :-) Finishing the twilight of my career as an IC consulting, and it's much better for me.
How did you get started consulting? I'm in a similar spot, been a director, don't really want to go back to it.
Took the same path, just wanted to commiserate on the emails. It'll teach you where Bezos got the idea for his infamous "!"/"?" emails.
Somebody burn email and chat to the ground, I want to move back to interoffice memos ;)
Can you share a bit more about Bezos email ?
Ancient Internet lore at this point :)
Bezos used to (supposedly, didn't work for him) have the habit to forward emails to reports (direct and further down), with just an added comment of "!" or "?"
"!" was "Do something about this" "?" was "Can you please explain WTH?"
https://www.reddit.com/r/MBA/comments/kwryld/on_product_mana... is an example story of that. There are plenty more.
The exclamation mark version seems apocryphal, though.
As someone who has been around for decades I assume, do you thnk anything tech has created has made it easier to manage people or teams?
I'm only 35, but I don't see how it could of. Systems should be able to improve collaboration and alignment, but I don't see many that do.
Or maybe I don't know how much worse it could be.
This is super interesting - thanks for sharing!
> 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
Could you provide some examples of what managers need to know?
It's less about what I need to know and more about how I need to organize it. I get the same information from all of my reports, but the ones who were managers hand it to me ready to go where the others I get it from a conversation.
When I'm talking to my team, I need to know things like:
* Anything that is blocking them (and what they think will solve that)
* Any unexpected events, fires that are about to start/have started
* Progress on their tasks and any timeline updates
* Things they've heard from meetings with other teams that might impact what they're working on or other people on the team
The ICs who were managers previously tend to come to 1:1s with this already sitting in our shared document outlined roughly like I have above when we start our meeting. E.g.
* I'm waiting for Joe Bloggs to finish his API work before I can build the user workflow for X. He was supposed to be done last week but I'm still waiting. He's being very vague about the timeline and I need to know when this will be done so I can start work. Can you talk to him for me?
* Mary was out sick last week so didn't finish the design for Y. We're working on it now and she'll be done by Tuesday. I've put my work on Y on hold until then and am focusing on Z instead. It should still be done by the deadline.
* Status of Project Foo is...
* I had a sync with the database team yesterday. Did you know that they're planning to move everything to paper tape next quarter?
All of that would come out in a conversation anyway, but having it like this focuses it and puts it in context already (which is normally what I would need to do with that info).
The real difference is that folks who have been managers before tend to have a better understanding of what will impact the larger team or project, not just their part of it. I care about the individual too, but some of my brain is always on the bigger picture.
Awesome - thank you
To add on to this I like things organized as: - things you need my action on - things you need my input on - things you think I need to be aware of that may need my input/action later
it is both harder and very different.
Given that there are plenty of people on the spectrum working in IT a promotion can be a devastating blow to some.
The thing you've mentioned about poor performance resonates a lot with an unfinished text I have about generation lost to covid.
For me shaping a new team is all about forming bonds between teammates. Living in eastern europe it usually involves a lot of drinking together. :)
The end result is that you have a team that cares about each other, and if someone has a bad day for whatever reason (sick cat, kid misbehaving at school, hangover or divorce) the rest of the team will be happy to fill out and carry on as a unit. If something bad will happen the team will indicate the bad apple and you'll know when to step in.
Even though my first daily job in 2006 was an online first company I was very sceptical when covid started. It takes a lot of thought and preperation to have your org ready for an online work, and setting up zoom calls is simply not enough. I took hiatus as I felt I was not able to form a functional team based on skype calls. I missed some money but I think the history somehow proved me right.
I'm not going to lie, this is what I feel work from home and distributed teams has made hardest.
It's not that it can't be overcome, but it has to be done intentionally rather than organically. And that's a whole task a manager needs to add to their list of responsibilities.
Never thought of that before.
> I missed some money but I think the history somehow proved me right.
Maybe, but I will say that having the norm be "unless you hang out in person your team can't bond" is an out for some people to excuse not being friendly or empathetic. Friendly people are friendly no matter the medium.
I've had managers hand-wring over getting people to hang out, and it's like: okay, I've drank beer with this difficult person that you hired, can they stop being an asshole in chat now?
My point is, if you're forming a new team from people that never seen each other and they communicate during random zoom calls the chances they will grow a real bond are very slim.
People will join the stand up call saying routine like "hello yesterday no blockers", proceed to grab a random task from the backlog and call it a day.
Meanwhile in the office people will have a casual chat over a coffee, go for a smoke, grab a lunch together and maybe even hang out after work on their own accord. When someone shows up late for office saying "crap my kid is really sick" it's more likely that someone else steps in and say "hey, it's fine, I'll do the deploy for you today".
When someone asks for that in a group chat people may miss it, and honestly, who cares about random set of pixels on your screen.
Not to mention that in the office, if you're not an asshole, people will stay with you after work and be willing to teach you how to work with that new library or system. I'm not seeing that organically happening in full remote structure where you can't really put a face behind a name.
Like I've said, I worked for fully remote companies long before covid happened, but everytime those companies invested a lot of time and money to get people together and do random meaningless stuff. Heck, when I joined Wikia in 2006 they flew us all from all around the world for basically two weeks vacation so we just could spend the time together and to get to know each other.
> My point is, if you're forming a new team from people that never seen each other and they communicate during random zoom calls the chances they will grow a real bond are very slim.
Sure that's fair.
This is very true and I learned this quickly when moving to a management role. As an IC, when someone is out for some life event, it might mean more work for you to pick up the slack. As a manager, everyone on your team's problems become your problems.
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.
> 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.
I've been a manager, and I've also been a volunteer firefighter for many years. I've seen a lot of things no person should see.
My relatively brief stint in management kept me awake at night more than the shotgun vs face suicide, or fatal motor vehicle accidents that I attended in the same period. I think it was because the fate of those people was well out of my hands, but the livelihood of my direct reports was not.
you sound like a very empathetic person. But hear me out - at end of the day, it's all just business. I was let go on Thursday, 1 hour before end of shift, in a 60 seconds zoom call. Got told that core team is working hands on in the office, has high velocity, and me being remote is slowing them down. I strongly suspect it was also about the fact that this week they had me work on a project I haven't touched yet, and I got no support to set the dev env properly even. So I was developing blind, while also working overtime to push changes to backend I joined to work on. My wife just lost a kid, this was first job I had in 8 months, just started on new year. We are in small debt. I worked from 6 in the afternoon to 5 in the morning (timezone difference) to output a lot, so they keep me and raise my rate. Company raised 16mm but they're still startup, yknow. So when push comes to shove you get let go without them asking about any of that, or concern themself with it. CEO almost bitterly thanked me for working with them and notified me my contact is over and that's it, hung up and left to work on their launch. Team didn't even notice I m gone. I still went to coworking space today to send CVs because I didn't have heart to tell wife we are cooked again. But look, it happened before, I chose to do this job. I'll deal with the fallout, find new one. It is O.K., I'm not entitled to anyone's pitty. Like I said, that is the risk of business. As manager you cannot set rules of the company. And even if you could, sometimes you still need to make hard decisions. You're not a rock in the stream they can latch on, you are another man floating downstream. Don't lose sleep.
> it's all just business
People use those as magic words to absolve people of responsibility, humanity, and guilt. Nothing about 'business' mitigates those, IMO. Why would it?
I think it's laziness and irresponsibility to just elminiate essential requirements and responsibilities because you don't want to put in the effort.
At the same time, the risks of 'business' are affordable to some people: They can get another job, can afford the layoff, etc. But for many people, especially in the US with a poor workers comp situation for very many people and where health care, housing, education, and nutrition (for many) depend on income, it's not affordable.
I wouldn't call them magic words to absolve people of responsibility, but rather a cliche name for situations like that. Of course you can have ethical business, I mean business ethics were first class we had in economy. But in real world you WILL get bulldozed sooner or later by "it's just business". Read the geravis principle. It's not condoning, it's observing.
> in real world
Another cliche or magic word is 'reality' - as in, 'my point is reality' and therefore anything that disagrees must be fantastical. It's also the old rhetorical tactic of claiming inevitability.
The reality is that everyone acts with ethics; it's a matter of degree: businesses don't murder people, for example. Another reality is that we make reality the way we want it; to say we can't make it otherwise is simply to fold.
As much as I loved matrix I still can't bend the spoon or be my own boss.
I don't quite understand your point. It's not about bending spoons, but about the arrogance of certainty.
And why not be your own boss? It might take some work to get there, but I think the most important requirement for being your own boss is the drive and adaptability to overcome all the challenges.
I'm very sorry to hear that. I hope you'll find new, better work soon. Where I work, we do not have any open positions I'm aware of at the moment. But if you like we can connect. I'm trying to start my own start-up rn. But can't promise anything.
Good luck with your product! Don't forget to update profile with info about it
In addition to me being terrible at not taking my reports personal problems home with me, what did me in was pouring large amounts of time and effort in getting people to improve (e.g. if they were on a PIP, but just in general as well), and that effort not being reciprocated.
It was a great learning experience and fun track to be on, but I'm a happy IC again.
s/has a heavy emotional toll/is emotional labor/
Sustainable labor requires care, including of the manager.
I'm not trying to make light of your experience, and I do appreciate that you care about people you have to look after deeply.
However, I also don't think what you described is professional with respect to being a manager. A manager's job is to balance the interest between stakeholders and their reports, make sure things happen as promised (and adjust scope when promise can't be met), and make sure everyone in their team grows (skill, remuneration, etc.).
> 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.
These are not things that would affect you from being a good manager. That's just part of the job of being a manager. It's a different kind of problem, it's not necessarily heavier problems. It's unhelpful, or even narcissistic, to think that you're actually quietly taking on more burden for everyone without being appreciated.
You should absolutely have empathy as a manager, but if your empathy is weighing on you instead of enabling you to be a better manager, then you're probably not doing a very good job as a manager.
> 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.
I disagree. That's just an excuse of not doing what you should be doing as a manager: manage things. See above.
If you are an empathetic person, if you work in a team where people have/had "cancer/long-term illness, death in the family, miscarriages, etc.", then it's emotionally just as taxing whether you're an IC or a manager. In fact, if you can't manage your emotions and get what needs to be done done (damage control, repriortization, etc. to get things shipped), then you're not doing your job as a manager.
Edit: feel free to downvote if you don't agree but much appreciated if you also leave a response to say why you disagree. Otherwise, I hope you feel good "punishing" people just because you feel differently but don't actually have a concrete argument against.
> You should absolutely have empathy as a manager, but if your empathy is weighing on you instead of enabling you to be a better manager, then you're probably not doing a very good job as a manager.
That sounds... very peculiar, un-empathetic a point of view, like you are blaming someone for facing a difficult moment.
Case in point, if you were to manage managers, and you had to tell that to one of your report facing such a situation... that would be, in that case, a fail in management on your part.
You don't tell people in a tough spot to "toughen up", "not good for that role", not even in corporate environments.
That's plain toxic. And inefficient (whereas you should be looking for a way to improve the situation/morale in some way, short term, and long term).
So you give them the space to explore the situation, their feelings, and you support them to find their solutions. That's how you lead by example. Not by jumping to conclusion "oh... looks like someone's not fit for the role".
You make some good points, but it's important to keep in mind that as a manager, when you are task allocating and reprioritizing employee work, you need to keep your team's individual challenges in mind. The same way that a developer might need to manage server resources, or consider the impact of a new feature on future maintenance, a manager needs to solve the problem, except the resources available to solve the problem happen to be human.
If a teammate has a sick parent, everyone on the team may choose to empathize. For the manager, every challenge that comes up, the parent sickness is one of your constraints to be dealt with. You need to compartmentalize sufficiently that you can think about this without stopping your work to solve the problem, but not so much that you treat the worker as a non-human resource. It can get a little tough.
> then it's emotionally just as taxing whether you're an IC or a manager
Speaking from experience, at least for me that's not true. For me the largest emotional toll is knowing that I'm responsible for dealing with whatever is happening. Sure, I might wind up taking the exact same actions as an IC. But as an IC I don't *have* to. And that helps, even if just enough.
I don't see anything narcissistic about being a normal human being with natural empathy for the people they work with. Managing people does require emotional stability and self control, though. ICs tend to automatically defer to their managers. Sometimes, this leads the ICs to misinterpret tiny reactions from their managers in completely unintended ways. I find that negative, emotionally charged reactions from managers are especially likely to lead to unintended reactions from their ICs. As an IC you try to not bring your personal life ups and does to the job. This is even more important as a manager.
> I don't see anything narcissistic about being a normal human being with natural empathy for the people they work with.
I agree but that's not what I said. What I said was it's "unhelpful, or even narcissistic", for a manager to think that being empathetic as a manager is more emotionally taxing than an IC.
> Managing people does require emotional stability and self control, though.
It does. That's just being professional though. Being a good coworker in general requires emotional stability and self control. I'm not sure if you're trying to argue that a manager has to have much greater ability to do those than an IC since you seem to avoid saying that directly.
> ICs tend to automatically defer to their managers. Sometimes, this leads the ICs to misinterpret tiny reactions from their managers in completely unintended ways. I find that negative, emotionally charged reactions from managers are especially likely to lead to unintended reactions from their ICs.
Uh, the reverse sounds just about as true? I'm honestly not sure what the argument there is.
> As an IC you try to not bring your personal life ups and does to the job. This is even more important as a manager.
It's unclear from what you said why it's more important as a manager -- that's just what every professional should do at a workplace. Can you please elaborate?
As a manager, you are always implicitly communicating from a position of power. That changes what you can and cannot say. It's not very hard to understand once you experience it from a manager's perspective, but I don't think that I would have truly understood this exclusively from an IC's perspective, though.
It's truly frightening for people who don't understand that well to be given the opportunity to mange people.
As yobbo said it much better than me, "the part that is narcissistic is believing your empathy is uniquely taking a toll on you."
It's impossible to have a conversation with people who only make reasonable-sounding statements that are irrelevant to the actual conversation. I'm out.
> narcissistic
Maybe you mean something else? Narcissism is the condition of a very vulnerable ego, and insisting that nothing around you can threaten your ego - everyone has to be 'perfect'.
The part that is narcissistic is believing your empathy is uniquely taking a toll on you.
> These are not things that would affect you from being a good manager. That's just part of the job of being a manager. It's a different kind of problem, it's not necessarily heavier problems.
The crux of the issue is here I think. You, as a manager, a report, anything, have no say as to what anyone feels and how, and how it affects them. That’s purely on them. You may only be there for them.
You may think for yourself, that these are not heavier problems than other ones. Others may think differently, and feel differently. That’s not more, or less professional (whatever that word has ever meant).
Being a good manager is how one does manage their team, in the end and what the outcomes are. Not how one feels/struggles to do it internally or within the confidentiality that you have with your own manager. Manager to whom you should be able to openly share how you struggle yourself internally. Which requires trust.
If, ever, your manager did retort « you’re showing you’re not fit for this » or came to moral judgement for just expressing your thoughts to them, this becomes a Whiplash situation you better get out of, because that manager will not have your back, ever.
(of course, if the personal issues of the manager/report turn into problematic actions or omissions, that’s another topic)
In my experience the inverse is also true. Dealing with performance and behavioral issues can take a huge amount of time, and it something that is never discussed with parties who are not involved.
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.
> Dealing with performance and behavioral issues can take a huge amount of time, and it something that is never discussed with parties who are not involved.
This is true. I feel like there needs to be a better solution to it which isn't wearing your heart on your sleeve or airing dirty laundry in public.
Recently, I saw some emails from the manager two levels up form me that shouldn't have been in our CRM where he was standing up for my manager and his paycheck not going through properly. It seems like it was just an oversight because this one paycheck is run differently than others, but the director was clearly triggered because he said to payroll, "if we need to withhold anyone's paycheck, don't just do it. I need to know first because I need to know how to figure it out."
I just quietly deleted the email and made sure similar ones wouldn't get logged. But I was also impressed at how quickly this director just stood up for someone under him. And if not for this chance stumble upon I never would have known of this side of his work.
Maybe the recognition of managers is something that has to be done publically by those above them to get their teams to hear it?
This is a perfect example of the silent work managers do.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to remind someone on the people/finance side that their systems work for the employees and not the other way around is astounding. “No we cant ask them to wait another month to get paid, no I don’t care our system doesn’t support it, fine pull out your check book and write them a physical check…”
How can such silent work be made "unsilent" so potential employees can use it as a factor in determining the company/team they work for?
From the applicant side, maybe it's just a question I should ask somehow in interviews.
In my (big tech) company, managers have little leverage to retain people. Salary/bonus aren't in their control. Even evaluation aren't decided by them.
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.
I would wish that they would also:
- Listen to their team. Issues arise, complexity may be higher than appears. Being receptive to reality and not being obstinate.
- Manage priorities, when there is too much to do everything, so progress can continue instead of gridlock by stakeholder updates, changes, and context switches leaving you feeling like a husk
- Not an expectation, but I find the good ones almost play the role of team therapist. I had a very kind manager stay up until midnight with me being supportive when it got really bad. The opposite of this is the not-my-problem people
- Really really good managers understand the pressures you are under, and give suggestions on how you can work smarter.
I do think sometimes there is pressure and they get in the way of work to produce visible artifacts to have something to point to that they did. I’m empathetic, a lot of their work is invisible.
Oh, that explains a thing. A decade or so ago, I was a well regarded engineer at a FAANG who got an offer from a startup. I told my manager I was probably going to take it, as it sounded fun. He and his lead tried to talk me into staying, showed me other departments I might find more fun. Really, they could've offered me a trivial raise and I probably would've stayed, but I was too meek to ask for money, and they didn't bring up money at all.
That always struck me as very strange; I assumed it was either a mistake, or a "if they're going somewhere that is a pay cut, clearly it isn't money, and if you offer them money they'll leave in 6mo anyway". But, if they don't have that level to pull, that's a much simpler answer.
Do you mind sharing what big tech company? I've worked at both small companies and big tech. Managers do not have full control, but they can influence very significantly comp and evaluations. If your manager isn't doing it then it is a performance problem.
If you are a very senior IC, managers may consult you in these situations as well. Fishing for interesting projects or possibly even trying to have you talk to the person leaving as well. You generally would have context and an ability to connect with the other IC in a way a manager may not. I've never been in management but have on many occasions been roped into these scenarios.
Part of being a manager is to be proactive in trying to retain the good people. Increasing their visibility within the leadership and across the organization, paying keen attention to their career goals, selling these goals in advance to your manager and others within the organization, clearing hurdles that may be affecting their work etc.
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.
Its a good example to call out but it should be obvious to anyone genuinely considering the transition. Managers are there to manage people, the job is easy when the teams awesome and the jobs hard when the team isn't awesome. This includes poor performance, attrition, and people drama. All things that come with the territory of managing humans.
There's also a huge part of "managing moods" to prevent people from thinking about leaving in the first place. And all of that within the constraints of the department budget and company policies.
yes!! 90% of manager's job is setting the mood.
from vibe coding to vibe management
The real Vibe Coding
Crisis management is a big part of the job, and the more people you have the higher the chance there is a crisis at any given point in time. Around 100 devs there's usually at least 1-2 things going on at any given time.
Does anyone tell their manager they are leaving and still expecting anything nowadays? I thought dive-and-save is very rare since the flattening trend happened (esp. in big tech)
Never experienced the dive-and-save myself. Usually a wince and a sigh, followed by "oh... when's your last day?" Your first line supervisor is upset, but resigned that he's powerless to do anything substantive that might retain you. The MBAs at corporate HQ couldn't care less, and it'll take them weeks/months to get around to approving a new job req.
> Case in point: trying to retain good people.
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.
One thing I discovered: almost everything a manager does has a big lag between input and observed impact. Retention is one of the slowest, it's like steering a cruise ship!
I can't say I agree with this bc I have felt the immediate impact of a key employee leaving, usually in the form of me taking up their responsibilities. Even with a two-week, sometimes even four-week, hand off, this turns into real pain the moment that employee is gone.
So do not under-estimate the impact of retention.
People leaving is definitely a step-function of negatives as the responsibilities get shared between the (now smaller!) team.
I think GP was more saying that improving retention, at a % level, is a slow ship to steer. (At least what is available at the manager level.) Decreasing retention across the org in the long term doesn’t happen overnight, and it can take a while to observe whether the effect is trending downwards or upwards. (And also depends on what signal you use - people actually leaving, or people talking about leaving!)
Personally I think spending huge amounts of time on retention _after_ someone resigns indicates huge, possibly org-wide, problems with communication and career development.
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/
If the majority of your retention work is escalations and meetings at the time they want to leave, you're really holding this management thing wrong.
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.
> there is a LOT of activity at the manager level that you never see and therefore don't often think about when you are an IC.
This is what needs to be discussed in standups, yet strangely never is.
Are you saying you, as a manager, are running a group so poorly that you have enough churn to where retention makes up a large percentage what you work on day to day?
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?
You’re getting downvoted, it seems, but you raise a very real point: you need to have a high turnover, or rough span of control ratios, in order for this to be a common interrupt.
Especially given it’s well known that people don’t leave companies, they leave bad managers… it’s a bit telling.
Anecdotally: I spent 6-7 years managing at various levels (manger/sr mgr/director) before going back to an IC role, and I had a single regrettable attrition (+2 non-regrettable) in that time.
> Especially given it’s well known that people don’t leave companies, they leave bad managers…
I know this is an old saw because it’s usually true, but I’ve left companies where I had a good relationship with my manager because I lost confidence in leadership at some level above them.
Sometimes you can see the train wreck coming and it’s time to go.
I would point out that you still left because of a bad manager, just a higher level one.
I recently went through the retention process, and before resigning the first thing I did was ask around to figure out exactly how the process worked (I wanted to stretch my end date for various reasons). The knowledge was definitely there among the longer tenured ICs, and I've shared notes on my case.
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.
Sounds like pretty bad point to intervene though? If I decided to leave, and even announced it I'm probably pretty pissed off already. I probably raised my concerns before - or if I haven't, it is an indication of dysfunction of its own, I just had no space for that. In the best case you give me something that convinces me not to leave - and my takeaway will be that things are only going to change if I threaten with leaving.
Alot of leadership in general is keeping drama away from the troops. A sure sign of a toxic workplace is when stuff like this and other high level drama at the management level is well known.
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.
> Given that they are good and worth keeping, this triggers escalations, meetings with the employee and between managers, senior managers and HR.
Locking, barn, horses etc.
Would someone be so kind as to tell me what IC stands for?
Individual Contributor- a position that doesn’t have reports
I've been gathering anonymous feedback from teams I've worked with as a lead or eng mgr. I usually ask the scrum master or someone neutral to talk to the team and gather a few bullet points. I always talk to the team first and ask them for willingness and permission.
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.
I think smaller companies do think this way of retaining good people. Large corporations believe anyone is replaceable. Again I am an IC & don’t see/hear any extra work done for retention. This proves your point though.
> Large corporations believe anyone is replaceable.
This is definitely true. By design, large corporations are structured so that there is no single point of failure.
> Again I am an IC & don’t see/hear any extra work done for retention.
Even in large corporations, extra work definitely happens for retention (I have experienced it myself as an IC). Even though everyone is by design replaceable, the organization has some incentive to work on retention:
a) Bad retention hurts the organization's reputation and future hiring (horror stories spread very fast)
b) Within the team, losing a great teammate hurts morale and output and managers know it will result in a hit on their metrics at least for the next half.
c) Managers may not always be able to backfill, and losing an employee can reduce the size of their "empire" that they are often trying so hard to establish at whatever cost.
There's also a constant tension between using fear as a motivator to squeeze more work out of employees, but not squeeze so hard that they quit. Different companies find their own spot on this continuum. For example, Amazon is famously in the sweatshop part of the scale and they could care less about their reputation. They seem to be doing OK though.
Managers have three functions
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.
you should never try to retain someone thats trying to leave. Even if you are successful at the moment they will leave eventually.
Conversely, if an employer tries to retain you, the safest assumption is '... until your replacement appears'
No honor among thieves, etc. I've given every place a chance just to see what happens, it's always been a joke. The dynamics don't work.
I was promised $50k last time! Not enough to look over my shoulders even more.
The idiom is "honor amongst thieves", i.e. MF DOOM:
> It don't make no sense, what happened to the loyalty?
> Honor amongst crooks, trust amongst royalty.
> The idiom is "honor amongst thieves"
This is obviously false.
But if you really need documentation, https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44388/is-there-h... has collected quite a lot of it.
It looks like the conclusion on that page supports my claim.
> Conclusions
The notion, at least, behind the expression "there is honor among thieves" is ancient, and it is expressed (inexactly) by English writers as far back as Daniel Defoe in 1723. A pamphlet published in 1782 describes "there is honour among thieves" as an "adage," so the familiar wording must be considerably older than that date.
The counter-proverb, "there is no honour among thieves" is somewhat younger—at least in Google Books search results, with an exact occurrence in 1828 after earlier instances in which writers denied the assertion that honor did exist among thieves.
I read you as claiming that the idiom used the word "amongst". That wasn't true when the word existed and it still isn't true now.
The concept of honor among thieves has been used in many ways. Whether you emphasize that it's present in certain contexts or that it's absent in other contexts doesn't change the way you refer to it.
No honor among pedants.
Credit where it's due, but language exists to be used. I wasn't quoting their work but countless bad movies
Ah yes. I see now that your negation works out to be the same expression.
Sorry about your rug pull experience though.
Is this always true?
If their only concerns are things a manager can change, then why would they leave if they get what they were seeking elsewhere?
Not always true. I've coached people to stay before and they are still at the company. Sometimes they have concerns that actually could be fixed from management. People are complex and have many different reasons for wanting to leave, some fixable some not.
> Sometimes they have concerns that actually could be fixed from management.
curious. what are some examples of this and why do they take threat of leaving before management fixes it.
My uncle wanted more money, and when his current employer counter offered he stayed for years afterward.
Definitely not always true; but commonly stated as truth.
Not true in my experience being on both sides of the equation
If someone puts in a resignation then sure, let them go. But if they come to you, their manager, and say "I'm thinking about leaving" it's a different situation. They may have a legitimate reason that you can solve to their satisfaction.
never respond to threats or negotiate with terrorists
I find far too often that people that state things like the are the terrorists.
> there is a LOT of activity at the manager level that you never see and therefore don't often think about when you are an IC.
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.
You make it sound like employees are perfect and communicate transparently at all times. Many people lack the ability to be self critical and want to avoid confrontation. That often leads to surprises, a managers worst friend.
Not op. But to refute 'You make it sound like employees are perfect and communicate transparently at all times' and 'surprises, a managers worst friend'.
Modern workplaces forced quarterly reviews, thus there should be no surprises. In practise reviews actively prohibit employees from communicating transparently.
Your last sentence makes me think we agree. In my experience employees perceive they have much more to lose from transparency. If they are low agency, not actively bad and defer when asked what they want, you may be surprised when they finally quit.
The issues with any of these things is bad companies/managers burn lots more people than good companies, hence creating large numbers of people with zero trust in things like reviews.
This is, if you've been burned by a company getting rid of you after being transparent, you are never going to be transparent again even if it would be in your favor. Then when you look at most companies thinking the most important thing is how much profit they are going to make next quarter that quarterly meeting stops looking like an event to see how you are doing, into one where the company determines how much blood they can extract from your withered corpse.
> It's actually not that difficult: just be honest to people, treat them fairly, and be considerate.
Then why do we see so many people complaining about bad managers?
I’m had all three titles at various points in my career but the reality is that my responsibilities and operational altitude varied widely from company to company. I just completed a job search after being laid off and one of the challenges of finding a job in leadership is deciphering what each company actually wants from their managers or directors or VPs.
Some roles are “hands on”. For others that’s a red flag. For some it’s all about managing people and emotional intelligence. For others it’s all about technical acumen and technical direction. Sometimes what they are really looking for is exactly what the last person in the role did. In other cases, they want the opposite of the last person to hold the role.
The only thing you can really depend on when it comes to leadership titles in software, in my experience, is that one’s title explains which meetings one is expected to attend.
I've had a similar experience, however I found it tied to the size of the company. If you're a director at a large corporation, you will be very siloed and you most likely won't be doing much coding. If you're a directory at a small company, you're going to be coding, managing coders, and being part of leadership and strategic discussions.
Can confirm. I currently work for an SMB (~150 employees) as a manager. Our VP doesn't write any code but the directors and managers are still IC's on projects.
Right now I really like being an IC in addition to being manager cause I still have that coding itch to scratch, but I just know one day I will eventually graduate to role where I don't write any code. Long term it is the direction I want to go in but it's going to be bittersweet when I finally get to a role with no coding.
Isn’t the most effective way to find out what you’ll be doing is by measuring how many people are going to be under you overall?
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.
The "number of people you've had under you" does provides insight into what a role entails, but there's still a lot of variance. What does seem to be uniform is that the "number of people you've had under you" determines whether a hiring company will think you’re qualified for a job. Companies simply aren't likely to take a "risk" hiring an outsider that hasn't been in a role with a similar perceived scope of responsibility. And since actual here's-what-you're-doing-day-to-day responsibility can vary so much, the "number of people you've had under you" becomes a proxy for that.
I understand the reasoning for why they put so much weight on the number of reports you’ve been previously responsible for, but it also explains why big companies stagnate. The people change but the thinking and strategy doesn’t.
> The only thing you can really depend on when it comes to leadership titles in software
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.
And it's not necessarily a bad thing. I should think adaptive roles would be a benefit, not a hazard. At my company we simply list "software engineer, all levels" in our postings.
s/I'm/I've
> The biggest single development issue I’ve seen over the years is that many VPs still think like directors.
> The VP’s job is to get the right answer. They are the functional expert. No one on the team knows their function better than they do. And even if someone did, they are still playing the VP of function role and it’s their job – and no one else’s — to get the right answer.
> If the CEO makes a plan, gets it approved by the board, and executes it well but it doesn’t work, they cannot tell the board “but, but, it’s the plan we agreed to." Most CEOs wouldn’t even dream of saying that. It’s because CEOs understand they are held accountable not for effort or activity, but results. Part of truly operating at the VP level is to internalize this fact.
Alas that I read this 6 years too late, because it perfectly explains what went wrong at my then-company. A member of the C-suite came up with (what sounded like) a good strategy, but it didn't work because the engineering team wasn't able to execute well enough; and rather than either modify the plan to account for this or shift his attention to fixing the engineering culture -- which might have been politically impossible, but was still his responsibility to try -- he doubled down and became more obsessed with implementing the details of a losing plan. In other words, he was thinking like a director.
Meanwhile, another front-page item today is a reminder of why this stuff matters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43431675
A great book is "Strategy and the Fat Smoker". It's written by a consultant but points out an obvious point: the quality of the strategy itself is not nearly as impactful as the ability to execute. The author compares this to being a fat smoker who won't change their habits - knowing the right strategy is insufficient.
Only a consultant would manage to fill a book with such a trivial observation.
Is there any point to reading it beyond the insight you shared in one sentence?
In my opinion, yes, it's a short book. A lot about how to actually change culture and habits of a team.
> [Leveling] conflates career development and salary negotiation. It encourages a mindset of saying, “what must I do to make L10” when you want to say, “I want a $10K raise.”
It's not obvious to me why this is a bad thing. I agree that incentivising a box-ticking mindset discourages ownership and initiative. But for software engineers I feel like there has to be some methodical (and transparent) way for raises to be assigned, and for it to relate to skills and traits. Otherwise you can easily end up in a situation where people are rewarded for being bolshy and savvy rather than valuable to the company.
Am I missing something here?
I think that what you are missing is that "what must I do to make L10" and "what is valuable to the company" are typically somewhat orthogonal. A prototypical example is that almost every career ladder out there mentions things like "impact" and architect/systems design work rather than often more valuable maintenance work that keeps current systems running. In addition, measuring the contribution of any individual to a team effort is always difficult, in some cases pretty much impossible until years later. This means that it is always possible to game such career frameworks by focusing only on the things the framework rewards and skipping everything else.
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.
If following the framework does not provide value to the company, the framework is obviously flawed.
Well, that's sort of the author's point -- every framework is focused on something other than simple salary numbers, which definitionally means it is focused on something other than the dollar value provided to the company.
We recognize that they can still be a useful tool, because 1) assigning dollar values to employees is an inexact science that's hard to standardize over an organization and 2) ICs like at least some direction about what they need to do to be eligible for more money aside from just "provide more value"
the frameworks are always flawed
the best leaders know this
Sure, but does that mean the framework shouldn't exist? Something can be flawed and still provide some value.
In the case of leveling, I'd suggest the levels are guidelines and not policy. As soon as they become policy, management cannot work around them adequately, and they begin to detract value.
For example, at my employer, we have levels (within job families, I haven't seen a level grid that has engineers and personal assistants). But, I've never had to tick every single box to get an employee promoted. I have to make my case, and I do use the levels as a guideline, but I've never felt it necessary to absolutely follow every item.
> Otherwise you can easily end up in a situation where people are rewarded for being bolshy and savvy rather than valuable to the company.
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.
> 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.
This is a win from the business's perspective. They are getting greater value for lower cost.
In my more cynical moments, I sometimes suspect that tech companies deliberately target the sort of low self-esteem perfectionist types for which this behavior is common specifically because the company sees an arbitrage opportunity between what the employee is worth and what the employee believes they are worth.
They absolutely do, but those companies end up getting labelled "burnout factories" like Applied Intuition or Scale AI and as a result have trouble both recruiting good seniors or retaining their juniors long enough for them to become senior.
At the end of the day, companies run by adults treat their employees like adults and don't try to stiff them out of a misguided desire to save $100k over three years.
I think the problem that developers may feel is that they want to earn more money for being a better developer, but not nessicarily accept more responsibility or spend less time developing code.
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.
> I think the problem that developers may feel is that they want to earn more money for being a better developer, but not nessicarily accept more responsibility or spend less time developing code.
Well the problem is some people don't get there is a limit of how much impact and additional revenue you can create for the company by writing better/more code. And that would serve as a basis for paying you more.
The thing is a guy helping out via mentoring 10 other people or recruiting better talent will create much more impact on how the company functions than if he wrote 2x better code or 2x faster. There is simply in almost all engineering effort a hard limit of how much a single person can contribute.
> The thing is a guy helping out via mentoring 10 other people or recruiting >better talent will create much more impact on how the company functions than if he wrote 2x better code or 2x faster. There is simply in almost all engineering effort a hard limit of how much a single person can contribute.
Very debatable. Not at all true where I work ( worked ). Better code clearly larger impact on larger timeframes ( think 5+ year ) that perpetually retraining incoming juniors.
This line of thinking applies to creating widgets on the assembly line but writing code combined with solving the right problems can totally have 10/20 even 50x impact. Automation can be levered up quite well with the right setup.
To get promoted you must just pander to your boss and completely ignore what your job is supposed to be and what the company needs.
The higher up you go the more important it becomes to make an impact to teams outside the purview of your boss. So I'm not really sure this holds.
in this context 'your boss' is usually a level or two above your direct manager on org chart Take it as the most senior person you can get regular face time with, this also needs to be gamed.
I thought it went without saying… That's how you get promoted over your boss and become his boss.
I've seen it happen.
> It encourages a mindset of saying, “what must I do to make L10” when you want to say, “I want a $10K raise.”
> 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.
This varies by employer.
At my employer, we have several job families that encompass "software developer"... software engineer, cloud engineer, architect, and technical fellow.
With the two engineering roles, there are levels... software engineer I, II, III, Lead, Principal. Architect starts with more seniority... architect (roughly equivalent to to Lead), principal architect. And technical fellow is "director level" - basically a terminal spot for ICs who are really good at building software but have no desire to manage people - they typically report to a VP or director - they do have lots of meetings, but they're also setting the technical direction of the company for the long haul.
I guess it depends on where you work. I’ve moved up four “levels” since I started and I basically just do the same thing. You could argue I should have been the higher level from the start and it took a while to get recognized.
Pay and rank have a connection but not a direct connection.
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 article is good, but I want to complain about this argument (which the author is not responsible for):
> CEOs understand they are held accountable not for effort or activity, but results
IMO that's one of the biggest problems in the American business world. If you ruin the company long term to get "results," your plan is successful. If you harm the company short term for long term benefit, your plan has failed.
No long term thinking, just watching number go up and down. It's practically a form of superstition.
> Nobody gives a hoot about profit.
— W. Edwards Deming
Ruin is subjective, results are objective.
> “It’s like saying with $3.65 I can buy either a grande non-fat latte or a head of organic lettuce”
Ah, 2015.
i smiled at that too. miss those innocent times.
Find a better unit to report your costs in. Like hours of work, or any other hard asset (real estate, gold, bitcoin etc.). Otherwise you are bound to be disappointed every year.
I would like to know your definition of a hard asset if you consider bitcoin one.
Indeed I haven't used that term correctly. What I meant, is some kind of asset that is not easily inflated, something that in the long term can retain its exchange value better. Of course, nothing is guaranteed, and especially with bitcoin, it super volatile. But you have a better chance of judging your purchase power based on that.
How many Big Macs?
or grande non-fat lattes?
Is it innocent because prices seem cheaper to us today?
[dead]
Out of scope for this article, but:
>Most leveling systems are too granular, with the levels separated by arbitrary characterizations. It’s makework. It’s fake science. It’s bureaucratic and encourages a non-thinking “climb the ladder” approach to career development. (“Hey, let’s develop you to go from somewhat-independent to rather-independent this year.”)
This is a funny, common requirement. Every junior developer is told they should feel free to ask questions - and now they have a financial incentive not to.
I’ve managed a few people who have come to the same conclusion as you did there, and had a mixed success rate there.
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 big tech these overly-granular, arbitrary systems are designed specifically to avoid this kind of variance in promotability from how managers infer the rules. If they're designed badly, you have to lie to get your example through the pipeline.
>It’s not about not asking questions
If the spec says 'doesn't ask questions', it is!
> If they're designed badly, you have to lie to get your example through the pipeline.
Agreed
> If the spec says 'doesn't ask questions', it is!
It's not. At anywhere I've ever worked, it's about meeting enough of the criteria and your manager coming to bat for you. If the spec says don't ask questions and your manager backs you, you're getting promoted. If the spec says you must make 3 widgets a day and you make 4 widgets a day more than anyone else, but your manager won't back you, you're not getting the promotion.
If your manager is a rule stickler, follow the rules. If they value breaking the process, then break the process.
But dogmatically pointing to the rules, and saying "but the rules say this" is unlikely to get you very far. To quote Geoffrey Rush - "They're more like guidelines"
I'm glad for you. I'm paraphrasing a previous employer's guidelines.
> Every junior developer is told they should feel free to ask questions - and now they have a financial incentive not to.
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….”
I have a similar mindset though less focused on the type of questions being asked and more about how many times I have to answer the same question.
Ideally, the number is one time. As in one conversation where the person walks away understanding the answer. If I have to have that conversation more than once it’s a problem.
Obviously there’s nuance - it can take time to get your head around a new concept or hard problem. But in any case, I like that as one dimension when thinking about a person’s skill/level/potential.
> I have a similar mindset though less focused on the type of questions being asked and more about how many times I have to answer the same question.
Yes, I completely agree and do that as well.
The focus on “type of question” has been something I’ve done more recently after helping someone out. Just reflecting on “what type of problem did I just help solve and how can I make it easier for them to solve on their own in the future”. Very often the answer is “more documentation” or similar, getting things only in my head down where everyone can benefit. On the other hand I walk away from some problems I’ve helped with frustrated that the answer was 1-2 Google searches away and the issue had nothing to do with “our stack”.
I mostly agree with you, but there’s another angle that is similar. How many times does the person come to you with a similar question but on a slightly different topic and you need to guide them through _how to find_ the answer. I’ve supervised mid level engineers in the past who will just drop a stack trace in a slack DM and expect me to tell them what’s wrong - I didn’t write the code so why do you expect me to figure it out for you. But when I have the conversation of “we’ve talked about how to dxooore these kinds of problems a few times now, next time you need to apply these techniques”,it often doesn’t land.
Asking questions and unblocking yourself is a required competency for acting independently.
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.)
I always say being a manager is one of the toughest jobs around, tougher than most IC jobs. But at the same time, bad managers have many more avenues to escape accountability than ICs do.
I greatly respect the good managers I know. But as a current example, one of their direct peers has spent several years driving off top talent, failing to deliver on goals, and is now encouraging others to quit in order to destroy their own team on the way out…and is currently on a multi month leave of absence! And their boss says “oh but you see I must follow process x” and “the problem has only recently gotten this bad.” All of which are bullshit lies to cover the fact that this toxic manager has been very effective at deflecting and avoiding.
I have to wonder about a job function that cannot police its own ranks.
I might disagree a bit with this, I've had all three titles and from my experience:
A manager is executing on plans, managing the work, aligning people on teams and enforcing policy & process.
A director is creating the plans to solve problems, intaking work, aligning teams and creating good processes from policy.
A VP is about defining the problem teams need to solve, managing capacity/budget for work, aligning on a strategy across a company and creating good policy.
The junior engineer asking “how can I become a VP?” is classic. Chances of you becoming a VP at the same place you worked as a junior engineer are slim. I know one person who did it, it took him 25 years, and he had been on the golf team in college, so he had a lot more exposure to company VIPs than most. Change employers while in middle management or you will spend a long time there.
And that’s assuming you even like being a VP. Sure, the money’s good, but there’s a lot of accountability and you either need to be good at taking it or good at avoiding it.
Hilariously, in the 2010s you didn't need to become a VP to make that kind of money. You could go the principle or distinguished engineer route and still make bank.
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.
> The junior engineer asking “how can I become a VP?” is classic.
How are they going to know what you just said without asking?
Is it me or do attempts to generalize career development across companies seem futile?
The concrete example here I can give is working at one company where "Manager" meant you had 10+ direct reports and were expected to do almost no technical work. Versus a second company where "Manager" meant you had 4-5 directs and were doing significant amount of technical work. The path from IC to Manager at company 1 had almost no commonalities with company 2 despite similar-sounding titles.
I guess what I am saying is that promotion ladders are so tightly integrated with company norms that attempting to seek outside advice on "how do I get to the next level" seems useless.
Edit: To rephrase more succinctly - Are articles like TFA useless or do I not know how to interperet them?
It's a data point. It's similar to the ridiculous titles given to ICs in the last 20 years. What does Senior Developer vs Senior Engineer mean? Do Architects code or not? I'm sure you have an answer, but someone else with different experience might have a complete different answer.
Really appreciate this post as I try making the leap from Senior IC Engineer into a "next rung up" role (currently aiming for Enterprise Architect, Principal IC Engineer, or Management of ICs); it really helps explain what mindset I should be having for each phase, should I seek to continue upward growth.
In the here and now, it seems like my "sweet spot" is to aim for Director in the next five years or so, regardless of the next role I eventually take (currently on the hunt due to RIF). I'm already at the point where I'm mentoring junior colleagues, delegating tasks among the team, and spending more time on tactics and strategy than daily engineering work - and that seems to fit with a Director role, albeit cross-function and cross-domain (which is what I already do, being an infra engie that can also do networking and storage and public cloud and collaboration - Senior jack of all trades). Above that (VP, etc)...I dunno, guess it depends on what kind of person I am in five years' time, after I've hit Director and had some experience in that role.
I think to be a manager, also 'read the room', or 'context'. Your response is just a bunch of "I this" , "I That". Nobody knows you. What does your current step in life have to do with anything, with anybody else.
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.
hah yea i have very low confidence that this person is going be sucessful at their goal the way they described it
seemed like the opposite of what i suggested here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43434340
Ya'll be reading way too much into a potential management or leadership style based on one comment about what I specifically took away from the OP and how it affected me specifically. If anything, the vibe I'm getting back is that you're the types to make strong judgements based on single sources absent broader context, which is not something I'd want in either an engineer or a leader above me, as it demonstrates a degree of inflexibility or unwillingness to be wrong. The one above you at least challenged me in a way I could respond to, rather than resorting to an insult masquerading as critique based upon one comment.
Take your own advice:
> Genuinely like ppl around you from your heart ( not fake it)
Folks who genuinely empathize with others aren't quick to resort to anonymized slights based on limited information, in my experience. Rather, it's the fakers who all too quickly devolve into brash and flippant comments when they feel they're safe behind some sort of shield. I'm aware this is a bit hypocritical on my part saying it this way, but sometimes you gotta wade into the mud to make your case.
That is how I meant it. Just observation.
When I was younger engineer. I did 'I' self reference speech a lot. It was years later I realized it was alienating people. Now really focus more time on listening, and only speaking about what the other person is interested in. Now when others are always using "I", it just stands out at me.
People really are simple, and want to talk about themselves, so if you realize this, and talk about what others want to talk about, you get along better.
I picked it up from Dale Carnegie, 'How to Win Friends and Influence People'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...
Yep its very for almost everyone because so much of our identity is tied around I and its very hard to let that go. I personally struggle with that a lot.
...yeah, I get that, and have been articulating that better through career coaching, leadership skills development, and actual work. My comment on this piece was self-referential, though, in an attempt to explain what I got from the piece, and how it affected me. Hence the extensive use of I/Me/first-person-perspective.
In an actual leadership role, my role is to build and maintain the bridge between our team, their expertise, and the agendas of those above us. I champion their successes, and shelter them from unwarranted blame. I set the tone, and in order for them to be successful, it needs to be a tone they resonate positively with. It's a role that's part translator, part leader, part firewatcher, and part strategist, all on top of the usual IC stuff - at least initially, or as needed (e.g., headcount reductions, RIFs).
At least for initial management roles, it's about maintaining balance - ensuring the team is productive and can succeed, without letting them burn themselves out or get dragged into "makework"/"busywork".
> I can’t tell you the number of times people have asked me for “development” or “leveling” conversations where I get excited and start talking about learning, skills gaps, and such and it’s clear all they wanted to talk about was salary.
This seems to be a rather naïve response. In a paying job, the main impetus to increase your knowledge and performance is to gain more salary. Clearly the people that they are talking to want to know "what kind of value do I need to provide to the company in terms of knowledge or skills that will enable me to make more money". I don't see why this should be a disappointment.
The author is excited to talk about helping the employee grow and have more impact, which (if successful) should make them more valuable to the company, resulting in promotion and increased compensation.
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.
In my experience:
1.) As a manager I was working tactically to facilitate the day-to-day plans of my leaders. I also functioned as a buffer between those leaders and my direct reports. I typically made a decent bit LESS than my direct reports as I was management, not development.
2.) As a director (I was responsible for an entire main product) I developed, negotiated, and implemented a long term (1 - 5 years) strategic plan for a product. I primarily interacted with team/focus managers and the directors of the company (Prez, VPs, etc.) to further those goals. I made considerably more than my direct reports and had options as part of total comp.
3.) As a (junior) VP I primarily did coordination between product line directors and the operational heads (EVP, Prez). Focused on long term corporate strategy which tended to be much more about finance than about product. Dealt a lot with VC/investor relations, corporate partnerships and market positioning.
I found it interesting that the author mentioned tactical planning for manager and director, but not strategic planning for the VP. That seems like a useful differentiator to me (with extremely contrived examples)...
C-level - sets highest level strategy (We're going to the moon!)
VP - adds level of detail to strategy (draws a map from earth to the moon, decides we need a rocket ship to get there)
Director - bridges strategy and tactics (creates high level requirements the rocket ship, makes sure there are enough gas stations on the way to the moon)
Manager - ensures tactical success (ensures the team builds a rocket that meets the spec, makes sure the rocket stops for gas on the way)
And of course, for a sufficiently large org, some of this gets offloaded to dedicated Product Managers, Program Managers, etc. But, that's orthogonal to the point of the article, I think.
VP seems like just a title that corporation gives out when they run out of brownie points or something.
I think the impression comes from banks, because you need to be a VP to sign contracts for the company or something like that, so they just make everyone a VP.
C-level - sets highest level strategy (We're going to the moon!)
VP - Tells directors to work faster
Director - Tells managers to work faster
Manager - unblocks team
ICs - do real work
Or another way to put it is
VP- protects their empire from the C level
Director- protects their department from the VP
Manager- protects their team from the director
IC- can get real work done because they are protected from this political crap
This puts words over why I don't want to be promoted. I've watched enough VPs looking enviously at the seemingly stress free life (comparatively speaking) of lower level staff engineers, busy as they are shuffling from one escalation to another instead of actually building stuff.
You're not wrong. Upper management is a very stressful grind with little glory. It used to be that it was paid very well to compensate for that, but staff engineer jobs are close enough in comp now that the difference in stress becomes really questionable.
…What do they actually do all day?
I understand what line managers do just fine, but our company works on a process where important projects are supervised by a VP, which really leaves you with the feeling that you never see what the directors are doing. Presumably they're doing something. Although my last one got fired because everyone under him thought he was useless, so maybe not.
Reading the article, it also makes them sound useless because it just says it's okay if they have an excuse for failing.
It very much depends on the company and size of the team. A lot of it is planning, filling gaps, coordinating with other teams, and endless meetings.
I get that that can sound like valueless filler, but it's actually more important than you'd think if you've never seen the sausage made, so to speak. It's basically trying to turn ambiguous mandates from above into actionable plans.
Steve Jobs on a related topic, what it means to be a leader:
https://youtu.be/rQKis2Cfpeo
Guess VPs (according to both) are it
I am not a big fan of Steve overall, but the one thing he inherently understood was “identity”. How I am using “identity” in this context is, how someone sees themselves. It is the story they tell themselves about themselves. I am a good leader. I and good at solving problems. I am a dog person. I am tidy or I am sloppy. And on and on.
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.
thanks for putting into words what i realised but couldnt formulate. best workers were ones where the product that they managed was a part of their identity.
This is important, but you still have to manage those people because nothing lasts forever and they can burn out!
If we assume the natural time evolution of groups of people is to decohere (with sqrt t?), being a leader means keeping everyone roughly in phase?
RRW's 絶対領域?
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8680#comment-2003765
*From the foxhunt site https://archive.today/latest/https://www.sohu.com/a/47905536...
Lagniappe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Duke_of_Wellington_at_Pau,...
""discolored water"" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_San_Francisco_(SSN-711)#:~...
I think this post is excellent. It clearly describes the problem in many companies - granular levels/ladder climbing.
It also describes another great problem that shows up in tech - non-technical/non-owner managers, directors, and VP.
As described in this article, the VP is supposed to be the expert who created the plan of execution, the director is supposed to be the expert who executes it.
But in big tech at least, this is not what happens. VPs and directors are clueless to the point of incompetence. They understand politics but not how to drive with leadership, deep technical understanding, planning, communication, and direction. They spend an enormous amount of time in BS like stack ranking and perf reviews instead of creating solid plans that move the company needle - externally.
As a result, in large companies, you see the corporate hellhole decline. VPs and Directors are not respected at all. They can't answer much. They aren't clued in on the tech. They don't understand competition. They don't understand innovation. They do understand ladder climbing politics - so they create an empire of ladder climbers.
It is almost hilarious how poor some tech management is. Would you join a ship where the captain does not how ship-steering works?
If you want to be a VP, just come to a company where I work. It's not been growing in size for like 15 years, and these top ranks have been saturating with people who asked for promotions.
Everyone is VP, director or head of something to the point that it just looks ridiculous when His Highness Head of QA and His Majesty CTO stay late in the office to fix that useEffect hook in the cancel subscription pop-up.
US/NATO military equivalents to corporate titles:
Team lead: E5-E6, W1
Manager: E7-E8, O2-O3
Associate Principal: W1-W2
Principal: W3-W4
Senior Principal: W5
Senior Advisor: E9
Associate Director: O4
Director: O5
VP: O6
SVP: O7-O8
COO O9
CEO/Diplomat O10 (4star)
Chairman: O11 (5star)
Conglomerate Chairman: 6star, Pershing
The big difference is that in the military everything above team lead has an internal support staff and planning occurs independently at every level.
I would add that typically the O levels there (officer in military) in corporate usually have bonus/equity as part of compensation, like a major element of comp, not some $1k petty cash bonus.
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.
I think differentiating roles between “effort” vs “results” is an interesting concept. I don’t have first-hand experience with a formal role ladder. I work in a small firm where I created my own role building a software platform internal to an org where no one else has any software engineering expertise. However, I’ve always ascribed to the notion that seniority is proportional to “social credit”. Where social credit is some combination of your perceived expertise at your craft, your ability to achieve results (on an arbitrary project/task) i.e. your professional competence, and the trust others put into you that you can/would help them if they ever needed. Social credit is built, and also spent. Failure is tolerated if you have social credit to spare, but is ultimately finite. People want to follow you if you have amassed more social credit than most.
This is also why starting your own thing will give you better experience at being a VP than working at a 9-5.
(But it’s also harder than being a VP.)
And if you’re going back to 9-5 after an unsuccessful startup stint, look for VP or GM like roles. Anything else won’t have enough degrees of freedom to keep you happy
Interstingly in a traditional British company directors are the most senior and VPs don't exist. A director would be a board level job, as in a statutory director.
Obviously there are a lot of US companies in the UK and their influence spreads...
Also very dependent on sector.
Noticed hn in general seems to consider VP pretty senior. In my day to day finance world it's basically middle management. i.e. People still pretty deep in the detail
>Noticed hn in general seems to consider VP pretty senior
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.
In finance, this would be more like a managing director (e.g., in Two Sigma, one of the engineering leaders reporting directly to the CTO). You're totally right that "VP" just refers to more like a mid-level or senior engineer in that world.
Quoting the blog post:
>"I am talking about one of three levels at which people operate: manager, director, and vice president. Here are my definitions:
>* Managers are paid to drive results with some support. They have experience in the function, can take responsibility, but are still learning the job and will have questions and need support. They can execute the tactical plan for a project but typically can’t make it.
>* Directors are paid to drive results with little or no supervision (“set and forget”). Directors know how to do the job. They can make a project’s tactical plan in their sleep. They can work across the organization to get it done. I love strong directors. They get shit done.
>* VPs are paid to make the plan. Say you run marketing. Your job is to understand the company’s business situation, make a plan to address it, build consensus to get approval of that plan, and then go execute it."
As an IC at startups or consultant I frequently feel like I'm expected to do all of these things, and produce results.
“Levels don’t matter except for these levels that I care about”
:rolleyes:
All titles are made up. No one fits a role/title perfectly. It’s all a bunch of bullshit. Normally it’s really just using salary ranges as the core thing people care about and people move up “titles” while not improving their skills one bit (seniority, playing politics better, etc).
At my last company they made a big deal about becoming a “senior developer”, it was a lot more responsibly, work, _pay_, etc. Years later I (and another developer) was outperforming the “senior” developers by a good margin and the company gave us both title bumps, a 3% CoL raise, and… $1K bonus.
That was probably the last time I believed in any sort of sanity in ranking/titles/etc.
Ask for what you want, don’t wait for a “performance review”, yes it’s uncomfortable, get over it. No ranking system is going to accurately reflect skills.
> All titles are made up
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
Those are great ideas in theory I guess but not at all how they are treated industry wide and often not how they are treated within the same company.
99% of the time titles have very little to do with what someone does day to day. It’s just not that simple and clear cut.
All that to say, I don’t find one persons thoughts on what those titles mean very useful since that’s just what it means to that specific person. There is no, that I’m aware of, industry-wide agreement.
Not to mention I find those definitions to be silly, overly simple, and not how anyone thinks of their job.
See what I said to the other guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43434093#43456611
Unfortunately, shit will always roll downhill. I can tell your understanding is an ideal scenario, because it's the opposite of how the real world works.
1. I didn't write the article. 2. I suggest you read the sidebar listing the author's real-world achievements.
Wow, this post could not have come at a more welcome time.
I'm a Solutions Architect, and after 4 years in-role am agitating for advancement; a 2-year merger put everything for everyone on hold until its resolution. It's become clear that there has been no plan for advancement.
After unsolicited and vague promises of a director or even VP(!?) role before the merger resolution, they have since been talking of *maybe* a manager, or maybe *maybe* senior manager role. *Maybe* managing just two of my current developers, whom they are preparing to off-shore. This all while they have promoted another SA to a director position; a well-deserved promotion at that.
Oh, they're also getting rid of the Solutions Architect job itself: soon I will be "Lead Analyst".
This is all to say that the post and all your comments are very helpful! Love this site.
When I had an IC role, I would recommend tech projects and execute them w/ my team (we can solve "problem X" with "tech stack Y"). I also had a lot of agency in creating solutions for tech proposals. When I had the director role, I made sure nobody wasted time. I would qualify deals to chase, recommend strategies and core competencies to pursue (AI and Cloud yes, Blockchain and Quantum no). Now, in my VP role I try to get people good at making these strategy decisions (we should follow shipley for capture, etc.). Also, a LOT more relationship capital building and external COMMs at the VP level.
Some of this seems a little simplistic; as a relatively new director who reports to the CTO I think everyone is "building the plan" but at different levels of granularity. Where we run into trouble is when the CTO gets too far away from defining the broad outcomes and veers deep into the "how". They get very prescriptive, but without the context of the implementation details or any real knowledge of the countless small problems that directors, then managers, then ICs deal with. It looks a lot like (and really is a falvour of) micro-managing.
>> It conflates career development and salary negotiation
I just went through this with an IC 2 levels below me. To the credit of the person's manager they communicated to the IC "don't ask me for a promotion when you want more money". The (easily said; harder to implement) solution is to build a management relationship with people that has an "agent-client" dynamic. The direct manager can't be viewed as the decision maker and needs to be the advocate for this to happen IME.
"I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."
I vaguely remember a quote that goes "No kid ever dreamed about growing up to be a middle manager."
I get that work is just a means to an end, but find something you love to do. If you love management, that's great. I love being an engineer, and prefer to be a player/coach over just a leader, and hate that as I get older my age is looked down on.
IME the only time (higher) age is looked down on is when it's used a crutch by that person - whether its derision of others because they're not as old, or "I've been around longer than you so you should listen to me simply because of that" or whatever the case may be.
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.
i don't agree with any of these definitions. From my experience VPs and directors are so far removed from any actual work that most of their "plans" mean very little. Things get done not because of their "plans" but despite of them.
In terms of career development. Ppl aren't promoted for their ability to make "plans" or execute them. Ppl are promoted into those promotions for being trustworthy by ppl above them .
To get to that position, you should be
1. be people oriented. Genuinely like ppl around you from your heart ( not fake it) . Take the first step and build genuine love for ppl around you. Your first instinct towards anyone should be trying to make their work lives easier. This is super hard for nerdy coder types because we have mental depenendcy on being the "smart one", hard to let go of that part of identity.
2. consistenly deliver results and become the person that can be trusted by person that gave you the assignment. Building trust is the main job when you go work. Its not writing some badass code or being innovating or whatever.
Having been in both situations in large organizations, I can say the connection between the plans and the work can be difficult to see sometimes, but the absence of such a plan is much worse in the long run. As the size of groups grow, people don't generally self organize.
Great career development advice. This is absolutely the most reliable way to advance in an organization.
this is why in my company the only VP is the company cat and the title is hereditary.
Most of the work of “good” managers is about affecting culture, providing a sustainable work load, emotional intelligence, encouraging team work and sense of shared ownership
Yet in outsider society and political discourse this is thrown into the trash under the weight of individual rewards and exploitation
Perhaps we need a rethink
To be a good manager means to run a team well and get stuff done. To be a good VP means to increase shareholder value. To be a director means you are at some percentage of completion of the soul/morality extraction process that happens when transitioning from the first to the second.
It is a good read. It is early so I can't help wondering if I am nodding, because it hits close to home or coffee did not hit yet, but I think I agree with the author here.
It's an interesting read an hard to disagree with.
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.
This is an interesting way of thinking about it compared to the common definition that uses "scope" (which outside IC roles is a synonym for to headcount)
Anybody have some book suggestions that describe what a Director or VP does, and what makes a good one, in the day-to-day sense?
I'm a bit late to respond here but in case you're checking replies: Camille Fournier's book The Manager's Path is enjoyable to read and covers exactly this
> Another practice I’m not hugely fond of is “leveling”
> That said, I do believe there are three meaningful levels in management
Cool!
> I can’t tell you the number of times people have asked me for “development” or “leveling” conversations where I get excited and start talking about learning, skills gaps, and such and it’s clear all they wanted to talk about was salary. Disappointing.
I mean…these people are rational and they want more money, which is an objective metric. In a confusing world of HR jargon, levels, lack of clear links between output and compensation, what else could you expect? It’s on you, the manager, to link the financial metric to specific tangible results, whether past or future.
If high performers are having these “I want a raise” conversations, it’s because they know they are delivering, they want a sign of progress in their career. They may already be gathering market data of their real price through interviews or at least discussions/research. This means they are already at risk of moving. Lack of insight into this from managers is “Disappointing”
In my own experience, and having guided others through these conversations, managers need to always have some clarity on what they could provide to the people reporting directly to them.
The timing should be determined based on an understanding of what is best for the company. E.g., what maximizes retention or other key organizational metrics.
Dave Kellogg is definitely someone worth listening to.
> Yes, you might discover that a Senior FPA Analyst II earns the same as a Product Marketing Director I, but why does that matter? It’s a coincidence. It’s like saying with $3.65 I can buy either a grande non-fat latte or a head of organic lettuce. What matters is the fair price of each of those goods in the market — not they that happen to have the same price.
Well, it infuriates me just the same. If a coffee shot costs the same or more that some other food that is healthy and gives you more calories and/or nutrients. And I say this as a coffee lover.
But beside specific examples nitpicking, I understand the gist of it, and I understand the market reasons - you want to attract or retain talent and they/we look at compensations on a market level - but this still doesn't mean it is fair. Unless you believe in fairy tales and invisible hands.
> but this still doesn't mean it is fair
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.
"Fair" has many facets. It can be fairly compensated for the market value of a nominal role but still be unfairly compensated within the company according to the work executed and the "value"[1] created.
[1] Value in this context can be not just only monetary value but creating a good working environment, help other to do better their job etc
I'm not sure what to tell you. That words can have different meanings given the context? And this version of fair is using a specific one that you're unwilling to accept.
It seems you wish the author used "market rate" and not "fair". But you're annoyed at the wrong thing because that usage is completely valid. That society has allowed "fair" to mean what the market is willing to pay regardless of its equality to fellow man.
Because if that's the case - nothing is fair.
What’s the alternative?
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.
Personally I think “…but we executed the plan…” is unreasonable at any level, at any job, at any task, and any point in anyone’s life. It’s never a way to go through any part of life.
If you set out to complete a task, it should be to achieve your goal. Your should measure your success as achievement of your goal, not by whether you went through the motions.
The main job of these "managers" is repeatedly asking "when will this get done?" and "Why isn't it done yet?".
You could hire a parrot to do these jobs.
I like this post, it's clear, well considered and concise. I'd caveat that with, "for certain kinds of companies". Two thoughts:
1) On his issue with levels. I don't disagree with most of the observations, but I've definitely experienced staff that are less concerned with the pay increase and just want the validation and pat on the back of the level bump. It's weird, because it usually comes with more responsibility and work. While just getting more money lets you go back to what you were doing and are already good at. But everybody has their own ideas at career progression.
2) In my personal career, the types of companies I've worked for have a slightly different flavor of this, and I've come up with my own internal shorthand ideas for what these titles mean. It's useful to consider this because as you rise in these ranks, you have to also train the next generation to be able to step into your shoes and do a good job:
Manager - you are 85%/15% focused down/up. Down into your reports and tasks and up to receive new input from your manager (perhaps a director) and provide back status. You spend that 85% of the time taking somewhat vague directions and turning them into actionable tasks by your reports. You reports in turn should have well scoped tasks that when completed, build into a completed work unit that satisfies a directive from up your chain. You are a work breakdown structure and scheduling engine. Your performance is generally measured by delivering programs on-time, on-budget, and having a minimum of issues with your reports.
Director - you are 50/50 focused down/up. You spend time refining vague business unit goals into vague programs. You rely on your Managers to turn those programs into work tasks. You have a lot of responsibility for driving revenue, have a budget, but in most companies are not specifically measured by P&L. Your performance is measured by revenue targets. You get pulled into sales and marketing projects that are already moving freight trains to provide grounding, and to mobilize resources under you to support specific efforts. You got into your position because you provided on-time, on-budget program successes repeatedly, and a few of them struck gold by chance. You also had a knack for working well with the sales/marketing people and maybe even straddled between worlds.
VP - you are 15/85 down/up and spend that time turning impossibly vague corporate goals into merely vague business goals. You are responsible for P&L, and your performance is measured by both revenue and profit targets. You spend a lot of the day working with sales and marketing, and you conceive and initiate growth efforts. Depending on the company, you likely have your own subordinate sales and marketing team that reports directly to you, and is separate from the engineering team. You got into your position primarily because you are really good/lucky at growing revenue and can put together revenue growth strategies that have a higher probability of working than not. It's even possible you never spent time in the engineering organization, and worked up through the sales/marketing path.
Source: Been all of the above at various times. Highest position was President of a very small startup, which I count as almost meaningless (where I also did a stint as a VP). "Biggest" position was half a decade as a Sr. Director of an 200+ head engineering organization in a several thousand person company till I was promoted out of it.
A lot of manager talk on HN lately. Time to start Manager News?
Many times, the best managers are the ones that are good hackers in the first place.
I get tired of the "eww, management is where engineers who can't hack it go to die" trope.
I was being serious... Managing is a distinct skill, and having a separate space to discuss it would be nice.
Obligatory UK translation here: If you're reading this in the UK, when he writes "Director", the nuance is different. In the UK, this means Company Director most of the time, although the US influence is changing this.
Oh, sweet summer child...
> But it’s the same standard to which the CEO is held. If the CEO makes a plan, gets it approved by the board, and executes it well but it doesn’t work, they cannot tell the board “but, but, it’s the plan we agreed to.”
Some advice to the managers and aspiring managers from the perspective an employee.
Good qualities in managers:
* I have a lot to learn from you
* you reward me with promotions and bonuses when I do well
* you can sell a vision, even a small one, and motivate me
* you take my problems and concerns seriously and do not ignore them, rather than gas-lighting me and trying to paint my concerns as the problem
* you have the awareness to figure out what my core motivations are, and have and skill to align your goals with mine, thus putting both of us on a path towards shared success
* you are forthcoming and honest with your feedback, bc you see my blindspots and tell me about them so I can fix them
* you understand that too much attrition is a bad signal for management success
* you understand that as a leader you understand accountability -- you deserve a greater proportion of the success but also the downside when things go bad
* I want to crawl over broken glass for you bc of all of the above bc you have earned my loyalty
Bad qualities in managers:
* there isn't much to learn from you, and the best thing I can learn is not how to be bad manager, bc you're a bad manager and I know it
* if you leave and my performance does not suffer, it means your presence never had a positive effect (or any effect) in my role
* you gas light me when I bring up problems and concerns, shifting any responsibly form you to me
* you are neurotic and I need to work around your emotions to make you "feel good", and I get more reward for this than actually delivering work
* you do not have the courage to give me difficult feedback that I need to hear bc you are afraid of having uncomfortable and awkward conversations
* you are so preoccupied with making your manager happy that you sacrifice your employees to accomplish this
* you do not care enough about attrition and underestimate the consequences of losing good employees, mostly bc your employees feel the consequences, not you
* bc of your lack of skill as manager, the relationships you have with your employees end up being adversarial rather then a shared success..no one wants to crawl over broken glass to work for you and the employees who stick around do not want to be there
* you do not understand accountability -- you repeatedly make poor decisions bc you never face the consequences, until its too late and then you get fired bc at that point, its obvious the problems was you all along
* you were promoted bc you kissed the right ass at the right time, which does great damage to your world view bc now you assume this is just the way the world works
I could keep going, but that should suffice for now.
A classic
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