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Throughout my first two years working at Meta, I used to be a person contributor (IC) engineer. Then, after an encouraging evaluate, my supervisor requested if I’d begin managing a group of my very own. I had acquired robust efficiency rankings and earned belief amongst my colleagues and the management group, and the group’s headcount was constantly growing annually.
That is the usual origin story for engineers who transition to administration. However the expertise required to succeed as an engineer and those a supervisor has to have are considerably completely different. Robust engineers succeed via rigorous analytical capability and deep work. Robust managers (whose work is decidedly un-analytical!) inspire and develop folks’s careers, whereas additionally being ready to leap into points at a second’s discover.
The best motivation to turn into a supervisor is easy: You care about folks. Administration is inherently a people-oriented job, which implies managers ought to develop their studies via constructive and constructive suggestions. supervisor cares about discovering every individual’s zone of genius after which assigning work that finest matches that engineer’s profile. The byproduct of that is the power to scale affect, however that shouldn’t be the first motive.
A standard, but misguided, motive to modify to administration is to earn extra money. No less than inside Big Tech firms, managers and ICs on the similar stage are paid the identical quantity. Actually, some firms intentionally pay their managers much less, merely to discourage mercenary engineers who’re optimizing for compensation quite than folks.
Nevertheless, there may be nuance right here that’s price calling out. At extra senior ranges, managers are promoted at sooner charges in comparison with ICs. A supervisor’s affect is basically derived from their affect in an org, which incorporates the variety of folks of their reporting chain. A director with 50 engineers of their org can successfully “declare credit score” for the folks on their group.
However, a person contributor on the director stage should produce output that has an analogous scale of affect to what the 50 engineers shipped. As you’ll be able to think about, that is a lot tougher. IC promotions at these ranges require a stage of technical brilliance that’s troublesome to reliably reproduce.
Managers usually get promoted as they accumulate extra folks below them. This course of can occur via re-orgs or worker departures, not essentially via the distinctive contributions of the supervisor. The result’s that managers who stick round lengthy sufficient will naturally develop their careers. Empirically, that is apparent within the knowledge. At an organization like Meta or Google, there are much more VP-level managers than there are IC engineers of the equal stage.
In the long run, due to this fact, managers do earn extra money than particular person contributors. This isn’t essentially mistaken, however it’s best to replicate in your incentives and decide what is going to make you fulfilled past the cash.
I ended up saying sure to the administration alternative I used to be supplied, and I’m very glad I did. Like all job, there have been components that I cherished and components that I didn’t, and I ended up switching again to the IC ladder inside a 12 months.
—Rahul
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