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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 assessment, 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 persistently growing annually.
That is the usual origin story for engineers who transition to administration. However the abilities required to succeed as an engineer and those a supervisor has to have are considerably totally different. Sturdy engineers succeed by way of rigorous analytical potential and deep work. Sturdy managers (whose work is decidedly un-analytical!) encourage and develop folks’s careers, whereas additionally being ready to leap into points at a second’s discover.
The best motivation to grow to be a supervisor is straightforward: You care about folks. Administration is inherently a people-oriented job, which implies managers ought to develop their stories by way of constructive and constructive suggestions. An excellent supervisor cares about discovering every individual’s zone of genius after which assigning work that greatest matches that engineer’s profile. The byproduct of that is the flexibility to scale affect, however that shouldn’t be the first motive.
A typical, but misguided, motive to modify to administration is to earn more cash. A minimum of inside Huge Tech firms, managers and ICs on the similar degree are paid the identical quantity. Actually, some firms intentionally pay their managers much less, merely to discourage mercenary engineers who’re optimizing for compensation fairly than folks.
Nevertheless, there’s nuance right here that’s value calling out. At extra senior ranges, managers are promoted at sooner charges in comparison with ICs. A supervisor’s affect is basically derived from their affect in an org, which incorporates the variety of 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 degree should produce output that has the same scale of affect to what the 50 engineers shipped. As you’ll be able to think about, that is a lot more durable. IC promotions at these ranges require a degree of technical brilliance that’s tough to reliably reproduce.
Managers typically get promoted as they accumulate extra folks underneath them. This course of can occur by way of re-orgs or worker departures, not essentially by way of the distinctive contributions of the supervisor. The result’s that managers who stick round lengthy sufficient will naturally develop their careers. Empirically, that is apparent within the knowledge. At an organization like Meta or Google, there are much more VP-level managers than there are IC engineers of the equal degree.
In the long run, subsequently, managers do earn more cash than particular person contributors. This isn’t essentially flawed, however you need to mirror in your incentives and decide what’s 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 every job, there have been elements that I liked and elements that I didn’t, and I ended up switching again to the IC ladder inside a yr.
—Rahul
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