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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 overview, my supervisor requested if I’d begin managing a crew of my very own. I had acquired sturdy efficiency scores and earned belief amongst my colleagues and the management crew, and the group’s headcount was persistently rising 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. Sturdy engineers succeed by rigorous analytical capability 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 perfect motivation to turn out to be a supervisor is straightforward: You care about folks. Administration is inherently a people-oriented job, which implies managers ought to develop their reviews by optimistic and constructive suggestions. An excellent supervisor cares about discovering every particular person’s zone of genius after which assigning work that finest matches that engineer’s profile. The byproduct of that is the power to scale impression, however that shouldn’t be the first motive.
A standard, but misguided, cause to change to administration is to earn extra money. A minimum of inside Big Tech corporations, managers and ICs on the identical degree are paid the identical quantity. The truth is, some corporations intentionally pay their managers much less, merely to discourage mercenary engineers who’re optimizing for compensation reasonably than folks.
Nonetheless, there may be nuance right here that’s price calling out. At extra senior ranges, managers are promoted at quicker charges in comparison with ICs. A supervisor’s impression is essentially 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 crew.
Then again, a person contributor on the director degree should produce output that has an identical scale of impression 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 re-orgs or worker departures, not essentially by the distinctive contributions of the supervisor. The result’s that managers who stick round lengthy sufficient will naturally develop their careers. Empirically, that is apparent within the information. At an organization like Meta or Google, there are much more VP-level managers than there are IC engineers of the equal degree.
In the long run, subsequently, managers do earn extra money than particular person contributors. This isn’t essentially improper, however it is best 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 components that I beloved and components that I didn’t, and I ended up switching again to the IC ladder inside a yr.
—Rahul
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