Comment by mindvirus
2 years ago
Even in FAANG it's a promotion. If not immediately, the cap for ICs is much lower.
Principal engineer at FAANG (L8): likely one of the best engineers in the world.
Engineering director at FAANG (L8): manager who's been there for a while and is good at acquiring more reports.
As a ratio, there are far more eng directors to managers than principal engineers to engineers.
All that said, know what you want in your career. If you love building, build. If you want money, do management.
> If you want money, do management.
If you make it to my comment, please - do not go into management for the money. If you want to build, then remain an IC. If you want to grow other engineers, further THEIR career, make THEM better - go into management.
The friends of mine who ended up in management for the money and complain about their reports make me so angry.
I mean, this has a certain truth to it... but this isn't really a situation unique to management.
A lot of engineers, of all flavors, are at least partially in the field for the money. Maybe they enjoy their work, maybe they're good at it, but for a lot of people it was more of a plan C or D after the things they really wanted to do turned out to be something they couldn't make money at.
Some of them would rather be authors or musicians, some of them chemists or physicists, a number of them are just waiting to buy a goat farm upstate. If you include them people who would rather be engineering something else, but that something else doesn't pay the bills, it may be a majority of engineers who are in it for the money.
> please - do not go into management for the money
Please won’t do much, even if I agree. Incentives and all that.
Point well made.
Guys, everybody goes into management for the money.
Sometimes, people are asked to become managers because their managers think that they have the right combination of skills and attributes to be good at the job.
And sometimes, the people who were asked, due to a combination of stubbornness and a desire not to “sell out”, deny the request for 7-8 years. Eventually, a person might realize that the original requesters may have been correct and that’s how they become a manager.
Or so I’ve heard.
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say that many people get into management for the money. My thought is that the motivation, the incentive, is wrong.
I’ve had too many shitty managers in my career to think I’d put other people through similar experiences. So, my switch into management was motivated by, hopefully, making the experiences on my team positive ones
I disagree.
Plenty of people I know do it for other reasons: power, control, purpose, leverage, …
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If you go into any activity for the money, you'll ruin the activity.
Your point is that managers are more upwardly mobile, which is fair, but that doesn't mean when you make the switch it is a promotion. G9 IC -> M0 will not increase your salary. It does grant you more power, but that is not a promotion per se.
The other thing to watch out for is manager growth over the last 10-15 years was a result of the structural needs of an unprecedented tech bull run. Now that the industry has moved into belt-tightening mode, the heaviest scrutiny is falling on managers. The type of political games a typical 35 year-old EM (5 years coding, 10 years EM) may not be as effective as they were in the previous environment. There are a LOT of EMs getting pipped or knocked back to IC these days, whereas ICs with a bit of product/UX sense, ability to think a bit beyond their silo, and willing to work on "boring" business applications will continue to be highly valued, especially given the amount of dead weight that has found its way in by grinding leetcode.
That's a great insight. I hadn't considered how the bull run led to the current structure, as we switch from "keep this ship together while we grow" to driving operational efficiency.
Yep. Literally straight from Mark Zuckerberg's mouth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff4fRgnuFgQ&t=6585s
<quote> [From 1:49:53] Um, you know, at the beginning of this, we, um, I asked our, our people team, what was the average number of reports that a manager had? And I think it was, it was around three, maybe three to four, but closer to three. I was like, wow, like a manager can, you know, best practices that person can, can manage, you know, seven or eight people. Um, but there was a reason why it was closer to three. It was because we were growing so quickly, right? And when you're hiring so many people so quickly, then that means that you need managers who have capacity to onboard new people. Um, and also if you have a new manager, you may not want to have them have seven direct reports immediately because you want them to ramp up. But the thing is going forward, I don't want us to actually hire that many people that quickly, right? So I actually think we'll just do better work if we have more constraints and we're, um, you know, leaner as an organization. So in a world where we're not adding so many people as quickly, is it as valuable to have a lot of managers who have extra capacity waiting for new people? No, right? So, um, so now we can, we could sort of defragment the organization and get to a place where the average is closer to that seven or eight.
It’s true but for most people in practice they won’t make it to L8 either as IC or manager so it’s really more a question or do you want to finish your career as an L6 IC or manager.
Most people can get to L7 by mid 40s if not sooner. People who don't progress seem to do it based on choice (want less responsibility, unwilling to change teams to find more opportunities, etc). Careers don't end in people's 30s.
I’m sorry, but that comment is absurd. MOST people can make it to L7 in their mid 40s? Most people can’t even get in the door at entry-level trying their very hardest, hard-stop-period.
"Most people"?
So if you start with a population of 100,000 employees at entry level, after a few years "most" of them will end up as L7?
That does not make any sense. Senior is the terminal band for "most".
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You nailed it. The requirements spelled out in the career ladder for IC vs. manager at FANG is ludicrous.
During calibration the ladder generally isn't consulted but it could be weaponized at any time. It is quite intimidating.
It’s pretty obvious that if you want to climb the career ladder you’re most likely to succeed as a member of the group that defines the career ladder.
It really depends. Our company (FAANG equivalent) has a lots of high ICs. There are lots of high level ICs because there are far fewer Techlead Managers who covers both sides. But tl managers are way too hard so most ppl pick one track to stick with.
High level ICs have LOTs of weights on the technical directions. They are not replaceable by the managers.
I would also say that being an engineer at L8 is a meaningfully different set of skills than L7. The whole ‘what got you here won’t get you there idea’ starts at L7 for either track…
Changing job from being cleaner to programmer is also interesting wage but is not "growing into".
I don't think what you described is a promotion? M1 = IC6, M2 = IC7, etc as you said. As far as the number of directors and VPs, sure there are probably more but I would describe that more as "it is easier to get promoted as a manager than as an individual contributer past IC6"
However... This is starting to change. We now have engineers reporting to higher levels, so basically each manager has an equivalent IC reporting directly to them. In theory this means the numbers are more equivalent.
There's no money in the world that will want me attend meetings all day.
Converting from manager to engineer at the same level requires a special test in at least one FAANG company. Doesn't that mean going from manager to IC is a promotion? And then obviously the other way around must be a demotion?
> Even in FAANG it's a promotion.
No, it is not. You switch from L6 IC to L1 M (FB/Google scale). Compensation remains exactly the same.
> If not immediately, the cap for ICs is much lower.
This is different from management being a promotion...