Comment by Swizec
21 hours ago
> A Principal Engineer should be just as valued and well-treated as a CTO. Most companies fail to do this, so everyone wants to be the CTO. Establish a career track, where technical people aspire to technical positions.
I spent my whole career avoiding engineering management and trying to grow in the pure technical leadership direction. One day I realized that for every staff engineer there are 10 managers, for every principal there are 5 senior managers, etc.
Turns out management is not so bad and companies seem to appreciate that kind of help a lot more
edit: also as a manager you get to work on all those pesky “It’s a people problem, actually” parts of engineering which is pretty fun. Every time in technical leadership where it felt like “Well we’ve got the plan now we just gotta incentivize doing the plan” you’re the one doing the incentivizing yay!
I was a manager, much of my career.
I hated it, but was actually pretty good at it (I worked for a company that didn't suffer slackers, and they kept me for almost 27 years). I mainly kept it, because I couldn't trust anyone else to do the job correctly.
But my heart has always been in the tech, and I did side projects, that whole time. Since leaving, I ran screaming back to being a technical implementation person, and am almost deliriously happy.
A good manager is actually fairly hard to find. It's been my experience that a majority of highly-talented developers, don't make good managers.
> I hated it, /../ I mainly kept it, because I couldn't trust anyone else to do the job correctly.
I think the best managers are people who will even do management if that's what it takes.