Comment by geon
17 hours ago
For anyone else as confused as I was; apparently "IC" means Individual Contributor, as opposed to leadership or management.
17 hours ago
For anyone else as confused as I was; apparently "IC" means Individual Contributor, as opposed to leadership or management.
Let's play "spot the manager"
I don't mean to shame anyone for learning new information, but even if you have no interest in management, your career will benefit greatly from knowing the terms and concepts that managers in your industry commonly use. There's a lot of people out there who are aggressively against learning "corporate jargon" and then find themselves lost trying to understand why their company's leaders talk and act the way they do.
A lot of the “I won’t learn it” people are young. The ones who aren’t young end up appearing naive and ignorant.
The day the layoffs take your job (but not your officemate’s) might be a good day to learn how to read the corporate signals.
Couldn't agree more.
Early in my career, I hated, and I do mean despised people who used the term "value".
And then, one day when my colleague suggested migrating all our servers from windows to Linux but couldn't for the life of them articulate what that would do for the business / client, it started clicking. A lot of us talk about effort, activities, tasks, accomplishments. I did this, Bob did that, Fatime did the other thing. At some level of management, "value" is the well understood shorthand for "when we follow the chain of benefits, what does this actually do for the client / business?". Its their job (when done well) to ensure technical tasks contribute to business value.
And we could be upset that they are inventing weird jargon for no clear reason, but then spend a minute explaining "garbage collection" etc as a term of art, and realize that pots are calling kettle black and all that - nobody has weird jargon like IT techies :->
When I was hired at my current role, it was clear to me that I'm in an IC vs Management position. It's really not that weird and is a very common term.