I'd say that 80% of the time, the IC track is bad for the ambitious, non-consulting engineer ultimately, unless your plan is to move around alot, which is a strategy that gets riskier as you get older and better compensated. Even for the consultant, the path to growth is... hiring people and leveraging their labors!
End of the day, the size of your tribe or budget is a physical manifestation of your power in an organization. Power is how you get stuff done -- all of the right answers don't matter if you cannot realize the outcome. IMO, it's critical to grow as an engineer to be able to get others aligned to whatever task is at hand.
My career is very much in the applied space -- my perspective is someone delivering solutions, not inventing tech. It may be different for different disciplines/scopes.
This is an excellent point. About 80% of the time, this is how it plays out in most larger orgs.
The interesting thing is what happens in mid size to smaller companies, where organization structures are not as well defined. You still need people here, however, if you know the stack very well or are a proficient IC, you can make contributions that can have a significant impact on the org, and gain the trust and allegiance of many engineers, albeit informally.
I've seen this happen a lot. A senior engineer will either create or integrate a new tool or process which makes life easier for other teams. They are grateful to the person and are much more willing to hear the engineer out for future designs and projects.
All that to say... just having a title doesn't get you anywhere. You have to build trust by delivering value, however incrementally. Maybe this is really trivial stuff, IDK.
You're not making a great case for senior ICs being impactful.
I mean, what you described is one way to deliver senior-level impact for a team.
However, this has a very important problem. Every time you join a team, you have to build up this rapport from scratch. If you switch jobs every few years, you'll find half your professional time consisting of busting your ass to build up rapport, only to have to start from zero at the next job.
When you're hired as a manager, you don't need to do (this kind of) rapport building. You just tell people what to do, and they will build it.
> If you switch jobs every few years, you'll find half your professional time consisting of busting your ass to build up rapport, only to have to start from zero at the next job.
Not half, all of your time will be busting your ass building up rapport.
Lets look at the alternative: you start a greenfield project with no understanding of what the rest of the company's stack looks like. Engineers know some person was hired to do something, and they may be interested in what you're doing, but they're probably not invested in it (the people who hired you are probably more invested, but they're unlikely to be the ones who have a deep understanding of the tech stack). You're facing an incredibly uphill battle here, as there are certainly going to be things that you will need assistance with (custom libraries, weird deployment frameworks, shitty deployment scripts that only one person somewhere knows how to get working etc.).
You may be a super genius, super hardworking person and be able to pull it off. For the average case, I am convinced this is a backwards way to approach the problem.
Not necessarily. Positional power is only one aspect of a managers capability.
It doesn’t prevent you from using personal power and influence, although most organizations are setup to purposefully make it difficult to function that way.
Usually your best managers do both. Think of the best people that you’ve worked for in any environment. Usually they are people from whom you’d seek advice and counsel.
It is a gross over-simplification - but I've had a lot of managers, and not once have I seen one bust their ass for a year, and then take six months to gather feedback and peer support on their work, in order to get the rapport necessary to do the job they were hired to do.
I mean, they do this sort of thing, in order to show that they are superstar, and should get 2x the headcount they currently have, but they don't actually need to spend a year and a half convincing people with results, in order to be allowed to direct their existing headcount as they see fit.
A senior IC, on the other hand, needs to personally prove themselves at every workplace, before they are allowed to act in the role of a senior. You're expected to deliver the results of a manager, without the corresponding power. You're expected to exercise soft power, and you're expected to acquire this soft power on your own.
It is an incredibly inefficient way of getting stuff done, if you ever switch jobs.
Totally! I believe the debate can be rephrased in certain situations as : whether you want to always be the player or do you want to be a coach at some point. As coach, you remain relevant as you grow older and have a bigger impact on the team. And in tech, nobody stops you from playing as a coach.
End of the day, the size of your tribe or budget is a physical manifestation of your power in an organization. Power is how you get stuff done -- all of the right answers don't matter if you cannot realize the outcome. IMO, it's critical to grow as an engineer to be able to get others aligned to whatever task is at hand.
My career is very much in the applied space -- my perspective is someone delivering solutions, not inventing tech. It may be different for different disciplines/scopes.