Why Senior Engineers Should Stay ICs

1/16/2025 at 7:22:53 PM

If you're a senior IC who does strategy, then the term "IC" is misapplied. You want to be a 1/2x engineer, not a 10x engineer.

I was a Sr Principal for about ~3 years, which taught me that the most valuable thing I could do was drive discussions to decisions, quickly and mostly painlessly.

Your job is to run good meetings to conclusions - any meeting which causes a follow-up meeting is a bad one.

However, that job get immensely harder if you can't understand complex technical things and tie-break decisions quickly. If your feet are not on the ground, you can't understand exactly why someone wants an API to be cut exactly at this level of abstraction.

If you have a bunch of motivated people working for you, this works in your advantage as they will grab you before the meeting to make sure you understand exactly what they are going to present & if both sides do it, then you will come into the meeting with more information than you could have gathered on your own.

And then the project will go ahead, things will break, whichever fork was taken. If you cannot jump in at that point to fix things or at least roll up your sleeves to get your hands dirty, then your opinion will slowly stop mattering to people.

So after quarterly planning has been done, you need to dig up some time to get into the thing that you think is the most risky thing that was decided upon, but work on it instead of asking for status reports.

About 6 hours of my weeks used to be 1:1s with people, mostly outside the office and on walk in a loop.

This happens because you are influential in the organization as a senior engineer - you get told the struggles, hopes and expectations of engineers, which allow you to run backchannels into the management tier whether it is about recognition, money or just personal stress factors.

All of this stops working when you aren't able to do the work that an IC can do, but your other 50% of time is made more valuable by the 50% of time you spend fixing things in the guts of the system. I'm only half kidding, mostly I could only do a day a week of coding at best, the rest is just eaten up like this.

by gopalv

1/16/2025 at 8:16:04 PM

It is indeed a delicate balance, and different companies take it in different directions. I've seen ICs who focus almost entirely on a single pillar with minimal collaboration needed, but I've also seen Principal Engineers who were essentially part-time PMs. It really depends on what the person's strong suit is, or what gaps they naturally end up filling.

by kidsil

1/16/2025 at 6:47:05 PM

Counter opinion: if you want to advance in your career, always opt for management roles when given an option, even if you feel you don't love the shitwork that comes with it. Management is more versatile, more leveraged, and always has a seat at the table, whereas senior IC's power is serving at the peril of some manager. I would argue the most senior ICs that actually are successful are also managers who are afforded the luxury of not writing reviews and crappy paperwork pieces of the management, and thus are told they are ICs.

Another aspect of this is only a few companies really afford to have serious IC tracks beyond a certain point (basically FB and Google). Many more companies would be looking for senior management roles than senior IC roles, even if the absolute number of positions is lower; plus senior ICs are usually hired in their core specialization (e.g. networking expert is not automatically hired for ML in the same level,) whereas managers are seen as useful in different domains, giving them practical mobility.

by tgma

1/16/2025 at 8:44:41 PM

Counter: I was once promoted to a management role and I hated it. I kept it up for a year and then went back to dev in another company.

Not all people want to be in meaningless meetings, shuffling people around and dealing with their personal/career growth, dealing with project plannings and Gantt charts, preparing presentations for upper management, etc.

/rant :)

by prerok

1/17/2025 at 4:58:57 AM

Sure, I totally get that someone may hate it and on balance decides it is not worth it for them, and still recognize it is generally a career promotion. I am simply asserting it is objectively a promotion even though there's propaganda at FAANG explicitly suggesting otherwise.

by tgma

1/17/2025 at 7:18:28 AM

It is a promotion, I agree, at least at most companies. They usually have a single ladder and many times from senior engineer there is nowhere to go except management.

Some companies, however, do recognize the need for multiple ladders, so you can also be promoted within engineering, with a salary that is higher than middle management.

It is a problem, if you switch then to a company that does not have multiple ladders, though.

by prerok

1/16/2025 at 9:37:36 PM

I think this is the right approach. Give management an honest try, but if your life is miserable or not enjoyable, become a dev again.

by francisofascii

1/16/2025 at 7:03:54 PM

> whereas managers are seen as useful in different domains, giving them practical mobility

And this is exactly my problem with becoming a manager. You become fungible, easily replaceable, movable and fire-able.

by dusanh

1/17/2025 at 4:57:30 AM

And they are the people who decide whom to fire.

by tgma

1/16/2025 at 10:41:33 PM

It's a completely different world, and some people aren't made for it. Among other things, the politics of management positions is often pretty intense, and not something that engineering-oriented people find fulfilling.

by timr

1/17/2025 at 4:54:37 AM

ICs like to think they don't have to deal with politics. It is only an illusion that sometimes is true because their manager happen to protect them from those (double-edged sword: hurts visibility) and if they are lucky their interests are aligned with the boss. ICs often have a worse hand in politics because they have to fly blind in the politics world and operate with less information and visibility.

by tgma

1/17/2025 at 5:05:55 AM

I agree, but being aware of politics is entirely different than jumping into the deep end of the pool.

by timr

1/16/2025 at 11:02:52 PM

A low level manager really doesn’t have any more influence than a staff architect and often less. In the role I rejected that I spoke about in another reply and the role I accepted, the staff level IC is at the same level in the org as the engineering manager and we both report to a director.

In my current niche - cloud consulting - I can be over a project dealing with software development, cloud architecture, data analytics, migrations, cloud hosted call centers, etc.

Just like an engineering manager, I don’t have to be the best at each role. I just need to be comfortable working at that level of “scope”, “impact” and “ambiguity”.

by scarface_74

1/16/2025 at 7:41:33 PM

counter counter point: Meta, Amazon, and other tech co's have considerably flattened their orgs in recent years

by Ancalagon

1/17/2025 at 4:56:28 AM

Well, no one bats an eye if a manager chooses to become an IC (of course they have to know their shit, many of whom don't, and always bluff "I wish I was an IC"), but from IC to manager is not an automatic option.

Being a manager is "not a promotion" promotion.

by tgma

1/16/2025 at 9:38:53 PM

Those are clearly the exceptions.

by betaby

1/16/2025 at 11:25:49 PM

I think that the advice needs to consider company, society culture and even family dynamics. We don't live in a bubble where we can make decisions entirely based upon our personal preferences.

In my experience (Sydney, Autralia) being a competent and productive IC in an organisation has limits. An alternative is to become a contractor and build up a reputation for delivering quality results on time and budget. You can easily out earn the managers and garner respect. However, the longer you stay with a client the more you get sucked into the meetings and politics.

The downside of contracting is that you need to continually evolve and technologically skate to where the puck will be. Doing so requires one to be clued into emerging fads as seen from the clients' perspective not your nerd's view.

by GianFabien

1/16/2025 at 7:41:51 PM

I do wonder how AI changes this.

I think for a long time, if you genuinely wanted to have a large organizational impact, eventually you needed to go into management. One person can only do so much.

Ignoring bureaucracy and organizational constraints (probably far fetched), a single individual might be accomplish to do 10x more in the near future. Especially since a individuals will always move significantly faster than all the coordination that comes with managing a team. Maybe middle management becomes less relevant as a result?

by serjester

1/16/2025 at 8:37:37 PM

That's my feeling also. The role of IC and EM is collapsing into a single hybrid role.

by babyshake

1/16/2025 at 10:37:59 PM

i’m conflicted on this one. i’ve actively resisted management roles (except once where i was expected to be both primary IC and team lead) in favor of increasing both breadth and depth of IC expertise. i’m consistently top tier of my teams due to much this.

however, when it comes time to find a new place i find i’m overlooked because im older than most IC, don’t have the requisite experience for management (usually an ATS weed out), or my salary is above most “normal” IC bands. so now i regret not adding more management experience to my CV

by swasheck

1/16/2025 at 10:57:42 PM

I saw the writing on the wall a decade ago and moved into cloud consulting. I’m 50 now.

In 2016, I was a senior engineer on two projects—one involving hiring contractors and another leading a legacy transformation with a small team. I preferred the latter.

Next, I joined a startup, gained hands-on AWS experience, led AWS initiatives across teams, and focused on POCs/MVPs, actively avoiding team lead roles.

Then, I landed at AWS Professional Services as a mid-level consultant, leading smaller projects or workstreams in larger ones.

After leaving, I had a choice: a strategy role overseeing acquisitions or a staff software architect position at a consulting firm. I chose the latter.

Now, I either work with customers to define requirements and project plans (acting as a solution architect) or lead multiple workstreams, coordinating architects, sales, customers, and project management.

by scarface_74

1/16/2025 at 10:07:29 PM

I'm looking for this proof of meaningful career growth.

Nowhere in the article does it mention how growth materializes. It seems like if you do this you'll just continue to be a senior engineer forever.

You have to find a way to get yourself into strategic leadership and step away from coding to move up to those higher levels.

In this world, there are doers and dinguses. If you're still doing, the dinguses who manage you don't want you to stop doing.

by dangus