You don’t need to be a manager to have a successful career in the engineering industry

[-]

escargotBleu@reddit

In my contract it is written "Principal Software Engineering", but you'll be laughing if I tell you my compensation. And then you'll be laughing a second time when I tell you the salary of a manager at the same hierarchy level as me (it is higher than me, obviously)

(I do not live in the USA)

[-]

RobotsAreSlaves@reddit

So would you mind to share those salaries?

[-]

jjasghar@reddit

https://Levels.fyi is still pretty accurate from what I understand.

[-]

Individual-Praline20@reddit

Whaaaaaaaat? 200k for staff dev engineer? OMG I need to get another employer then 😂

[-]

Bakoro@reddit

Levels might be fine on a per company basis to see total compensation, but it has a strong skew towards larger companies and higher wages/compensation packages.

[-]

LotusFlare@reddit

Even within those big companies, it skews high. Drop it by about 30% to get the real average. There's just a reporting bias you can't fight where the people making the big bucks are the ones who report their salaries.

[-]

escargotBleu@reddit

I'm remote in France, my gross salary is 55K.

The guy I was speaking of, idk... 70-80k ?

[-]

RobotsAreSlaves@reddit

55k for principal, wow. They squeeze you really hard.

[-]

escargotBleu@reddit

I mean... I don't even know where the "principal" comes from, I'm not even a "senior" anyway.

And you cannot really compare my salary with a US salary...

35h of work per week, 7 weeks of paid holidays, health, education, and retirement costs are completely different...

[-]

Kuinox@reddit

I hope you are not on Paris ?
Because I graduated 3 years ago in an paris school, and most of my schoolmate are paid around 50k€ on paris.
If you are on Paris with this salary as a "principal", you are getting severly underpaid.

[-]

RobotsAreSlaves@reddit

I see. The difference in the same title between different companies is a thing. I’m from Europe too but i get paid like your manager despite i’m senior and i’m below principal level

[-]

johnbaker92@reddit

Oh my, France still milking software engineers as much as possible. Glad I no longer work in that hell hole - not to mention the absolutely horrible politics, commérages, etc.

[-]

darthchebreg@reddit

C’est la France mon cher ami !

[-]

throwawaymo11812@reddit

Absolutely agree. I've found that you don’t need a formal management title to make a real impact. Sometimes, the best leaders are the ones who just lead by example and support their team. It’s all about being proactive and helping others grow, whether you’re officially in charge or not.

[-]

michaelochurch@reddit

These dual-track organizations are catastrophically disingenuous. It's way harder to make Principal Engineer, which is typically Director equivalent, than to make Director or VP.

Principal is actually tough; VP is a given, if you can put up with management.

[-]

Kache@reddit

I don't know this to be the case, but I think in part a supply/demand thing. Management necessarily scales by growing the hierarchy (of people), but tech scales sometimes by people and sometimes by more tech.

[-]

tanner_0333@reddit

Hating being a boss more than being bossed is so true Its about finding where you fit best and doing great there not just moving up for no reason What you think

[-]

Unexpectedpicard@reddit

Your company has to have an engineer track for this to work. A lot the engineers stop below the VP and there is no technical role above senior engineer

[-]

AncientPC@reddit

Even if there is a parallel track between ICs and management, there is more work and therefore available positions on the management side the higher up you go. For every principal engineer there is probably 3-10x manager headcount at the same level/pay band.

[-]

fried_green_baloney@reddit

3-10x

Usually biased more towards 10x, especially if you throw in PMs with the line managers.

[-]

gjionergqwebrlkbjg@reddit

Why would you? It's a totally different job.

[-]

alfredrowdy@reddit

This is not true at all. There are a lot fewer managers than ICs, and you can typically be promoted to principal when you meet the job requirements, but you are not going to be promoted in manager track unless the org is growing or someone leaves, you won’t get promoted to those roles solely for meeting the requirements, rather there has to be a need for the role.

Principal/staff is also WAY less stress than director/VP, like an order of magnitude difference.

[-]

caltheon@reddit

Makes sense if you think about it. Say you have a department for Product X. That Product is important, so it has a VP in charge of it. That VP has 5 Senior Directors in charge of various aspects. Each SD has 5 Directors, each Director has 5 Managers, and each Manager has 10 Engineers. You are looking at 1 VP, 5 SD, 25 D, 125 M, and 1250 Engineers. Having too many reports isn't ideal, nor is having too view. The exact amount depends on the company. Now that Principal Engineer or Distinguished Engineer position, that is setting the technical direction for Product X...you may need at most 3 of these. So for every 1250 engineers, you have 3 top level engineer positions, maybe 20 high senior levels, but you have 155 Management positions

[-]

salgat@reddit

The issue is that the salary of who reports to you shouldn't dictate your own salary since the two roles have orthogonal responsibilities. For example, Apple has teams of ML researchers whose compensation dwarfs their manager's, and that's okay.

[-]

Carighan@reddit

Yeah, most managers do less work than the people below them, and in modern companies have no responsibilities anyways - I mean fuck, even CEOs don't, they get 50mil+ severance and go to the next company if they "fucked up" - so there's 0 reason they ought to make a lot of money.

All they do is do some mild excel data entry and graph creation, organize a meeting or two like a secretary would and do a few phone calls so the engineer->engineer route is interrupted and information can be distorted on the way.

A surprising amount of management is just that. Sub-secretary-level work. And the compensation should fit that!

[-]

oalbrecht@reddit

My CEO was crazy busy. Flying all over the world to close huge deals, giving presentations to employees and customers all over the world. And he was a billionaire and could have retired years ago, but apparently enjoyed what he did.

[-]

salgat@reddit

Sounds like a lot of sales jobs.

[-]

baconOclock@reddit

How pathetic.

[-]

Pascalswag@reddit

But how many were going to St. Ives?

[-]

shit_drip-@reddit

Hmmm I think I'll hire a director and 2 managers to discuss your post in depth. Let's set up a weekly cadence to discover the use cases

[-]

Trick-Interaction396@reddit

You must be a CEO! Make sure to hire your friends and hire everyone who actually knows the business.

[-]

oalbrecht@reddit

Don’t fire them! Just make them return to the office. That way you can ensure only the best employees leave.

[-]

Captain___Obvious@reddit

Lots of directors in my company with 0 direct reports. Directing jack and shit

[-]

toadi@reddit

I actually was a VP without reports. Mandatory was 15 reports in the company and I was the only VP without. Now I build the whole software engineering division from scratch. Over 100 engineers devs/AQ/Ops and hired a head of engineering as VP too. Reason... I was an expat and I can't manage locals directly ;) After I got everything running was bored...

[-]

AncientPC@reddit

You joke but someone needs to hire/fire people. Would you prefer HR do it? Or another engineer?

If it's another engineer, are you volunteering to create the job description, source and reach out to candidates, follow up and negotiate compensation? (No one ever wants to do this work.)

What if an engineer harasses another coworker? What about engineers not pulling their weight pissing off the rest of the team? Are you going to sit down with those people?

Who's going to negotiate with leadership on roadmap, deliverables, headcount? If no one does this work and/or does it poorly, the team gets broken up or told what to do in a top-down fashion.

[-]

shit_drip-@reddit

Hmmm better hire another 3 directors and managers to consider what you wrote further.

[-]

Izacus@reddit

Yep, also promotions are easier to get to as manager on average according to numbers and research I've seen.

[-]

Carighan@reddit

Which is always mind-boggling, as you'd think even the most densest C-suite of them all knows of the Peter Principle and the intuitive and quite easily observed idea behind it.

But instead of allowing engineers to just advance in paygrade and responsibility while performing good work, they soft-force everyone to make the company worse by having more and more managers for less and less actual work, while also making everyone miserable in the process.

Something something about C-suites always being miserable and hence having to inflict it onto others...

[-]

ebalonabol@reddit

Lol, in CIS, there's simply no principal/staff/devrel positions. After senior, you either are a team lead, a tech lead, or a manager. I know exactly 3 companies in CIS where there's life beyond the senior position

[-]

BOSS_OF_THE_INTERNET@reddit

I never understood why you’d want to take your best players off the field and make them coaches. If you’re a great developer, you can IC as long as you want and get paid a fuck ton for it.

[-]

AncientPC@reddit

Management and coding are orthogonal skill sets, but at a minimum you need to be an adequate coder and performer to be a manager candidate.

In practice, a manager needs to have enough technical experience to ask insightful questions and call out bullshit in order to earn the team's respect, but simultaneously not become a defacto tech lead.

[-]

n3phtys@reddit

Management and coding are orthogonal skill sets

are you sure about that?

Yes, sure, if the coding part is only implementing perfectly exact specifications. But in reality, both skill sets are way more similar in practice. Which is also part of the reason you even see this switch so often - compare this to most other jobs of this type.

What really is different - most of the times - are the underlying goals and metrics.

In a good company, even those goals and metrics align with each other, so everyone works for the good of the company. Sadly, this is still rare.

[-]

Carighan@reddit

No, a good manager needs that.

But a company also only needs an absolutely trivial amount of good management. The other 95% are the cruft around that, and they barely need enough knowledge to pick their nose to perform their ... job.

[-]

Kinglink@reddit

You forgot the work good manager....

Managers can have any skill, but you're right the best managers have a solid programming background.

[-]

mirbatdon@reddit

It's significantly more difficult to negotiate higher salary in an engineer relative to manager track. There is still a very long-standing bias that managers should individually make more than their highest paid report.

Obviously this isn't the case everywhere but it's been my experience that engineering track folks really need to be exceptionally careful how they handle their negotiations to not appear "problematic" or difficult from a leadership perspective- whether they are behaving reasonably or not.

[-]

st4rdr0id@reddit

There is still this pervasive view that managers don't need to understand what they manage. This was first told to me by a university professor that was involved with PMP.

[-]

mirbatdon@reddit

You've hit the core of the problem right on the head. For that particular class of manager (which is common because it is easy to staff for), they are equipped to do basic people and project management duties. An IC under them with potentially specialized skills may be more valuable to the organization. Tricky spot.

[-]

propelol@reddit

You don't negotiate salaries as a developer. You join another company every other year. It will net you more money in the long run than whatever compensation the company you stay at offers.

[-]

mirbatdon@reddit

If that is one way you have found success great. Why limit yourself.

[-]

edo-26@reddit

There is still a very long-standing bias that managers should individually make more than their highest paid report even though they're entirely different jobs.

Which is kinda funny. Imagine if sport coaches were paid more than the best players they manage.

[-]

Over-Temperature-602@reddit

Why is that funny though? You're responsible for the output of the whole team while the best player is responsible for their individual output?

I'm an IC myself so not trying to justify a high manager salary for myself but rather I see an upper limit for how much impact I can have as an IC. Meanwhile my manager manages a team of 5+ ICs and is ultimately responsible for whether we hit our deadlines or not. A good manager can get more out of those 5 developers than a poor one so their impact is leveraged by the number of ICs they manage? And it goes on so if you are the manager of five managers and do an awesome job your job could potentially impact 25 developers positively.

[-]

mirbatdon@reddit

i think the problems start when the value of a manager's responsibility for people is exceeded by the value of an IC's responsibility for many other IC's (under many other managers) output.

[-]

NoShftShck16@reddit

It is so apparent which people in this thread have been graced by good leadership and which people have not been. It's obvious to you that, duh...a good manager has been a meat shield for you, enabling you to perform better, and has done that for multiple times over, which can take a lot of effort and management. And other people see their, likely, shit managers just sit on their asses and do nothing.

[-]

edo-26@reddit

I've had good managers. But I've also had good colleagues turned into bad managers because this was the way to a better salary. I'm not saying managers should always be paid less than the members of their team, just that they shouldn't automatically be paid better than the best technical people.

[-]

WingZeroCoder@reddit

That was my first thought when reading up u/Over-Temperature-602 ‘s comment — I have yet to work for a manager who actually does take responsibility for not hitting deadlines (or, for that matter, does much of anything at all to manage resources or facilitate success).

So naturally, I’m inclined towards “managers should make less or perhaps not be involved at all”.

But if such a mythical manager existed that actually took responsibility and managed resources, I can absolutely see that position making more money.

[-]

dweezil22@reddit

When the players unions are powerless this happens. At the most extreme you have the NCAA where the players (until recently) were completely unpaid and the coaches made millions per year. ICs don't typically have unions so... yeah...

[-]

pragmojo@reddit

After this latest round of layoffs imo we need to unionize the tech industry. Software engineering is an ideal field for collective bargaining, and basically they have been paying us and offering catering and massages not to do it for the last 30 years.

[-]

DisplayedPublicly@reddit

Good EMs still have the skills to play the game. So there need's to be some incentive to develop another skill set and step of the field.

[-]

Izacus@reddit

Also, managers are the ones deciding the compensation in majority of companies which leads to some obvious results :)

[-]

st4rdr0id@reddit

Because quality doesn't matter in this industry. If a software company churns out something that appears to work, that is enough for the salespeople to market it. Management lives in denial thinking that if serious problems arise, there is always time to make it better.

I could go on and on about why this happens. But essentially it all comes down to corporate decision-makers ignoring the true nature of software, and the absurd level of fakeness of this post-capitalist economic system.

[-]

SittingWave@reddit

I never understood why you’d want to take your best players off the field and make them coaches

because most of development work, after those who know what they are doing have done it, is grunt work that can be done by a bunch of code monkeys from India. So either you direct said monkeys, or you are out because "we have the product, why do we need such expensive engineer? we can hire sales with his salary and pump up our revenue"

[-]

Kinglink@reddit

I think they problem comes from a misunderstanding. You don't want your most senior people to be writing code. They're too valuable for that. You want them to be making decisions, designing systems, architecting the big project, understanding the requirements of the newest tech, studying the hard stuff.

The problem is the people who don't code are "managers" the people making decisions are "managers" so if you don't code, you're on the management track. This is not right.

But if you already have a situation where the managers make the decisions, you have a problem. They should be guiding a decision, but the engineers should be capable of making decisions themselves.

[-]

jayd16@reddit

A well managed/mentored team is way more effective than another pair of hands.

[-]

supermitsuba@reddit

True, but you ONLY need one lead. That skill is different and not something that everyone cares about. But there is other leadership that needs to be done and compensated for outside of management track.

There is a phrase, "too many chefs and not enough cooks"

[-]

dweezil22@reddit

Staff+ IC's are not just another pair of hands, "just another pair of hands" caps out at Sr Dev except rare edge cases (either a bad promo, or someone with world-class specialized and business critical tech skills)

[-]

TheGRS@reddit

I’d much rather get someone close to the work into managing it rather than bring someone from outside in, assuming they have good people skills. I agree that if you don’t want to manage you don’t have to, I feel like the market is still good for staying an IC as long as you want. But it’s a trade off of not getting many opportunities to call the shots, you know? When you’re in management you get to call many shots which has its own rewards.

My take is more that people are just very dynamic and complex, roles are very rarely a perfect fit forever. Management is often a good fit for certain people, even the introverts.

[-]

BOSS_OF_THE_INTERNET@reddit

My comment was more a rebuttal of the idea that management is the only option for senior devs who want to keep advancing.

[-]

ForearmNeckDay@reddit

Well it somewhat is - of course it varies from place to place but staff engineer is much more of a management role than an engineer role.

If you just want to write code and work with tech, and you don't want to deal with people and office politics then senior dev is the ceiling.

[-]

dweezil22@reddit

100% correct. Also worth noting that Elon's massacre at Twitter gained a lot of fans throughout Big Tech, and it's made super high paying EM jobs MUCH harder to come by and much less safe than they've been historically.

It's never been a better time to be a Staff+ IC relative to an EM, and really anyone that still enjoys eng work and is capable of succeeding at Staff+ that chooses to be an EM instead is a fool IMO. (If someone hates the eng work or can succeed better as an EM than IC, fair enough, I'm not talking about them!)

[-]

BOSS_OF_THE_INTERNET@reddit

That’s fair. Let me narrow my definition of manager down to a manager of people, e.g. an EM

[-]

doktorhladnjak@reddit

Because non technical management is even worse at their job

[-]

dimon222@reddit

You can have a successful career as Junior Engineer. It's not about success, it's about getting enough money to retire while still progressing through ladder in organizations that simple don't have engineering paths beyond Senior/Lead engineers. In this kind of organization if you tell your manager that you want a position in ladder where you will be earning more than he does, he will show you where you can go with such asks.

[-]

iamiamwhoami@reddit

In most places I've seen senior engineer is the terminal level, meaning if you don't make it to that level after a certain number of years you start to get managed out.

You can be a senior engineer and be very heavy on the coding aspect and very light on the leadership and mentorship front, but you have to be able to code individually at a level to justify that.

[-]

oalbrecht@reddit

I think it depends on the company. My last company allowed people to stay there forever if they wanted. It was very difficult to get past the senior level and many didn’t try.

[-]

Uberhipster@reddit

maybe but you will never be able to exert any control over the requirement scope without being one

[-]

heavy-minium@reddit

If you're not at a big ass company, that is. The majority of jobs outside certain locations in certain countries will barely have options to follow this approach.

[-]

Wild_Struggle922@reddit

I want to be a manager so I don’t have to code and so I have a better chance at surviving in this industry and feeding my family.

[-]

WeirdIndividualGuy@reddit

and so I have a better chance at surviving in this industry and feeding my family.

Weird, every tech company I’ve worked at the 15 years, when shit hits the fan, the first to go is management. That made me not want to ever be in management, as I’ve always survived layoff rounds as a non-management engineer.

Competent companies when necessary will lay off the expensive decision makers, because it turns out your very smart engineers can also make those same decisions and bring them to life

[-]

righteousprovidence@reddit

It also depends on your division within a company. If your part of the organization is making money at a stable and growing rate, the change of a layoff is relative low. But if your division is either bootstrapping a new product or doing pure R&D, the chance of decimation is high went the company as a whole isn't hitting share holder expectations.

[-]

XMLHttpWTF@reddit

management roles are more precarious than good engineers in my experience, and more likely to get caught in layoffs

[-]

Weird_Cantaloupe2757@reddit

It’s also harder to find a new gig when one doesn’t work out

[-]

dweezil22@reddit

The only modifier there is a lot of managers are very good at politics and networking, and thus are better suited to weather a layoff or bounce back from one than someone that isn't. This may give outside viewers a false impression that Mgr's are safer or more employable. Thing is, if you have those skills as an IC they're equally valuable, it's just that they're not table stakes for IC's the way they can be for management, so you get a correlation bias.

[-]

moreVCAs@reddit

“Middle management” is like the classic example of a highly precarious professional(ish) role. Partially due to fan out (literal redundancy in practice), partly due to fungibility (replacement is way easier to train than, say, your best report).

[-]

-oRocketSurgeryo-@reddit

replacement is way easier to train than, say, your best report

In my experience as a happy IC, management changes are hugely disruptive, because a lot that has been learned can be set aside. I've left jobs before when it happened. I suspect that there is a big hard-to-measure cost to replacing managers.

[-]

notyourancilla@reddit

Tbh if you don’t want to code I want you off the keyboard also

[-]

campbellm@reddit

I want to keep coding (and I'm close to 60) and not be a manager so I can continue providing something of value.

Mgmt jobs are in a way worse state of affairs now than creator types.

[-]

shit_drip-@reddit

Hmmm you didn't use the magic business word, your performance is below expectations

[-]

hammonjj@reddit

Managers get canned way more often than good engineers when layoffs occur

[-]

dimon222@reddit

Considering we're living in world where tools can't yet replace our peons, we likely will still need people operating these tools. And operating these tools isn't a manager job. You're safe fella.

[-]

Steve-edtech@reddit

Success in the engineering industry doesn’t require becoming a manager. Many engineers holding an engineering degree thrive by developing specialized technical expertise or taking on roles like technical leads, where they guide teams without managing people. Companies often offer dual career tracks, allowing engineers to grow as individual contributors (ICs) and make significant impacts through innovation, technical leadership, and expertise without needing to pursue management roles.

I read a blog published by Moonpreneur, which helped me gain detailed knowledge about the easiest engineering degrees.

https://youtu.be/4PG6M_g48sI?si=Q1_vkcRRUTMO5SmD

[-]

kamikazefurball@reddit

I tried management for ~2 years, falling into the trap many good senior devs fall into thinking that it is a promotion. No, it's a different job entirely. Hated it. Jumped ship to a different company back to a Sr Dev, and promo to Staff after a couple years.

Much much happier, and my TC is between a Sr Eng Manager and a Director at my company. I make more than my direct boss. Last few years have all been 350-450k depending on stock perf. On track for 450k+ this year – not FAANG but recognizable public company.

To be honest there is a fair amount of skill overlap between a good Staff+ and a good EM, like leadership, mentoring, and working directly with the business folks to come up with technical solutions. I do genuinely enjoy those things as the technical advisor. But I'm not responsible for people problems, performance reviews, budgets, and all those nightmares that I hate.

If you're a good senior engineer and want to stay an IC there absolutely are companies and opportunities to stay an IC and have a very lucrative and enjoyable tech-focused career.

No, I'll never make VP/CTO which is a higher ceiling than Principal IC. But I make and save enough to retire by 45 so who cares.

[-]

Southern-Reveal5111@reddit

In my company, there are more directors than staff engineers. All those staff have 20+ years of experience. In the last 3.5 years, I have met only 4 staff engineers, but around 12 directors. The director makes the same amount of money as a staff engineer.

The irony is that they clearly tell the engineers that you cannot be promoted for this and these reasons and most leave. The promotion in the management line is straightforward. They pick up the least performing guy and promote him to a management role.

[-]

supermitsuba@reddit

And let me guess they have a vague sense of what the requirements are. The only time someone is promoted is if "they are doing the job" but you don't get details about what it is.

I worked at a large place like that. Nothing uniform and it's all networking. The best is they place higher pay behind those positions as an excuse to pay you less.

Such BS. It honestly sounds like a trap tho as you will probably have to work more or some crap.

[-]

Southern-Reveal5111@reddit

Yes, it is true.

Recently they promoted a person who is terrible at work but is known for attending meetings and sending misleading emails to people where negative things are completely hidden.

[-]