Career growth: why managers are increasing faster

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During my first two years of work at Meta, I was an individual contributor engineer (IC). Then, after an encouraging examination, my manager asked if I will start to manage my own team. I had received solid performance ratings and gained confidence among my colleagues and the management team, and the organization of the organization constantly increased each year.
This is the history of standard origin for engineers who go to management. But the skills necessary to succeed as an engineer and those of a manager must have are considerably different. Strong engineers succeed thanks to a rigorous analytical capacity and deep work. Strong managers (whose work is resolutely non -analytical!) Motivate and cultivate people careersWhile being ready to jump in problems at any time.
The ideal motivation to become a manager is simple: You care about people. Management is intrinsically a little focused on people jobThis means that managers should develop their reports through positive and constructive comments. A good manager care about discovering the genius area of each person, then allocating work that best corresponds to this profile of the engineer. The by-product of this is the ability to evolve the impact, but that should not be the main reason.
A common reason, but wrong, to move to management is to earn more money. At least within large technological companies, managers and circuits integrated at the same level are paid the same amount. In fact, some companies deliberately pay their managers less, simply to discourage engineers from mercenaries who optimize remuneration rather than for people.
However, there are nuances here which are worth calling. At older levels, managers are promoted at faster rates compared to ICS. The impact of a manager is largely derived from his influence in an organization, which includes the number of people in their chain of reports. A director of 50 engineers in their organization can actually “claim credit” for the inhabitants of their team.
On the other hand, an individual contributor to the director must produce a production which has an impact scale similar to what the 50 engineers have shipped. As you can imagine, it’s much more difficult. IC promotions at these levels require a level of technical radiance difficult to reproduce reliably.
Managers are often promoted when they accumulate more people under them. This process can occur through re-orgs or employees’ departures, not necessarily by the manager’s unique contributions. The result is that managers who stay long enough careers. Empirically, this is obvious in the data. In a company like Meta or Google, there are many more VP level managers than IC engineers of the equivalent level.
In the long term, managers therefore earn more money than individual contributors. It is not necessarily false, but you must think about your incentives and determine what will make you fill beyond money.
I ended up saying yes to the management opportunity that was offered to me, and I am very happy to have done so. Like everything jobThere were parts that I loved and parts that I don’t have, and I ended up going to the IC scale in a year.
—Rahul
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