Hacker News Reader

Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

OK, they can fire me. There are other coding jobs. They move up the chain and have to sit in meetings taking on greater responsibilities while I sit back and code for years, increasing in position and compensation without really having to be more accountable for the success or failure of the business. They probably make more than me, but I just shut down at the end of the day and run around with my kids.

There are far more ways to measure success in life than your paycheck or where you fall in an org chart.

View on HN

I agree completely. If that's the choice you made in life and it makes you happy and fulfilled, I'm genuinely happy for you. But you can only make that choice if you walk into the situation with your eyes open. I don't like being bullshitted.

Upvoting this. Being a well-paid individual contributor who can work a ~40 hour week is amazing. I was a manager in another industry before I learned to code and I'm grateful I don't have to do it anymore. Having to put under-performers on a plan, being on the hook for work not done during a staffing shortage, trying to keep people happy when there aren't any raises or promotions to offer... if some other engineer wants to take that stuff on and get paid more for it, more power to them!

Your pay as an IC will plateau. It may plateau at a nice comfortable level but plateau it will. It’s a log curve not an exp curve. Younger professionals in the first 5-10 or so years of their careers are just seeing the extreme left of the log curve, where it’s steep, and conclude they’ll get 50% raises forever. Trust me, you won’t.

Management comp paths tend to be more linear.

But in the management paths there is a lot more getting locked at a position.

“Your pay as an IC will plateau.”

This depends on your org. Also there are individual contributors literally and individual contributors who function like a force multiplier and, although not managing, provide a lot of value beyond just their commits. I’ve seen this with wizard architects and sysadmins who just a percentage of their time is great on a project.

“Force multiplication” is an intangible. If your salary depends on it, you’re depending on someone in management noticing that you’re “multiplying the force”, and that you’re willing to leave. It happens, but it’s rare, and usually occurs when people are great negotiators, or such an OG with the founding team that they’re like part of the corporate logo.

For most people, salary correlates with measurable influence, and there’s nothing more measurable than head count. So maybe you’re right about certain orgs, but I wouldn’t advise any young turks to bet on it.

Basically, every nerd thinks they’re gonna be Jeff Dean...but there’s only one Jeff Dean, and his job is taken.

>>> For most people, salary correlates with measurable influence, and there’s nothing more measurable than head count. So maybe you’re right about certain orgs, but I wouldn’t advise any young turks to bet on it. Basically, every nerd thinks they’re gonna be Jeff Dean...but there’s only one Jeff Dean, and his job is taken.

absolutely this

The point to take away here was measurable influence.

Just as in how sales people can be on commission but no one puts fifty developers on commission the ability to measure is as important as the metric itself

“Force multiplication” is an intangible. If your salary depends on it, you’re depending on someone in management noticing that you’re “multiplying the force”, and that you’re willing to leave.

Most managers don't set their own salary, and are dependent on someone else noticing and respecting their "contribution" (like "headcount" metrics) for their compensation consideration. It is entirely possible to be sidelined as a manager, just as it is anywhere else.

Everyone should have clear, communicated, consistent, meaningful, deliverable, pragmatic metrics that they are subject to in their evaluations.

Jeff Dean is also a manager at this point. There were historically two though, Jeff and Sanjay, and Jeff's former role is free.

The “former role is free”? Google is huge and has thousands of managers, so it’s only “free” in the sense that they’re hiring some managers. There’s still only one Jeff Dean.

I think you misunderstood.

Jeff was an IC. He no longer is. Under the naive assumptions that many people in this thread are making, that means the IC position he was in should be available.

It's not. I leave why as an exercise to the reader.

Ah, indeed. I took your comment to mean the opposite. Mea culpa.

Salaries plateau on both tracks until you get up to the very high levels. RSUs are really the only way to get compensation that keeps growing.

The maximum upside of the management track is definitely higher but the chances of achieving it are far lower. If your span of control is 8, that means only 1 in 8 of your managers will become a manager of managers and 1 in 8 of those will become a director and so on. Unless you're in a hypergrowth environment, the other 87.5% will struggle to move past the first management rung for a significant chunk of their career.

It also means less job security should one find oneself out of a job for whatever reason. A company needs about 1 manager per 8-10 ICs, and 1 second level manager per 8-10 team managers. Logically, that means there should be about 10% as many first level manager positions as IC positions, and about 1% as many second level positions as IC positions.

they’ll get 50% raises forever

50% raises are a sign of company growth and a competitive market. Once a business is well established, growing slowly, and there are enough developers to go around compensation will settle down.

We're in the first few decades of Internet technology companies. This is the industrial revolution all over again. If you look at the first factory workers in the early-1800s, and the first steam engine engineers, and the first factory production foremen, they were quite well paid relative to other jobs. Later, when rural folk saw what was happening and moved to the cities and mill towns for work, and the supply of workers boomed, the wages stopped growing (and actually fell). The factory owners made hundreds of millions in today's money. They built towns for their workers to live in (Bournville, Rowntree, Port Sunlight here in the UK). Now Google is looking to do the same sort of thing. Its all playing out in a very similar way.

Give it another 20-30 years and things will look very different in tech.

> Now Google is looking to do the same sort of thing

I wish. Where in middle American or whatever you call the equivalent in Britain is Google or any other tech company building towns for their workers?

Nope, Google and the other FAANGs are all still focused on 4-5 large urban areas, almost all of them on the West Coast.

Yeah. My boss is a half-coder, half-manager. He can fire me. He gets paid more than me. On the other hand, I don't take my laptop with me on vacation. He feels that he has to. I never feel that.

Completely concur with this. After 10+ years in engineering management, rising through the ranks, I'm at a stage where I don't want to solve people problems anymore. I want to get back to coding or solve problems as an IC. Most companies will need only a handful of VPs, Directors and Managers but almost all companies will need software engineers. As a manager, one has to sacrifice becoming technical and competitive in the market or be the best in their field. Even if they are a really good manager, different companies have different expectations of their managers. Google might want pure people managers whereas LinkedIn might want managers that write code 60% of the code. It's just not worth it though some perks are really nice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com