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Comment by posharma | Hacker News Reader

Over 40 dev (Individual Contributor - IC as they call it) here and all I can say is that the article is completely ignoring large companies like FAANG, Microsoft, etc where ICs are allowed to remain ICs (design, write code, mentor juniors, etc) and they thrive given the right scope. Edit: In fact these companies have a separate IC ladder to climb (if at all you wish to climb the ladder). If you're not interested in climbing the ladder, that's fine too as you can happily remain a strong productive engineer coding to your heart's content at a certain level (typically called the terminal/career level) without any pressure of moving up. I must say though that growth in the IC ladder is slower than the management ladder in most companies.

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This is a small part of the normal distribution. Many many companies can't facilitate this sadly. Maybe that is ageism?

I rather think a lot of mid size companies facilitate that. B2b, any industry. Anything other than a startup nurtures its enginners, it is expensive and slow to train new hires. They will make up the role for you if it means you will stay even just another couple of years.

Could you tell more about the separate IC ladder? Never worked at FAANG, but outside, the two ladders I saw were management, and faux-management - i.e. "senior developer" -> "principal developer" -> ..., where you just get all the management responsibilities with little of the authority. If there's a third ladder in some companies, I'd love to know, because I have little desire to do management work.

At Google, L5+ ICs are expected to be leaders in some capacity but this is not the same as faux-management. Are you the primary company expert on some especially critical system that keeps everything running and are regularly consulted by VPs for major funding decisions as well as regularly consulted by TLs making major design decisions? That's a tremendous amount of leadership and sufficient to build a L7 or L8 career on the IC ladder.

If you want to only communicate to other people via code then yes, IC growth beyond senior is still limited at FAANG companies. You need to be doing architecture. But I don't think that is an entirely bad thing. Especially given that senior engineers at these companies still make oodles of money.

The Principle Devs I’ve worked alongside didn’t manage or even directly delegate to anybody. They were glued to the monitor, doing architecture, and writing and supporting tons of code. Typically difficult narrow-domain stuff and frameworks leveraged by many people. Seniors did similar with a somewhat smaller scope.

> Over 40 dev (Individual Contributor - IC as they call it) here and all I can say is that the article is completely ignoring large companies like FAANG, Microsoft, etc where ICs are allowed to remain ICs (design, write code, mentor juniors, etc) and they thrive given the right scope.

30 year old IC at a FAANG right now, and IMO if I'm still an IC at a FAANG when I'm 40, things have gone horribly wrong. I'm saving upwards of $200k per year, not including my actual retirement accounts.

Good for you. However, choosing to retire at a certain age because you've the requisite funds is orthogonal to having the option to continue as an IC.

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