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Comment by maheshba | Hacker News Reader

author of the post here: apologies for the acronyms! I code-switched from academia/research to industry via FB a few years back and just picked up a bunch of terms that I thought were universal in industry. IC does mean Individual Contributor or "person that is not a manager" -- I'll add a definition on top!

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I wonder if it says anything about Facebook's culture that I've never heard of the term Individual Contributor before. Everywhere else, it's Team Member or something along those lines indicating that you're not on your own.

“IC” is also commonly used at Google and at many other companies. It is by no means a Facebook thing.

I would add that, in context- it’s commonly used to differentiate job functions between managers and… well, ICs at companies where managers and ICs are peers or where ICs are potentially more senior than some managers in title and pay, sometimes by a lot.

So yeah, it’s a term of industry that often shows up in tech companies because of the usefulness of that distinction in those environments.

> Everywhere else, it's Team Member or something along those lines indicating that you're not on your own.

Individual Contributor means you don't manage other people, but it doesn't imply you are a team member. It helps to think of it as a role where at some point one is senior/skilled/specialized enough to contribute as a team of 1, working with one or more teams at a time.

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