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I've been an IC at a company providing IC services to small companies in the buildings next to FAANG HQs. I've worked as an IC designer, have been involved in a lot of IC (obviously) and I also have several years of experience in IC. So clearly, ic wot ppl mean when they type IC.

As an IC on various forums for over a decade, I've only started commonly seeing this abbreviation in the past 2 years.

Just don't.

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It's an amusing term for sure and definitely an outcropping of the internals at FAANG (or maybe MS as well) culture. Like, it almost sounds denigrating. "I was just an individual contributor"; like, the people who do the real work, y'know, they're out there doing the difficult work of herding cats to tell them which protobufs to move from A to B, while the ICs are, y'know just ICing doing the actual protobuf shuffling :-)

It's just about promo culture @ Google, etc. and not in fact I think a reasonable principle of how good software gets built.

At Google specifically, the term simply refers to someone who does not have formal people management responsibilities. (For example, if I were a tech lead on a major project but did not have any reports, I'd refer to myself as an IC.)

Also, there's no stigma: it's a completely neutral term.

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