- The ladder isn’t really taller

Another point: there many more senior+staff engineer roles than EM roles. Once you become an EM, it's much harder to make a switch, because: a) the roles are fewer b) companies are wary of bringing in an EM for a team (prefer to promote within the ranks, in my experience). c) switching from EM to a senior engineer role is hard both because it feels like a downgrade and because I see companies not that willing to offer it. Of course, if the company is on the right course, you've hit a jackpot and can become an important leader few years down the line, but I know many EMs who are trapped in a bad org because of this. I believe engineers transitioning to a management role should keep these things in mind. I prefer making less bucks and keep my peace of mind about moving somewhere else.

Promotions on the engineering ladder " when ready without needing to wait for the star to align " is because very often those promotions only entail better title and pay. Periodic promotions keep people happy. But any promotions that entail a real step up in responsibility requires team/company growth for those positions to open up.

> The ladder isn’t really taller. In my company, I think it's roughly 2-3% at L7 or more. It takes really special skills to reach that level, not just years of experience. I don't know how it compares to EM though, but it's a tall ladder! > those of us happy to go back to IC roles have no trouble finding work My concern as an IC is ageism. I wish that I can say that when I'm 50+. I feel EMs are a little more immune to that (perhaps more so in Europe where SWEs aren't very well respected).

Thanks for the feedback! I must say I've never worked in real big tech, and I've never worked with an IC beyond staff level. I'd imagine promotions to principal / fellow are quite rare as well? Besides, most "normal" companies don't have these grades, at all. By transferable, I mean skills that are useful outside of our big tech bubble. You might not want to go out as money is very nice, but still good to know you can do something beside computer beep bop.

A couple of other points that struck me as different from my experience, and maybe more a function of where this person is working rather than some fundamental difference between the roles: The idea that your word is taken more seriously as an EM rather than an IC when it comes to (for example) needing to test more. I have to admit that this may have been one of the reasons I felt the need to switch to a management role myself (I was an IC that had recently been promoted to a staff level role and subconsciously I felt like I lacked credibility and hiding behind a title would help me get some). In practice that turned out not to be true -- I didn't need to do that at the time, and now as an IC in a different company, my thoughts and feedback are taken seriously at an organisational level and by my peers. The fact that you have to stack rank and pick an under-performer every half is just b…

>IMO the best thing about being a manager is that you get to spend a lot of your time thinking about the future In some places it's the opposite: domain-specific codebases far outlive the separate projects they are used for, and the devs are the ones thinking about what their product should be. Kind of like how Linux is a long-lived product made by devs, used in many short(er)-lived C-level projects.

> The ladder isn’t really taller. Most EMs end up clustered at the equivalent of L6/staff engineer. Promotions to senior manager and beyond are situational and rare. Meanwhile, my peers on the engineering ladder get promoted when ready, without needing to wait for the stars to align. This sounds like an anecdote tainted with confirmation and survivorship bias. Most SWEs get stuck at senior (especially at Google), getting clustered at L6 is already a privilege relatively speaking. Promotions to L6 are not super rare but less than a majority get them. Promotion to a L7+ is a struggle, if you say most of your peers get there naturally maybe you discounted those who left because they can't get promoted, or you just didn't happen to make many friends with people below your job level ? Or, as a senior manager, are you really sure you see that more than half of the team you manage reach L6+ and…

I also found it weird that the author thought being an EM is a good path to being an entrepreneur. Going from zero to one has very little to do with engineering management. Being able to hack out code quickly and being comfortable talking to potential customers (preferably not in that order) are the most important things and not at all related to being an EM. It's no guarantee that you'll get to hire anyone to manage. And yeah, there are mechanically far fewer management roles than engineering roles, and since the boundary between lead engineer/first line manager is pretty porous in both directions, you're not actually competing with an equivalently smaller pool.