The Insider Guide to Careers
Insider information, secrets and tips about getting hired and building careers. For employees and job candidates.
The traditional hierarchy of the workplace is actually a relatively new concept. It came into existence as recently as the 1930s. Alfred Sloan, after whom the Sloan School of Management at MIT is named, was the person who introduced a lot of standardization and logic in the wild west of American industrial practices. In the 1930s, he introduced the hierarchy of employee, manager, Director, VP, and CEO. The space of industrial hierarchy has changed little since those days, almost a century old. There has been little or no little innovation in that space. One innovation, though, has been that of dual career tracks in tech companies, referred to as the technical career paths.
A few decades back, IBM realized that not all software engineers were cut out for a management career track. Instead, many needed to gain the business and people skills required to manage resources and direct reports. So they proposed that engineers can continue being an individual contributor for their entire careers without being forced into people management. The root cause is that software engineers can sometimes be complete nerds with little interpersonal, communication, or leadership skills.
This model has been copied by almost all big tech companies worldwide. As a result, a critical question for senior software engineers or staff engineers is whether they are ready for a technical career path or a people management career track. An example is shared below.
As per the picture here, one can decide whether one wants to become a manager or a staff engineer. Both these options decide which path one would take. Technical paths lead to Architect, Principal Engineers and so on. People paths lead to Director, Senior Director and so on. In many companies, there is no path from Distinguished Engineer or Architect to VP, unless the employee chooses the Senior Director track.
As one grows in a company, especially in a software engineer pathway, one gains a good knowledge of technical skills, especially concerning software development. But, at the same time, it is tough for employees to know their gaps in non-technical skills. We at Careerbolt will offer employees free technical, business, and people assessments of skills, but currently, this feedback is difficult to get. There are two ways by which engineers solve the problem:
Advantages of Technical Career tracks:
1) Business teams are often full of smooth-talking, sales-focused individuals with little or no idea of the technical challenges. Hence getting good technical employees in the open market is much easier than pure technical employees. Unfortunately, this disparity means that business roles, especially early in careers, offer relatively lower pay than comparable technical focused roles.
2) Some engineers will never be managers. For example, I have seen innumerable cases of brilliant engineers who keep zooming like a rocket in their careers till they become people managers. At that point, the career track crashes and burns. It is a tragedy to force people into roles they will never be good at.
3) Distinguished Engineers, Fellows, and other pure technical roles pay as handsomely as Vice President and above. Some companies are beginning to understand that they should be paths to equivalent Senior VP tracks as pure individual contributors. Google, IBM, and Cisco have done a lot of homework to create viable alternate career tracks. The catch is that very very few people become fellows or senior fellows. For example, I read once that there are only three senior fellows in Google worldwide.
Disadvantages of Technical Career tracks:
If an employee is very ambitious and wants to progress to the top of the corporate pyramid, choosing the people manager career track may make the most sense. The reasons are listed below:
1) There are too many software experts worldwide, whether in Bangalore or the Bay Area. It is relatively easy to gain technical expertise over time but very challenging to achieve people and leadership skills. Hence finding people with the right blend of technical and people skills is difficult, which means that the market is ready to pay a premium for such a basket of skills. In addition to higher compensation, people possessing diverse skills have high bargaining power and can change jobs anytime. They are not bound to any company, and companies struggle to retain such excellent talent.
2) Outside a few big tech companies, one’s career comes to a complete stop after a distinguished architect role as Vice President roles require people management work experience. Unfortunately, most companies have yet to find ways to retain senior high-performing architects. As a result, quitting is the only option for such employees seeking bigger roles or higher compensation.
3) If you are an architect or senior architect, you must keep learning to be the best in that field. Software engineering is a space where the world keeps changing completely every couple of years. So a lot of learning agility is required to learn new skills and unlearn older skills repeatedly. This process can be stressful as the goal keeps moving every time.
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