When you consider how different the work is, no wonder the transition is so difficult. Progression along this path is much more unknown. The default feedback loop for these are much longer (generally twice a year when company surveys aggregate results per manager). But a lot of management is the less visible things-do people feel like they have opportunities to grow at a company, do they feel safe at work, do they feel challenged. Now consider management: Managing people and teams is a much more subjective process, so much so that companies routinely try to have “no managers-a completely flat org!” There are some more tangible things like, did the team deliver what they said they would. I still think it’s more clear than the management route. That may be for another post-how to move from junior to mid-level to senior engineer. Note: In re-reading this, I am reminded of a time when this technical path was not that clear to me. Most of the uncertainty around the technical path comes not from the work itself but from titles, compensation, and perceived career progression. But generally speaking, at the end of the day, if you’ve had a big chunk of heads-down coding time, and merged a handful of pull requests, it was a good day.
#ROUGH BUMPY ROAD CODE#
Or a comment you leave in a code review or tech spec could plant a thought that leads to a much better implementation. There are some nuances-if you spend time upfront clarifying requirements, you might save yourself 2 weeks building a new endpoint and backfilling data you didn’t actually need. The path to seniority is fairly clear in terms of the work-building, debugging, maintaining, and being a core contributor for larger and larger projects. Many companies track the crude metrics of number of lines of code added or number of commits. The transition from technical IC, or individual contributor, to engineering manager is rough.Ĭonsider coding: it’s a fairly objective process, or at least it’s treated like one. He gave me a look, and said-critically but kindly-“is that really the best use of your time?” When I met with my manager for our weekly 1:1 later that day, I mentioned what I had done. Within fifteen minutes, I had opened three pull-requests, each deleting anywhere from 10–50 lines of unused code. Starting at the file that was open in Sublime, I quickly found a few lines of unused code to delete. I rolled out of bed, checked to make sure neither of my kids were awake yet, and pulled my laptop out. A few years ago, I woke up and took a look at my work calendar.
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