Is being promoted from individual contributor to manager still a thing?<p>Certainly the mobility from engineer to manager is something that I haven't witnessed "in the wild" ever, after 10 years in the business and having seen half a dozen organizations; neither with myself, nor with my peers.<p>What I predominantly see is a caste system where engineers are the lower caste and MBA-types are the higher caste, and members of the lower caste aren't taken seriously when voicing suggestions and opinions regarding business direction and management and also certainly don't stand a chance of being moved into any positions where they would meaningfully influence business direction on an ongoing basis.<p>There is an exception, though, which is that female engineers may still get promoted into management (...not going to speculate on reasons right now).<p>Also, what I've sometimes seen work is a lateral move followed by a vertical move, say from engineering to sales, and then from sales into management.
Having made the switch from IC to IT manager and now back to IC (at a different company), I want to add in a few insights of my own:
1. It's probably not a good idea to get into management if your team is a remote team.
2. If you're managing a remote team for the first time and your boss is also colocated with your remote team, make sure he/she is not a micromanager.
3. Make sure you're talking to your team and checking in on them. The introvert part of me had a hard time with this.
4. Yes, it's ok to interrupt your smart, gets-shit-done employees, especially if you've haven't talked to them in days.
5. Make sure you set a vision to your ICs and hold them accountable to that vision. It helps if they contributed to making this vision with you.
6. Yadda yadda yadda, I'm happy being an IC again :)
For a slightly more humorous (but very real) take on the management ladder, I highly recommend The Gervais Principle:<p><a href="https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/</a><p>In my experience it's been dead on accurate.
How does one transition into management without prior management experience? This is a genuine question I've been wanting to move out of engineering for a while but it's been very hard so far to get into non-eng positions. (No luck so far).<p>Do you just talk to your direct supervisior and lay out your career path wants or do you need to look for another position at some other shop or what's a working strategy here?
I don't believe a word of this. It's the usual buzzword-soup that's self-contradictory with even the simplest glance (e.g. claiming a manager's value is both unmeasurable but also the key to promotion? If it's unmeasurable, you're probably getting promoted for something else, like company growth, being well-liked, looking the part)<p>It reeks of the self-importance of a director who reassures himself, "Well I got this far, so I must be doing things right." Is this author the kind of person who'd fail to buy google for 1bn, while "ensuring alignmnet with managers" and other PHB concerns? We'll never know.<p>But what we do know is that less that 5% of this article is actually about making the right decisions happen. That to me is a red flag.