The Evolution of Management: Transitioning Up the Ladder

Is being promoted from individual contributor to manager still a thing?<p>Certainly the mobility from engineer to manager is something that I haven&#x27;t witnessed &quot;in the wild&quot; 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&#x27;t taken seriously when voicing suggestions and opinions regarding business direction and management and also certainly don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s probably not a good idea to get into management if your team is a remote team. 2. If you&#x27;re managing a remote team for the first time and your boss is also colocated with your remote team, make sure he&#x2F;she is not a micromanager. 3. Make sure you&#x27;re talking to your team and checking in on them. The introvert part of me had a hard time with this. 4. Yes, it&#x27;s ok to interrupt your smart, gets-shit-done employees, especially if you&#x27;ve haven&#x27;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&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ribbonfarm.com&#x2F;the-gervais-principle&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ribbonfarm.com&#x2F;the-gervais-principle&#x2F;</a><p>In my experience it&#x27;s been dead on accurate.

How does one transition into management without prior management experience? This is a genuine question I&#x27;ve been wanting to move out of engineering for a while but it&#x27;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&#x27;s a working strategy here?

I don&#x27;t believe a word of this. It&#x27;s the usual buzzword-soup that&#x27;s self-contradictory with even the simplest glance (e.g. claiming a manager&#x27;s value is both unmeasurable but also the key to promotion? If it&#x27;s unmeasurable, you&#x27;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, &quot;Well I got this far, so I must be doing things right.&quot; Is this author the kind of person who&#x27;d fail to buy google for 1bn, while &quot;ensuring alignmnet with managers&quot; and other PHB concerns? We&#x27;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.