Tech Jobs: How to Get a Promotion Without Becoming a Manager

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How to grow your technical career as an individual contributor? Every large company should offer employee engineer access. Here's how to get into the IC channel.

译自Tech Works: How to Get Promoted without Becoming a Manager，作者 Jennifer Riggins。

Written by longtime The New Stack contributor Jennifer Riggins , this monthly column explores workplace conditions, management philosophies, career development, and the tech workforce market as it affects the people who build and run the software the world depends on.

Not everyone wants to be a manager. Not everyone should be a manager. There should be ways to grow your career within an organization without having to manage a team. Sure, tech giants tend to have clear promotion paths for senior engineers , but what about other companies? You know, those more traditional organizations are more likely to be hiring right now?

And, how do you gain a voice in an organization and expand your influence without managing people?

As companies grow, they must find ways to retain technical talent.

Unexpected technology companies - such as banking, telecommunications and healthcare organizations - are still thinking about how to build the technology hierarchy beyond the senior software engineer role during the first five to seven years of an employee's career. This is strange because the vast majority of technical jobs are in non-tech companies . This makes it difficult for these non-tech companies to attract and retain senior engineering talent.

Thus, employee engineers came into being.

Read on to learn how to take the road less traveled, which means leading without managing, so you can build and impact technology at a global scale.

What exactly is an employee engineer?

Outside of big tech companies, the career paths and benefits for employee engineers are murky at best.

Loiane Groner has been working in technology at Citibank for 13 years and currently serves as Vice President of Software Development. She spoke at last year's QCon London on how to succeed in technology at non-tech companies —and how to avoid the management fast lane.

In the simplest definition, a Staff Engineer is a senior individual contributor (IC). This job does not involve directly managing a team. This is a socio-technical and strategic role that helps drive business goals forward through technology decisions. The promotion ladder for Staff Engineers starts with Senior Software Engineer and comes with higher salaries and more responsibilities.

The Employee Engineer Project is a series of employee engineer stories written by Carta's CTO Will Larson as both a book and website. These employees plus roles typically follow a similar path:

Staff Engineer.
Senior Staff Engineer.
Chief Engineer.
Excellent engineer.
Research engineer.

Typically, Distinguished Engineers and Fellow Engineers still only exist at big tech companies. In contrast to engineering management career paths , employee plus routes and role descriptions vary from company to company. But that can be the fun part of the job.

"What exactly is in a staff-plus-engineer job description? Sometimes I'm willing to joke with my colleagues that I don't know what my title is anymore," Groner said, reflecting on her previous senior staff engineer role.

"One day, I help lay out the architecture, the next day, I help define the long-term strategy. The third day, I help the team solve a major production problem. The fourth day, I have a completely different task. Some days, I Little did I know that my job title would be based on the tasks I performed that day.”

The Path to the Senior Engineer ” by Tanya Reilly outlines the three key pillars of the senior engineer role:

Think globally . Unlike a team leader, whose decisions impact the team, senior engineers make decisions that may impact the entire organization, such as choosing a cloud provider. These projects, such as cloud migration or software block retirement, can take years to complete.
Project implementation . On a more complex level, Groner says, you sometimes end up doing things that no one wants to do. These projects often involve cross-company stakeholders and require some political capital.
Raise the level . Although you have no direct reports, you are expected to serve as a role model to teach, mentor, and influence your colleagues.

How are these three pillars connected? They often have cross-organizational impact and require significant technical knowledge and experience.

What does a senior engineer do?

Beyond that, Groner says, "your job as a senior engineer has to be important to the company." That doesn't always mean using the most advanced technology. She adds that your special project may go unnoticed.

"These important tasks may involve gathering data that doesn't exist, looking through old documents, combing through code that no one touched 10 years ago."

In an era of trying to do more with less manpower, senior engineers are often focused on automation or can work with platform engineering teams to create more shared services and golden paths. Senior engineers often make cost-benefit decisions.

If you hold this role, you will typically decide on the next ticket tool or process and participate in continuous integration efforts. In more regulated industries, you might be looking for ways to do continuous deployment at a lower level in a developer or quality assurance environment.

If you work at a non-technical company, you typically have to have vertical knowledge and domain expertise in addition to the technical knowledge you bring, Groner said.

Additionally, if you are the first in this type of role in your organization, part of your job may be to document and communicate your job responsibilities. Not only will this make it easier for you to leave a mark, it will also help your company retain technical talent.

While these roles are more technical, managers and senior engineers alike need to develop core skills:

communicate.
Influence.
teamwork.
Authorization.
Time management and prioritization.
Guidance and coaching.
The ability to disagree.
Emotional intelligence.

Especially in non-technical organizations, transitioning from Senior Software Engineer to Senior Engineer can be challenging. It’s important to remember that just because you’re not a team leader, it doesn’t mean you’re not affecting change.

"You help decide what tools will be adopted at the organizational level, define processes as best practices for engineering teams and how to adopt them," Groner said. "You can influence the company on a global scale."

And be sure to check that you're happy with your path. As Groner says, "If you want to make sure you're progressing in your career, compare yourself to who you were yesterday. That way, you can see if you're actually on the right path, or if you need to A place of change.”

How to become a senior engineer

If you're reading this column, you're probably at a company that's losing senior technical staff , or maybe you're five years into your engineering career and trying to figure out your next move.

Andrea Della Corte , vice president of engineering at fintech company Curve, told The New Stack, “While there are many warning signs, such as a lack of learning opportunities, no clear path, or a lot of red tape, any IC that feels chronically underutilized and has limited impact will One should evaluate whether it is necessary to move on to other opportunities.”

These job-hopping triggers may include "not having the opportunity to drive major projects and/or influence the strategic direction of the company," says Della Corte, who is also the chief interviewer at Technical Interview Coaching .

Or it could be that you've plateaued because the only way to move up is through management.

"If you're an individual contributor, you need to make sure you work for a company that values and owns that career path," John Colgrove , founder and chief vision officer of Pure Storage , told The New Stack. "From a company perspective , as a leader in a company, you have to ask yourself: Do I really want my absolute best individual contributors to stop doing what they’re doing and move into management, where they might just be mediocre?”

As a company, you've invested in your engineering staff, but only up to a certain level. You risk losing talent because you haven’t established a non-managerial way to advance – but now you can.

"The greatest engineers can build the greatest products for you. Why would you tell them to stop being engineers?" Colgrove asked.

He added that employee engineers in some ways provide a better perspective than managers: "When you're discussing a policy or a way of doing things, senior individual contributors can bring the benefit of someone earlier in their career more than a senior executive can. mentality.”

There are certain qualities you want to look for when building employee engineering roles. Della Corte says being a subject matter expert in a technology field or company vertical is extremely valuable, and that's also true in high-demand technology areas like cybersecurity and machine learning.

"This level of technical contribution allows them to remain at the core of their organization's technological advancement while enjoying the autonomy and challenge of their areas of expertise," which is an important way to retain technical talent, he said.

Della Corte continued, Good candidates for the Employee Engineer track are aligned with your company mission, able to deliver excellent work under high-urgency situations, and demonstrate natural leadership skills. Again, not because they will be directly managing people, but because this role is all about influence.

Colgrove emphasized that ICs must be treated like leaders. This means that they should be treated with the same respect as their managers. For example, if your organization hosts a company-wide leadership summit, your individual contributors should attend as well.

“Manager-IC Pendulum”

Many organizations make the mistake of simply having an individual contributor put on the manager's hat. Usually this hat reads: Technical Director.

Charity Majors , co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io , said at QCon Plus 2023 : "They stop writing code. They stop doing technical jobs. Over time, this leads to reduced employability and a loss of knowing that they are a bit There’s a lot of anxiety that comes with being a manager stuck in that role.”

She added that it was a presumed one-way transfer to the manager, which would bring more money and influence. The assumption, she says, is that "this is really your only chance for career advancement. The best engineers make the best managers. It's all bullshit."

It doesn’t have to be either/or.

This is unfair to the team as this is not a person who naturally feels called to a leadership role and may not possess the necessary qualities. That's also unfair if you're a newly promoted technology executive, Majors said, because while "you deserve career advancement," you shouldn't be locked into a management track in your career and lose out on technical experience.

However, if you have broader socio-technical skills, you may be attracted to IC and management roles. This is another option open to you. Majors advocates what she calls a Manager-IC Pendulum , which allows for "tremendous depth and breadth of experience" by switching back and forth between roles.

She believes that the best line managers have reached senior engineer status, when they have acquired a solid foundation of technical skills. But she urges not to be afraid of becoming a practice manager.

“Keeping these skills relatively fresh gives you undisputed credibility and helps you resonate with your team,” Majors said. “It gives you a good intuition about their actual pain. It allows you to maximize Stay employable and keep your options open.

“Unless you have these skills, you can’t really debug sociotechnical systems, or adjust them, or improve processes, or resolve conflicts.”

On the other hand, by getting involved in management, you are more likely to gain the necessary connections and then be able to influence technology strategy when you return to an IC role.

“There’s no substitute for management—understanding what motivates people—when it comes to truly connecting business problems to technical outcomes,” Majors said.

Even if it's not an established management role, Staff Plus Engineers must be adept at influencing the organization. No matter what technology career path you pursue, remember that you can always change direction. Even HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto stepped down from a leadership position at his own company and found a new path by switching from chief technology officer to individual contributor: "I became more engaged and excited, which shows that this is what I'm doing The right choice.”

Good luck finding the right option for you!

Heather Joslyn contributed to this article.

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