alt Hacker NewsI have a theory. How close does the following describe you?
* You're an engineer with 3-6 years of experience in a primarily IC role
* Maybe you've done some tech lead stuff, but you've never actively worked in engineering management.
* You feel that management (and HR for some reason?) is constantly in the way of you getting stuff done, and that your life would be easier if you could simply decline every meeting and only communicate through pull requests.
Humor me, please. I'll explain after.
Replies
For the sake of moving this along, that describes me perfectly. Please, continue.
I have 35+ years experience as a manager and engineer at large enterprise tech companies (what the kids now call FAANG, though some of the company names were different back then), and was a Founder, CEO and CTO at a $7M VC funded company and several other "differently-funded" startups.
Couple decades in with some leading but still remaining an IC officially.
The right work just doesn't get done without staff engineers and architect types having frequent conversations & meetings as well as constant code reviewing. Or long-term ICs effectively doing this role without the title and expectations/responsibilities (raises hand). You can identify these people because they ask questions relentlessly. Always well-considered ones, but even the ones that might make them look stupid in a meeting.
Coding is a small percentage of the work but also just as important. That's the sweet spot. The "non-stop meetings/socializing" people and the "headphones on & grind PRs" types are both two extremes of behavior that are boat-anchors in any organization and will bring productivity/customer-impact to a screeching halt if it goes unchecked for long enough.
And it's _always_ those stupid-seeming questions that uncover showstopping problems that would have bit you if left ignored.
Edit: Not to greenlight anything Palantir is doing, but in my opinion the FDE/FDSE model is probably everyone's near-future if your company is B2B. You can't be an "ignore meetings" type of person and do that.
It’s a trap.
Middle-management as we knew it at the turn of the 2010s is probably gone forever. You don't need to coordinate many many teams as you used to. Same as huge frontend team with dedicated support for graphql, etc. AI made most of that redundant.
By extension we're going to need a lot less middle managers as coordination problems decrease.
As for the point I think you're trying to make, the problem with middle management and other chokepoints in general (like PM teams) is that often they become an antipattern. They soak in all the information and then dole it out parsimoniously, so the typical experience as an IC is to be barely able to see the full picture