Career Progression Troubleshooting
Explore common career progression challenges in software engineering within dual career tracks for individual contributors and managers. Understand how to balance coding and management roles, address concerns about transitioning to management, apply frameworks to avoid the Peter Principle, and implement peer feedback for fair promotions. Discover strategies to customize progression frameworks and link them to compensation while maintaining flexibility for different skill sets and company structures.
Even if you define detailed career tracks for both ICs and managers, people will still find lots of bugs. You might even be experiencing some of them yourself as a new manager. Let’s do some debugging and see if we can find some answers to common questions.
Isn’t a manager on both tracks?
If you’re a manager, you might be thinking, “Hang on, aren’t I on both tracks? I code as well!” It’s a good question. There are plenty of managers that are still able to produce high-impact code contributions as well as manage a team of engineers.
However, the track that you’re on defines your primary function. If you’re on the management track and are still able to produce a lot of code without putting your managerial responsibilities at risk, that’s fantastic. However, if you’re on the management track and you are coding to the detriment of your managerial responsibilities, you need to rethink how you’re spending your time.
As you’ll have seen in this course, becoming an effective manager takes a lot of practice. If you excel and are a natural manager, you may find yourself able to free up more time for your own code contributions. However, you should make sure that you’re performing well as a manager first. Your team needs you to do your job.
What if I don’t like management after I try it?
Since we’ve defined that the IC track is different from the management track, and hence that they’re different jobs, we can better understand why engineers are hesitant to make the leap into management. What if they do so and don’t like it after all? Do they become stuck and have to leave the company if they don’t like it?
It’s possible to create a safety net. Imagine that one of your staff has applied to run another team at the company, and you know that they would do a stellar job. However ...
