It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an individual contributor in possession of a couple of years at their current level, must be in want of a promotion.
One of the great frustration points in the tech industry is the individual contributor career path. While most companies these days have a separate career track for people who don’t want to become managers, many people still end up becoming managers because they don’t feel capable of being promoted as individual contributors.
This is a pain point for both senior management and employees: senior management thinks there aren’t enough good Staff+ engineers, mid-career employees end up in management jobs they don’t enjoy and aren’t good at, and engineers suffer from both mediocre managers and few examples of non-management leaders to look up to.
