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Common management failures in developing individual contributors

You can't afford to let the ICs on your team feel that they have no career path.
February 23, 2021

The tech industry has worked hard over the years to make it clear that there is a career path for people who don’t want to become managers.

Most companies have carefully created separate senior career tracks that provide details of the differences between being a manager and being an individual contributor (IC). And yet, many people still believe that you can’t get ahead without becoming a manager, and many companies who want more senior individual contributors struggle to promote people on this path. This is a shame; great engineers really shouldn’t need to manage large teams to get promoted, and companies lose out on a critical skillset when they push all of their good engineers into management.

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