Career Growth: Why Managers Rise Faster

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During my first two years working at Meta, I was an individual contributor (IC) engineer. Then, after an encouraging review, my manager asked if I’d start managing a team of my own. I had received strong performance ratings and earned trust among my colleagues and the leadership team, and the organization’s headcount was consistently increasing each year.

This is the standard origin story for engineers who transition to management. But the skills required to succeed as an engineer and the ones a manager has to have are significantly different. Strong engineers succeed through rigorous analytical ability and deep work. Strong managers (whose work is decidedly un-analytical!) motivate and grow people’s careers, while also being prepared to jump into issues at a moment’s notice.

The ideal motivation to become a manager is simple: You care about people. Management is inherently a people-oriented job, which means managers should grow their reports through positive and constructive feedback. A good manager cares about discovering each person’s zone of genius and then assigning work that best matches that engineer’s profile. The byproduct of this is the ability to scale impact, but that should not be the primary motive.

A common, yet misguided, reason to switch to management is to earn more money. At least within Big Tech companies, managers and ICs at the same level are paid the same amount. In fact, some companies deliberately pay their managers less, simply to discourage mercenary engineers who are optimizing for compensation rather than people.

However, there is nuance here that’s worth calling out. At more senior levels, managers are promoted at faster rates compared to ICs. A manager’s impact is largely derived from their influence in an org, which includes the number of people in their reporting chain. A director with 50 engineers in their org can effectively “claim credit” for the people on their team.

On the other hand, an individual contributor at the director level must produce output that has a similar scale of impact to what the 50 engineers shipped. As you can imagine, this is much harder. IC promotions at these levels require a level of technical brilliance that is difficult to reliably reproduce.

Managers often get promoted as they accumulate more people under them. This process can happen through re-orgs or employee departures, not necessarily through the unique contributions of the manager. The result is that managers who stick around long enough will naturally grow their careers. Empirically, this is obvious in the data. At a company like Meta or Google, there are far more VP-level managers than there are IC engineers of the equivalent level.

In the long term, therefore, managers do earn more money than individual contributors. This is not necessarily wrong, but you should reflect on your incentives and determine what will make you fulfilled beyond the money.

I ended up saying yes to the management opportunity I was offered, and I’m very glad I did. Like any job, there were parts that I loved and parts that I didn’t, and I ended up switching back to the IC ladder within a year.

—Rahul

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