🧭 The Uneven Tracks of Engineering Careers

Talk to any engineer about career progression and you’ll quickly hear the same frustration:
the individual contributor (IC) and management tracks aren’t just different — they’re uneven.

They run on completely different rulebooks.
Different speeds.
Different standards of proof.

⚙️ The IC Track: Earn It Before You Get It

Becoming a senior or staff engineer isn’t something you grow into — it’s something you earn long before you’re recognized for it.

The IC path is structured around performance, output, and consistent demonstration of ability. You don’t just apply for a new title — you act the part for years before anyone even entertains the discussion.

A typical IC journey looks something like this:

1. Associate → Mid-Level: You master your tools, learn the codebase, and start taking small ownership areas.
2. Mid-Level → Senior: You show initiative — mentoring others, proposing improvements, raising quality standards.
3. Senior → Staff: You already operate as staff long before you’re promoted — designing systems, influencing architecture, guiding peers, and pushing through ambiguity.
4. Staff → Principal: You make visible, cross-organizational impact, often without formal authority.

And at every step, the rule is the same: perform at the next level for long enough to convince someone you deserve it.

The IC world is one of proof before reward.
You must do the job for months or years before being trusted with the job.

You’re expected to:

• Take on projects beyond your title.
• Mentor without being called a “lead.”
• Deliver under pressure.
• Demonstrate architectural thinking before being empowered to make those decisions.

Meanwhile, any stumble or delay is documented and judged.
Even context-heavy wins — like cleaning years of tech debt or improving performance — can be reframed as “took too long.”

🪑 The Management Track: Get It, Then Earn It

Management, on the other hand, tends to start the other way around.
You don’t prove you can manage before promotion — you’re given the role and learn on the job.

There’s rarely a formal qualification, certification, or performance prerequisite. Many first-time managers are promoted simply because:

• The team needs “a manager,”
• You were available,
• Or leadership sees you as “having potential.”

A typical management journey looks like this:

1. Senior Engineer → Engineering Manager: You’re promoted, often abruptly, to manage your former peers. Training is minimal.
2. Manager → Senior Manager: You learn to handle budgets, feedback, and people ops over several years — with wide tolerance for mistakes.
3. Senior Manager → Director: Success is tied to perception — your ability to align with leadership, manage up, and present well.
4. Director → VP/CTO: Now it’s about narrative, strategy, and optics. You’re measured by influence more than direct impact.

And because management visibility sits closer to executive leadership, its failures are often absorbed into the system.

You’ll hear things like:

“It was a tough quarter, but we learned a lot.”
“That manager is still finding their style.”
“This was an organizational misalignment, not a people issue.”

Where ICs are told, “You need to improve performance,” managers are told, “You’re still growing.”

🎭 Two Standards, One Company

This imbalance has real cultural impact.

ICs feel constantly on trial.
Managers feel perpetually protected.

IC underperformance is called a performance issue.
Management underperformance is a growth opportunity.

And because management roles are more visible, failures can be reframed as “strategic experiments,” while IC success stories often go unnoticed.

I’ve lived that imbalance firsthand.
I was once criticized for taking five weeks to solo-deliver a major feature. What wasn’t said:

• I offloaded my team to keep our quarterly plan on track.
• I cleaned up years of tech debt.
• I fixed over a dozen bugs in the process.

The delay was context. The result was quality.
Still — I was told I was “partially meeting expectations.”

Meanwhile, leadership had spent almost a year cycling through failed AWS provisioning approaches they’d dictated top-down — a complete miss of the original goal — but that was celebrated as “a valuable learning experience.”

It’s not just frustrating. It’s systemic.

🧩 The Fix: Parity, Not Privilege

If both paths are meant to represent leadership — one through influence, the other through authority — then both should be held to the same standard of rigor and accountability.

We need:

• Symmetry in progression: Clear, transparent frameworks for both ICs and managers.
• Trial periods: New managers should have measurable milestones, just like IC promotions.
• Objective reviews: Equal accountability to outcomes, not optics.
• Positive demotion paths: Normalize stepping back from management without stigma.

Becoming a manager shouldn’t be a free pass to “figure it out.”
It should be a structured commitment to build others — with the same discipline engineers apply to building systems.