Decoding the Crossroads: Navigating the IC vs. EM Career Dilemma

A lot of us senior engineers may have felt torn between two paths on how to pursue our career at least once in our life; following the IC (Individual Contributor) path or transition to become an EM (Engineering Manager). Or some of us even are not given any other choices but instead asked to become an EM in order to cover a recently promoted manager etc. Not to mention the challenge of figuring out, understanding what we should expect from these different paths and finding the right questions to ask ourselves can become extremely tricky. As a senior backend engineer with 10+ years experience within the field, it took some time for me to navigate these in a way that I feel more confident in deciding what I want to do next. I pursued various strategies; reading books, having mentorships, taking courses, trying things out myself etc. Going through this journey of thoughts made me realise I want to become an Engineering Manager. There is no doubt that transitioning into this path from a full-time engineering role has its pros and cons, and I have experienced them closely in the recent months. This brought me to the idea of writing my journey in a multi-part blog post. In my first (the one you are currently reading) post I’ll mention about my decision process on what challenge I want to take on. I also am planning to cover the lessons I’ve learned, tips I wish I’ve known before and the mindset I developed over years to help me understand what I want most out of my career. This will be followed by a second post that will be about my experiences in my first ever EM job. Hopefully it helps you as well and let’s start!

Photo by Antonio Feregrino on Unsplash

I’ve been working as an experienced/senior engineer for some time, now what?

Climbing the ladder of the IC path for engineers might start getting tedious, unsatisfying and/or ambiguous after some point. At some point after I become a senior engineer, I remember asking myself what I see myself doing at work ten years from now. Although I highly enjoy designing systems, coding and having the chance of building tangible things that directly contribute to my company’s business, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that after ten years (I’ll come back to this shortly). And in recent years in the software industry we started seeing more people tend to try out different things throughout their careers. So to say, moving more horizontally instead of following the traditional linear path, such as moving from being an engineer to a PM (Product Manager), or moving into another domain in the same company with the same title. It can be seen as a new way to approach a career as a portfolio of different skills. Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis defines this as “The Squiggly Career” if you are interested to learn more. I think we should have a blend of both, which in my opinion is to be able to switch paths if we want to and be able to pursue that.

Your manager is your partner

As Camilla Fournier stated in her book The Manager’s Path, you need to learn how to be managed well in order to manage well so that you have enough experience to build your own management philosophy. I would even extend this by saying that try being managed by at least 2 different managers to be able to compare different practices.

I started feeling much confident and aware when I started discussing my desire in engineering management with my manager. Hence I strongly suggest getting the most out of your relationship with your managers. Regular 1:1s with your manager are the perfect way to do that. Be very open to your manager on what you expect from them and also how you want to grow. Let your manager be your partner on this journey. Sharing, listening, honesty and openness eventually create a mutual trust. Don’t forget that your goals and accomplishments are (and should be) also your manager’s goals and accomplishments. Let them be involved in your transition journey and create a development goal for yourself collaboratively.

One thing that I observe often when talking with my colleagues is that they expect their managers to take the steering wheel during 1:1s. Don’t forget that your manager should not be the sole responsible of how to facilitate your 1:1s, your contribution should be tantamount to your manager. Try being proactive by asking questions. Also share your vulnerabilities and be coachable. Learn how to give and also how to receive feedback.

Drawing a justified path

After being involved in various projects and teams, I found myself questioning myself more often about what I would like to do next. I know I like everything about tech, but I’ve always been interested in helping people grow and improve my leadership and business skills. Therefore I was seeing myself at least trying out being a manager at some time in my career. But the responsibility of engineering managers have always been ambiguous to me, especially across different companies and cultures, hence I needed more information to understand in order to justify the reasoning behind my next step. There are some things that I’ve tried out in the last couple of years and think is very useful to know.

First of all, imagine yourself in the mid and long future, what do you want to do 5 and 10 years from now. And don’t also only think about work-wise, think about where do you want to live, your desired way of working, how much you want to spend your time in meetings (and obviously speak more than usual) etc. I believe it’s a good starting point as such small details in how you envision adapting your future lifestyle in how you work, providing a clue to what you want your next step to be in your career.

On what do you want to spend your time most on a regular weekday? Do you want to do coding, leading and steering tech initiatives, help people grow, manage deliveries, define tech or product strategies, enable people to thrive in what they want? You will see that this list grows. Worth noting that you may also want a mixture of those. It is also common that things you want change by time. Some helpful tips on this:

1. Find a mentor within the company but in a different domain if possible as you share the same company culture. Hearing about different past experiences helped me widen my peripheral vision.
2. Ask your manager to try out things that do not fall under the responsibilities of your current role, but in the potential roles on your career ladder in different paths you are in between. If you are interested in being an EM, try mentoring and coaching people (these are two separate concepts), facilitate squad celebrations or cover your manager in one of the project updates sync meetings.
3. Mentor and coach people. These terms are often mixed-up with each other. Mentorship is when a mentor helps a mentee, who has the same (or related) profession, by sharing their past experience in the field. Coaching is where the coach aims to help solving a specific problem of the player (person being coached, term used by Myles Downey) by asking the right questions and putting them to the flow. I think coaching is specifically important as it takes the bigger portion of a manager’s daily job day by day. Along with the change in the way of working happening more intensively since the pandemic, psychological safety is becoming more and more prominent, which is playing an important role in shifting modern management to require softer social skills more in contrast to the old-school management style. Pro tip: try improving your active listening skills, both the effectiveness and the ease of learning active listening are highly underrated 🙂
4. Read through literature related to the subject to understand different paths and shaped my perspective on engineering management:

• Staff Engineer by Will Larson is very helpful to understand the definition and expectations of the role, understanding the different archetypes was truly eye-opening.
• Resilient Management: The best content I’ve ever seen discussing physiological safety.
• Crucial Conversations: Don’t let the cover trick you :) A reference book for how to approach difficult conversations.
• The Culture Map: This helped me a lot to realise how much we underestimate the importance of cultural differences in working environments.
• How to Decide: Making important and quick decisions is a gem!
• The Making of a Manager: You’ve most likely heard about this book in the field. Definitely a reference guide!

Hope this post was helpful! I hope to share the second part of this post where I will mention how I landed my first interim engineering management opportunity and my first experiences, stay tuned!

About me:

My name is Çağrı Aslanbaş, I live in Stockholm and work at Spotify. I’m a senior backend engineer and currently working as an interim engineering manager.