IC vs Leadership
One is not better than other, but before you lead, do a gut check. Where’s your heart?
I fell in love with building software because it was then that I realized just how powerful it is to take something from concept, to design, to creation. I realized that that power existed within my own mind, and the skills I had to make the things I dreamed of. I spent years doing that, over and over, building and creating new products for various companies, and mostly, I loved it. I still love it. I’m still very much my inner 11 year old just realizing that the line of code I just wrote is why that functionality works.
Along the way, I fell in love with something else that I hadn’t anticipated: building people. Leadership is a lot of things but the most important work is not in the spreadsheets. It’s in your one on ones. It’s in the genuine compliments you give your team for work well done. It’s in the trust they build in you, and you in them. It’s being their umbrella so when it’s raining all around them, they are protected from the elements and can focus on the task at hand.
We win, or lose, together.
Today I was approached about a couple of individual contributor roles that while certainly sounded interesting to my inner geek, I realized a while ago that I don’t want to take that step back in my career. As a woman in tech, it was a long haul to get to where I am. More than that, I don’t want to stop mentoring, leading, sheltering, and cheerleading for my team.
Some people are born to be IC’s. Some are born to be leaders. Neither is better or worse; they each have their own benefits and hang ups. Some of us, like myself, are a mix of both. I still love to code, but I also find a great deal of reward in helping people be their best selves. As a “classic” INFJ, I suppose this is just part of my personality.
Being an IC is relatively “safe” — the only person whose responsible for your success or failure is yourself. Your contributions are easily measured and you can easily see your impact on the product and the company. Leadership isn’t that simple because so much of your contributions are behind the scenes. You won’t be able to say, “I built that” anymore. Instead, your contributions aren’t about you. Your success is measured by the success of your team.
The highlights of my career are (mostly) not specific products. They are the teams I’ve been a part of, the managers that believed in me, and the developers I’ve led who trusted me not just to see their work, but to see their worth as whole people. They’re the teams that trusted and relied on each other; that knew that our success was a collective effort, not an individual one. They’re the moments when I whipped out the proverbial pom-poms to cheer for them in their successes and encouraged them when things weren’t going so well.
To some, becoming a manager is seen as natural career progression, but to me, it’s not and shouldn’t be. It should be something you do because you’re just as, if not more, passionate about the people as you are the tech. You should be as committed to developing your leadership skills as you are to learning the latest <insert favorite tech stack> build. Leadership is not a destination. It’s a journey, just like software engineering we can never be done honing our craft.
Technology changes every single day; the stack your product uses now might change in a few years (or less) but what really lasts is the impact you have on the people around you, regardless of your title.
