Choosing an Individual Contributor (IC) role over a manager role

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

At Facebook, and indeed the tech industry at large, we have a general concept of two roles; Individual contributors (or ICs) and managers. In most industries, moving into management is seen as a promotion. During my career, I’ve been a manager and an IC. Currently I am an IC at Facebook in the Solutions Engineering team, by choice, because I believe this is where I add the most value to the team.

I’ve had a number of different roles over the years:

• Pre-university intern at IBM
• Multiple summer placements at IBM
• Software Engineer at IBM
• Business consultant and team lead at IBM
• Hardware engineer at a defence contractor
• Freelance iOS app developer
• Team lead/manager at a tech startup working on both hardware and software
• Asst VP Engineering at the same tech startup
• Solutions Engineer at Facebook

For this note, I’ll mostly talk about my move from VP Engineering at a startup to Solutions Engineer at Facebook and why I made that decision.

I initially ended up as a manager largely through organic growth of the startup I was at. When I joined as a team lead, the company was quite small. Three years later when I left, the company was 150 people large with a 55-strong engineering team. 53 of those engineers reported directly through me (first lesson; never have that many people reporting to you!). There was a bigger company strategy at play which made it difficult to reorganise the team, and this was the primary reason I ended up being disenfranchised with a management role.

In some ways this was typical startup culture; I didn’t intentionally choose to be a manager, I just ended up in that position because it was what the company needed. Within 6 months of my joining I was doing a management role and that stuck as the engineering team grew.

Things I enjoyed about being a manager

I enjoyed most of my time managing engineering teams, but there are a few specific aspects that really stood out:

1. Helping people grow and succeed — this is really the core responsibility of being a manager, and (luckily!) it is this aspect of the role I enjoyed the most. Working through challenges and concerns that people had, and then helping them figure out how to start to tackle them, then watching them take on those issues and come to a successful conclusion can be really rewarding.
2. Defining company strategy and direction — This was an important task, helping to set the engineering direction, aligning with business and sales teams, and ensuring we were building both towards commitments we had made to clients and also to keep us on track for future product development. As with any “lead” role, this discussion had to involve many stakeholders and managing the opposing perspectives can be quite challenging, but also a lot of fun.
3. Growing the team — This was another responsibility that largely fell to me in a small company — every recruitment packet was reviewed and assessed by myself, a company co-founder, and our Chief Product Officer before we made a decision to make an offer. We took this very seriously, especially in the early days of the company since each person brought in was going to have an outsized impact on the company culture. Cultivating that culture and shaping it in a way that not only delivered on our projects but also made the company a nice place to work was really important.

Things I did not enjoy about being a manager

1. Deciding how much to pay people — This is not so much of an issue at Facebook, where we have a more formulaic approach to compensation, but in my startup days we would be given a number by our CFO that was the increase for the engineering budget, and we had to decide how to allocate that budget across all of the engineering staff. Inevitably there were people who were good at their jobs but being paid way below market rate. Others were good at their jobs but being paid “about right” for the market. Making decisions on who should get pay rises, and by how much, was never fun and almost always resulted in someone in the team feeling hard done by.
2. HR — As an engineering lead at a small company, many of the individual crises that team members had fell to me. For many of these situations, I was ill equipped to deal with them given my engineering/consulting background. I certainly learned a lot by doing this, but always felt like I was doing those individuals a disservice due to my inexperience in dealing with personal problems. I’m relieved that we have a HR team at Facebook who are much better equipped to handle these situations!
3. Assumption of status — This one is a bit harder to explain, and it’s something that is much less prevalent at Facebook. In many companies, being a manager is seen as a more “senior” role to not being a manager. This often results in people paying more attention to what you have to say. Having a business card that says “VP” meant that people respected your opinion more. I found myself constantly having to redirect questions to the engineer or salesperson who actually knew much more about the topic than I did, and over time this ground me down quite a bit.

So what made me think about being an IC again?

There were a number of factors that made me reconsider my role as a manager and seriously consider IC roles, but the main ones were the things I didn’t enjoy about being a manager that I’ve talked about above. That, in addition to a general sense of burnout from having too many direct reports led me to decide that my next role would be non-managerial.

Following very soon after I’d made this decision, I was head-hunted by Facebook, and the role was an IC role. Facebook was not hiring for managers in the Solutions Engineering team at the time and this actually suited the conclusion I’d already come to.

The Solutions Engineering role itself was interesting, but I was also worried about losing out on the parts of the manager role I really enjoyed. When I looked at the role in detail, I figured I could definitely learn new things, and still retain a lot of the aspects that I did enjoy around people growth through mentoring. I also did a lot of research into Facebook culture to help me understand how hierarchies, HR, compensation, and other elements worked. The company culture itself played a big role in convincing me that an IC role would be a good fit.

Learnings and takeaways

Expectations:

The expectations on a manager vary by company, but there are a few key aspects that remain true;

• Managers are responsible for helping people succeed
• Managers are responsible for formal performance assessments of their team
• Managers are responsible for ensuring that their team heads in a coherent direction
• Managers are responsible for growing their team and nurturing a good culture

The expectations on a senior IC are, funnily enough, almost exactly the same:

• Senior ICs are expected to share knowledge and help their peers succeed
• Senior ICs are expected to help align the team and drive a coherent direction
• Senior ICs are expected to help grow the team and act as a beacon of team culture

Maximise for your focus:

What responsibilities really matter to you and how do you maximise for that whilst minimising the responsibilities you dislike? At Facebook, managers have a primary focus on helping their team, ICs have a primary focus on driving work. This isn’t to say that people in these roles do not take on other responsibilities too, but their primary focus is what they will spend the most time doing.

Reassess once in a while:

Your own perspective and outlook will change over the course of your career. You should reassess once in a while whether you think your current role is still fulfilling your needs. I do this about once a year. You’ll note that many of the things that I said I disliked as a manager are less of a direct issue at Facebook, so something I do think about is whether a manager role would maximise my ability to learn in a way that being an IC would not. For the time being, I’m still enjoying and learning a lot as an IC, but it is good to “never say never” :-)