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I’m a mechanical engineer working for an aerospace company but I want to make the transition into tech. During my last 2 semesters of college, I took some coding classes and realized this is what I really wanted to do. I graduated in December, 2021 and have been teaching myself programming ever since. I still have a log to learn but I want to eventually land a job at HubSpot or Spotify. In the meantime I’m looking for mentors. Is anybody willing to chat and offer some advice and connections?
Rising Star
Go with growth when it’s available. If coding is your passion you’ll always find opportunities to do it but growth is harder to chase.
I was thinking the same
Thats awesome. Glad to hear that companies are promoting within and not looking else first before asking their own employees!
Try it out, if you don’t like it I would almost guarantee that they’ll let you go back to being an IC with the same comp.
I would love to write back more details to this later. It's been a struggle for me for 10 years back and forth with Management and IC. I am currently interviewing for IC roles after several successful years in management. I will say though, I have fallen behind. It's been difficult to find high level positions who can look past the fact i was not in the weeds recently. I've done a TON of studying, interviewing, and personal projects to keep my skills up the past 6months or so. (SwiftUI and Jetpack) One of these times it'll work out.
My manager told me a few years ago, you accumulate skills and roles like a snowball, you don't shed one for another. There's plenty of principal skills that fit management skills and vise versa! At a high enough level they really blend together.
People management is a WHOLE different job. So watch out for that and be ready. No daily productivity hit, more of a long range feedback loop with a really big payoff when you make good policies, decisions and process.
Happy to chat more! Good luck!
You really should do what YOU want to do. If you feel like your time is best spent as an IC you should keep doing that. If you do decide to go down the management track, set the expectation that you want to keep contributing technically whether it's through designs, code reviews, and/or coding.
I've seen plenty of people switch in and out of management in my career while at the same company. I don't think there's anything wrong with trying.
I think, in the long-term, succeeding in management & leadership is for those who want that job and are determined to make success of it.
So if you plan to just “try it”, then upon encountering difficulties you plan to run back to being an IC, you have already failed even before you have started.
My suggestion is search your heart and ask it if it is 1) satisfied with the technical journey you have already had and is ready to leave that all behind.
And 2) Assuming the answer to 1 above is yes, then assess yourself to see if you are ready for this career change to the land of people, projects & policy management; and are ready to fight to make it a success.
It would be much harder going upwards in-house so that’s a bonus. It’s also easier to go downwards. I say pursue the promotion, level up your skills. Take in what you can from this new perspective and if you enjoy it. Stay. If you don’t step down.
It’s much harder to go upwards in general. So I would say this is a good opportunity to explore and if you don’t like it… then yeah
See if you can try it out for six months with the option to move back to IC if leadership doesn’t suit you. Of course a lot of it depends on the leaders you will report to. I would meet with the prospective leader and their leader to talk about their leadership style and their plan to ramp you up into management.
If the stock doesn’t convince you… I don’t think you are going to find a more challenging FAANG than the one you are already at. New challenges (and stock grants?) seem to appear for leadership.
IC is a common term in the industry. I've never worked at FAANG and all of my employers with more than a dozen or so employees have used it.
This is the most real answer and exactly what I’m struggling with. I think the answer is yes. Let’s see if I can do it.
Speak to someone who already does the job and see if it's something that appeals to you. I used be IC and now I am driving the process and coordination across 25 people. I still solve problems, I still enjoy it, I still make use of my technical background but I don't write code regularly. Think what problems you like solving and how. If it's only problems like how do I scale across x platform but not how do I scale a team and workload across x people then maybe worth checking something else. In my company we also have the distinguished engineer track which is exactly to progress high performing IC into senior positions while remaining primarily hands on, maybe yours has something like that too.
You could try to go down the Software Architecture track. Also an opportunity to be a leader, but you stay technical, and still get to write code, if at least for prototypes.
You can ALWAYS become less technical, but it's really hard to go from a less technical role back to a more technical one.
From architect you can basically go anywhere
You have to do what makes you happy or you’ll be miserable. You can have financial success as an IC or a manager.
Lead this decision with your heart, but listen to your mind too. Just give more juice to what will make you happy long term.
Refuse politely
Upward growth is always important. Know that there are a ton of different challenges that go with making this kind of switch. Yes you're technically sound, know your way around the codebase, but you're now responsible for others and their technical soundness (+contributions), timelines and growth.
Many go into leadership thinking one thing and realizing it's a completely different game than what they thought. Mentally prepare yourself to go back to square one. How you handled something as an IC will likely be different in how you handle it from the management perspective. You're going to fail in a multitude of different ways and that's ok. Stay true to who you are as a person and your IC/manager hat will become one.
I’ve been hesitant to take on managerial roles in my career because I know I enjoy being an IC and the ability it gives me to skill up in my chosen career. I don’t think I’ll always resist leadership opportunities, but for my mental health and my professional career path, I’ve tried to be very intentional about what I agree to take on.
That’s just my take on your situation; don’t let culture and pressure lead you in a direction if you’re not prepared or want to go. Your career is your own.
Talk to your manager about your interests and concerns, so when you take the opportunity there are no surprises and they know how to properly support you and plan your career growth.
There are very valid reasons to want to work more independently, however consider that as you grow in your career, interacting and collaborating with others is inevitable.
You don't have to lead, but you definitely need to build your collaboration skills. Managers don't have to be people managers either, although it's the most natural thing not all management roles require to lead if can find a natural leader in your team to develop and you can focus on the delivery and operational side of the role.
Reflect on whether you have been navigating in your comfort zone, think that you'll never know whether you truly like management and leadership if you don't give it a try.
Management is a different career path than technical. There are exemptions, but find out what it means and how it progresses from there. There are very different opportunities and risks between the two paths …
Your manager sees something special in you. You should thank him/her and really think about it for a day or two. If you decide you don’t want to be a manager yet you should tell him you want to continue to learn watching him/her for another year or two. If you are ready to take the leap, then ask for guidance and find out if your manager will comity’s your guide you in hour managerial journey. It’s a very different set of skills that a manager has to madter
I don't have any direct advice but for those who are engineers "capping out" at the principal level and being pushed into management of any kind, and you REALLY hate doing management, I feel for you. I really just want to code and build things. I'll lead a technical team but, man, I don't want to manage people ever. It's upsetting that "management" is seen as the next tier, but what can you do.