My experience is that the 'separate but equal' dual engineering track is largely a myth and that if you want advancement, the manager track is a much more viable track. Even with some of the recent flattening, there are still far more higher level roles for management than ICs. They are also given far more visibility and access inside the company which is extremely valuable in a large org. It also seems a good choice if you're not very good - I've seen bad managers hang around far longer than bad engineers.
I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation. I myself have been called all of those things, but have honestly not been able to tell the difference: in some cases, I have had much more responsibility as a "senior backend developer" than a "staff engineer". I have recently interviewed for a number of roles with titles like CTO, engineering manager, tech lead etc and there is so much overlap that they seem to be one and the same. Have worked at companies on three continents, in organisations ranging from 6 people to 10k+, so have seen a few titles.
This is entirely it. Titles should be consistently ordered within an organization, but they are not portable from one organization to another.
This is a lesson I’ve had to explain over and over to people at the beginning of their careers. I’ve been asked for advice about which offer to take from people thinking about leaving 10s of thousands of dollars on the table because another company will give them a Senior Engineer title and they think that’s important.
When hiring, titles are basically ignored unless the person is coming from a company like Microsoft or Google where their leveling system is publicly known.
I’ve interviewed so many “Prinicpal Staff Engineers” or even “CTO” people who would barely qualify as senior engineers at an average company. I’ve also interviewed “Senior Software Engineers” who had more experience than knowledge than anyone on our teams (and that’s saying a lot!)
Hiring managers know this, but it’s not obvious if you haven’t done a lot of hiring or worked at a lot of different companies.
But not a pure S/W one. Like an actual engineer with nuts and bolts and pneumatics and amps and bolts and the like. That was the title at many many companies, it was a pretty rigid one too, despite the job function being quite jack of all trades.
But then tech decided that they wanted to use Systems Engineer too. The reasons weren't bad, I guess.
But then trying to find a job in my version of the role was near impossible on any job site.
Unix this, Windows that. Sure, I used Unix systems for my job too, little servers for controlling some mechanical systems. Not like huge racks that served up billions of requests.
And then I'd get the job spam too, as I matched some keyword threshold for the S/W type systems engineer. Always a entry level role through.
Gah! Why couldn't S/W take the title of Unix Server Engineer, or Python Integration Engineer or something just a tad more specific and not bleeding all over my discipline?
Titles for ICs matter for two reasons: comp, and perf reviews. At bigger companies the amount of RSUs for Staff versus Senior can be substantial. At a startup where equity is worth nothing and salaries are in a tight band anyways it doesn't make a difference.
For perf reviews your title dictates the rubric you get evaluated against, but in fact your manager is probably trying to fit a curve and then work backwards to the rubric. So they'll decide you're a 3/4 and then pick some boxes for your weakest areas to mark you down in. The realpolitik of it is that you can do the same work or more at a lower level but get paid less, depending on what you negotiate coming in, your experience, previous roles, etc.
Once you get into VP, Director, and C level they are comparable between orgs on their own kind of ladder. There's levels of responsibility for outcomes associated with being higher in the food chain. Not to say there also isn't a political aspect, but they are broadly comparable between bigger orgs.
> At a startup where equity is worth nothing and salaries are in a tight band anyways it doesn't make a difference.
It doesn't make a big difference to the company, but a lot of employees want these titles for ego / resume / status / recognition. And titles are free for startups to give away, so many do.
As others have said, levels and titles are generally for compensation and performance reviews. Each company has their own bespoke ladder but it generally maps to:
Each company has their own numbers and names but it generally progresses like that. Impact and scope scales as you head up the ladder.
L5 or Senior is usually considered a “terminal” role. That means all engineers should be able to get to this role. And people without the headroom get managed out if they can’t get to L5.
Staff+ is usually “special”. It means that people count on you to drive initiatives and you have something special other than just writing code. You are able to make product and business impact.
Distinguished and Fellow are very rare. Large FAANG companies will only have a handful of these engineers. It means you’ve made industry-wide impact like inventing map-reduce or DynamoDB or Kubernetes.
Titles make no sense whatsoever, you're correct, but in nearly all organizations there's a split between IC track and manager track, so the argument the OP is making is debatable but it's not absurd on its face.
Your job title encompasses the highest-order bits about who you are, professionally. The value is much more between organizations than within a single one.
If you plan to stay at one place for a long time, it's much less important. You have a chance to figure out how things 'really' work in practice. I know a guy who is a senior architect, and everyone refers to him as that at his company, but his actual on-paper title is something like "project technical lead". It's just not very important if you are going to stay there for 20 or 30 years and chase deep breathing metis.
I don't have the same career outlook, so my job title is important to me. I actively negotiate for it. My own title is "senior DevSecOps engineer". Criticism of the acronym notwithstanding, this paints an instantly legible set of competencies around what I do best, what I do adequately, and what you probably would get better value for money paying someone else for. I'm probably pretty good at vulnerability management and securing CI/CD pipelines. Optimizing weights on our anti-spam logistic classifier is probably not the kind of thing I can do well. Etc., etc.
Within a given company, I think these roles are well-defined. In a big tech company, a principal engineer will influence decisions at a much higher level then a senior whose isn't visible outside his team. And an engineering manager support, evaluate, represent the team, and help with goal alignements.
If we measure principal engineers by "cross team force multiplier impact and its visibility to management" (second part being key), what kind of behaviors do we incentivize? Are there, possibly, bunches of mid-level and senior engineers dealing with extra hassles to demonstrate this impact?
>are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation
Titles at least useful to understand the hierarchy, but roles truly mean nothing. Sometimes the adult in the room is a PO, sometimes it's EM, sometimes they are responsible for the timelines and "project stuff", sometimes it's a Senior Engineer. In some places a QA is effectively doing PO stuff.
One thing that's worth remembering is that companies - especially in Silicon Valley - use titles as a way to compare salary levels with each other.
If you are an engineering manager looking to make the case for raises for your team members one of the tools you have available is usually an anonymized survey of similar compensation levels from other companies.
You can say things like "this person is a high performer and is being paid 85% of the expected level for this title at other companies nearby - we should bump them up".
Your company may use job titles in a non-standard way, but there's probably an HR document somewhere that attempts to map them to more standard levels in order to make these kinds of comparisons useful.
I don't know how this works in other industries or countries, but I've seen this pattern play out in San Francisco Bay Area tech companies.
>> use titles as a way to compare salary levels with each other.
small companies typically go the other way, using titles to make up for concrete remuneration. This is why everyone in a startup is a VP and ICs climb the ladder to senior in a couple of years.
> This is why everyone in a startup is a VP and ICs climb the ladder to senior in a couple of years.
Another thing I've noticed happening is that if these companies grow into medium sized companies, these OG employees actually become VPs and directors whether they are qualified for these roles or not. Just by virtue of them being there first. I've worked at enough medium sized companies and have seen this at every one of them: "Why is this moron SVP of engineering?" "Well, he was employee number 5 back in the day."
This brings back memories of the candidate who demanded coming in as a high level engineer. Their argument was they were currently a CTO. Of their 2 person company. While they were still in college. And they were only borderline hireable for our entry level role.
Same for "programmer", "software developer", "software engineer", and so on. People insist that there's a real difference even when I have been all those things and there was no difference.
Outside of the FAANG style companies where how their levels map to each other are well known, titles are only useful to compare within the same company. You can't compare a specific title between two companies as they may not even have the same hierarchy much less requirements & expectations.
Personally, I don't give two shits about my title. If I could just be "computer programmer", I'd be happy. But the org likes titles and as long as I have to play that stupid game, I try to get titles.
There is a major gap in this analysis by not controlling for industry or companies. Engineering Manager is a very generic title, so this is going to get Start Ups, Big Tech, Little Tech, Enterprise, Contract Shops, etc. Staff Engineer is very uncommon in Enterprise or Contract shops, there you typically see SWE 1/2/3 -> Tech Lead -> Architect. Most Tech companies I think have more of a SWE 1/2/3 -> Staff Engineer -> Principal.
The other part is that Engineering Manager is a terminal position, I've known a few people who were manager for 20 years without ever going to Director / Exec whatever, its just a competitive jump and mathematically most will never go up. This is ALSO true for Senior -> Staff and Principle though. But Engineering Manager positions often have more of an upside with bonuses / incentives than Engineers get.
Finally it is ultimately a career change, and that should be the primary factor to consider.
> Engineering Manager positions often have more of an upside with bonuses / incentives than Engineers get
Not really.
Staff Eng and above will end up making similar to an EM including bonuses and has much more job mobility. You have to remember that most EM roles only open up once you hit Staff, so you are basically taking much more responsibility and longer hours for a marginal salary impact.
Engineering Manager jobs are hard to come by and your job security is actually less than an individual contributor, because even if an initiative was delivered late due to no fault of your own, if sales is braying for blood in order to protect themselves after failing to meet quota, it's the EM's head that is offered on a silver platter.
As a manager your role isn't to be the "best technical person" anyway. You still need to understand fast-changing capabilities of course. But you are managing people now, and the required skills are different. See below.
* The ladder is very competitive
It's always competitive, and in my experience it was the exact opposite - there were far fewer VP-level technical roles than VP people managers.
* The pay is lower (for senior managers vs. senior technical track)
Again, this is the opposite of my experience (besides at the first-line manager level, where pay was comparable.) Where I worked managers could quickly get paid more with more responsibility. I always thought it was because managing people is actually a lot less fun (at least for me it was.)
The biggest reason not to become a manager is because _it is a completely different job_. Although managers need to be technically competent, management skills are much more about people (and politics.) If that isn't your jam, then don't become a manager.
I think you underestimate the job mobility that is lost when you transition from being an individual contributor into someone on the management track.
The reality is, there are very few EM and above jobs, and job security is tough - if I have to choose between firing an EM or a SWE, I'd fire the EM first because I can always find another replacement or split their responsibilities across multiple individual contributors and the PM.
If an EM is laid off or fired, it's extremely difficult to find another role, and it truly is a terminal position. Why would I hire a laid off or fired EM or Director when I can promote internally or hire someone from within my network?
Additionally, back when I was an SE, if we had a deal go bad in order to protect our ass we'd blame the EM so that we can have a head on the platter to hand our CRO, unlike a seasoned SWE who can push back and argue PM requirements were unclear and PM can argue that sales+product was aligned.
Not quite. In most companies managers are seen as 'inner circle' people while technologists are just workers. Managers get exposed to a lot more comms, giving more visibility and get ability to act like a smart person purely because they have more emails and get into more calls than the others. They not only get more power, but also get more info.
If you already don't know that though, are you really cut out to be a manager? You're joining the company "mafia", with all that implies, for good or ill.
I agree, and they have more power because they have more info and are given more visibility, and because they lack the deep technical knowledge in xyz, they compensate it with all sort of office politics.
sure, as long as we're talking about 110 to 170k$ non-managing, technical roles in EU, I'd like to see a full eclipse soon (both exist but I think the latter could be easier to find)
It continues to amaze me that becoming a manager of anything should mean moving away from it. The manager has to move away from the detail, but why should they move from the substance of the role. A legal partner has to stay up to date as much their staff, in fact a legal partner is often the only one who can answer complex questions. When I need complex advice on my statutory accounts I get referred to the Audit Partner, the most senior manager.
The manager at my structural engineers can still calculate a beam size, he is better at it than his staff.
So why in software should an engineering manager move away from tech? Isn't this just a sign of disfunction in those organisations rather than anything about the role. Is it this MBA idea that management itself is a profession, rather than being 'a higher level thinker than the others'?
And what do these managers even do if they have moved away from tech? Approve holidays and expenses? My personal theory is that in these kind of organisations a manager is the person who is better with PowerPoint than the other people!
> Is it this MBA idea that management itself is a profession, rather than being 'a higher level thinker than the others'?
Yes I believe so. At uni i see soooo many people who are in software to make a startup (before even knowing how to code) and make a quick buck instead of being good programmers
I suppose what really escapes me is that companies are willing to pay people to do a pointless job. I wonder if the most senior are just more comfortable listening to a meaningless PowerPoint meeting than hearing complicated stuff about the work their company does
The best managers can still do the work part, that much is obvious. Not necessarily being the best in the team but offering the best project-level advice because the manager has enough skill combined with being the only one in the team dedicating thinking cycles "to the whole picture". But that only works well if you have the buy-in skill level that needs to be kept sharp.
> The manager at my structural engineers can still calculate a beam size, he is better at it than his staff. So why in software should an engineering manager move away from tech...
Because a manager at a structural engineering company is essentially acting as the equivalent of what a Product Manager or Forward Deployed Engineer is in the tech industry, because they are expected to be a technical domain expert and own delivery.
Meanwhile, for most software companies the underlying codebase isn't want generates revenue - it's the codification of business logic that does. Additionally, companies tend to have a separate Princiapl Eng to Distinguished Engineer/Architect track that outranks EMs and is in direct contact with leadership.
> Is it this MBA idea that management itself is a profession, rather than being 'a higher level thinker than the others'
Most Engineering Managers and Beancounters aren't MBAs - no company wants to sponsor an employee at a PTMBA which can cost upwards of $250K now.
I agree with that. The way I see the marketing going forward with AI, you need to be able to have proven outstanding technical skills and deep understanding across several technical domains to be able to add value to the chain. This mean staying in the trenches along with serious self-education schedule. You should be reading books now and doing hard stuff.
Alternatively, this is all a psy-op by AI companies to make engineers willing to work harder for less money so they can pretend all that productivity growth is thanks to their stuff.
> My friend was afraid that as a manager, he'd have less time to experiment and adapt. Especailly with a bigger team (he was offered to manage 6), you don’t have much time to play around.
You guys get time to play around? As lead/staff?
> You can be a great EM for years and find yourself stuck.
my job is basically self-directed. I'm expected to predict the future for what we as a business will need in 6 months to a year and become the expert in it now. lay the framework, prototype, sell to the larger org, integrate and move onto whatever else. This is in addition to the normal jira-driven feature/bugfix bullshit. I am looking at the problems we might run into then derisk them by figuring out what to build.
But I'm at a large org where timelines are about as flexible as jello. I think I'm also overqualified and underpaid so my boss just lets me do whatever.
Like I've been porting firmware from C to rust a day or two a week while I also am directing some more jr devs for our VP's latest product obsession.
Some people seem to genuinely enjoy being people managers and excel at it. It's not always obvious in advance who those people are so I'd still recommend people try it out early in their career if they get the opportunity, particularly if their company allows them to back out if it's ultimately not a good fit
This article periodically surfaces in some shape or form. There's this idea that there's a "dual ladder", and the IC ladder offers just as much respect and compensation as the management one. This is a lie, and the sooner we stop telling it to the young generation - the better.
Human societies have always rewarded and valued those who built hierarchies more than those who built things. If you focus on building a thing - you will forever be a cog in someone's big project. There's a reason that management ladder is more competitive.
> There's this idea that there's a "dual ladder", and the IC ladder offers just as much respect and compensation as the management one
It is not a lie. It is true IF you live and work in the Bay Area, Seattle, and TLV - which represent the bulk of tech industry employment.
Companies where the underlying stack is a revenue generator and not a cost center are companies where these kinds of dual tracks exist, but these are only found in the major tech hubs and are not available if you are remote first.
They also require you to be both technically and socially adept.
Sorry, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. The ladders are simply not comparable, even in the Bay Area. Sure, at the entry point where one transfers from the IC ladder to management compensation can even drop. However, that's the bottom rung - and one typically can't get straight into management as a new grad. The management ladder goes higher.
Totally agree, completely different skillset. Every engineer I've seen "promoted" as such becomes miserable, and frankly is not very good at their new role, effectively making it a double loss.
Honestly, I’m pretty good at it but yes indeed quite miserable, particularly now, in this market. With hiring very slow, companies know people are trapped.
Saying that becoming an EM is "moving away from tech" is crazy. As an EM you will be steeped in tech, just as you would be as an IC. It just may not be the tech you want to be steeped in. Again, same as an IC. In either case, unless you are working in AI, you will need to "play" with things like OpenClaw in your spare time.
The real reason not to become an EM in 2026 is because AI makes our jobs 10x harder.
> The real reason not to become an EM in 2026 is because AI makes our jobs 10x harder.
This is true, but our job was getting kind of boring anyway. Time to lead, not manage. We should be having just as much fun as the ICs, and the best I know are having the time of their lives.
This article is not very helpful, just like any sort of absolute yes/no advice. The ad in the middle that looks exactly like the "content" makes it worse.
Using OpenClaw as an example of exploding technology and why it's a bad time to move away from this (not sure how EM is a move away?) is ridiculous. And stating the career path is too competitive shows they don't really know what a true technical ladder looks like. Most organizations are going to have about as many staff developers as senior EMs and principal developers as senior directors. If it's stability you're after neither is particularly at risk in my experience, but I'd bet your CTO is looking to shake-up the domain of staff developers more than management with the AI hype train.
// but I'd bet your CTO is looking to shake-up the domain of staff developers more than management with the AI hype train.
Well that's a given, isn't it?
The contemporary CTO is looking for quantitative proof of productivity increases via Agentic AI adoption based on things like delivery cadence or SLAs. Management is a qualitative function, and guaranteed to be skilled in 'mapping' their role to the delivery of value and reporting such things upward anyway.
Engineering Management are there to make firm commitments and reasonable compromises around the ability to deliver features generally already committed to hard dates by either Sales or by virtue of external market forces. How this is achieved using social and political capital alongside Domain Knowledge is the distinguishing factor between an IC and a Technical Manager imo.
It's curious to see the rational argument against the emotional choice the author makes.
The critical piece here is the anecdotal (but true) insight that engineering orgs have been flattening over the last few years.
There are a lot of factors, but rarely discussed is the realization that senior engineers are completely capable and often willing of managing other engineers directly. The definitive text on this subject is literally called "Herding Cats" :facepalm:
In reality, senior engineers often have strong communication skills (albeit different than the styles of other management and leadership positions), very good time management, and likely can perform many of these 'soft skills' that engineering management is doing out-of-band from the teams directly responsible for shipping software.
The engineering manager role feels like it was borne out of a very west-coast ideology from another era responsible for removing agency from people based on dated stereotypes. There was a self-fulfilling prophecy wherein we said engineers aren't capable or willing to have agency to work across teams, manage resources, or communicate about career goals or blockers, and then plugged someone in the middle to take these activities away from engineers.
I'm exposed to a lot of teams with high-aptitude/techincal people that are not software engineers and almost never do you do see the equivalent of a traditional software engineering manager.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a continued and dramatic compression of these roles going forward.
> Here are the main arguments from our conversation:
> Thanks Unblocked for supporting today’s article!
> AI coding tools are fast, capable, and completely context-blind. Even with rules, skills, and MCP connections, they generate code that misses your conventions, ignores past decisions, and breaks patterns. You end up paying for that gap in rework and tokens.
> Unblocked changes the economics.
Yeah I was reading through this going... huh? This is the same font and layout as the article. uBlock let this slip through. Maybe there's good content here, and maybe they need advertisements to pay the bills (as a well-paid Engineering Manager...) but I couldn't finish the article knowing that it was deceptively formatted.
Might be worth talking about peer respect. Do soldiers respect the West Point grad that hasn’t or doesn’t do soldering? Not really right?
Some won’t ever take that position out of sheer self respect.
Many EMs are not ready to roll their sleeves up and do the full work, they are only ever riled up enough to roll their sleeves up and begin hiring like a maniac or going batshit crazy with micro management. You see, we all saw you too at work. Just know that. This is the LinkedIn comment you won’t see to your stupid fucking work achievement post - fuck you. Morning rant over.
// Do soldiers respect the West Point grad that hasn’t or doesn’t do soldering?
Yes, just like an Office Hierarchy there's an expectation that they respect the Rank - based on the caveat that the Officer/Manager doesn't confuse Rank with Authority.
Also, to clarify some previous assertions, VP title is often needed to empower a given member of staff to sign contracts on behalf of the company in certain jurisdictions or configurations.
> he'd been offered a promotion, to an Engineering Manager role
Funny how this lateral move to another function is seen as a promotion.
I've done both for significant amounts of time, and rather than a blanket, utilitarian "dont become a manager", I'd go with the antithesis to that blog buried at the very end:
> So why am I still an EM [...] the main reason is that I enjoy my job
EM positions come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and it's an entirely different function from that of a developer. I had tremendous fun being a manager in a couple startups, where left with lots of autonomy I could learn about, then experiment with better ways to deliver than "let's do 2w sprints" and ship shit. The human management was interesting, especially the continuous improvement side of things: it's especially exhilarating when you find something someone can do better and have a durable impact on their career ; it's especially tiring when you have to become something at the convergence of a psychiatrist, a referee and a nanny.
In large companies, the job isn't the same. You're stripped from autonomy and forced into a bureaucratic aspect of things. Dates are the main control dial that VPs have, so your main goal is to provide random dates, track random dates, make sure it's gonna be delivered at random dates, and make up excuses for why that date was not met.
After alternating a couple of times between the two functions, I figured development is what brings me the most joy, so I staid with it. But to each their own, and you might want to be a manager:
- if you have a true interest in the function, go fo it. There's a lot of learning to be done (the main problem with bad managers, I believe, is that they're thrown there because they were good devs, and they just make shit up rather than learn) and you'll discover things
- at the opposite side of the article's thesis, AI is a chance for you to innovate as a manager. The bureaucratic aspect I mentioned can be smoothed by it, and new tools mean a new way of working, so good times to experiment!
- don't just do it for the utilitarian side of things. Developing your career is important, but you also need to do it a sustainable way. Something I keep telling: it sucks to be good at something you hate. So do something you like.
- it is not my experience that pay is lower, Amazon paid SDMs more than SDEs, Microsoft pays them the same.
- titles mean very little. VP at MyFavoritePet who employs 12 people is not the same job as VP at Amazon. Principal (not principle - makes my eyes bleed every time) is harder to achieve at Amazon than at Facebook. Not because the job is more complex, but just because they define things differently.
//Funny how this lateral move to another function is seen as a promotion.
Not at all. IC salaries outside of the absolute top-tier companies are capped, and were traditionally always capped lower than any degree of Senior Management prior to the 2000s.
More to the point, they were capped illegally and in collusion with the main players in the game, completely separate from market forces.
This was ably demonstrated by the class action taken when five former software engineers sued Apple, Google, Adobe Systems, and Intel in a Federal District Court in California for colluding in an “overarching conspiracy” to keep wages low by promising not to poach each other’s employees.
65,000 software engineers eventually claimed they were unable to jump companies for higher pay because of a series of non-solicitation agreements by the likes of Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, and Apple's Steve Jobs.
Outside of VC/PE funded American tech hotspots, this depression of salaries for IC roles still tends to be the case - particularly in Europe - for whatever reason.
Simply put, the promotion is in the remuneration; the lateral move in functionality is simply a required re-alignment of role and responsibility to meet the expectations of the 'Leadership' tier - something always distinct from original job function, be it in Sales, HR, or Engineering.
My experience is that the 'separate but equal' dual engineering track is largely a myth and that if you want advancement, the manager track is a much more viable track. Even with some of the recent flattening, there are still far more higher level roles for management than ICs. They are also given far more visibility and access inside the company which is extremely valuable in a large org. It also seems a good choice if you're not very good - I've seen bad managers hang around far longer than bad engineers.
I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation. I myself have been called all of those things, but have honestly not been able to tell the difference: in some cases, I have had much more responsibility as a "senior backend developer" than a "staff engineer". I have recently interviewed for a number of roles with titles like CTO, engineering manager, tech lead etc and there is so much overlap that they seem to be one and the same. Have worked at companies on three continents, in organisations ranging from 6 people to 10k+, so have seen a few titles.
> that it really depends on the organisation.
This is entirely it. Titles should be consistently ordered within an organization, but they are not portable from one organization to another.
This is a lesson I’ve had to explain over and over to people at the beginning of their careers. I’ve been asked for advice about which offer to take from people thinking about leaving 10s of thousands of dollars on the table because another company will give them a Senior Engineer title and they think that’s important.
When hiring, titles are basically ignored unless the person is coming from a company like Microsoft or Google where their leveling system is publicly known.
I’ve interviewed so many “Prinicpal Staff Engineers” or even “CTO” people who would barely qualify as senior engineers at an average company. I’ve also interviewed “Senior Software Engineers” who had more experience than knowledge than anyone on our teams (and that’s saying a lot!)
Hiring managers know this, but it’s not obvious if you haven’t done a lot of hiring or worked at a lot of different companies.
Rant:
I was a systems engineer for a while there.
But not a pure S/W one. Like an actual engineer with nuts and bolts and pneumatics and amps and bolts and the like. That was the title at many many companies, it was a pretty rigid one too, despite the job function being quite jack of all trades.
But then tech decided that they wanted to use Systems Engineer too. The reasons weren't bad, I guess.
But then trying to find a job in my version of the role was near impossible on any job site.
Unix this, Windows that. Sure, I used Unix systems for my job too, little servers for controlling some mechanical systems. Not like huge racks that served up billions of requests.
And then I'd get the job spam too, as I matched some keyword threshold for the S/W type systems engineer. Always a entry level role through.
Gah! Why couldn't S/W take the title of Unix Server Engineer, or Python Integration Engineer or something just a tad more specific and not bleeding all over my discipline?
Okay, whew, rant over
Titles for ICs matter for two reasons: comp, and perf reviews. At bigger companies the amount of RSUs for Staff versus Senior can be substantial. At a startup where equity is worth nothing and salaries are in a tight band anyways it doesn't make a difference.
For perf reviews your title dictates the rubric you get evaluated against, but in fact your manager is probably trying to fit a curve and then work backwards to the rubric. So they'll decide you're a 3/4 and then pick some boxes for your weakest areas to mark you down in. The realpolitik of it is that you can do the same work or more at a lower level but get paid less, depending on what you negotiate coming in, your experience, previous roles, etc.
Once you get into VP, Director, and C level they are comparable between orgs on their own kind of ladder. There's levels of responsibility for outcomes associated with being higher in the food chain. Not to say there also isn't a political aspect, but they are broadly comparable between bigger orgs.
They matter within a company for the reasons you cite. They mostly don't matter between companies however.
Why do you think that? Senior, staff, principle levels are pretty standard across the industry, even if some companies call them different things
> At a startup where equity is worth nothing and salaries are in a tight band anyways it doesn't make a difference.
It doesn't make a big difference to the company, but a lot of employees want these titles for ego / resume / status / recognition. And titles are free for startups to give away, so many do.
As others have said, levels and titles are generally for compensation and performance reviews. Each company has their own bespoke ladder but it generally maps to:
Each company has their own numbers and names but it generally progresses like that. Impact and scope scales as you head up the ladder.L5 or Senior is usually considered a “terminal” role. That means all engineers should be able to get to this role. And people without the headroom get managed out if they can’t get to L5.
Staff+ is usually “special”. It means that people count on you to drive initiatives and you have something special other than just writing code. You are able to make product and business impact.
Distinguished and Fellow are very rare. Large FAANG companies will only have a handful of these engineers. It means you’ve made industry-wide impact like inventing map-reduce or DynamoDB or Kubernetes.
Titles make no sense whatsoever, you're correct, but in nearly all organizations there's a split between IC track and manager track, so the argument the OP is making is debatable but it's not absurd on its face.
Your job title encompasses the highest-order bits about who you are, professionally. The value is much more between organizations than within a single one.
If you plan to stay at one place for a long time, it's much less important. You have a chance to figure out how things 'really' work in practice. I know a guy who is a senior architect, and everyone refers to him as that at his company, but his actual on-paper title is something like "project technical lead". It's just not very important if you are going to stay there for 20 or 30 years and chase deep breathing metis.
I don't have the same career outlook, so my job title is important to me. I actively negotiate for it. My own title is "senior DevSecOps engineer". Criticism of the acronym notwithstanding, this paints an instantly legible set of competencies around what I do best, what I do adequately, and what you probably would get better value for money paying someone else for. I'm probably pretty good at vulnerability management and securing CI/CD pipelines. Optimizing weights on our anti-spam logistic classifier is probably not the kind of thing I can do well. Etc., etc.
metis?
Within a given company, I think these roles are well-defined. In a big tech company, a principal engineer will influence decisions at a much higher level then a senior whose isn't visible outside his team. And an engineering manager support, evaluate, represent the team, and help with goal alignements.
Maximally cynical take, tongue somewhat in cheek:
If we measure principal engineers by "cross team force multiplier impact and its visibility to management" (second part being key), what kind of behaviors do we incentivize? Are there, possibly, bunches of mid-level and senior engineers dealing with extra hassles to demonstrate this impact?
>are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation
Titles at least useful to understand the hierarchy, but roles truly mean nothing. Sometimes the adult in the room is a PO, sometimes it's EM, sometimes they are responsible for the timelines and "project stuff", sometimes it's a Senior Engineer. In some places a QA is effectively doing PO stuff.
One thing that's worth remembering is that companies - especially in Silicon Valley - use titles as a way to compare salary levels with each other.
If you are an engineering manager looking to make the case for raises for your team members one of the tools you have available is usually an anonymized survey of similar compensation levels from other companies.
You can say things like "this person is a high performer and is being paid 85% of the expected level for this title at other companies nearby - we should bump them up".
Your company may use job titles in a non-standard way, but there's probably an HR document somewhere that attempts to map them to more standard levels in order to make these kinds of comparisons useful.
I don't know how this works in other industries or countries, but I've seen this pattern play out in San Francisco Bay Area tech companies.
>> use titles as a way to compare salary levels with each other.
small companies typically go the other way, using titles to make up for concrete remuneration. This is why everyone in a startup is a VP and ICs climb the ladder to senior in a couple of years.
> This is why everyone in a startup is a VP and ICs climb the ladder to senior in a couple of years.
Another thing I've noticed happening is that if these companies grow into medium sized companies, these OG employees actually become VPs and directors whether they are qualified for these roles or not. Just by virtue of them being there first. I've worked at enough medium sized companies and have seen this at every one of them: "Why is this moron SVP of engineering?" "Well, he was employee number 5 back in the day."
This brings back memories of the candidate who demanded coming in as a high level engineer. Their argument was they were currently a CTO. Of their 2 person company. While they were still in college. And they were only borderline hireable for our entry level role.
Same for "programmer", "software developer", "software engineer", and so on. People insist that there's a real difference even when I have been all those things and there was no difference.
Outside of the FAANG style companies where how their levels map to each other are well known, titles are only useful to compare within the same company. You can't compare a specific title between two companies as they may not even have the same hierarchy much less requirements & expectations.
Yeah. "You already know what a title is, Neo. A title is a text field attached to a pay grade."
My employer has no formal titles for engineers pretty much for this reason.
Main distinction I tend to see is just whether you're doing line management or not, which tends to be the EM track
Beyond that, agree it seems like it can just be anything in virtually any title
Personally, I don't give two shits about my title. If I could just be "computer programmer", I'd be happy. But the org likes titles and as long as I have to play that stupid game, I try to get titles.
There is a major gap in this analysis by not controlling for industry or companies. Engineering Manager is a very generic title, so this is going to get Start Ups, Big Tech, Little Tech, Enterprise, Contract Shops, etc. Staff Engineer is very uncommon in Enterprise or Contract shops, there you typically see SWE 1/2/3 -> Tech Lead -> Architect. Most Tech companies I think have more of a SWE 1/2/3 -> Staff Engineer -> Principal.
The other part is that Engineering Manager is a terminal position, I've known a few people who were manager for 20 years without ever going to Director / Exec whatever, its just a competitive jump and mathematically most will never go up. This is ALSO true for Senior -> Staff and Principle though. But Engineering Manager positions often have more of an upside with bonuses / incentives than Engineers get.
Finally it is ultimately a career change, and that should be the primary factor to consider.
> Engineering Manager positions often have more of an upside with bonuses / incentives than Engineers get
Not really.
Staff Eng and above will end up making similar to an EM including bonuses and has much more job mobility. You have to remember that most EM roles only open up once you hit Staff, so you are basically taking much more responsibility and longer hours for a marginal salary impact.
Engineering Manager jobs are hard to come by and your job security is actually less than an individual contributor, because even if an initiative was delivered late due to no fault of your own, if sales is braying for blood in order to protect themselves after failing to meet quota, it's the EM's head that is offered on a silver platter.
The arguments:
* It's a bad time to move away from tech
As a manager your role isn't to be the "best technical person" anyway. You still need to understand fast-changing capabilities of course. But you are managing people now, and the required skills are different. See below.
* The ladder is very competitive
It's always competitive, and in my experience it was the exact opposite - there were far fewer VP-level technical roles than VP people managers.
* The pay is lower (for senior managers vs. senior technical track)
Again, this is the opposite of my experience (besides at the first-line manager level, where pay was comparable.) Where I worked managers could quickly get paid more with more responsibility. I always thought it was because managing people is actually a lot less fun (at least for me it was.)
The biggest reason not to become a manager is because _it is a completely different job_. Although managers need to be technically competent, management skills are much more about people (and politics.) If that isn't your jam, then don't become a manager.
I think you underestimate the job mobility that is lost when you transition from being an individual contributor into someone on the management track.
The reality is, there are very few EM and above jobs, and job security is tough - if I have to choose between firing an EM or a SWE, I'd fire the EM first because I can always find another replacement or split their responsibilities across multiple individual contributors and the PM.
If an EM is laid off or fired, it's extremely difficult to find another role, and it truly is a terminal position. Why would I hire a laid off or fired EM or Director when I can promote internally or hire someone from within my network?
Additionally, back when I was an SE, if we had a deal go bad in order to protect our ass we'd blame the EM so that we can have a head on the platter to hand our CRO, unlike a seasoned SWE who can push back and argue PM requirements were unclear and PM can argue that sales+product was aligned.
Not quite. In most companies managers are seen as 'inner circle' people while technologists are just workers. Managers get exposed to a lot more comms, giving more visibility and get ability to act like a smart person purely because they have more emails and get into more calls than the others. They not only get more power, but also get more info.
If you already don't know that though, are you really cut out to be a manager? You're joining the company "mafia", with all that implies, for good or ill.
I agree, and they have more power because they have more info and are given more visibility, and because they lack the deep technical knowledge in xyz, they compensate it with all sort of office politics.
The document is comparing salaries of staff engineers, and EM's. In my experience staff engineer positions are even rarer then EM positions.
sure, as long as we're talking about 110 to 170k$ non-managing, technical roles in EU, I'd like to see a full eclipse soon (both exist but I think the latter could be easier to find)
> In my experience staff engineer positions are even rarer then EM positions.
Where do you work?!? If you are in Western Europe then the blogpost is irrelevant for you. The Western European market is weird.
> It’s a bad time to move away from tech
It continues to amaze me that becoming a manager of anything should mean moving away from it. The manager has to move away from the detail, but why should they move from the substance of the role. A legal partner has to stay up to date as much their staff, in fact a legal partner is often the only one who can answer complex questions. When I need complex advice on my statutory accounts I get referred to the Audit Partner, the most senior manager.
The manager at my structural engineers can still calculate a beam size, he is better at it than his staff.
So why in software should an engineering manager move away from tech? Isn't this just a sign of disfunction in those organisations rather than anything about the role. Is it this MBA idea that management itself is a profession, rather than being 'a higher level thinker than the others'?
And what do these managers even do if they have moved away from tech? Approve holidays and expenses? My personal theory is that in these kind of organisations a manager is the person who is better with PowerPoint than the other people!
> Is it this MBA idea that management itself is a profession, rather than being 'a higher level thinker than the others'?
Yes I believe so. At uni i see soooo many people who are in software to make a startup (before even knowing how to code) and make a quick buck instead of being good programmers
I suppose what really escapes me is that companies are willing to pay people to do a pointless job. I wonder if the most senior are just more comfortable listening to a meaningless PowerPoint meeting than hearing complicated stuff about the work their company does
The best managers can still do the work part, that much is obvious. Not necessarily being the best in the team but offering the best project-level advice because the manager has enough skill combined with being the only one in the team dedicating thinking cycles "to the whole picture". But that only works well if you have the buy-in skill level that needs to be kept sharp.
> The manager at my structural engineers can still calculate a beam size, he is better at it than his staff. So why in software should an engineering manager move away from tech...
Because a manager at a structural engineering company is essentially acting as the equivalent of what a Product Manager or Forward Deployed Engineer is in the tech industry, because they are expected to be a technical domain expert and own delivery.
Meanwhile, for most software companies the underlying codebase isn't want generates revenue - it's the codification of business logic that does. Additionally, companies tend to have a separate Princiapl Eng to Distinguished Engineer/Architect track that outranks EMs and is in direct contact with leadership.
> Is it this MBA idea that management itself is a profession, rather than being 'a higher level thinker than the others'
Most Engineering Managers and Beancounters aren't MBAs - no company wants to sponsor an employee at a PTMBA which can cost upwards of $250K now.
I agree with that. The way I see the marketing going forward with AI, you need to be able to have proven outstanding technical skills and deep understanding across several technical domains to be able to add value to the chain. This mean staying in the trenches along with serious self-education schedule. You should be reading books now and doing hard stuff.
Alternatively, this is all a psy-op by AI companies to make engineers willing to work harder for less money so they can pretend all that productivity growth is thanks to their stuff.
> My friend was afraid that as a manager, he'd have less time to experiment and adapt. Especailly with a bigger team (he was offered to manage 6), you don’t have much time to play around.
You guys get time to play around? As lead/staff?
> You can be a great EM for years and find yourself stuck.
Better start now then, right?
yeah?
my job is basically self-directed. I'm expected to predict the future for what we as a business will need in 6 months to a year and become the expert in it now. lay the framework, prototype, sell to the larger org, integrate and move onto whatever else. This is in addition to the normal jira-driven feature/bugfix bullshit. I am looking at the problems we might run into then derisk them by figuring out what to build.
But I'm at a large org where timelines are about as flexible as jello. I think I'm also overqualified and underpaid so my boss just lets me do whatever.
Like I've been porting firmware from C to rust a day or two a week while I also am directing some more jr devs for our VP's latest product obsession.
this is peak "the majority of people in this role are garbage but I'm a rockstar". 98%+ of people identify as special snowflakes.
Some people seem to genuinely enjoy being people managers and excel at it. It's not always obvious in advance who those people are so I'd still recommend people try it out early in their career if they get the opportunity, particularly if their company allows them to back out if it's ultimately not a good fit
I don't get this argument: don't do it, you have better otptions, but it is good for me because i enjoy it.
This article periodically surfaces in some shape or form. There's this idea that there's a "dual ladder", and the IC ladder offers just as much respect and compensation as the management one. This is a lie, and the sooner we stop telling it to the young generation - the better.
Human societies have always rewarded and valued those who built hierarchies more than those who built things. If you focus on building a thing - you will forever be a cog in someone's big project. There's a reason that management ladder is more competitive.
> There's this idea that there's a "dual ladder", and the IC ladder offers just as much respect and compensation as the management one
It is not a lie. It is true IF you live and work in the Bay Area, Seattle, and TLV - which represent the bulk of tech industry employment.
Companies where the underlying stack is a revenue generator and not a cost center are companies where these kinds of dual tracks exist, but these are only found in the major tech hubs and are not available if you are remote first.
They also require you to be both technically and socially adept.
Sorry, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. The ladders are simply not comparable, even in the Bay Area. Sure, at the entry point where one transfers from the IC ladder to management compensation can even drop. However, that's the bottom rung - and one typically can't get straight into management as a new grad. The management ladder goes higher.
Totally agree, completely different skillset. Every engineer I've seen "promoted" as such becomes miserable, and frankly is not very good at their new role, effectively making it a double loss.
Honestly, I’m pretty good at it but yes indeed quite miserable, particularly now, in this market. With hiring very slow, companies know people are trapped.
Saying that becoming an EM is "moving away from tech" is crazy. As an EM you will be steeped in tech, just as you would be as an IC. It just may not be the tech you want to be steeped in. Again, same as an IC. In either case, unless you are working in AI, you will need to "play" with things like OpenClaw in your spare time.
The real reason not to become an EM in 2026 is because AI makes our jobs 10x harder.
> The real reason not to become an EM in 2026 is because AI makes our jobs 10x harder.
This is true, but our job was getting kind of boring anyway. Time to lead, not manage. We should be having just as much fun as the ICs, and the best I know are having the time of their lives.
This article is not very helpful, just like any sort of absolute yes/no advice. The ad in the middle that looks exactly like the "content" makes it worse.
Using OpenClaw as an example of exploding technology and why it's a bad time to move away from this (not sure how EM is a move away?) is ridiculous. And stating the career path is too competitive shows they don't really know what a true technical ladder looks like. Most organizations are going to have about as many staff developers as senior EMs and principal developers as senior directors. If it's stability you're after neither is particularly at risk in my experience, but I'd bet your CTO is looking to shake-up the domain of staff developers more than management with the AI hype train.
// but I'd bet your CTO is looking to shake-up the domain of staff developers more than management with the AI hype train.
Well that's a given, isn't it?
The contemporary CTO is looking for quantitative proof of productivity increases via Agentic AI adoption based on things like delivery cadence or SLAs. Management is a qualitative function, and guaranteed to be skilled in 'mapping' their role to the delivery of value and reporting such things upward anyway.
Engineering Management are there to make firm commitments and reasonable compromises around the ability to deliver features generally already committed to hard dates by either Sales or by virtue of external market forces. How this is achieved using social and political capital alongside Domain Knowledge is the distinguishing factor between an IC and a Technical Manager imo.
It's curious to see the rational argument against the emotional choice the author makes.
The critical piece here is the anecdotal (but true) insight that engineering orgs have been flattening over the last few years.
There are a lot of factors, but rarely discussed is the realization that senior engineers are completely capable and often willing of managing other engineers directly. The definitive text on this subject is literally called "Herding Cats" :facepalm:
In reality, senior engineers often have strong communication skills (albeit different than the styles of other management and leadership positions), very good time management, and likely can perform many of these 'soft skills' that engineering management is doing out-of-band from the teams directly responsible for shipping software.
The engineering manager role feels like it was borne out of a very west-coast ideology from another era responsible for removing agency from people based on dated stereotypes. There was a self-fulfilling prophecy wherein we said engineers aren't capable or willing to have agency to work across teams, manage resources, or communicate about career goals or blockers, and then plugged someone in the middle to take these activities away from engineers.
I'm exposed to a lot of teams with high-aptitude/techincal people that are not software engineers and almost never do you do see the equivalent of a traditional software engineering manager.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a continued and dramatic compression of these roles going forward.
Flagging due to being an advert in disguise.
> Here are the main arguments from our conversation:
> Thanks Unblocked for supporting today’s article!
> AI coding tools are fast, capable, and completely context-blind. Even with rules, skills, and MCP connections, they generate code that misses your conventions, ignores past decisions, and breaks patterns. You end up paying for that gap in rework and tokens.
> Unblocked changes the economics.
Yeah I was reading through this going... huh? This is the same font and layout as the article. uBlock let this slip through. Maybe there's good content here, and maybe they need advertisements to pay the bills (as a well-paid Engineering Manager...) but I couldn't finish the article knowing that it was deceptively formatted.
Might be worth talking about peer respect. Do soldiers respect the West Point grad that hasn’t or doesn’t do soldering? Not really right?
Some won’t ever take that position out of sheer self respect.
Many EMs are not ready to roll their sleeves up and do the full work, they are only ever riled up enough to roll their sleeves up and begin hiring like a maniac or going batshit crazy with micro management. You see, we all saw you too at work. Just know that. This is the LinkedIn comment you won’t see to your stupid fucking work achievement post - fuck you. Morning rant over.
But for my real EMs, much respect :)
// Do soldiers respect the West Point grad that hasn’t or doesn’t do soldering?
Yes, just like an Office Hierarchy there's an expectation that they respect the Rank - based on the caveat that the Officer/Manager doesn't confuse Rank with Authority.
Also, to clarify some previous assertions, VP title is often needed to empower a given member of staff to sign contracts on behalf of the company in certain jurisdictions or configurations.
> he'd been offered a promotion, to an Engineering Manager role
Funny how this lateral move to another function is seen as a promotion.
I've done both for significant amounts of time, and rather than a blanket, utilitarian "dont become a manager", I'd go with the antithesis to that blog buried at the very end:
> So why am I still an EM [...] the main reason is that I enjoy my job
EM positions come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and it's an entirely different function from that of a developer. I had tremendous fun being a manager in a couple startups, where left with lots of autonomy I could learn about, then experiment with better ways to deliver than "let's do 2w sprints" and ship shit. The human management was interesting, especially the continuous improvement side of things: it's especially exhilarating when you find something someone can do better and have a durable impact on their career ; it's especially tiring when you have to become something at the convergence of a psychiatrist, a referee and a nanny.
In large companies, the job isn't the same. You're stripped from autonomy and forced into a bureaucratic aspect of things. Dates are the main control dial that VPs have, so your main goal is to provide random dates, track random dates, make sure it's gonna be delivered at random dates, and make up excuses for why that date was not met.
After alternating a couple of times between the two functions, I figured development is what brings me the most joy, so I staid with it. But to each their own, and you might want to be a manager:
- if you have a true interest in the function, go fo it. There's a lot of learning to be done (the main problem with bad managers, I believe, is that they're thrown there because they were good devs, and they just make shit up rather than learn) and you'll discover things
- at the opposite side of the article's thesis, AI is a chance for you to innovate as a manager. The bureaucratic aspect I mentioned can be smoothed by it, and new tools mean a new way of working, so good times to experiment!
- don't just do it for the utilitarian side of things. Developing your career is important, but you also need to do it a sustainable way. Something I keep telling: it sucks to be good at something you hate. So do something you like.
- it is not my experience that pay is lower, Amazon paid SDMs more than SDEs, Microsoft pays them the same.
- titles mean very little. VP at MyFavoritePet who employs 12 people is not the same job as VP at Amazon. Principal (not principle - makes my eyes bleed every time) is harder to achieve at Amazon than at Facebook. Not because the job is more complex, but just because they define things differently.
//Funny how this lateral move to another function is seen as a promotion.
Not at all. IC salaries outside of the absolute top-tier companies are capped, and were traditionally always capped lower than any degree of Senior Management prior to the 2000s.
More to the point, they were capped illegally and in collusion with the main players in the game, completely separate from market forces.
This was ably demonstrated by the class action taken when five former software engineers sued Apple, Google, Adobe Systems, and Intel in a Federal District Court in California for colluding in an “overarching conspiracy” to keep wages low by promising not to poach each other’s employees.
https://equitablegrowth.org/aftermath-wage-collusion-silicon...
65,000 software engineers eventually claimed they were unable to jump companies for higher pay because of a series of non-solicitation agreements by the likes of Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, and Apple's Steve Jobs.
Outside of VC/PE funded American tech hotspots, this depression of salaries for IC roles still tends to be the case - particularly in Europe - for whatever reason.
Simply put, the promotion is in the remuneration; the lateral move in functionality is simply a required re-alignment of role and responsibility to meet the expectations of the 'Leadership' tier - something always distinct from original job function, be it in Sales, HR, or Engineering.