# The Pyramid and the Spire: Management and Individual Contributor Tracks

*November 22, 2021* | #career-advice

Most tech companies have two tracks for engineers, data scientists, and other
technical people: an individual contributor (IC) track and a manager track.
The intent is that a technical person should be able to advance their career
along the IC track without switching to managing people---which is an entirely
different skill set and job.

I have been on both tracks, and while it is true that you can continue to be
promoted without going into management, there are some trade offs. Many of
these trade offs are discussed in depth elsewhere, but there is one I want to
highlight that that is less obvious: _There is more room at the top of the
manager track than the IC track._

## The Structure of the tracks

Every company is slightly different, but most of them have their tracks
set up something like this:

```text
    L1 → L2 → L3 → L4 → L5 → L6 ...
                  ↳ M4 → M5 → M6 ...
```

Where an **L** (short for "Level") indicates an IC role and an **M** indicates
a manager role. The higher the number, the more senior the role.[^numbers]

[^numbers]:
    In this example I started the track at L1, but many companies
    start it at a different number. Amazon seems to start at 4, Apple at 2,
    Facebook at 3, Google at 3, and Microsoft at 59. For a lot more
    information on a specific company's levels and total compensation, see
    [levels.fyi][levels].

[levels]: https://www.levels.fyi

The only role open to the most junior engineers and scientists are IC roles,
which makes sense: junior people lack the hard-earned experience companies
want a manager to have. As they get promoted they move from L1 to L2 and so on
until at some point they reach a level (L4 in my cartoon example above) where
they can move onto the management track (prefixed with M). Of course not every
IC gets this opportunity.

Both tracks narrow as they go up. There are generally a lot (perhaps tens of
thousands for the [tech giants][giants]) of L1, L2, and L3s in a company, but
L4s and above are rarer. Likewise they have an army of front-line managers
(M4) but only one CEO (or two in rare instances) at the top of the management
track.

[giants]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech

## The Pyramid and the Spire

The IC track is very wide at the bottom. I was not exaggerating when I said
that there are tens-of-thousands of lower level ICs at the tech giants. But
what is different is how fast they narrow. The IC track gets narrow very
quickly while the manager track stays broad longer. Let me share some examples
from my previous company:

### The Highest Levels

At the very highest level, there were a few (probably about five) executive
vice presidents---M9 on my example tracks. There were no L9s at the company.
There was a single L8, someone with more than 30 years of IC experience in
Silicon Valley. The company had more than a dozen M8s.

### In Data

In the data organization, there was one senior vice presidents (M8), two vice
presidents (M7), and roughly five directors (M6). There were only two L6s, and
one of them had almost 20 years of experience at the company. All of the
managers had less tenure than that.

## The Track Forward

I am very happy as an IC, I love solving problems and writing code. But I love
helping people, setting strategy, and communicating with partners. I still
haven't decided which track I will stay on in the long term.

From a pure numbers game, if I want to climb to the highest levels, the
manager track looks better. But it is easier to jump between companies on the
IC track---I could leave my job today and have a stack of comparable IC offers
within a month. Also the manager job is **just different**, I would no longer
be an engineer.

I find [Charity Majors's][cm] post [_Engineering Management: The Pendulum Or
The Ladder_][wtf] an excellent discussion of the drawbacks of being a manager
and one strategy for jumping back and forth, one that has guided my career
thinking. Give it a look!

[cm]: https://twitter.com/mipsytipsy
[wtf]: https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/

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- [A Career Involves Luck: My Annotated Resume](/blog/my-luck-resume/)
- [Data Science, Compensation, and Asking for Money](/blog/data-science-asking-for-more-money/)
- [The Data Science Spectrum: <br>From Analyst to Machine Learning](/blog/data-science-job-spectrum/)