The bittersweet of management
Pros and cons of being a manager vs an individual contributor
I am a software engineer/manager and worked in a few leading tech companies in the U.S.. I’ve been a software engineer for 6 years and a manager for 7 years. The largest team I’ve managed is 34 people. When writing this, I’m in the middle of a transition from management back to IC, due to a combination of personal, family and external factors.
I’m writing this post both as a personal reflection and something for others when they consider the career transition.
Note that these pros and cons are written from my personal perspective; as someone who is an immigrant to the U.S., an introvert, and worked in fast-paced, high-growth product engineering organizations:
Pros
Influence and impact can be rewarding. Manager has more leverage for influencing people, and making an impact. Unless your are working on very specialized, technical domains (In which case, that challenge may also be solved by the open-source community, or academia), working in the industry meaning managing a large group of people brings a higher leverage to deliver impact. Your words and actions have an outsized influence when in a manager position.
You’ll have an audience. You tend to get more attention at work as a manager than an IC. There are more occasions when you are obligated to speak or when your opinion needs to be consulted. It causes stress but overall, having audiences can be rewarding and motivating.
Mentorship and seeing people grow. If you enjoy mentoring and helping people grow like I do, being a manager gives you more opportunities for building mentorship relationships. It’s particular rewarding seeing people grow benefiting from your guidance and support, and some of them might become close friends beyond work as well.
Less boredom. Being bored is likely the last thing a manager will experience - priorities and team structure changes, people’s interest changes. Almost everyday presents some new challenges.
Compensation. While large companies have same the compensation band for IC and management ladder, being manager likely offers better compensation in the long run (unless you are technically very specialized and distinguished). For instance, Series C startups may give 1% equity to hire a head of engineering.
Cons
Work-life balance. This is the largest con. While both IC and manager have work-life balance challenges, I find manager faces more external factors: even when you’d like to slow down - your department might need to grow or deliver more quickly for the business, re-org happens that may completely change your team and scope, people might look up to you for things that affects their career, your reports (especially when they are managers) may have career ambitions for scope and have expectations for your growth, etc. Once you are a manager there is no stopping: A vacation is not really a vacation, as work continues around you, and you’ll need to catch up afterwards. Slowing down is much harder in manager’s position.
Intellectual freedom. For this I was referring to the degree of freedom to seek for information or learn / work on something completely based off of personal interest. Being a manager, I often feel obligated to dig in and address issues even though if I don’t feel like to. Bureaucracies and politics affects managers more than IC.
Job security. The positions higher-up are much fewer for management than IC. Most efficient organizations stay flat and have a 1:8 (or higher ratio) between manager and IC, job opportunities are much scarcer higher up.
Flexibility. Managers are often required to attend more meetings, making working hours less flexible. Changing jobs is also harder and less frequent - as manager are responsible for other people’s careers, taking any position is a commitment of 1 year plus.
Freedom of speech. There are cons to getting people’s attention too, as people may over-react to what you say and you have to be more careful or stay silent at times. The lesser freedom of speech can feel quite restrictive:
You might celebrate someone while others felt left out.
You may say something as a priority and it changes, causing throwaway efforts. (This is particularly true for middle-management when they are often not the final decision maker).
You might prioritize investing your time and efforts in certain areas while others felt unfair.
Many of the pros and cons can change based on a person’s personality and interests, as well as the company you work for. At the end of the day, it’s just a job, follow your heart rather than your mind when making these decisions.
