Everywhere I look, those who advance appear to be moving into management or at the very least become full time PowerPoint engineers. I love writing software.. it’s what I want to do as my profession but I also want to advance in my career. My question is how many high-grade engineers are successful while maintaining a primarily software development role? Or is this just a uniquely Intel problem, and other companies have already learned to let passionate people advance while having them do what they do best?
Some companies have specialized tracks that allow you to stay closer to the tech, but at the end of the day, as you rise up the company you should be multiplying your output. The only way to scale is to mentor others on the things that made you awesome so you make them awesome. Mentoring != writing code.
Well, with my team I make sure I know how the code works, contribute fixes and optimizations, can always build and deploy alone if I have to. Even if I don’t do most of the grunt work, I try to lead from the front. I sure as fuck can’t lead via a slide deck or endless meetings where we push bullshit around the room.
I think you're missing the point. Designing a good solution that strikes the balance between cost and time, is sustainable, and fits into the plan strategically is the challenge. Developing process improvements that improve a team's efficiency so the teams productivity increases by 30% has a multiplier effect that means you ultimately added more value than just coding away. These bigger picture value adds are what's expected as you get higher in the ranks because your scope increases. Once you've been coding for 20 years, it gets very mundane and really it isn't that special. There's millions of coders out there. Coming up with the solutions with the big picture in mind, that's not so easy.
We have a l8 ic in our team who cant stop churning code and reviews a bunch of cls a day.
L7 and some L8 ICs at Amazon still write code, usually key parts of org-critical projects.
"Everywhere I look, those who advance appear to be moving into management or at the very least become full time PowerPoint engineers." That is because you are at Intel.
Yes well I did ask if it was an Intel-specific problem, seems you think it is. Obviously I want to avoid that, which could mean moving away from Intel.
Not could. Should. Intel is literally the Titanic post iceberg.
There are still very high level ICs at Google who write a lot of code. It's definitely possible, but a bit harder maybe, especially if you want to grow.
What do you mean by “grow”?