Manager or individual contributor -- you don't really have a choice

Every tech company has a manager track and an individual contributor track, and at some point, everyone faces a decision about which ladder to focus on.  I’ve read many comparisons of the two ladders over the years; here is the most recent I’ve come across: Every Staff (IC6) eng needs to decide if they want to be a eng manager or not.  Full of generally good advice.

But I don’t think most of us really have a choice in the matter.  Deep in your soul, who you are determines which of these paths is right for you.

I never really wanted to be a manager.  A lot of management is a total drag.  Meetings.   Performance reviews.  HR issues.  Dealing with higher-ups.  Calendar disasters.  All a pain in the a&*.

The first time I was asked to be a manager was when I was in the Boy Scouts.   I was growing tired of the Scouts, and I skipped a week of troop meetings. The troop leader called me and told me how important I was to the troop, and he wanted to make me a patrol leader.  I thanked him, and never went back to a Scout meeting, I had no desire to manage.

I made it through high school and undergrad without ever having to manage anything; I kept my head down and worked solo.  However, in graduate school, with an increasing number of group projects, I couldn’t help but speak up as I saw teams dithering around on pointless efforts, and I found myself managing team efforts.

And after grad school, I could never keep my mouth shut when I saw the organization around me doing stupid things or focusing on irrelevant goals.   I always had to speak up and point out what I thought was the correct path to achieve the goals.   And I wasn’t always right, but I was right often enough. I was willing to accept the risk of being wrong and learned from my mistakes.  And before I could say “boo”, all of a sudden I was managing teams.  

I have friends who can tolerate organizational inefficiency, but they cannot keep their mouths shut when it comes to the design and architecture of products.  They can’t stand to see us build stupid sh&t.   They possess a clearheadedness on design that I admire, and they are destined to become senior individual contributors.   

You can weigh the pros and cons of both ladders, and you can work on the skills needed on either ladder — but if you listen to your gut, the choice has probably already been made for you.  

Shorts

Stratechery discusses NVIDIA's results this week ($), and I hadn’t really thought about how US policy regarding China may encourage the development of a non-NVIDIA, non-US software stack for AI in China, and how this could be a really bad thing.   I come away from this thinking that we need to allow NVIDIA to sell freely anywhere in the world.

Tariffs Won’t Reindustrialize America. Here’s What Will.   Study China’s playbook, invest in new manufacturing technology, and work with allies — all great advice.

Auto Shanghai 2025 Wasn’t Just a Car Show. It Was a Warning to the West.  A colleague said, “It is what America probably looked like to Europeans 100 years ago: Scale, speed, organized chaos”.  Another colleague said, “China’s the epicenter of automotive innovation. I don’t see a path for the US or Europe to shift that.” 

Good explainer of large-scale solar costs from Construction Physics.  Summary: solar is low cost today and has plenty of room for growth; batteries and storage matter a lot; with modest improvements in solar and battery efficiency, it can become the dominant source of power.

Bond report on AI — the speed and scale of AI buildout and adoption are fascinating.