I joined my current company 18 months ago as the first person in a newly established department. Three days later, we hired three more people. Of the total four, I and some other guy were the most senior, but the department was flat; we weren’t really in charge of the two other people from an administrative point of view, but we were the go-to people for complicated work.
Things went well this way since then, and I received favorable appraisals in December 2020 and June 2021 that recommended me for a promotion that made me a senior this past July, but not in charge of the entire department.
Being a department head at the company means you’ll spend less time doing your own work, and more time supervising others and joining meetings and updating processes. I don’t like any of that, but I didn’t have to worry about it for a while considering I was just made a senior.
Last week the other senior guy who joined around the same time in 2020 resigned, leaving me practically in charge of two people, with another hire currently in the pipeline, and the management told me that I will be the head of this department early next year if nothing changes until then.
There’s going to be a good pay increase, but I’ve just received an increase that I’m pretty comfortable with. I don’t want to supervise others, I don’t want the politics, and I don’t want the additional responsibilities.
Put simply: I am excellent at what I do, as long as it is at the tactical execution level. You take me a level up to head a department, and I’ll lose that advantage and become a weak head of department.
Talking to management and saying I don’t want the promotion isn’t an option for many reasons. What do I do now?
Assuming you bring great value to your company, you might want to talk to them about an IC (individual contributor) path. It’s pretty common at technology firms, and can be awesome for everyone, if done right. In theory, a high level IC could be as trusted (and paid) the same as a Director or VP level, and could potentially be involved in strategic decision making as well. They just don’t have any direct reports. If done poorly, it’s used an excuse to pay senior people less money.
One of the more commonly used examples of doing it right is Google with Sanjay Ghemawat. Last I checked, both he and his buddy Jeff Dean were Senior Fellows (level 11 and the only two people of that rank). While their annual salary might be in the low 7 or high 6 figure range, their total compensation per year is probably worth somewhere in the 8 figures.
One of them runs Google AI and has thousands and thousands of people below him in the chain. The other doesn’t manage people, but is considered extremely important to the company.
Having been where you are, career-wise, I think it’s wise to know your skills. Given the current circumstances at the firm, I second DMC’s recommendation to have a career path conversation with your management. Tell them the type of role that you are most productive, and share your reservations about the long term viability of you in the straight management role. In this employment environment, I think you can be very straightforward (although diplomacy is never a terrible option). I know it can be hard but don’t let yourself get shoved into a role that’s a poor fit.
My gf told “management” that she did not want a raise that was being discussed . As I understand her situation, she has ownership in the company and doesn’t think it’s a good move for someone with her title to be paid what they’re offering as it sets a precedent. Instead they gave her a nice bonus, structured in a way that is good for her and the company.
I should note that this is a red flag for me. While it appears that you don’t want to share the reasons, if I ever found myself in a job where my career path could not be discussed, it wouldn’t matter, as I’d be looking for another job.
If the company does not have an individual contributor career path, they are not likely to create one in the next 6 months. You are their easiest choice for the position. You might ask that they support some college level management courses on company time. I’ve done that.
I had a friend in the same position. He is a really good software engineer, loves coding, and was the ‘go-to’ guy for solving hard problems. So of course his manager told him he was being promoted to management. My friend strongly objected, saying that he was happy with what he was doing and wanted to work on technical stuff and had no aptitude or desire for management.
He was told that refusing a promotion was a career killer, and for ‘his sake’ the manager insisted on promoting him anyway. It was a disaster. My friend was miserable, and didn’t do a very good job at it. So then he got demoted and a bad performance review put in his file. He went back to being a great engineer, then got laid off with the rest of us when the company’s terrible management caught up with it.
I somewhat agree with this, but I also wonder why you feel so strongly that declining the position is not an option. Is there really nobody above you with whom you could have an honest conversation about this?
You might also consider something like, “I know Larry hasn’t been here as long as I have, but he has excellent administrative skills, and I think he’d make a better department head than I would.” (assuming there’s somebody on your team that would be good at the job and actually wants it.)
I’ve been Peter-Principled a time or two myself, and it’s no fun. Speak up!
That’s me! My bosses used to do anything to avoid giving raises; instead they’d give awards and new titles. And all of a sudden my title had “Supervisor” snuck in there.
Well, I did talk to the boss. I made an appointment for “after hours”, slipped into his office at 5:02 and told him almost exactly what you just said (though mine had the additional punch of “You take me a level up to head a department… and I can guarantee the department will crash and burn.”
He said he really just wanted me to have a title so it looked like my department had a “middle manager”… Me: “But we’re doing better than we ever have. These are quirky, creative types who do their best by NOT being middle-managed!”
So we came up with a compromise. I got “Senior” stuck on my title, and he had a meeting with all of us to make it clear that our department was still collaborative… and that I would NOT have to attend the (long. pointless, boring) management meetings.
Oh, maybe you could use my line: “Look, do you want me twiddling my thumbs in meetings, or here in the trenches actually producing… and making money for the company?”
Yeah, this was not as common 40 years ago when a position like this was created for the “whiz kid” in our IT department. It worked out so well for him, that it became more and more common and eventually part of the institutional policy.
I had a chance to be a supervisor, but I wasn’t a whiz enough of a kid to get one of these deals, so I turned it down. I like doing work – not telling others how/what to do. It might have limited my career a bit, but I had a solid job life and a balanced home life. I’m happy with how things turned out.
“I’ll quit if you try to put me into management” has always worked for me. But our company has had an IC program for a while. Unfortunately, the higher IC levels are sorta just management-lite. You don’t have any direct reports, but you’re expected to be a project lead. If you don’t, you’ll cap out at a certain level no matter how productive you are individually.
Two of my ICs have a seat at the table for many high level organization conversations and neither do any sort of management or true project lead. I will sometimes have them or others be the voice of a project (giving me feedback) when I’m too busy to stay in the loop, but they are able to be completely insulated from all politics and bureaucracy. Most projects generate an organic leader anyway, even if they’re not really management types. It’s typically someone who is a SME for that project scope and therefore listened to by the other team members. Any actual kerfuffles can be brought to my attention to be handled.
I also fully expect to be paying those two ICs more than myself sometime in the next 4-6 years and have zero problem with that. I’ll remain an executive and they’ll be highly respected and highly paid data scientists.
@SharltoCopley, if you like your job otherwise, you need to find someone in upper management to help cheerlead for this. If you get that, you can bypass a lot of the red tape needed to get something like this launched and you won’t be the one who has to work out the details. My company went from no IC path, to an informal, but existent IC path on the day I was hired, because the company enabling that path was one of the conditions of employment that I laid out.
Often it just isn’t a choice. I’ve been pushed into management positions twice, first because the director was too lazy to do a candidate search for someone who wanted the job, and now because it was a numerical necessity (too many reports for one manager, who was offsite anyway, to manage, and I was the most senior person with prior management experience) and even though it is fucking miserable if I refused to do it there would be a big furor and I’d probably be looking for a new job whether they fired me or I quit in protest. It’s not even that I’m that bothered by the administrivia of approving timecards and travel reqs, or doing performance reviews, or other stuff that takes me away from technical work (which I’m also expected to do); it is all of the corporate nonsense work that comes down like a shitstorm every time I’m overloaded with other actual work, like the DE&I training and “discussions”, or dealing with people not complying with corporate procedures, and so forth. (When I had to answer for why my team isn’t more diverse, I pointed out that the last two of three hires were given to me without any input, and the rest of my team were all people already working on our contract under sub and badged over or recruited back after having left said sub, so I’ve essentially had no way to “diversify my workplace”.)
Yeah, even if you aren’t a manager, you’ll be in a leadership or project lead/manager position at some level. Some people excel at that, and some are not great leads per se but are really good at individual mentoring, or are best off on their own focusing on their area of specialty. Creating a good team is all about figuring out what people are good at and what keeps them engaged at an individual level while also feeling like they are a valuable contributor to the larger effort; unfortunately, when you get “Human Resources” and upper management involved, they often start from the premise that people are just “resources” that are interchangeable parts and start insisting that everyone have career goals that fit into some standard mold. It has ruined more engineering-and-science focused companies than I can count.
Sure, which is why I said it needs to be done right. While we all know that Human Resources isn’t really there for the sake of the employee, they do report to upper management (yes, if I start groping employees, they can go over my head to the big boss and get me in trouble, but they otherwise are there to assist me in keeping my employees happy) If upper management is as you described, then I’d call that a shitty company with no hope of doing IC right (nor retaining the best talent).
The “problem” I’m running into (which, really, isn’t much of a problem at all–I’m paid very well and happy with my job) is that to reach the next IC level, the requirements demand that I lead a team of significant size. Now, I’ve developed a number of complex, high-value projects, but so far none of them have required a giant team. We have a number of very experienced people in our group, and so the projects have only required me and 1-2 other engineers of similar experience. Due to this experience, very little actual leadership is required–it’s mostly a function of architecting a thing in a sensible way, and people can figure out the right thing on their own. It’s such a light touch that it’s almost invisible.
In contrast, there’s an engineer on our team that is at the next higher IC level. He does almost no actual engineering work. Instead, he spends most of his time in meetings, filing bugs and RFEs (request for engineering), and leading very junior engineers to work on his projects (which are mostly not that complicated).
Now, I don’t actually have a problem with this role–it’s a valuable service to the company. But it feels like a mismatch to the concept of an IC. To reach the next level myself, I’d have to stop doing most engineering work, occupy my time with more meetings, and dream up more busywork. That’s not great for me or the company.
The defect, I think, is in the rigid definitions in the IC hierarchy. Probably some companies do this better.
One of my heroes is an older mentor/coworker who got huge promotions three times. Which meant that each time he was getting farther and farther from the actual work.
He hit a point where he realized that he’d gone into the field because he loved the work, and the customers he’d been instrumental in helping.
So he went in and explained that to management, took his “triple demotion” (and a massive pay cut), and… he was suddenly so much happier, and joked that his “mental health got a triple promotion”.
That doesn’t sound unreasonable. At my company, a senior is someone who has a lot of experience and is typically given more complex tasks, may take the lead in projects, and advise other workers when they need assistance but they’re still individual contributors. I’m glad you were able to work something out. It’s best not to move into a position you don’t want.
Actually, it has been my observation that the primary function of HR isn’t to assist either line managers or employees working for them, but to protect the company from liability. In some cases that means aggressively pursuing offenders; in others it means insulating them by losing complaints and building a case against accusers, and always to support executive management in whatever direction they give. I’ll admit to being jaded by adverse experience, and I’ve worked with the rare exception to the rule, but I generally view going to HR with any issue as either a procedural necessity (if someone makes a complaint or clearly violates a corporate standard) or something to be avoided if at all possible (if I just have a question about a procedure or need guidance for how to deal with a performance issue that doesn’t rise to the standard of requiring more than verbal correction). I recently sat through a lecture on diversity in hiring in which the recruiting manager consistently reviewed to candidates or new hires as “talent” and “labor resources” instead of “people” or “employees”. It is that kind of euphemism that makes me play George Carlin routines quietly in the background for compensatory sanity recovery.
Not that I’ve seen, or at least, not for long. I’ve worked for companies with separate management and technical tracks, but people advancing on the tech track get co-opted to lead and manage projects that don’t have enough prestige for someone on the management track to undertake, often things that are dead-end projects or that involve a lot of grunt-type work like creating working procedures or “technology deployment”, e.g. managing the adoption of some new analysis tool or information system, even though it doesn’t really take a lot of technical skill to do this. I’ve seen a lot of people build up their retirement bundle, retire, and then come back as technical contractors where they can pick and choose what they want to do just to avoid all of the nonsense, which is actually more expensive than just maintaining a full time employee even with benefits and overhead.
The traditional areas HR supports the company have been through recruiting & staffing, benefits, compensation, employee relations, and of course compliance. I’m mostly in the compliance business with a little benefits, recruitment, and employee relations on the side. I work for a large company and rarely a day goes by where I’m not assisting an employee who has questions about policy or their benefits. The idea that HR is there primarily to protect the company from liability is rather old fashioned and ignores their other functions.
Honestly, in most of the places I’ve worked I’ve never given HR any thought. The only time I ever interacted with them was when I was hired and once a year during open enrollment. But I wasn’t a manager. If you have an HR department prone to building cases against accusers (which sure sounds like retaliation to me) you’ve probably got a company with a crummy culture. And HR doesn’t drive the culture of any company.
In the last few years recruiters have started becoming talent acquisition specialist supposedly because the TAS is focused on long term planning whereas a recruiter is focused on more immediate needs. Allegedly. Our talent acquisition specialist do the same thing they did when they were called recruiters. And I still refer to employees as employees. But I’m not a talent acquisition specialist so what do I know?