Not Every Developer Wants to Become a Manager — And That’s Okay

Companies should create clear career paths for individual contributors

Photo by Jaromír Kavan on Unsplash

I have only worked in startups with flat hierarchies. Even at companies where there are no clear titles, you usually find three kinds of engineers: The junior developers — fresh out of school; the tech leads to whom everyone reaches out for help and whose technical opinions matter the most; and in the middle, between the juniors and the tech leads, a vast ocean of software engineers with various skills and experiences.

One topic that repeatedly came up in our retros is the lack of career growth opportunities. This topic seemed to puzzle some tech leads who thought that there were a lot of projects and a lot of new things to learn. There were surely a lot of learning opportunities. Still, when the only feedback you get in your 1:1 meetings is “You’re doing great, keep going,” you don’t feel like you’re progressing.

As software engineers, we want our opinion to matter — we want to have an impact. The obvious next step is to become a tech lead but it’s unclear how we get such a position. Or if we even want it.