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Engineering Career Paths - Individual Contributer
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In engineering we usually have roughly two career paths to choose from: Individual Contributor and Engineering Manager. Kaja will talk to Steve about his career choices and why he decided to go deeper into hands on coding.
In engineering, we usually have roughly two career paths to choose from, we can go deeper into being a hands on contributor, fighting our way through the code jungle. Or we can zoom into a meta perspective and support other engineers to do the jungle tours. We can manage them by keeping a certain distance from the code itself. I myself have not decided yet which career path I want to follow. And I want to hear more about other people's experiences. Today, I will talk to Steve about this and his career choices, and why he decided to go deeper into the jungle getting his hands dirty on the code. Hi, welcome to our podcast. Hey, Steve. I know you've been on the podcast several times. But do you want to quickly say who you are and introduce yourself?
Steve Hicks:Yeah, I don't think it's been very often that I've been on the podcast on this side. But I'm Steve Hicks. I'm an engineer at Artsy. I've been at Artsy for a few years. And I've been a software energy engineer in the Milwaukee Wisconsin area for probably over 20 years at this point. So kind of old, kind of a long career.
Unknown:Well, I'm also an engineer, but not with so many years experience.
Steve Hicks:That is all
Unknown:I have. I mean, I started pretty late. I'm turning 35 in two weeks. So nice. Yeah, happy birthday things. I'm still a bit indecisive about my career, and which way to go. So I'm so curious to hear about your career. And that's why I wanted to interview you today. And yeah, let's let's get right in and start. Maybe you can tell me like, which was your entry position at Artsy, or what did you do first?
Steve Hicks:Well, I'll start by saying the bad news that I have shares that I also am always indecisive and unsure and confused by my career. I don't know, hopefully, I can provide a little bit of clarity there. But maybe it's just for both of us to figure out what we're doing with our lives. So I my entry into Artsy I came in as a senior engineer. During my time at Artsy, I had the opportunity to be a tech lead for a little bit on one of our teams, one of our product teams. And after doing that, for about six months, I stepped back and said that I didn't want to do it, and move back into the individual contributor role. Before Artsy I've kind of, for a long time floated right along this border of individual contributing developer on the team versus lead developer on a team. And I've never taken the steps towards management. But there have been times where I've been on teams where, you know, that was a consideration as I was doing the kind of the lead developer thing. And yeah, so Artsy, it wasn't really a surprise to me, that I would pretty quickly find myself in that position of trying to decide whether to be an individual contributor, or whether I wanted to be more of that tech lead type of role on the team.
Unknown:So we have to kind of differentiate between like, okay, tech lead, and then people management definitely, have you ever considered also being a people manager?
Steve Hicks:I have definitely considered it. Yeah. And maybe just add a little clarity to the conversation, I guess, Tech Lead at Artsy is, is typically on a team, we have, you know, our product teams, or maybe four to six or so maybe eight engineers, as well as product manager, and sometimes a UX slash design person, data analysts, probably forgetting somebody. But so there's a variety of people, but there's usually a lot of engineers on the team is, I guess, the point I wanted to make there. And so the tech lead is kind of the person who they step in, as a representative of the engineers into a lot of the conversations about strategy and try to provide help where they can in terms of getting the engineers able to do the things that they're trying to do, versus the people manager. Yeah, where you're really focused on helping someone further their career and dealing with that kind of stuff. For a long time, the way I thought about it was, I would love to be a people manager, when I feel like I've fallen behind on the technical side and can't provide value there. And so there have been multiple times in my career where I said, Okay, I think it's time I think, like I've reached that point where I'm not really contributing as much technically And I think in all of those cases, I didn't do it, I didn't really take those steps into people management. And I think that the parts that have scared me away from it the most are, when you're an individual contributor, you kind of have this much tighter feedback loop, and you see the rewards of the work that you're doing much sooner, and you see the payoff. So, you know, you write a little bit of code, and you ship it to production and that feature is done. Or maybe it's a larger project. And even then it's like, you work for three months on this project, and then we launch it, but you're seeing the results of it within a span of a few months. And when you get into dealing more with people's lives and careers, and how they're feeling about their job, like that feedback loop is not nearly as tight, you don't do one thing, and then see the results of it a week later, it's months or years later. And that's the thing that I've always had to I've always had trouble kind of navigating in my head, like, I really thrive on those, those quick wins. And those, I guess that satisfaction that comes from the icy side of just like I make changes, I ship it to production, the features were there, the features there, the feature is better. And yeah, I don't know, I just haven't really accepted what it would take to change that mindset. And I think, to some degree, as a tech lead at Artsy that is, I experienced some more of that. And I think what helped me realize was, I still don't think I'm ready to make that kind of change, I'm getting enough joy out of the technical side and feeling like I am still providing enough value that I can keep that up and not have to shift my mindset of like, how do I how do I feed my brain? How do I like feed my brain with dopamine chemicals that make me feel good or whatever?
Unknown:Yeah, it's sometimes fear that it's somewhere unwritten, or assume that you have to like in order to proceed in your career, you have to kind of go into the more managee side, but I personally don't believe that you can only proceed in that direction. But I actually think that in the individual contributor side, there's also a depth where you can go more into it. Yeah. And where you can actually make a lot of progress in your career. And yeah, and also grow further along the years. So I personally don't believe in this assumption. Yeah, there's only one progress.
Steve Hicks:I agree with that. And I think that Artsy actually shows that off pretty well. Like, I think we have a lot of strong individual track or an icy track engineers.
Unknown:That's also why I was curious talking to you, especially, I want to know, like, what's the what would you say is the most fun part about the work that you're doing now? Or the career that you have now?
Steve Hicks:Yeah, this is a good question. Because I don't really have cancer. Like I said, um, I am kind of a little bit uncertain about where I'm at right now, with my career. I think that if you had asked me this question, a year ago, I would have had a different answer than I have today. A year ago, the answer for me would have been, I really love and enjoy the team aspects. And being able to contribute to the team without having on I guess we'll just say it this way, maybe able to contribute as kind of a leader on the team without having the responsibility of a leader. And without having to, you know, sit in meetings that I didn't want to sit in to, I'm not very good when talking about strategy and not very interested in it. And so I spent a lot of time there as a tech lead. But that's one of the reasons I didn't want to do it anymore. I found that it was conversations that were like too big for me to process or too big for me to, to be interested in. So gosh, I totally lost myself there. Oh, okay. Sorry, this is. So I think previously, what I thought was really fun, was being somebody who was there to just like jump on issues when people needed help and help move people forward, get them unstuck when they were stuck on a problem, and I do still really enjoy those things. But I think I'm personally right now finding a lot of a lot of joy in just leaning into a technical problem and like a big technical problem. And while it may not be the right now, I think the thing that I'm most interested in at Artsy, in terms of the work that I'm doing is, oh, yeah, we work on a team together. I don't think we said that. But our team is the partner experience team and the partner experience team works with what we call are partners which are like art galleries and fairs. And we provide ways for them to get their art up on Artsy. And there's one tool that our team works with quite a bit, which is our CMS, we call it, it's a legacy project, but also a new project, like it's been around for so long. And it's got so many years and years of different strategies for doing things in it, which, you know, it's nice to see that kind of thing survived for that long, but also, it's, it can be confusing and unsettling to like, go into the codebase and not really know how we're supposed to do things because you see 15 different ways of doing them. And, and then there's also some performance problems in some areas. But so anyways, right now, the thing that's most interesting to me from a technical standpoint, is trying to just remove a whole lot of risk and confusion from that project and get it to something more unified. And performance. Right now, in this moment. That's what I'm enjoying. I still enjoy all that other stuff that is more kind of tech led the getting people on stock and jumping on things to help people out wherever it's needed. But I don't know, I'm kind of leaning more into that just I'm, I'm an IC who's gonna do stuff. Roll.
Unknown:No, yeah, I totally can relate to the another question is what's like the least fun thing in your job? What do you not enjoy the
Steve Hicks:least fun thing in my job? I think I kind of alluded to this earlier, or maybe didn't even allude to it. I think it just said it. I don't like strategy talks. I just I don't? I don't know. I have a hard time thinking about that. So what I mean by that is like, not necessarily what are we building right now? But what are we going to build in the future? And how are we going to? What are the things that we're going to do to turn this product into something profitable? So yeah, so talking about that is something that I don't enjoy, I also am finding it difficult to just talk really deeply about the edge cases of the product, and how things should work and all of that. And that's interesting, because I think that in the past, that has been a strength of mine. But I'm definitely not feeling that right now.
Unknown:It's like a product fatigue.
Steve Hicks:Yeah, I mean, it could be, I think, for me, it's a lot of, because I am trying to figure out what it is that I want to be doing with my career. I don't it's like the questions that I'm asking myself aren't about what should this product do? The questions I'm asking myself are, what should I be doing right now? And how should I be contributing? That's kind of where my head is at.
Unknown:Interesting. What were like the most challenging things for you to learn during your career,
Steve Hicks:most challenging things for me to learn, I think very early on probably was the fact that I think the most difficult problems in software have nothing to do with the technology, I think that they have everything to do with people. And when I started, I didn't get that. And so, you know, I was definitely very frustrated by the fact that I could try to solve these problems with code and like they weren't working. That's frustrating. But But I also remember when I was younger, looking around as kind of this young developer, at the people around me who were maybe a little bit older, and had been doing it for 510 years longer, and seeing a lot of them move into the management track and thinking, what why what's wrong with them? Why are they doing that? Like, they just must not know how to program. And, and then realizing that that's not what it is at all, it's that these people have realized that the problems aren't about the code, the problems are about the people, whether that's getting people to work together on the team, or that's getting that's like making people happy about what they're doing. Or that's about, you know, the people side of our products serves people, and we have to figure out how, how it makes them happy. And so these people that I saw moving into a management career, like I think that they got that part of it, it wasn't that they were five steps behind me in terms of programming, like I had thought it was that they were 15 steps ahead of me in terms of understanding what we were actually doing.
Unknown:Yeah, I always have to love when when somebody asks me, like, what was the most challenging thing for me to learn? It was definitely me standing in my own way. Yeah, kind of dealing with my own ego. And I feel that these are like the actual hard tasks. And it's so funny that these are called like, soft skills, and but they're actually the harder ones. In my opinion.
Steve Hicks:Yeah, definitely. And I kind of feel like any of the hard the hard skills or whatever, you know, whatever. I was in high school, like, I didn't really study, I got straight A's, it just school was the thing that was easy to me taking tests was easy to me. And that's kind of how I feel a little bit about learning new languages or new technologies a little bit. It's like, it takes time and investment, and you have to learn it. But it's not, it doesn't feel like it's a difficult thing for me to figure out if I just give it the time. The people side of it, like takes me forever, and I can't figure it out.
Unknown:Hmm. One thing that I was also wondering is, if you could describe like a perfect position that maybe, you know, dream big. Let's forget about all of these like position descriptions and describe like, what would be like the perfect job as like a next level where you could look forward to growing into this position? What would be like the, the dream position of that you could imagine if you set aside all these things that are in reality.
Steve Hicks:Right, right. Well, I think it's, again, a little bit hard, because I do feel like I'm in a little bit of a transition. If you take reality out of it, I would be a bike mechanic, I would work in a bike shop. I would, that's just what I would do. I love working on bikes. In reality, like slightly more reality, I'm not going to do that I'm gonna be involved in building software, to some degree. And I think that one year ago, my even six months ago, my definite answer was okay, well, I want to be involved in learning and educating people, I want to help coach them and I want to help them learn new things. I want to take time to break things down and describe them in ways that they that they now understand that they didn't get before and pair program with them and help them get on stock and do all of those things. I think that still might be the answer. Because I do sort of feel a little bit like my current shifts to doing to focusing more on when you're just like hacking on computers, is kind of a kind of, like an adjustment that I'm making, because of where I'm at. So so like Artsy doesn't really have the space for somebody to just be teaching all day. And so, but I think that's why I'm setting that aside.
Unknown:Maybe at Artsy, this could become a thing, right? Only because it's not existing now doesn't have to be something that we don't have a new future. But it's interesting for me that you mentioned teaching, because for me, it's actually the opposite. So I used to teach German as a foreign language before I got into this job of engineering. I am good at teaching, but hated it. Yeah, and the reason was not because I hate teaching, I actually love talking about stuff that I'm passionate about sharing my knowledge, but the problem was that I'm being on that side, forever is so painful to me, like I prefer being on the side of the learning person. So sitting there and getting knowledge from someone who knows more about one thing is so much more fun for me then being the one who was like teaching. And I felt so envious of my students. And I was sitting there in the classroom, seeing them being super motivated, because they were always like, having something hard to figure out. And I was the one who knew everything and also had you know, after you teach one course, and you repeat the same level, you actually you it's very repetitive, and you teach the same things to different bunch of people. And I felt like I'm not progressing. I'm not learning something. And then with engineering now, I felt that in the beginning, it was perfect. When I was doing junior level, I was always asking questions, learning stuff, but as I progress in my career, I feel like that happens less and less so right? It's like more and more this moments where I'm feeling okay, when especially if I'm working in a job for a while, and then a new person comes in and Amulek showing them stuff and telling them also with Ruby if you're like Ruby in the Ruby world and in this level, we're feel like yeah, there's not so much that people can tell me anymore. Yeah. Although actually I need to be humble. Ruby so many weird things that you discover even after like years and years, right. Um, but still, you know, I I miss this feeling of being the one who's like, learning and like being The one who's challenged a lot. And yeah, yeah. So for me this whole teaching aspect up to a certain degree, it's fun. But then if it gets out of balance, I always suffer from it. You see that after so many years of being in your job?
Steve Hicks:Yeah, it's interesting. My partner is also a teacher, she teaches Middle School English language arts. So like, I definitely have witnessed the pains of teaching. And I think it is a very thankless job, it does not get the credit that it deserves. And everyone who does it is certainly deserves to be paid more paid more than they're paid to do it. But I'm curious if you kinda like, Have you ever thought of combining the two things like teaching in the context of technology? Like, that's one thing that, for me, I feel like, gives me hope that it wouldn't become repetitive, because technology is always changing. And so you're always having to teach new things or something like that. Does that resonate at all?
Unknown:Yeah, I mean, it does. And I've experienced some it to some degree, because I've hosted workshops for beginners, and was like coaching people who were new to programming. So yeah, I think these were always like, super interesting experiences. And I think it's, I would say that I don't hate it completely, right. I enjoy teaching programming to other people or other concepts of software engineering, but I feel like it always needs to be in a certain balance where I feel like so. So if you would see knowledge acquiring as, like, a kind of food, you know, if you say like, I'm learning, so I'm, I'm like the one who gets the input, I'm eating the knowledge. Yeah. And then I'm, if I'm teaching, I'm like, preparing food for others. And I feel like, if it's out of balance, I'm left hungry, and always cooking food for others, and being hungry myself, and just doesn't feel nice. And then they start to envy them and feel like no. I want to be in that position. Yeah.
Steve Hicks:I feel that analogy. I'm sure it makes a lot of sense for for educators all over the world who feel like they give more, and then then they receive and then burnout
Unknown:in the career path. Question, I'm, it's also hard to say which abilities or skills you need, for what? Because I guess like, you need a bit of both and everything. Yeah, I mean, as an individual contributor, Bueller, you also need a lot of like, knowledge of team dynamics. You know, also, like self management is another thing, I guess that comes with the skills that you would also need for management, right? And then on the other side, and management, you need to have a good, solid knowledge of the whole technology and estimation of how complex things can be. And yeah, have this kind of experience. What can go wrong?
Steve Hicks:Yeah, it's all sorts of sorts of like, in on both sides, it's all sorts of big, like, systems level thinking. And, yeah,
Unknown:do you have any, like, advice or tips for what to consider when making career decisions?
Steve Hicks:Whatever you pick, lean into it, I think that that's part of the challenge that I've had is, like I said, I kind of bouncing in between that I see slash Tech Lead region, and you're floating from one end to the other and back, I think, because I never really leaned into one very hard. I think that it caused me to not really get strong at either of them. So I there was room for me to improve in both of them. And I didn't embrace that in either one of them. I just kind of like, you know, maybe as things got tough, and one of them I just like got scared and went back to the other one. And that was definitely I think, the wrong decision. I think, whichever anytime that I was in, either that I had made the decision to want to do one of those things, I think I should have leaned into it. I think that that's important for people to do. And then the second thing I would say is kind of related. There's a talk that I honestly shared probably 15 times last year, the name of the talk is like it's I think it's just glue, GL YUI and it's about how people in software tend to the people who tend to do the kinds of glue work, whether it be taking notes for a meeting, or it be you know, just like dropping what they're doing to help get another project out the door. Those types of just like just like keeping the team together and functioning tend to not get rewarded. because they switch to those kinds of that kind of work too early in their career before, before they're already getting credited for it. I guess this is actually the same thing that I just said. Because what ends up what ends up happening is, you don't get credit for all of the like deep technical stuff. Because you didn't do as much because you were you were too busy focused on actually helping the team function. And that tends to lead people disappointed.
Unknown:Yeah, I've experienced that. Yeah, I think a lot of people know this problem. Yeah. If you are like the kind of person who fields are naturally responsible for helping someone out or seeing if someone's struggling, or you could improve someone else's experience, and you know how you naturally want to help, then you often end up in like this trap of spending too much time on helping others succeed, while not spending enough time on yourself and your own. Yeah, work that you would actually get much more appreciation for. It's hard. It's it's kind of a trap, I think.
Steve Hicks:Yeah, it is. So especially, it feels good to help people. And it feels bad to not help people to watch people like struggle. So yeah, I don't I don't have any answers on what the right way to approach that is. But
Unknown:yeah, one way to approach taking this glue work out of it's being hidden, is for the company to actually give it a name. And also like, yes, yeah, give it some credit. And say like, Okay, we've seen you doing a lot of this glue work, actually, you know, you get promoted or something for that. But that never happens.
Steve Hicks:It's a hard thing to it's a hard thing to put any sort of structure around and say, Oh, you're doing like 17 pieces of glue work a month. So I've warned you for that. It's it's, there's so much about it that is really subjective and fluid. And it's really hard to nail that down.
Unknown:No, true. Well, yeah, so many things to think about.
Steve Hicks:Yes. Okay. I'm curious, do you have? Like, is there any takeaway that you have from this that has given you insight into what you might think about in your career moving forward?
Unknown:I think the one important thing that I will take away from this is like the leaning in thing, I think, you're Yeah, it's It's good that you're mentioning it. And that's a good, really important tip I think, no matter which direction you go into, but actually really, explicitly, like, lean into it and go all the way through and stay between the tracks and get lost somewhere in between. Yeah. Which is hard. But I guess Yeah, that's a good tip. I think we're, it's through also a bit early in my career to ask this question. I'm now at a point where I will probably like progress into senior roles soon. And then from there, I guess, the question gets more concrete. Right now, it's more like an imaginative think. Yeah, yeah. So I think for me, it's definitely like, this open question of how, how much can I still learn in the technical world to become like better at that? I clearly also have preferences. And I can totally relate to this feeling of like, yeah, not caring so much about product decisions that are on a higher level. Yeah. Yeah, I can totally relate to that. And very humbled by product managers being so into this where I find it so boring.
Steve Hicks:Yeah, I feel the same.
Unknown:Yeah, for me, it always feels like hard work. Actual hard work. Well, like the actual engineering is not so it's more like tinkering and fun and more like repairing a bike or something. I think that right. Yeah. Yeah. That comes pretty close to what it is. Yeah.
Steve Hicks:Yeah. That were I hadn't thought about that work being hard before but like, I mean, like, obviously to start but I hadn't thought about. That's what I'm facing is like, I'm just having a really, really hard time thinking about it. It's really difficult and challenging. But that is definitely the case.
Unknown:Yeah, whoa. Let's see where our Career Center going.
Steve Hicks:Again in a year,
Unknown:yeah, we could do it. I'll also talk to other people. Yeah, I'm excited with other career choices. And yeah, let's see what comes out of it. I hope we all learn something from from.
Steve Hicks:Cool. Okay, thank
Unknown:you, Steve.
Steve Hicks:Thank you, Kaia. Bye, bye. Thanks for listening. You can follow us on Twitter at Artsy open source. Keep up with our blog@artsy.github.io This episode was mixed and edited by Alex Higgins. And thank you Eve Essex for our theme music you can find her on all major streaming platforms. Until next time, this is Artsy Engineering Radio