Vidooshak says...

My good friend Vidooshak blogs here ,as a guest blogger - no less, about how freshers are in a hurry to reach manager-level positions. In a nutshell, people want to get out of the "team member" kind of role and move to a "team-leader" role as quickly as possible. Without having paid their dues, so to speak.

A different perspective from someone from product development as against the services sector - what Vidooshak writes is not completely accurate, for some companies at least.

I've met several people with superlative technical skills, working as so-called individual contributers all their lives. They don't want to manage people and, more importantly, they get sufficient respect in the companies they work in. I've known corporate vice presidents who wrote code in addition to doing whatever it is that VPs do.

Let's be quite upfront about it - what do people mean when they say they want to advance in their careers? More money? Check. A better lifestyle? Comes with the money usually, so check. Less work? Ahem... check? Better work? Check! Enhanced social status? Check.

All of these actually translate to climbing the designation ladder. In all the companies I have worked for (and also others in the same domain/industry) there are two such ladders: technical and management. Possibly other companies have them too, but the difference is that in the ones I know the tech ladder is given equal importance, same perks, same respect as the management ladder. Look at it this way, a Senior Software Engineer vs. a Project Lead - which one would you consider more successful in his career? In the work places I refer to, they may actually have more or less equal respect.

From what I have heard about the software services companies, it looks like the culture of promoting people to "manager" is ingrained. I heard of someone who had 40 people reporting to him after he had worked for about 3 years. In my previous companies, a person would be an engineering director if he had 40 reports! This difference is due to the large size of the services companies, perhaps; but that still doesn't explain how a person with 3 years experience out of college is thought competent enough to handle such a large team.

Am I laying the blame at the door of the IT industry? Absolutely! If freshers see a clear career path as a technical specialist they may not be so eager to get promoted as leads and managers. If they see their peers getting promoted as managers and getting perks and respect, why wouldn't one aspire to the same path?

The other problem is the non-standard designations. Everyone knows what a manager does and that it is a "high-up post". How many understand what these titles mean - Lead Member Technical Staff, Member Consulting Staff, Senior Software Engineer, Software Engineer II? In many companies you would be promoted to Senior Software Engineer after a year, in some it is a designation you earn after ten.