If an engineer at Big Tech can simply be fired, managers get hurt differently. They get converted into an IC — an Individual Contributor. On paper it’s a kind of tech lead: someone who both writes code and helps others write it.
Except they code… so-so.
The industry moved on without them
During their years away from the keyboard, the industry changed so much that even the tools and the terms they used to rely on are gone. The ground they once stood on has been repaved twice.
My manager sometimes pings me in the evenings asking how to do — literally — a git rebase. Or something of comparable difficulty.
And now they have to compete with the very engineers they were mentoring a couple of months ago.
The grades collapsed
Meanwhile it isn’t only the tools that changed — the impact of a single developer changed too. The grade ladder folded in on itself. The careful gradient from junior to staff that an entire management layer existed to shepherd people through — it flattened.
Today one senior engineer can rewrite the Bun runtime from Zig to Rust in a week and ship it to production alone. In an environment like that, a freshly-minted ex-manager IC simply cannot survive. There’s no slow on-ramp left to climb back up.
There is only one road now
The fork that used to define an engineering career — the moment where you chose your direction, tech lead or people management — is gone. There’s no fork to stand at anymore.
We all go “left” now. Into tech lead. We close ranks and march without managers, without people-support, without the one-on-ones that were supposed to catch us when we fell.
But not entirely alone. We have Claude — whom you now ask about your career, which restaurant to pick tonight, and how to keep going.
The only way. The tech lead way.