“Can I stay on a purely technical track and still advance my career?” I have heard this question asked of me many times over my career and have asked the same question to myself many times.

As a technical leader you need to have a strategy on how you will grow and retain your best engineering talent. One part of this is clearly defining a path of growth for your engineering talent. Here are a few things to consider when developing technical tracks.

Define the top of the ladder

Up to a certain point, the career path for an engineer is pretty straightforward. You start as an entry level engineer, but eventually you work your way up to becoming a senior engineer. But what is above a senior engineer? At this point the next set of rungs of the ladder become less well-defined.

In some organizations there are senior architect positions where responsibility broadens to larger parts of the organization. The highest level I have seen on a purely technical track is a Technical Fellow which is usually equivalent to the Vice President or Senior Vice President level (or in some cases a C-level). The responsibility is for the technical soundness of the whole organization. However, this is one of the issues with a purely technical track. The path to the top isn’t as clear as the path to the top for engineering managers. Starting at a first line manager, the career progresses through having larger and larger management scope (usually in terms of people, span of control and product engineering responsibility). The management ladder usually follows a pattern like this: first line manager, mid-level manager, senior manager, director, vice president, and finally CTO/CIO (with obviously some variation between organizations and industries). In contrast, the technical ladder doesn’t hold such a clear set of roles.

Or change the definition of the rungs altogether

This might seem at odds with the first point. But the alternative to defining a technical career ladder is to not define one at all!

During my time at Netflix, we side-stepped this issue by just not having rungs on the engineering ladder. We hired senior engineers. Only one rung, one title. And we continued to give them more technical scope and financial incentives. It helped that we didn’t tie compensation to reviews, but to what the market paid. So the “rungs” were not titles, problems and pay. I hired one engineer that went on to create the initial algorithms for adaptive streaming (he really did this independent of me, I just was fortunate to hire him). His technical leadership was recognized and he continued to solve harder and harder problems and be financially rewarded in the process. Another engineer in the streaming/encoding area stayed technical throughout his career because the technical challenges were just ever increasing. So the progress in career was ever expanding technical challenges and financial rewards.

As you can see, some rungs still existed. But they were not defined in the traditional manner. It worked because of the organizational commitment to rewarding engineering talent and giving them larger problem sets and rewarding them for it.

Lessen the Differences Between the Two Ladders

Another key to Netflix success, in keeping and retaining top engineering talent, was in the technical quality of the management leaders. Netflix hired engineering management that were themselves top level engineers. They were all deeply technical. When some of the engineers on my team later moved into director and VP roles, it was a bit of a smoother transition since their technical prowess was still in high demand. There wasn’t a big disconnect between being on the technical career ladder and being on the technical management career ladder. The skills on the management side were additive to their technical skills.

Let people move between the ladders

Every technologist will have to face the decision of whether to stay in a purely technical track or to make the switch to the management track. Switching too early may not give you the depth that you will need as you go higher in a technology management role. Previously, I wrote about my meandering path to management. I resisted the “dark side” and stayed in a “technical track” as long as I could. I was in my late 40’s before I took my first purely management role at Netflix as a director of engineering. But my ability to weave back and forth between the two tracks made it easier for me to finally make the transition — and with my eyes wide open.

For many technical organizations, we often represent these two career paths as two totally distinct ladders and don’t think about fluid movement between the two. But if we can let our people understand what a career in the other ladder really looks like from the inside, we can help them make a more informed decision. One approach is to create a shadowing program where you give technologists the opportunity to shadow a senior leader for a week. They get to observe what the job actually entails and see if their passions align. Another approach is to create rotation program that allow people to rotate into a new role with the idea they will come back to their prior job. It gives them a try before they buy approach. Recently, I worked with a client and helped craft some of their people management processes. We brought a couple of engineers into the project as well. The side benefit was they could see if management made sense for them or not. From the experience, one decided to make a transition and the other decided it wasn’t the right time.

Remove the bias and create a high level of respect for engineering

As in the example of Netflix above, if you want to have a technical organization, you must find management leaders that are deeply technical. Now this isn’t easy. Because often those coming from the ranks of technology weren’t trained in people management. Nor in business leadership. And some good people managers don’t have the technical depth. But if you make the mistake of hiring managers that are only good at the people management or business management side, then you will create a deeper divide between the two tracks. These leaders will have a harder time discerning true technical talent or technical leadership and soon the management will be full of people who don’t understand what they manage. You will have created two very different ladders and diminished the respect for the technical ladder in the process. While I have worked for excellent managers who didn’t come up through the ranks of engineering and yet had a profound curiosity and respect for engineering, it is not the norm.

One of the challenges PayPal had, when I joined in 2011, was the lack of deep technical management. The PayPal Mafia (the founders) all exited early and took their wealth to create some of the most iconic companies in Silicon Valley. That left a void. PayPal went through a phase that hired managers with less technical depth. This created a bias in the organization that valued managers over engineers. Which in turn drove out some of the good engineers and then attracted more and more managers with the same weak technical skills. The current PayPal is a different place, but it required a lot of hard work changing the DNA of the organization, hiring top technical talent and bringing in leaders that also had deep technical backgrounds. The respect for good engineering talent and the desire to create paths for these engineers go hand in hand.

Flatten the organization to bring more balance to the two ladders

I hate to admit this. But in most cases, there aren’t as many purely technical jobs at the top as there are management opportunities. We like to encourage people to stay on the purely technical track as long as possible.  But because many companies have a deep hierarchical structure, you end up with many more manager jobs than technical leadership jobs. One solution is to flatten the organization. A flatter organization has fewer managers and evens things between the two ladders. You do have to be careful not put too much span of control on individual managers, but spreading out the responsibilities more evenly and empowering the team to make local decisions, lessens the need for layers and layers of management. Even with a flatter organization there will probably be more VPs than Technical Fellows. But a flatter organization brings more parity to the two tracks.

Define Span of Control

It is a bit easier to define the span of control for management. A manager will have a direct set of reports and those teams will have a functional cohesion around skills or the work itself. It is not too difficult to look at how many direct reports a manager has and make a determination that the span of control may be too large or too small. However, with a technical leader what is their span of control? The non-management technical leader will generally have no direct reports. Yet they may have several products or feature sets that fall under their leadership. You will have to determine what they can handle. They will have oversight of a specified code base that requires their watchful eye and regular design and code reviews. They will have a set of technical challenges that they are responsible for driving. And they will have more and more product & business responsibilities as they apply the technology to customer problems. All of these define a span of control for pure technology leaders. In defining ever increasing roles for these engineers, you can expand the span of control in all these dimensions to create new rungs on the ladder.

Be Transparent

As you can see from the above suggestions, this is something you need to be transparent about. When technologists know that the options exist and all the nuance that exists with these options it can help ease their angst. And if they can have honest conversations about moving between the two without fear that it will destroy their career, then it will make for healthy teams. As a leader you are always having to balance what is best for the organization with what is best for the individual. Being thoughtful about technical career tracks puts you way ahead of most leaders and will allow you to attract and retain great engineering talent. Most importantly it will create space for your team to grow in their careers.