IC work is the new career flex

Getting to the top of the corporate ladder used to be the goal. Like, “I’m a VP, I’m… kind of a big deal.” That was the signal that you had made it. Now, the real flex is going back to being an Individual Contributor.

But not just a regular, entry-level IC. I’m talking about employees with no direct reports who can do work that used to take a whole team (all while still getting paid like a leader). I’ve been calling this new role the High-Impact Individual Contributor.

And I’m not talking about this as a conceptual, hypothetical idea. I know this type of role exists because… I recently became one of them.

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The old promotion ladder was dumb

I still remember to this day, when I was at SurveyMonkey, a recruiter from Netflix reached out. I was super excited! The first question on the first call? ‘How many people are you managing?’ I only had 3 at the time, and this was for a team of 15, so I was immediately disqualified. That was the #1 metric. Not output. Not budget managed. Not ability to solve the key problems. Just headcount. WHUT?

So getting more people on my team became a hard qualifier on how much impact I could have.

This whole structure is so dumb. Just think about it:

We take people who are truly good at their craft, and we tell them to do a job that has nothing to do with that craft anymore. Our whole system promotes people out of the job they’re good at:

• Average craft, great people skills: could be a great manager, but don’t get promoted.

• Great craft, bad people skills: gets promoted to management anyway.

(Or, you incentivize politics by only promoting people who maneuver themselves… which is a disaster I’ve seen waaay too much and makes my blood boil, so we won’t talk about that here.)

But wait, there is more! These new managers are discouraged from maintaining their craft. Getting ‘in the weeds’ on projects gets described as micromanaging and ‘low value work,’ even though that’s the thing that was valuable enough for me to get promoted!?

When I hit the senior manager level, my boss literally gave me an ultimatum: ‘You have to stop. You can’t be spending all of your time on that stuff. I’m going to watch your Jira history. No SQL queries, no tickets! If you can do that for 6 months, I’ll know you’re ready for a Director position.’

So, I did it. Which… was actually amazing, at the time. Back then, managing people was the way to have impact, so that pushed me forward and taught me to achieve things through the people I managed. I’m super grateful to that boss for forcing me to step away from the keyboard.

But that’s not how the world works anymore.

What’s a HI-C (High-impact IC)?

A HI-C is: An individual contributor who can complete a project that delivers business value, end-to-end, on their own. Usually an ex-leader (manager, director, VP).

In contrast, traditional IC work looks like owning a piece of the puzzle. You are a key part of the machine, but you generally receive projects and hand off projects to someone else, without really being aware of what’s happening on the other side of those walls.

When I say ‘impact’ I mean: Directly affects the key metrics for the business. These all boil down to increased revenue or reduced costs. This is the full picture for the business, and the reason that senior-level people can have an impact (and get paid more) is because they see the whole thing. They’re responsible for getting the project from Point A to Point B that delivers measurable impact.