Brian Balfour: observation

Transcript context

…Captain IC. Ooh. Yeah. Yeah. We have this framework called players, coaches, captains, and we talk about a little bit of the differences. And it helps distinguish the different type of leadership between senior IC and a manager. A manager is more of a coach, they're kind of coaching from the sidelines. And IC is like leading from being on the playing field. And those two things are very different. We kind of put that in place. We changed our entire compensation structure so that there is zero compensation trade off, whether you just want to keep growing as IC and stuff. There's more of these captain roles internally than there are manager roles internally. We've created the same titles for all of the levels, so people don't feel like they're making a trade-off on that external signaling factor. We give all the strategic problems to the captain level IC roles. The managers and coaches are purely around hiring, coaching, positioning players on the field. Identifying problems, but then handing those problems off for others to go solve. All of these types of things. But one of those things that's really bothered me for a long time is that you end up on this manager death cycle. When people think that's the only way that they can progress or the only way that they don't have to make these trade-offs, you end up with a lot of folks in those roles who are neither good at them or don't really want to do at them. And oh, by the way, you've also taken your star IC players off the field in the process of all of that. And then they go and just repeat the cycle. They create meetings and processes and all those things because what managers are supposed to do. And then they coach their team as that's the way you progress in this org. The whole thing repeats itself and it ends up being a really big mess. And so I think a lot of these principles are not new, especially in software engineering. I think that's where they've been around the longest. But we've applied it to every single function within the organization. And I think we'll take further steps in the future to even compensate the captain IC roles higher than the managers to essentially really provide a counteracting force. And people have to make a negative trade-off to become a manager, to make sure that people who end up in those roles are the ones who truly want to be there and truly do that type of work. And be the problem catcher, that type of work as part of it. I feel like this also just a very common theme now across companies. I feel like if you haven't written about this, I think just sharing this in depth would be really useful to a lot of people. Because I think a lot of startups are trying to think about this.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.