Engineer (sometimes trying to manage people) with 17 years of experience, with more than half of this spent on trying to understand search. Currently running things in search domain in Brainly and trying to sound acceptable while playing drums.

L8 Conf talks

Doomed to lead?

There’s this tendency that the obvious choice for outstanding engineers is to make them manage their own team, in an often futile attempt to “copy” their skill onto others. This is obviously the wrong approach and often the target of seasoned engineers' ridicule. “He’s a great coder, let’s make him code less!”, we say with a smirk on our collective face.

Is it actually wrong? As engineers, we want to develop our talents, get promoted and of course earn more. To earn more, though, we need to actually bring more value to the company we work for. How much can we scale our own, individually contributing, talent to really make it worth more?

In this talk, let’s try to answer the titular question—are we all doomed to lead?