Episode #1
Is software engineering management a one-way door?
Welcome back to I'm a Software Engineer, What Next? The podcast for devs figuring out their next move. Hosted by James Wilson and Matt Sinclair, we talk honestly about what it takes to build a meaningful career in tech. Season one is done. Season two kicks off a little differently: shorter, looser episodes with just Matt and James in between the usual guests, each one built around a topic that's on a lot of engineers' minds right now. First up, the line doing the rounds: management is a one-way door. James isn't convinced it's true. Matt turned up with three reasons it was never the door everyone thinks it is. In this episode, we cover: Span of control going from a "big" 7–12 to Facebook's 20, now reportedly aiming at 50, and what that does to the org chart The shift from pyramid to hourglass, and why the middle is getting gutted instead of the bottom ICs out-earning managers (the reported average salary at Anthropic is $750k; UK junior starting salaries near £240k) "The cost of readmission": why agentic coding makes the door back to IC cheaper than it used to be The super IC: Matt doing five-to-six people's worth of work solo since September, and the one scaling question he still can't answer Why the real risk of agentic coding isn't that you can't code, it's that you can't tell what's good The tax bomb nobody's pricing in: gut the highly paid middle and a chunk of government revenue goes with it Why Matt is building micro-businesses for his 20 and 21 year old kids instead of sending them job hunting Show NotesCharity Majors, "Engineering Management: The Pendulum or the Ladder": https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/ Matt on LLM-powered programming as a mech suit: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0178-why-llm-powered-programming-is-more-mech-suit-than-artificial-human HostsMatt: https://matthewsinclair.com James: linkedin.com/in/james-wilson-92170656 More from us: https://whatnext.dev/ https://quantumfaxmachine.com/
