"Don’t manage only to advance your career. Many tech companies have parallel career paths to seniority for both technical and managerial high-performers."
Is this really true?
Many engineers do become managers only to advance their careers.
The "parallel" technical career path never seems to deliver equal amounts of power, or even money, as compared to managers on the same level.
Even when a rough parity exists on paper, for every "principal Engineer" or whatever, there are a couple of dozen Vice Presidents of Blah. Oddswise, to make the same amount of money, and more importantly, to get more lucrative job offers in the future, in most companies it pays to transition to management than stay technical. (which is fine, it is just the way the world works, just pointing out that the article may need some fixing)
>The "parallel" technical career path never seems to deliver equal amounts of power, or even money, as compared to managers on the same level.
This is true. There's a self-deprecating joke about CIO being an acronym for "Career Is Over" because the Chief Information Officers are never promoted to CEO. On the other hand, it's common for the board to promote COOs and CFOs to CEOs.
If tech people want to be CEOs, they have to be an entrepreneur (e.g. Bill Gates, Larry Page, etc). Also, at small startup companies, CTOs (Chief Technology Officers) sometimes get promoted to CEO. (The CTO is often one of the founders or early employees.)
That said, if a tech person has no aspirations for C-level responsibility, the "parallel" career track for technical employees may offer enough progression and pay increases. They're ok with the ceiling being lower for the technical ladder.
CIOs are almost always* "keep the lights on" people. It's thankless work, and very frustrating, especially in corporations that don't value technology as a differentiator. In those cases, a lot of CIOs are promoted from within the Finance or Sales organizations, not any technical org, and they spend the vast majority of their time balancing restrictive budgets and managing attrition [of under-appreciated staff].
* There are plenty of highly appreciated, creative CIOs, but they're a minority ... which is why all the media aimed at CIOs & IT leaders (e.g. cio.com, etc) has spent the last couple years spreading doom & gloom about the profession, saying things like "the age of the CIO is over -- it's all about the CDO now" or "CMO budgets now exceed CIO spend", etc. It's also why the majority of CIOs these days don't sit on the board or are even in the CEO's inner circle, and instead report to either the COO or CFO.
I don't remember the last time I saw a company with a "CIO". It seems to be a dying trend.
Interesting fact: CIOs are also known as Chief Investment Officers (mainly in finance) and play an integral role to the company, perhaps in importance second only to the CEO.
At many finance shops, the CIO can even outrank the CEO, in reality if not on paper. For instance, during his glory days at PIMCO, Bill Gross was CIO while others, such as Mohammed el-Erian filled the CEO role, even when Gross was basically calling the shots.
And by "superstar", it's usually a person that can communicate his ideas eloquently and knows how to effectively evangelize and self-promote. It has not much to do with the actual technical competency. So, the skillset required to become a "technical superstar" resembles more of a skillset required for good manager or marketing persona than actual engineering skill set, though some level is required.
It's actually a different skillset than management.
A good manager is able to act as the interface between multiple teams, for example collecting requirements and resolving impedence mismatches. A developer who has advanced along the technical path does need some social and people management skills, but the role is very different. For example, they can mentor junior developers, or they can work with their managers to ensure that technical problems at said interface are spotted before they become problematic.
True, most of the superstars are "architects" who can both come up with excellent technical plans and then socialize/communicate them. I have a had a few "put on head phones and pump out 5 developers worth of excellent code" types as well.
I'm continuing to wander slowly but surely into more architecture roles, and while the term has fully justifiably been badly wrecked by people doing "architecture" who think it involves drawing diagrams with lots of boxes and lines and never checking the architecture against the requirements, there is a legitimate architecture role that does exist and there are legitimate skills that are specialized to that role. I'm not sure it's something that can be taught very well, though. But as one for instance, I could clearly explain to you how the architecture conforms to Conway's Law and exactly why it's shaped the way it is, and not some other way.
(Conway's Law is huge for a high-level architect... in a lot of ways you do not so much "create" the architecture as discover how to correctly translate the pre-existing corporate structures into code in the most business-efficient manner. "Architects" in this position who think they're working with a blank slate crash and burn, and probably are the source of the disdain for the term. A real architect is in fact working in some of the most constrained design space there is. In some ways that actually sorta kinda makes the job easier; you can sort through and dismiss a lot of bad choices very quickly with Conway's Law. The biggest challenge is when you get constrained down to zero choices for some problem and have to work Conway's Law in the other direction, and figure out how to fix the corresponding structural failures in the organization itself. It's a lot easier to change code than people structures, but sometimes you have no choice....)
You can't be a software architect without extensive experience as a software engineer first, at least 10 years, more like 20. At a previous job, you could go straight into architecture as a graduate on the "fast track". The architecture group at that company went on to produce many epic 500-page documents that no-one ever read, and one day they were all laid off... And no-one noticed.
> I'm not sure it's something that can be taught very well, though
Why ever not? You can study and discuss existing architectures, their advantages and disadvantages, discuss case studies of existing code and new requirements and what architecture to implement them in etc.
Of course, you also need some decent programming experience to come up with architectures that work in practice, but that can be also acquired.
This kind of architecture is akin to surgery, and there aren't enough cadavers available for practice. (Zombies, on the other hand, maybe.)
The Conway's Law factors are also harder to treat "fairly" in a theoretical sense relative to some of the real team-related difficulties that exist in any large enough organization.
That's what I have observed as freelancer in a lot of companies. People who rise high on the technical track have to be exceptional (and often get let go to save money) whereas managers can be average and have more staying power.
My advice to anybody who wants to have a long career and make good money is to go into management.
this may be different for companies where there is more respect for engineers.
I have seen very similar things as a freelancer as well. It just seems like management is a much easier path when looking for longevity, money and work/life balance.
That "parallel" track also only exists at tech companies. For non-tech companies that have in-house software development, there is only the opaque ceiling above "senior developer". The only way past it is to jump over to the management ladder.
I'm a VP at a mid-sized ($100mm revenue) startup. I report to the CTO, and am his probable successor.
I make slightly less than our highest paid engineer.
I would recommend finding a company with a true parallel track, rather than dedicating yourself to a job that you don't want, and thus likely won't ever be great at.
An honest question: Does the highest paid engineer know that (s)he makes slightly more than you? If so, does (s)he know of it in an official capacity or has (s)he sort-of figured it out?
Oftentimes, I've found that management operates from a position of informational advantage, while a person on a parallel technical track at the same level has access to a lot less information. Hence the question.
They don't have any formal way of knowing my salary, and I don't know what they think I make.
I'd share the details of the managerial bands if they were considering a switch, but to date they've been very clear that they're happy staying technical.
Sorry, it's late here and my brain is just unable to parse your sentence. Are you asking if it matters if the information is gained officially or unofficially?
I'm asking if managerial information is a strict superset of engineer information. Control of admin passwords to software seems useless or illegal w.r.t. the concept of information here.
What industry is that? In companies I have seen it's a matter of principle that an engineer can't make as much money as managers. They would lay off the best engineer in the world before giving him as much money as they make.
It's the old class system, an engineer is "blue collar" (no matter where he want to school) and a manager is "white collar".
Of course engineers don't help themselves at all with all the open-source "software should be free" and feel-good "anyone can learn to code" stuff they come out with. If you won't put a cash value on your work, why would they?
I was the founding CTO of a company that did ~$100M in sales it's last year. My top engineers made more in salary than I did. And our top sales people out-earned the CEO and all his staff's take home pay by a quite a bit (except, occasionally the VP of Sales). Which the CEO had no problem with, whatsoever.
If it matters, it was a company that sold software primarily to large banks globally.
How many VPs are there, and how many engineers at his pay grade? As in, if a junior engineer at your company is looking at their future, are there five times as many chances to become a VP as to become a highly paid tech superstar?
Advancing as an engineer is probably easier for the ambitious because there's not a fixed number of senior technical staff. If a technical contributor levels up their game, they can nearly immediately level up their pay.
The management track doesn't work that way; we need to level up our games, and then wait for an opportunity to arise due to corporate growth or turnover. For example, I'm getting coached to take over the CTO slot, but there's no reason to believe that I'll ever get the opportunity, because there's no reason to believe the existing CTO will ever give up their job.
It's an unfortunate truth of our society and business culture that we see these things as linear, hierarchical progressions rather than what they are, different roles with different purposes. Just like in the educational sphere we see High School < Bachelor < Master < PhD, there is a tendency to see technical < managerial from a leadership perspective and managerial < technical from a technical perspective. I wish we would move away from that stupid way of thinking. Devs are one role, PMs play another role, managers, directors, VPs ... they all should be serving distinct and different yet essentially equal roles, yet we see it as a competition and instill an artificial hierarchy. It's really only a symptom of a larger social value structure thing though, so it won't change any time soon or without a disruptive process in between the two states.
The challenge is that a lot of companies don't place engineers into the "critical skills" category, which leads to the [perceived by business & IT leadership] natural method of increasing an excellent engineer's sphere of influence being to promote them into management. Sometimes this works wonderfully, but it's obvious how spectacularly it can fail, too. If a company doesn't have engineering as a core competency, they're far more likely to fall into this trap than a company that does.
I'm speaking from experience here, having spent 15 years working for a company where promoting "technical managers" was a source of pride ... and 90% of the time the fallout of such promotions was that engineering quality degraded.
I have no idea if this is true, but just postulating a reason…
If you consider management to be a distinct skill,Someone with 10 years of experience engineering and also 10 years in management is (potentially) very skilled in two distinct fields. Imagine you have a lawyer with a PHD in geology and they work on ground water disputes or oil well stuff.
I agree. In my experience (PhD in geology actually, and decent modeling/statistics/etc.-type programmer but not 'expert' by HN standards), this sort of dual expertise is quite valuable, especially at a higher level: Not only can you be a liaison between the two domains and, say, proficiently implement an idea or interpret scientific findings in terms of case law for your clients, but you can also see opportunities for solving one domain's problems with another domain's tools, when the problem domain may never even realize there's a good solution (or even much of a problem!).
In terms of management and engineering, dual experience or expertise could definitely help with understanding how to implement features in a way that encourages collaboration or efficiency between devs, or leaves a feature open for extensibility or interaction with potential features that the engineers aren't aware of yet.
You will lose a lot of your technical skills in 10 years time. Also most companies will force you to become more political and "reasonable". Thereby making it even harder to straddle both as the real engineers will smell the stench of your technical decay a mile away, and will rightly retch all over....
In Deloitte there are now "orange profiles" which are only technical and are earning more than functional figures. It is true though that at the best of my knowledge no "orange profile" has made it yet to a Board.
But why would they if they're optimizing for technical skills? It seems the two are mostly orthogonal, so this wouldn't be expected. Not many biz execs are superstar engineers.
FWIW, I know senior engineers that chose the technical route rather than manager route, who make absolutely ridiculous amounts of money. Like close to 1,000,000/year including equity. I don't know any non VP level people making anywhere close to that.
We know these people exist but it's whether or not they're common enough for your better than average tech to land and whether it requires actual technical knowledge or just good salesmanship.
I imagine it's a mixture of both, but that if I wasn't a contractor, I'd probably feel it's easier to get paid more by going tech -> team leader -> manager.
I've never heard it suggested that these best-of-the-best types of positions should be attainable by "your better than average tech." If your biggest asset is that you are "better than average" I think even hoping for a generic Senior Software Developer type of position is ambitious.
Not everyone can be the best of the best, a lot of us are sadly just a bit better than average and we matter too. The market encompasses more than just the elite.
That said, given cultural differences and our abilities to judge their own skill, it's entirely possible your best of the best is just my above average.
At a startup this is a good rule of thumb, but the more established a company is, the closer to cash equity becomes. At a publicly traded company, equity can be a periodic (albeit variable) cash bonus if you want it to be.
> Pretend the equity is worth zero or close to zero (which it almost always is)
In a startup or private company yet to IPO sure.
In an established, large, public company, RSUs, ESPP and whatever else you get is definitely going to deliver cash. Sure as the market moves around it'll change in value but you might look at it as +- 20% of the expected value. It's certainly not worth 0.
Equity is almost always worth close to zero? You realize at publicly traded companies, it might as well be a cash bonus because you can instantly cash it out the second it vests, right?
Well known, top tier tech companies. I won't get into more than that they're senior engineers (partially because I don't know that I can answer that with more specificity). They all have 10+ years of experience and are typically tech leads on their teams.
Can you elaborate on the kinds of work they do? I can't see a senior engineer doing iOS/Android development making that kind of coin, but I can see it for someone who has been working in-depth building out datacenter technology or low-level mobile technology stacks, for example.
And I know of plenty of people who play football who make several million dollars a year. The question is, how common is it? In both athletics and engineering, the answer is not all that common.
The difference in football is that if you miss the cutoff for several million dollars a year, you make bupkis. In engineering, if you miss the cutoff for $1M/year (which itself is the low-risk alternative to "make a billion or nothing"), you'll make about $250K/year. And if you miss that, you make $200K/year. And if you miss that, $150K/year.
Engineering - at least at this point in history - is remarkable among professions where the very top of the pay scale is "the richest man in the world", but there's a relatively smooth progression below that where even a 25th percentile engineer makes a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.
I interviewed somewhere that specifically mentioned #1 in the job description. I applied in part because it was the only job ad I had seen to that point specifically mentioning it.
It was brought up again in the interview as a perk of the job, by the person who would be my boss, without my prompting. In the very next sentence he made a generalization about being confused as to why developers would not willingly work 45-50 hours a week as a rule and how "40-hour clock watchers" never lasted long at the company.
I don't disagree with the guy on the "clock watchers" point but he should appreciate that in some cases people's circumstances push them to become "clock watchers". If they commit and produce excellent work during the time they are there then they should last.
Also, yeah, that doesn't make sense at all! It suggests they didn't a) read the job spec or b) believe in the company's values or c) perhaps the phrase was really "We value [when you] work [your] life [out of] balance" ;)
The best way to tell if some company actually gives a shit about the above is to ask them what they are doing about it.
I interviewed at a company once where the answer to #1 is "we do 4-day work weeks and make sure people are actually working 32-hour weeks instead of 40-hours-in-4-days". They seemed like they actually gave a shit.
Ditto diversity - companies love to talk a lot of smack about hiring women and racial minorities, but ask them about actual programs, policies, or structures in place to pursue this goal and... crickets.
But yeah, in most places the answer to "what are you doing about these things you allegedly value" is "absolutely nothing".
It's probably true, but the thresholds to move up to the next level are vastly different.
On the "management" ladder, you probably need to mostly stay out of the way of your team and let them execute, while acting occasionally to filter information up/down the chain. If you've stayed in the position for a reasonable time and have not really screwed things up, you advance to the next level.
On the technical ladder, on the other hand, you'd really need to make quite a difference to move up to the next level. You'd have to go above and beyond doing your daily expected taken-for-granted work and make technical contributions on your own time to advance to the next level.
This may be true for the low levels of the management ladder, but it definitely won't take you to the point where you have 2-300 people under you and growing.
Very true. From a certain level on managers have to be extremely high performing. But in the lower ranks it's easier to advance as a manager than for technical people.
What would "forcing" look like? Typically forcing someone to do something requires power - political, financial, or other.
When engineers have something that managers or investors desperately want (e.g. Zuckerberg et al), then engineers have power. When engineers are interchangeable code-monkeys, then managers and investors have power. Of course, engineers could band together in a labor union to increase their power, but managers and investors don't like that very much, and that generates a cat-herding problem.
Well, if nothing else works, a programmer's union.
I'd prefer something more like the Screen Actor's Guild, which provides support (legal assistance if you need it, access to talent agents) but doesn't regulate compensation. That said, I don't think things necessarily need to go that way, and I don't want to see the negatives of traditional labor unions. But that shouldn't be off the table. The other side isn't going to play nice, so neither should we.
FYI, SAG does set minimum compensation, working conditions, meal requirements, etc. It doesn't set upper bounds or demand that more senior people get the better jobs.
It's also somewhat difficult to get into. Any aspiring actor can't just go and join.
FYI, SAG does set minimum compensation, working conditions, meal requirements, etc. It doesn't set upper bounds or demand that more senior people get the better jobs.
Sounds like what we need in software: downside protection (especially against managerial misbehavior) but no limit on the upside, and no stupid seniority system.
It's also somewhat difficult to get into. Any aspiring actor can't just go and join.
I'm sure I'll get this wrong, but the way it was explained to me is that you need to appear in 3 SAG productions in order to apply for membership. Since it's a big hassle for the movie production to get an exemption to hire non-union, you need to be special in some way (the director really wants you in particular, you have some special skill like dance, etc.). It helps to know other actors who will call you and say "hey, they need a ballerina to be in the background tomorrow" or whatever.
I'm also not sure how you'd bootstrap something like this for programmers. The reason it works for actors is that every actor who is even slightly famous is a member, so every production has to work with the union or only get completely random people (you're still allowed to make an indie film with your friends if none of them are members).
I think the selectivity problem is less of one for programmers than screen actors. We can use code tests or Github for membership screening. Thus, we don't create the chicken-egg problem where (a) it's almost impossible to prove yourself if you're not part of the union while (b) you have to prove yourself before you can join.
Getting broad-based membership is much harder. This is an industry full of (a) young people who think they'll have investor contact in 6 months and be founders in two years and retired in six, and (b) indentured servants on H1-Bs. Even if we get 95% of the top 50% of programmers (and that's wildly optimistic) as members, most managers will just ignore their need for talent, in that case, and hire bottom-rung engineers, preferring that over being responsible for bringing in a union. It (that is, hiring bad engineers to avoid bringing in represented ones) won't work, but it won't hurt those managers' careers personally, so nothing will be done about it.
The company where I work has the parallel career paths, but like you say, has a much higher proportion of managers at the higher levels.
In my view, money and advancement have to be part of the motivation for becoming a manager. Otherwise, it's too stressful and boring, and nobody would do it. My evidence is that every person who has joined management at the lowest rung, where the work is the most boring and unrewarding, has been somebody with a family to support.
> The "parallel" technical career path never seems to deliver equal amounts of power, or even money, as compared to managers on the same level.
The scope of a person focused solely on technology is narrower than the typical scope of senior management, and does not typically cover key functions like strategy (i.e. top-level decision-making) and sales (i.e. revenue generation).
I'm not saying that the latter are more valuable than the former but I will just point out that there are plenty of examples of companies with great technology that fail because of poor strategy or an inability to market their product/service as effectively as competitors who have crappy technology but better (or, at least, more effective) sales and marketing.
I think that managers also enjoy leverage from the people/teams/resources they manage - a kind of reflected-glory halo effect. The equivalent for a technologist (e.g. the creation of technology that makes others more productive) is not as obvious in most companies for various reasons (e.g. senior management lack of understanding of the impact technology has upon their company, non-technical managers' greater focus on self-promotion).
The "parallel" technical career path never seems to deliver equal amounts of power, or even money, as compared to managers on the same level.
Very true. Engineering is the hard way up, because there's so much less of the title and grade and salary inflation on the management track. Take Google. If you're a manager and don't make Director in 5 years, you fucked something up. On the other hand, the Director-equivalent Principal Engineer rank is 3 jumps (all of them non-trivial to make) above Senior. When I was at Google (and this is probably no longer true) the number of Principal+ Engineers at Google NYC was... zero.
The cynic in me suspects that dual-track organizations actually serve management's goals by making it look rank-per-rank superior, just as the lopsided college admissions climate convinces middle-class public school kids that prep kids who get into Harvard are somehow impressive (because it is very hard to get into an Ivy from a middle-class background, but really easy for rich legacy kids). If you make it astronomically difficult to become a VP-equivalent engineer, then the VPs (who had a much easier climb) look more impressive. Far from providing a genuine alternative path to success, this process cements the tribal superiority of management.
Most telling is that when Google really wants someone and is competing with finance or Facebook and gives them a High-Compensation Plan (HCP), the person is put on the management ladder, even if that person intends and expects to be a full-time programmer. It's really hard to justify a $500,000 salary for an engineer but much easier if you give that person a managerial title. I'd imagine that Google isn't alone in this. It's probably a standard big-company thing.
Engineers (and, in finance, also quants and strats) also share some of the blame for the relative grade deflation, because we beat each other up relative to businessmen. They give each other consistently high marks and talk each other up. We're far too honest. And this "honesty" is something I've come to view negatively because what it really is, is ratting someone out to management, often cheaply or for free. My inclination, if they aren't hurting me or a project that I care about, is to protect underperformers, not because I like it when people underperform, but because information is power and I'm not going to share honest performance information on other people unless there is a legitimate reason to do so. (I care if someone is fucking up my project, or an existential threat to the company or my career. I don't care if he's costing someone else's company a salary while doing nothing; that's not an existential threat, so who cares?) But engineers have a storied history of being willing to tear each other down for cheap or even for free, and technology management has been exploiting our lack of tribal cohesion, in order to turn us against each other, for decades.
Pretty sure a lot of what you said about Google isn't true. I personally know at least one Principal Engineer who works on the Search team in Google NYC; it's possible he was promoted after you left, but even then, he would've been Senior Staff and highly regarded.
Also, upper management in Search is still on the engineering ladder. These are folks with 2000+ and 500+ folks reporting to them, one of whom reported directly to Larry when I left, with net worths probably in the hundreds of millions, and they've chosen to stay on the eng ladder.
I also know folks who were special hires (tech celebrities elsewhere in the industry, with independent press and a strong publication record) who were hired in as Senior SWE with a salary befitting their previous accomplishments.
There were Senior Staff SWEs at Google NYC when I was there. It's not surprising that there's a Principal SWE now.
You're talking about anecdotes with regard to those highly-compensated engineers. They exist, but I don't think that anyone entering Google at 2015 has any real chance of becoming one of those 9-figure engineers from a SWE-3 start.
Growth is everything in both tech and careers. I don't think someone coming in to Google as a SWE-3 in 2015 has a realistic chance of being a 9-figure Distinguished Engineer while rising through the company. I don't think a manager does either - Google will be dead before they can climb the hierarchy. I think someone coming into Google as a SWE-3 in 2015 who then quits after a year or two and either joins a fast-growing startup or founds their own has an excellent chance of being re-acquired in 5-10 years as a 8/9-figure VP.
I don't think a manager does either - Google will be dead before they can climb the hierarchy.
You think so? Why do you think Google will be dead in the next few years? I'd bet on it being around, in some form, even 50 years from now.
A halfway competent manager at Google will make Director in 5 years and VP in 10. That might be, in part, because Google has so few competent managers that a "5" or a "6" is a local 9.75. And (for as much as I trash Google) I think the odds are that Google will be around in 10 years.
All of that said, I'd imagine that there are plenty of VPs and Directors at Google who are not making 8- or 9-figure packages. You can get VP on seniority alone at Google, just by not making mistakes once you're on the management ladder, but the 8-figure RSU packages require a bit of luck.
I don't think Google will be dead in the next few years. I think it will be dead in about 15-20 (because that is the typical lifespan of a tech company - witness Sun, SGI, DEC, Apple if Steve Jobs had not returned, Compaq, Microsoft, and many others). I also think that the average manager at Google will never reach Director, and indeed a SWE3 has a better chance of making Distinguished Engineer than a manager does of making Director.
The reason I believe this is simple numbers. Assume a Director is responsible for a department of about 120; he has 5-6 direct reports (all managers), who average 2 managers and a handful of direct reports. In total, the department has 15 managers, one director, and about 100 ICs. In a steady-state company (one that is not growing, which I think will increasingly describe Google in the near future), the only way for an existing manager to get the director job is for the director to vacate it. When will that happen? The competition for the spots the director would want to move upwards into (VP positions) is just as tight, and they are often filled externally. The competition for the CEO spot is non-existent; there is about zero chance that Larry will step down during his lifetime. So every single manager has to wait for the Director to retire or leave the company, and even then, he has only 1/15 chance that he'll be the one selected.
Things were different when Google was doubling in size every year; when a company grows that fast, it's ready for a new level of management every 2-2.5 years, and instead of multiple people fighting for the same spot, everybody on the team could be made a manager and a new level of fresh recruits placed under them.
On the engineering ladder, at least, promotions are not zero-sum. You can get promoted for building a system that has high impact, without having to displace anyone on the org chart. The problem is that "high impact" is hard to define for promo committees, and so they often fall back on metrics they're familiar with like "number of people on the team" when assessing promo cases. But the number are not against you the way they are when climbing the management ladder.
I'm not sure you have demonstrated what you are trying to show.
If I understand correctly, you've calculated the chance a manager is promoted to director as 1/15 * average number of directors that leave over the relevant time period.
But you haven't made any argument about the chance an engineer is promoted to distinguished engineer besides stating promotion non rivalrous. A system in which no one is promoted to distinguished engineer is non rivalrous, for example.
The false assumption is that you need to have 100 people under you to be a Director. It's a title, not an organizational role.
Managers benefit from a seniority system at places like Google because you get automatic level bumps after so long. Sure, the ladder will get longer at the top (there will be VPs and SVPs and EVPs and SEVPs and CVPs) as they have to invent new levels up there, but the fact is that it's just much easier for you if you're a Google manager with guaranteed promotions for average performance, as opposed to an engineer who has to do something special to get Principal+.
You could be right, though. Google may have to do an honest layoff (as opposed to the dishonest stack-ranking/PIP bullshit which is a layoff masked as a "low-performer initiative") and, when that happens, a lot of managers are going to find themselves on severance packages. The ones who manage to hold on will still be getting the guaranteed title bump every 2-3 years, unlike engineers to whom no guarantee is made, but it won't be the same, and being a manager at Google won't be the cushy, write-your-own-performance-reviews job that it historically has been. The churn will free up positions, but the game will (as you noted) feel more zero-sum than it is when it's expansion that creates them.
Is this really true?
Many engineers do become managers only to advance their careers.
The "parallel" technical career path never seems to deliver equal amounts of power, or even money, as compared to managers on the same level.
Even when a rough parity exists on paper, for every "principal Engineer" or whatever, there are a couple of dozen Vice Presidents of Blah. Oddswise, to make the same amount of money, and more importantly, to get more lucrative job offers in the future, in most companies it pays to transition to management than stay technical. (which is fine, it is just the way the world works, just pointing out that the article may need some fixing)