Managers just show off their team achievement but when it's time to take a bullet, they bail!!
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1dis+1oNiM6PF an interesting perspective on self importance. If you are one of the few good staff+ level ICs, you will be lumped into the company your keep.
Qualcomm's toxic culture and consequently the bad behavior it produces is widely known in the industry.
First of all people you are categorizing have families as well. They are just human being and they have first the obligation to protect their families...
Secondly, people who are taking the heat and the blame. And who protect your mistakes in front of customers and top management, are these people...
Never they will say, well responsible is a staff engineer who messed up.
Thats why they must make sure everything is working... thats what we call leadership!
Nothing works without leadership.... anything you could imagine in life, it must be a certain level of leadership...
Lastly, a Manager is a Manager because he has a team. Without a team, a Manager can't exist. Hence, team is the most important responsibility of a manager... meaning any manager will always try to protect his team...
Manager can have preferences, thats standard routine of life...
Its not elegant talking like kids.
It takes at least a Senior Staff or even a Principal to ensure that the less experienced team members to ramp up. Everyone has this idea that only Staff and below are working, but to ensure that the work gets "rolled-in" into the higher objective, you need more than, say, coding expertise. You need institutional knowledge. You need soft skills. Using both these skills along with the output of the individual contributors of the team, the team lead who is typically a senior staff or principal, will ensure that the goals are met.
Every organization needs to work like in this fashion and Q is no different. So, for folks who are labeling Principal Engineers in Q as "status collectors", they couldn't be more wrong. Many of them work as both individual contributors and also as team leads. I have seen a senior engineer who was not paying attention during code review and a catastrophic bug enter into the customer deliverable. Who do you think paid the penalty for that? It was both the Prinicpal and Senior Director.
However, to be fair, certain groups have more "latitude" for failure than others and they are su-king the life blood of Q and giving everyone a bad name. Don't lump all Principal and senior directors as "status collectors".
Child
Correction on previous post: Individual contributors are fine up AT staff.
Cuts should be made above and below staff.
Qualcomm's toxic culture produces really bad managers. Other companies should be wary of hiring managers from Qualcomm.
Individual contributors are fine up to staff. 75% of ICs above staff are resting and vesting.