Should I become a manager? Playing StarCraft can help you decide
Work and games are more similar than you think.
Once an Individual Contributor (IC) — engineers, data scientists, designers, etc. — reaches a certain level of seniority, opportunities start to open up for them to switch to the management track. At this point, a lot of people wonder should I or should I not become a manager?
Some decided to switch, and after getting a taste of being a manager, went back to the same crossroad again from the opposite direction.
Choosing between the Individual Contributor (IC) and Management career path is a tough and classic problem. There are many books and articles explaining the difference between them. We will take a look at these roles from yet another different lens: games. Interestingly, they can be compared to playing different genres of games and choosing between them is merely choosing the kind of game you want to play.
Being IC is like playing RPG.
Role-Playing Games (RPG) is a game where you directly control a character (or sometimes a small set of characters) as an extension of yourself. You perform solo tasks (kill monsters, solve puzzles, complete quests) and earn rewards (money, experience) to improve your character (buy weapons, learn new skills, level up). These accumulated improvement enables your characters to accomplish more challenging and sophisticated tasks, as the game progresses closer to its end goal. Examples of these games are the Diablo series, The Legend of Zelda, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Baldur’s Gate, The Witcher, …
In the Diablo series, you assume the role of an adventurer which you can pick from different classes. Then you have to perform the quests according to its storyline, which mostly involving exploring new map areas and find your way to the monster boss, killing lesser monsters and improving your characters along the way.
These are very similar to doing an IC job.
You directly complete the tasks. You achieve everything via the main character that you control. If there is a difficult monster, it is up to you to perform every attack with your own hands until it is defeated. This is similar to solving difficult technical problem that you can ask for guidance, but you have to eventually act on the problem by yourself.
You receive immediate feedback. If you kill a monster, you finish the quest, earn the experience, money and/or items from killing it immediately. This is similar to coding or designing that once you finish the task, you see the prototype or a working output right away.
You focus on improving yourself. You collect items and skills, in order to make your character stronger. This is similar to learning new technical skills in order to do the job better.
You can focus on one area at a time. For example, you can keep grinding, i.e. killing the monsters repeatedly to increase character level. Keep killing monsters to hunt for magic items. Trying different ways of fighting the same boss until you beat it. As an IC, some tasks can be very difficult, but you can focus most of your attention to deeply think about it.
Being Manager is like playing RTS.
“Management is a totally different job which requires different skills.”
— OH
People who are considering the switch might have heard the quote above, but whether they understand the weight of it is another question. Many ICs did not fully grasp what it meant to be a people’s manager until they transitioned into management and learned those lessons from first-hand experience. Perhaps they can understand the difference better by comparing to games?
In Real-time Strategies (RTS) games you are no longer just one particular character, but a commander of an army. Usually these games consist of of a flat field where two players fight each other and build bases. Example of these games are the StarCraft series and the Age of Empires series. Your job is to use strategies to command the army to defeat an opponent in real time.
Now that you have to control a large number of units. You have to approach the game differently, same with being a manager.
You accomplish the goal through others and need to delegate. You no longer rely on a single character to fight but combat through a large number of standard units which could easily perish at the hand of the enemy. You could micro-manage individual units, but have to use that only with the very important group while having awareness of everything else going on. Otherwise, the higher chance you forget about the broader picture and, eventually, lose the game. You end up delegating many actions to the AI most of the time. You know AI is not as good as you, but there is no way you can control all of the the units at the same time, so you have to put the units into the right formation/position/routing (set the team up for success) and trust them to do the right thing.
You wait longer for feedback. It takes time to collect resources and trains units. After that, you may have to keep sending units to attack over and over until you start seeing progress of the battle. The satisfaction of winning mostly come at the end. When you assign people to work on something, you have to wait until they come back with the results, or more problems 😂.
You focus on improving your team. Each unit has unique strengths and weaknesses, so your job is to assemble a good army that has a mix of units that complement each others, same with your team members. You can research technology or training to make them better, just like employee training. Each unit can die and be replaced, just like your team members can leave and you can hire new people.
You are always context switching. Running an army or a team requires you to be responsible for multiple things simultaneously. You have to manage the economy, not just the fighting in one area of the map. Make sure to order some worker units to collect resources (equivalent to requesting budget and headcount), training new units (hiring) and research new technologies to improve your army as a whole (improving your team), plus scouting new frontiers and opponent’s movement (keeping tap of business needs). Constant context switching is therefore inevitable.
Hybrid role is somewhere in between.
There are hybrid/transitional roles, such as Tech Lead Managers (TLMs) which let you share the time between IC tasks and managing a small team. I was looking for a game that has both RPG and RTS elements and found Spellforce 3.
In this game, players control a character they created and up to three companions, each with different abilities. Some maps require players to construct a base of operations and specialized buildings to gather resources and recruit units to defeat larger groups of enemies or fulfill certain tasks.
The review from PCGamer sums it up perfectly.
Simplicity is the key, as seen in the way it bundles all abilities for your four-person party into a simple action wheel that pops up when you hold Alt over an enemy. The RTS sequences require base building and gathering resources, but they’re spread fairly far apart and the laborers and caravans usually do their work without outside management. By keeping the RPG and RTS systems uncomplicated, SpellForce 3 ensures that they can both live on the battlefield at once without ever becoming too much to handle.
You need to do both jobs, which only works if they are both not too complex. As the team or the technical challenges grows, you might find yourself not having enough time to do both.
Being Tech Lead is like playing a Musou game.
A musou game is a Japanese hack-and-slash type video game that has the player playing as a ridiculously strong champion character that can fight through hundreds of simple enemies. The goal of the missions are commonly to win the battle (such as siege the castle and defeat the enemy’s champion), find an escape route, or defend the stronghold.
You can only control one unit at a time and spent the majority of your time fighting the enemies by yourself. However, (in the more recent version of these games) you can also give instructions to other champions that are controlled by the AI. These instructions are important to ensure the success of the mission, as you are leading all AI champions (other ICs) towards the same goal and guide their participation in the battle (where to go, which enemy champion to engage, hold the position vs attack). If the AI champions failed to handle their assigned task which may cause the mission to fail, you could rush your unit over to help.
In North America, these games are known as the Warriors franchises, and include games such as Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors, Hyrule Warriors, Fire Emblem Warriors and more.
Being Manager of Managers is like playing a simulation game.
Construction and management simulation (CMS) sometimes also called management sim (Ha!) or building sim, is a subgenre of simulation game in which players build, expand or manage fictional communities or projects with limited resources. Players are only allowed to control building placement and city management features such as salaries and work priorities, while actual building is done by game citizens who are non-playable characters. For example, The SimCity series, the Caesar/Pharoah series, Theme Hospital, Sim Tower
The Managers of Managers are removed from the front-line actions and no longer control what the individual units are doing. You oversee the work from higher altitude, give the team the best setup and let them do the work, hoping they will do the right thing, and course-correct them from time-to-time.
Can you switch back and forth between the genres then?
Choosing between one of these roles are similar to choosing which game genres you would like to play at the time. Are you more into RPG, or RTS? What do you enjoy playing more?
One thing to keep in mind is even if you are an excellent RPG gamer, you will not suddenly become a master of RTS overnight. Likewise, switching to management meaning you are starting over in a new genre.
In some culture, switching from IC to management might be perceived as a promotion, so switching back could feel a bit awkward. However, in the tech industry at least, it is not considered a promotion but a lateral move. An IC can also grow really high up on its own the ladder. That gives you the flexibility to switch back and forth. One caveat is that the higher level you are, the more different set of skills will be required on each side of the ladder.
Some ICs became managers. Some managers switched back to ICs and grew on that path. Some switched back to ICs and returned to management again later. Some never switched at all. There is no fixed formula of the games you can play, and so is life.
References
- How Do You Decide Whether an Individual Contributor (IC) or Engineering Manager Role is Right for You?
- What are the pros and cons of being an individual contributor vs a manager in software companies?
- Ask HN: Have you switched from management to IC?
P.S. What about Very Senior ICs?
It is rare to have an IC that works alone and has company or business-level impact, but it is not impossible. These are industry expert on certain topics, e.g. inventor of some famous technologies.
For most of the Very Senior ICs, they tends to be Tech Lead of Tech Leads, so there are some aspect that is similar to Manager of Managers. The difference is the Very Senior ICs focus on technical direction and divide-and-conquer execution, and the Manager of Managers focus on people and team setup to make it happen. This case is where I could not find a good way to insert it in my game analogy yet.
Acknowledgement
Thanks to Thawan Kooburat and Chanin Chanma for the feedback.
