My company has "IC levels" 3 through 8. 5 = Senior Engineer, 6 = Staff, 7 = Principal. Not sure what title 8 gets.

There is a "rubric" that defines the things an engineer must demonstrate in order to qualify for each of these levels.

There is a similar system for engineering managers.

What I find is that the managers' rubric expects them to do their day to day job well and promotes them for it.

But the engineers' one expects them to do something out of the box after level 5. They ought to create something that will cause people to sit up and take notice. It does not matter if you wrote high quality code, raised the engineering quality bar for a team, led a team to ship and deliver on time consistently etc. Excelling at their actual work does not seem to matter.

The salaries for managers and ICs are the same at each level. This makes me think that the easiest way to rise up the echelons of a typical tech company and make money is to become an engineering manager. It feels like the role also allows you to have better work life balance. Instead of burning the midnight oil for the company, you can use your spare time to continue to code but on your own ideas. Plus no on-call rotation.

It also appears that interviewing as a manager must be easier. I feel they mostly have to pass behavioral type of interviews and let their experience mostly represent their qualifications. An IC on the other hand must really put in the work before getting on the interview beat - read something like cracking-the-coding-interview, refresh their knowledge of algorithms they would never use in their job etc.

I wonder if the system's been rigged by and for the engineering managers?

What is your opinion on this?