Individual Contributor

“If you want to be able to really, like, accelerate through one of those steep technology inflections, The people who generally know the best about the technology are actually the ICs. So you have to, like, elevate them, you have to, like, protect them, you hav…”

“There's also another layer to this, which is as you go down in seniority, you're less likely to recommend your role. So execs, VPs, maybe even directors are sort of more likely to recommend their role than people who are crises.”

“The best paid people in, Many companies are now individual contributors at this point in in history especially in machine learning, like at least in the, at the machine learning labs, like OpenAI.”

“All the knowledge in a company is with the individual contributors are doing the work and the customers that like, there's no There's no knowledge with the people who are talking to you as CEO who are on your staff.”

“And it's like, okay, your job is now orchestration, you know, integration of work, planning, task management, reviewing, auditing, and that will, you know, that will radically change work.”

“In the end, the productivity of any company comes from the ICs, like what the actual, what is actually the work output and the ICs engineers or designers or someone are building that output. So I think if the tool should be optimized around anything, it should…”

“I noticed in all of the companies I worked at that actually the ICs and the high level leadership was, I think more philosophically aligned because I think CEOs and a lot of the high level leadership, they just want to see things happening. They want to see ou…”

“Until two years ago, individual contributors didn't have levels at Netflix. So all engineers were just senior engineers. All data scientists were senior data scientists. And we did not have a leveling system. We introduced IC levels two years ago, almost exact…”

“Those salespeople, those individual contributors are really only as good as the managers, the leaders that report to them. And so when we look at those charts in board meetings, we organize them by the managers because some really interesting patterns come in.”

“You could see in the 20 to fifty million dollar range, the data that we have is that typically a manager can manage five to seven individual contributors. Of course, as a company gets closer to IPO, they can scale that to seven to 10.”

“You have all these individual contributors who love you, but then they also work with these big companies and these big orgs, and they become these internal champions who spearhead adoption within their organizations and eventually turn into large amounts of r…”

“Things that makes us a lot more likely to be successful is that your, I see there's a tool and they can use it on their own. And it's technical. I think that helps a ton.”

“There are very few people who are able to execute extremely well and more than one thing. And it's especially true for individual contributors.”

“The more, Common path here is hire a couple individual contributors, make them successful, then hire a sales leader to scale the team.”

“If you're an individual contributor and you're not at a 10 person company, I would say don't try to force the organizational change. Organizational change is such a hard and messy problem. I feel like what I would do in that situation is I would just change th…”

“New managers tend to default to writing code to solve their problems. So new managers who used to be ICs, they look at a team, and they look at a team that's struggling, and the thing that they want to do is be like, I can just take some of these tickets, I ca…”