This is what I do. I don’t see the problem here. I don’t see the need to adopt additional characters.

It's a tradition from hand-set paper print which is now largely obsolete.

I interviewed for FB once and I don’t believe this is the case there. I was told the comp levels ran parallel for ICs and Managers. They do value their ICs it seems. This was one of the main reasons I was interested in working for them. You can see it on levels.fyi

The levels are parallel but it’s easier to get promoted to level 6+ on the management track.

There is M1 and there is M2, and then there's Director. There's no level 6+ on the management track. I'll disagree with this statement by saying that I think the step function in skills between managing people and managing people who manage people is huge. There are larger gaps between M1 -> M2 -> D than IC6 -> IC7 -> IC8...

but, I think the answer depends. If you are a really strong individual contributor, I presume getting an IC promotion is easier. If you are just decent, getting an IC7+ promotion seems incredibly challenging because IC7 requires an very high level of competence. If you are just decent as a manager, you can get luckier.

It me. I’m a good Dev but was never going to be one of the greats. Making the jump to manager seemed like the next logical step… and in sone ways it has been, but it’s a very different job. (Now that I evaluate other people’s dev work, I was actually a lot better than I thought I was)

I've noticed that many of the best devs are constantly worried about their output and quality and the worst not worried at all. This is as a Sr. IC who gets pulled in to other teams on the regular.

> There is M1 and there is M2, and then there's Director. There's no level 6+ on the management track.

M1 corresponds to the same pay band as IC6 and M2 corresponds to IC7. D1 corresponds to IC8. (By level 6, I am referring to IC6 / M1.)

M1 is indeed the same level as IC6 at Meta

This is the case in my company. My boss reluctantly went to the manager track as it was quite difficult to move up on the SDE track (from the level he was on) but much easier on the manager track.

I thought this was going to be about the video game :)

250k is a good pay in America but you won’t be retiring after five years. Income tax usually takes 25-35% off so your take home is 162k-187k. It’s easy to spend 10-15k/mo on expenses (mortgage, cars, gas, utilities, child care, food, clothes, medical, paying off student loans, retirement, savings, etc.). Then you’ll want to do things like take vacations. It gets eaten up pretty quick here.