Re: Industry versus academia

[address@hidden]

> 

> Yep. Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman argue this exact point in their book 
> "First, Break All The Rules": the only career that organizations truly believe 
> in is management. You can be the greatest programmer, salesman, graphic artist, 
> account manager, or whatever, but if you want to move up--both in terms of pay 
> and prestige--you have to move into management.

Not all software (or other high tech) companies are like this.  Even back
15 or 20 years ago they realized that it was really a bad idea to say that
you could only move up in prestige and pay by moving into mangement, and
lots of companies explicitly set up their job category structure with
promotion paths that let engineers move up without becoming managers:
Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer, Principal Software Engineer,
Technical Director, Yoyodyne Fellow, all that sort of thing.  I think this
had already been done at Digital (DEC) by 1980 or earlier.  Symbolics did
it pretty much as soon as we had the whole concept of job categories
at all, when we first hired professional HR people.  I had thought this
was quite pervasive in the industry now, although I have not tried to
do any explicit surveys or anything...