Re: Industry versus academia

[David Farber <address@hidden>]

Buckingham and Coffman give several example of companies that have broken away from the norm, but I personally have never worked for a company that had a full career track for programmers, nor do I know any programmers in such a position.

...Probably just dumb luck on my part...

david

At 01:38 AM 2/22/2003 +0000, DLWeinreb@attbi.com wrote:
>
>> 
>
>> 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...
>
>
--
David Farber
dfarber@numenor.com