Ask HN: EM to Director

[emthrowaway123]

How are you all thinking about your careers and making this move?

I'm going on 10 years of management with another 6-7 years of IC experience. I'm starting to see directors at big tech companies that are not only younger than me, but with far less management experience. Granted, I did get a few unlucky breaks - first startup got acquired and the parent company brought their own execs in, second startup promised me a director role but wasn't a good fit, and my current role is in a bigger tech org and they're not promoting from within and all recent hires are from the C-suite's previous company.

I could probably go to a smaller company and be a director, but that would be a step back in terms of scale and money.

A lot of companies aren't hiring in the US like they were, so growing organically seems like a poor strategy.

Is there a secret I'm missing?

[simne]

I'll describe situation from investors view.

Exists just two approaches to hire director. Each have drawbacks.

1. Grow organically from lowest position (Henry Ford claimed, he use this approach in FMC). Drawbacks - it is slow and such director will be definitely conservative, because he grown in company environment and probably will not want to change anything. Good things are - such way is good check of professional quality, and such director could be more loyal for company.

2. Hire director from outside, farther - better. Drawbacks - high risks to hire person without need knowledge/skills and definitely collective will see him stranger. Good things such person probably will be more open for innovations and will not much depend on company traditions.

Each investor himself decide, what he think more important for company - loyalty or innovation. I usually think, innovation is highest priority, but to be honest, life is complicated, and possible case in which I'll chose more conservative way.

And sure, human behavior is about will, for example, Lee Iacocca grown in FMC from mechanic, but once become president of other company.

[anoojb]

If you want to get to Director-level at a large tech company...it's a pretty binary process, you either strike gold on a high business impact project OR you follow the algorithm that's in the career guide and have people who can document and attest to the impact at the level.

Striking gold is a low probability medium impact event. Following the algorithm is a low probability low impact event...because you make lots of trade-offs on quality of life, generalizable skills, and personal goals. There's also lots of competition along the way. So it just depends on which game you want to play.

If you have any semblance of personal goals/interests you need to stop worrying about following someone else's career advancement algorithm and maybe consider adapting it to incorporate your own heuristics. This is where I've settled in my approach to career goals. But it's highly specific to where you are at with other parts of your life.

[pram]

"I could probably go to a smaller company and be a director, but that would be a step back in terms of scale and money."

This is what you needed to do. Companies were handing out Director titles like candy in 2021, but that ship has sailed.

[skmurphy]

In many companies the director-level promotion requires agreement from other directors in other departments. Not every director in the company but directors from other groups or organizations you will interact with. It's different from the promotion to manager or senior manager which normally only involves review by managers or directors within one silo.

The jump to director is by no means driven just by experience or tenure and may require skills or expertise you have not demonstrated. It may be time to have a career conversation with your VP.

[gpapilion]

Scope, it’s all about scope of your team. Em to director requires opportunity as well as performance.

For you that means focusing on a growing area of the company, and finding new areas to grow your team in. You also need to have a team of managers, who are growing their scope as well.

[bigtimesink → gpapilion]

I've been on the IC version of this. You have to be on the right team, do well, and have the right friends to get a promotion past the terminal level. Ask yourself where the team is in its lifecycle and how much growth it really has ahead of it.

[mcoliver]

The secret is networking. I don't have the numbers but annecdoteally what I saw was every (and I mean every) hire at Director level and above at big tech was a friend (or friend of friend) of someone at that company.

[aprdm → mcoliver]

Even within company, you want to have network laterally and upwards in different orgs, that is necessary for higher scope of work usually

[nostrademons]

I don't really want to be a director. As an EM you're still somewhat involved in the technical details, your work is more deterministic, and your scope is small enough that you can act with integrity and don't need to make the hard ethical calls. But as my director put it, "the job is all of the responsibility and none of the power". And my former director (who made it up to SVP of a 12,000-person organization) said that "At that level, you are more like a portfolio manager than an engineering manager."

If your job is going to be a portfolio manager anyway, you're often better off being an actual portfolio manager. You make more money, pay lower taxes, and have more working flexibility. If you make most of your money from a W-2, even if you're the CEO, you've taken a bad deal. The real money is in ownership.

But that said, if you really want to be a director, here's some strategies I've observed for getting there.

1.) Scope and headcount. It's really all about headcount - that is the qualification for being a Director. Increased scope is how you get the headcount.

2.) Find out what upper management wants. Volunteer for it. That is how you get the scope.

3.) Attach strings to every request that your team takes on. "Well, we could be doing [important executive ask], but we don't have resources for it right now. If you gave us headcount for it, though, we'll make sure that it becomes our top priority." Attach a quid pro quo to everything. That is how you get the headcount.

4.) The same goes for requests from peer teams, but there needs to be some finesse here so you aren't labeled as difficult to work with. Oftentimes, it's best to dribble out easy requests as a teaser of good faith, but then say that for any larger projects, you need a line item in their budget that donates headcount to your team.

5.) Ruthlessly inflate the difficulty of everything you do. "Oh, why did it take 2 months to move a button around on the screen? We needed to get alignment from product and UX, then we needed to check with 2 other teams, then we needed to make sure that it works on all the platforms we support, we needed to make sure it didn't adversely impact the click-streams to advertisements on the page, ..." (Note that in some companies, it really does take 2 months to move a button around on the screen. If you work in one of those companies, message it as taking 6 months.). This is also your way to provide work/life balance to the people underneath you. If they want to work 4 hour days, this is good for you, because it means you need twice as much headcount to accomplish the same task.

6.) Deliver on your commitments, but only to the extent that it looks good in a demo or PowerPoint. VPs aren't up-to-speed on the details; that's why they are VPs, and have hundreds of people under them to worry about the details.

7.) If you do get called out on the details, offer some excuse and then request headcount to fix it.

8.) If your department is about to implode, immediately start talking to executive recruiters so you can get a director title elsewhere.

9.) Actually just start talking to executive recruiters anyway. It usually takes something like 18-24 months to get a director role externally, so if one happens to land in your lap, take it.

[matt_s → nostrademons]

Most of these suggestions would probably get you tagged as being toxic in some organizations. Your descriptions indicate the work priority being more about getting additional headcount/budget to expand your team regardless of deliverables or actually delivering anything.

When I worked at a large corporation there were many organizations/teams just like this and I'd prefer to avoid that type of company because it felt like 90% of the time it was playing politics games.

[nostrademons → matt_s]

You'd get tagged as toxic in functional organizations. Most organizations aren't functional. The organization itself is toxic - it is dysfunctional managers all the way up, all looking to grow their fiefdom at the expense of actually doing anything for customers or users. And the larger the organization is, the more of a monopoly it has over its customers, the more revenue it makes, the more it pays its people, the more likely it is to be toxic and dysfunctional.

OP's post indicated that he's not interested in a smaller company because it would be a step back in scale and money. This is how you get to be a director in a company with scale and money.

There's a reason I don't want to be a director.

[aprdm → nostrademons]

> 1.) Scope and headcount. It's really all about headcount - that is the qualification for being a Director. Increased scope is how you get the headcount.

Scope != headcount, in matrix orgs (like big tech) there are directors with very small orgs (5-10 people)

[nostrademons → aprdm]

But you typically don't get to be a director with an org of 5-10 people, at least not in engineering, which OP indicated he's in. (It's different in other functions. PM/UX directors frequently have 10-15 people under them, and my wife is a deputy director in finance and has 2 reports. Her boss is the director and has 3 indirects, just her and her reports. I joke that their management chain really is a chain. Startups are also different - I once interviewed for a VP role at a startup that had 8 employees.)

For that promotion to director, you usually need at least 50 reports and at least 2 levels of management. And then the span of responsibility for (senior) director goes on up to about 500 reports. It's not unusual to have directors with less than that - but usually that is because they once had a big org, their scope and responsibility decreased in some re-org, but upper management is keeping them around so they have a deep leadership bench. Another re-org and they can easily end up with 500+ people again.

[aprdm → nostrademons]

Well I got to director in big tech with an org about 35 people and now I have around 15 people but bigger scope, and others have done with similar numbers too. Depends on the culture I guess, some cultures are all about empire building, others about impact / scope

[aprdm]

Why do you think time or your management experience would put you in path on director instead of others ? This question is very hard to answer without a lot of context. The TLDR is that you haven't been performing at director level or there's no need for another director in the org you are in

[sg47]

To become a Director, you need to start solving organizational problems outside your team. Like fixing hiring processes, interview frameworks, etc.

[sturza]

Are you in automotive?