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Welcome back to I'm a Software Engineer, What Next? The podcast for devs figuring out their next move. Hosted by James Wilson and Matt Sinclair, we talk honestly about what it takes to build a meaningful career in tech.
Season one is done. Season two kicks off a little differently: shorter, looser episodes with just Matt and James in between the usual guests, each one built around a topic that's on a lot of engineers' minds right now. First up, the line doing the rounds: management is a one-way door. James isn't convinced it's true. Matt turned up with three reasons it was never the door everyone thinks it is.
In this episode, we cover:
- Span of control going from a "big" 7–12 to Facebook's 20, now reportedly aiming at 50, and what that does to the org chart
- The shift from pyramid to hourglass, and why the middle is getting gutted instead of the bottom
- ICs out-earning managers (the reported average salary at Anthropic is $750k; UK junior starting salaries near £240k)
- "The cost of readmission": why agentic coding makes the door back to IC cheaper than it used to be
- The super IC: Matt doing five-to-six people's worth of work solo since September, and the one scaling question he still can't answer
- Why the real risk of agentic coding isn't that you can't code, it's that you can't tell what's good
- The tax bomb nobody's pricing in: gut the highly paid middle and a chunk of government revenue goes with it
- Why Matt is building micro-businesses for his 20 and 21 year old kids instead of sending them job hunting
Show NotesCharity Majors, "Engineering Management: The Pendulum or the Ladder": https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/Matt on LLM-powered programming as a mech suit: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0178-why-llm-powered-programming-is-more-mech-suit-than-artificial-human
HostsMatt: https://matthewsinclair.comJames: linkedin.com/in/james-wilson-92170656
More from us:https://whatnext.dev/https://quantumfaxmachine.com/
