On Sep 10, 2005, at 11:13 PM, Martin Klingensmith wrote:

>> Shucks, engineers from "good" colleges
>> seem to be expected to end up in upper management :-(
>
> I will be graduating with a BSEE in June 2006. I will NOT go into
> management, I want to do design work. I am fairly certain that I
> will be able to do just fine in design work without "moving up"
> into project management.
>
Your career should last about 45 years.  Let us know how you're doing
in 10 or so.  Especially if you're looking at an employer without
"dual track" advancement ladders...

Cisco (where I work) has a dual-track program.  There are "individual
contributer" titles that are equivalent in pay and bonus scale to
first and second level mangers.  That seemed pretty good for quite
a while, until we got bigger and the number of levels of management
ABOVE 2nd level became larger.  Currently there are more people in
our phone book with "VP" (vice president) in their title than those
that have managed to become "distinguished engineers" or "cisco Fellows"
(those being the 2nd-level manager equivalents.  VP is 3rd level 
manager,
and then there are SVP and then Chambers.  It's not bad, but it's not
great, either.  It looks to be a good 6 times easier to become a 2nd
level manager than the engineer equivalent thereof...)

BillW
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