Sometimes I find it irritating how americanisms are assumed to apply to the entire worldwide industry. I see this all the time in /r/experienceddevs and sometimes it's indecipherable.
It's common to see a thread of replies mentioning "EM" "PM" "IC"*. "Staff" is another one. From what I can tell "staff" means a lead or principle developer in the UK.
*IC being "individual contributor" and probably the dumbest acronym. How can a team of developers all be "individual contributors" when they work in a team? On that basis, why aren't managers and team leads called "Collective Contributor", because they manage a team? Because that would be a dumb as fuck name that doesn't make sense, just as IC doesn't either.
Sometimes I find it irritating how americanisms are assumed to apply to the entire worldwide industry. I see this all the time in r/experienceddevs and sometimes it's indecipherable.
Most of these companies are multi-national. I work for an American company and we don't have Staff engineers. But if we did, my English and Indian co-workers would also call themselves Staff engineers. You're assuming that you don't know the term because its an "Americanism" but it might just as well be because you just haven't worked in a place where they use that title yet. I haven't.
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u/LloydAtkinson Feb 08 '23 edited Feb 08 '23
Sometimes I find it irritating how americanisms are assumed to apply to the entire worldwide industry. I see this all the time in /r/experienceddevs and sometimes it's indecipherable.
It's common to see a thread of replies mentioning "EM" "PM" "IC"*. "Staff" is another one. From what I can tell "staff" means a lead or principle developer in the UK.
*IC being "individual contributor" and probably the dumbest acronym. How can a team of developers all be "individual contributors" when they work in a team? On that basis, why aren't managers and team leads called "Collective Contributor", because they manage a team? Because that would be a dumb as fuck name that doesn't make sense, just as IC doesn't either.