Don’t turn your 10x engineer into a .5x manager.

Not every high performing independent contributor (IC) will shine as a manager.

Yet at many companies, moving into management is the only path to career advancement. This scenario is bad for the best ICs, hurts their retention and drastically decreases the organization’s level of craft.

At Duolingo, we do things a little differently. We’ve built systems for identifying the strongest ideas and rewarding the people behind them—without forcing them to leave behind the work they love.

One of our five principles is “Show Don’t Tell” – that is, we lead with the work itself, not the story behind it. The ability to self-promote isn’t that useful here.

We also try to reward ICs and managers equally. We have a parallel set of titles and seniority levels for ICs—and corresponding levels of compensation.

ICs are critical to moving the company forward, and at Duolingo, they’re hugely responsible for our success.