> I have to contact various groups in the company- the cost center folks to get an approval for spending the money to get the SaaS, the security folk to ensure we're not accidentally leaking IP to the outside world, the legal folks to make sure the contract negotiations go smoothly.
I guess I was assuming (maybe wrongly) that you are an engineer/developer of some sort. All of that work sounds like manager work to me. Why is an IC dealing with all of that bureaucratic stuff? Doesn't they all ultimately need your manager's approval anyway?
I only started managing people recently (and still do some engineering and development, along with various project management- my job title is "Senior Principal Machine Learning Engineer - so not really even a management track).
I have a lot of experience doing this sort of work (IE, some product management, project management, customer/stakeholder relationships, vendor relationships, telling the industrial contractor where to cut a hole in the concrete for the fiber, changing out the RAM on a storage server in the data center, negotiate a multi-million dollar contract with AWS, give a presentation at re:Invent to get a discount on AWS, etc) because really, my goal is to make things happen using all my talents.
I work with my manager- I keep him up to date on stuff, but if I feel strongly about things, and document my thinking, I can generally move with a fair level of autonomy.
It's been that way throughout my career- although I would love to just sit around and work on code I think is useful, I've always had to carry out lots of extra tasks. Starting as a scientist, I had to deal with writing grants and networking at conferences more than I had time to sit around in the lab running experiments or writing code. Later, working as an IC in various companies, I always found that challenging things got done quicker if I just did them myself rather than depending on somebody else in my org to do it.
"Manager" means different things, btw. There's people managers, product managers, project managers, resource managers. Many of those roles are implemented by IC engineer/developers.
Certainly, and its interesting to see your perspective. At most of my jobs, if I needed a subscription to a SaaS (the earlier example) I'd tell my manager, explain my reasons, and they'd deal with purchasing, legal, security, etc. as needed, maybe looping me in if there was a technical question they could not answer.
I guess I was assuming (maybe wrongly) that you are an engineer/developer of some sort. All of that work sounds like manager work to me. Why is an IC dealing with all of that bureaucratic stuff? Doesn't they all ultimately need your manager's approval anyway?