Elena Verna’s recent post on IC work as “the new career flex” names something real: the management career track, as it exists in most companies today, is broken. We take people who are good at their craft, promote them into roles where they’re discouraged from practicing it, and call the result “leadership”. Her boss’s ultimatum – “no SQL queries, no tickets” – is a perfect example. Elena calls this system dumb. Dumb undersells it.

The current career track was always about status. The VPs who stopped shipping, who reduced themselves to meeting-monkeys and deck-jockeys, who used headcount as a proxy for impact in their CVs – those people weren’t failed by the system. They were the system working as designed. Politics beats craft in 95% of companies, and your aspirational career at FAANG or the tech company of your dreams is no exception, as anyone on the inside will tell you.

Real leadership in product and tech has always looked very different. The best leads I’ve worked with in fifteen years of fintech didn’t stop building when they got the title. They sat in the trenches and shipped alongside their direct reports, not because they had to, but because that is the job. Coaching through osmosis has always been the fastest way to lift a team’s performance: junior members watching how a senior thinks, decides, and recovers from mistakes.

When the role is lived correctly, it’s a bloody hard job – and it looks surprisingly similar to what Elena describes as the “HI-C”, just stripped of direct reports. Shipping. Coaching. Holding the business context as a deep subject-matter expert. Reading between the lines, I think Elena and I share the same image of a great lead, even if it’s a rare breed.

This brings me to where I fundamentally disagree.

Yes, AI might bring the death of the “bad lead” in favour of a loosely organised collective of HI-Cs shipping features end-to-end. Maybe. That remains to be seen.

But even granting that premise, the disagreement is about money.

Elena’s HI-C pitch contains an implicit promise: that you can step off the management track, go back to building, and keep your comp. She says it explicitly: comp “naturally flows to the people having the biggest impact, which are now ICs.” At Lovable – flat org, venture funding, the conviction that AI lets one person do the work of five – that might hold. Lovable is betting that autonomous HI-Cs are a force multiplier worth paying for. That’s an investment thesis.

But Lovable is not the market. It’s a well-funded AI company surfing a hype wave, one Anthropic release away from a very different competitive landscape. Extrapolating from Lovable to the rest of the industry is like extrapolating from a Formula 1 pit crew to your local garage. Not the same picture.

There are two reasons the comp will not hold for most, one structural, one cultural.

The structural reason is straightforward: if one HI-C genuinely does the work of five, the market clears at a lower price. This isn’t cynicism, it’s supply and demand. When AI makes individual output explode, the number of people needed to produce the same output collapses. You now have a surplus of labour competing for fewer seats. Even if each remaining seat is higher-impact, the negotiating power has shifted entirely to the buyer – your employer. You can call yourself a HI-C all you want, ship end-to-end, run on AI-steroids, the maths doesn’t change: when one person replaces five, the five don’t all get the salary of the one who stayed. A thin top decile with rare judgment will command premium comp. Everyone else competes for what’s left.

The cultural reason is simpler and uglier: most companies are not Lovable. They are Block. They are Meta. They are any of the hundreds of organisations that have spent the last two years “restructuring”. Which is just a fancy word for firing people and calling it “AI transformation”. These companies do not want to pay you VP comp to be a HI-C, the idea is laughable to them. They want to pay you IC comp and call it a promotion in spirit (“look at all the cool things AI lets you do now”). Titles are cheap. The people running these companies understand that better than anyone.

Here’s the asymmetry Elena’s post doesn’t name. At an AI-native startup, the HI-C role is an R&D investment. You hire a former VP, give them no reports, and let them build, because you believe their output will generate more value than their salary. That’s a bet on the upside. Outside that bubble, the same role is justified by cost reduction. The maths is inverted: one HI-C replaces a team of five, and the savings are the point. Same role, same title, completely different reason for existing. And when the reason is cost reduction, comp follows the downward trend.

None of this means Elena is wrong about the joy of it. If you love building – if the best parts of your job have always been shipping alongside your team, coaching through osmosis, watching your craft create something real – then the HI-C model, stripped of its corporate baggage, sounds like a future worth wanting. A life without decks and sync calls. Just imagine.

The problem: the people building this future are the same ones who have been promising the white-collar wipeout since 2023. They are not building a world where you ship more and get paid the same. They are building one where you ship more, there are fewer of you, and the surplus flows up.

Elena found a company that resists that dystopia, at least for now. Good for her. Genuinely. But don’t mistake an exception for a trend – especially when the trend is being built by people who have already told you exactly where it goes.

So if someone offers you that elusive new HI-C role: read the term sheet and fuck the title. Ask what the comp band actually is, and if that role exists because they just laid off five people who used to do it. The answer tells you whether you’re an investment or a saving.

Further reading: IC work is the new career flex by Elena Verna