Bias for IC or non-IC career trajectories

In the past five years, I have be a part of the start of multiple engineering organizations. This experience both caused and required me to put on multiple hats. At one time, I am an individual contributor taking on a product feature and driving it to production. At another point, I am a team manager conducting one on ones with a slew of 40+ ICs. At a third point, I sit on the Architecture Review Committee. Two other roles I have taken on are the Security Representative and a Platforms Engineer. My primary discipline is Software Engineering, and in this article, I would walk through deciding on pursuing the IC route or exploring other options. To begin, let me start with my motivations

My Origins

I was introduced to programming quite early on. In the last year of primary school, I stumbled on QBasic in a fourth section of a textbook. The flow of logic was as exciting as the concepts I learnt in mathematics and quantitative reasoning and I was curious. I wanted to learn about logical reasoning. The book pointed out that the sequence of instructions will be instructed by the basic interpreter which runs on a computer, and I had no access to a computer then. So my imagination was my friend.

Fast-forward to the first year of secondary school. We had a class on computer studies. This time, we had a computer Lab and my computer studies teacher invited me to join the Computer-JETS club after learning that I had some knowledge of QBasic.