Then in six months promote the ones that stayed back and you've effectively purged your middle management of deadweight.
Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
11–20 of 674 posts
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#12I want my career path as a developer to never be anything but individual contributor. I like teaching newer Devs but I don't want to manage them. Maybe I'm being naive?
I've been working professionally for 22 years and am still an individual contributor. I've refused all attempts to move me into any kind of lead/manager position.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#13The vast majority of the managers I've worked with wouldn't be particularly good ICs, not so sure of the wisdom of this move. Maybe it's a way to slow roll a bunch of layoffs.
The technical bar for EMs at Meta is quite high.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
And to be fair, until about 2015 or so, all managers at FB were expected to be able to do their reports job. This is definitely a good move, as I've heard some horror stories of management bloat at FB since I left in 2018.
That is interesting. I've been working in the field professionally for 22+ years and I've never had a manager that had any technical skills. None of them could even begin to do my job.
That must suck (unless you're really senior in which case it's normal). Hilariously enough, I learned so much more from my one non technical manager at FB but having leaders that understand what you do is incredibly helpful.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#15The vast majority of the managers I've worked with wouldn't be particularly good ICs, not so sure of the wisdom of this move. Maybe it's a way to slow roll a bunch of layoffs.
It's definitely a way to reset the culture and get rid of people who don't fit what Mark is trying to achieve.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#16I love management and, after over 17 years in an IC capacity, find that it fulfills me in a way that writing code stopped doing. I was also a manager at Meta in a past life, and really didn't love the experience due to the nature of the company and roles of manager. I do think I'd really like being an IC there, due to the high level of autonomy and focus on doing impactful work.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#17I want my career path as a developer to never be anything but individual contributor. I like teaching newer Devs but I don't want to manage them. Maybe I'm being naive?
Amazon has a whole tree of long tenured engineers that are strictly ICs. Principle engineers are still ICs
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#18If this headline doesn't get the HN commentariat excited I don't know what would.
Probably the announcement that all managers should start using NixOS and convert all their code base to a combination of Rust and Lisp.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#19The vast majority of the managers I've worked with wouldn't be particularly good ICs, not so sure of the wisdom of this move. Maybe it's a way to slow roll a bunch of layoffs.
Depends on the company, of course (and I've no idea how it works at Facebook), but some companies make their EMs out of ICs (much like Pokemon, I assume touching a special rock is required to effect the evolution) and it's somewhat common for EMs to re-IC-ify on their own anyway.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#20I want my career path as a developer to never be anything but individual contributor. I like teaching newer Devs but I don't want to manage them. Maybe I'm being naive?
>I want my career path as a developer to never be anything but individual contributor. I like teaching newer Devs but I don't want to manage them. Maybe I'm being naive? You can do this, but you will have to accept the plateau. There's really nowhere to go beyond Staff/L6, unless you're some super genius full of brilliant ideas or luck into being involved in a game changing product launch. Everything beyond that beco…
Not all companies have that plateau.