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Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

bloomberg.com

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Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

#31

Post by eklitzke »

bennysonething wrote: post #3

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?

This is easy to do and not looked down upon at FAANGs, but harder to do at smaller companies.

Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

#32

Post by turdprincess »

andrewxdiamond wrote: post #17
bennysonething wrote: post #3

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?

Amazon has a whole tree of long tenured engineers that are strictly ICs. Principle engineers are still ICs

The principal engineer role usually comes with expected impact on a big organization or even the whole company. Having that kind of impact is impossible as an “IC” in the traditional sense. Unless you are in some very cutting edge area, or get very lucky, your principal role will involve a big dose of the same leadership and management tasks that a manager or director would have.

Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

#33

Post by lifeinthevoid »

bennysonething wrote: post #3

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?

It's kind of satisfying to take care of people and help them develop.

Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

#35

Post by smeej »

irrational wrote: post #10
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #5

Earlier 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.

I don't need my manager to know how to do my job.

I just need my manager to know they don't know how to do my job and stop telling me how to do it.

Tell me what needs to be done. Trust me to figure out how.

Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

#36

Post by irrational »

cheeze wrote: post #29
irrational wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most FAANG companies grow managers from within, with many managers starting as ICs. Anecdotally, I've never had a manager that wasn't super technical. They wouldn't last.

Yeah, I've never worked for a FAANG company. I do work for a Fortune 100 company, but it is not a tech company (When I was hired, I was once in a meeting where I heard the founder of the company say that we would never have an IT department because we were not a tech company. We do have an IT department now, but that happened after the founder gave up the reigns.)

Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

#37

Post by eklitzke »

ramesh31 wrote: post #9
bennysonething wrote: post #3

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?

>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…

The same applies to being a manager though. You're not going to get promoted forever in any role, at some point you'll hit a terminal level, whether that's in an IC track or a management track. And it's not a problem as long as you find your work fulfilling.

Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

#38

Post by dieselgate »

smeej wrote: post #35
irrational wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't need my manager to know how to do my job. I just need my manager to know they don't know how to do my job and stop telling me how to do it. Tell me what needs to be done. Trust me to figure out how.

Kind of my thoughts as well - it's "cool" there are technical managers out there and engineering managers should be technical "enough" but I'd never expect them to be competent with all the ICs' jobs

Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

#39

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

justizin wrote: post #21
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely a way to reset the culture and get rid of people who don't fit what Mark is trying to achieve.

It can't be that difficult to contribute to the achievement of absolutely tanking the company's value by investing in a dead-end VR-for-work platform that was always just a distraction to avoid responding in any way to Congress pressing him about election interference.

Look man, Apple tanked Facebooks valuation, not the Metaverse.

And that's presumably why he wants the Metaverse, so he's not just a sharecropper on someone else's digital platform.

Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

#40

Post by flatline »

bennysonething wrote: post #3

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?

Some people spend their whole careers like this, there is nothing wrong with it. I personally avoided management for years, until I was offered a lead role over a team of roughly 4 people in Feb 2020. I had been working on the product for years and knew all the ins and outs and had a vision for its future. Cue the pandemic and everyone going remote - and the project ballooning to 25 people across three organizations. I absolutely thrived. I realized I’d done everything coding wise that I was really interested in, and that job had grown stale. I have matured, and found I have more social skills than in my 20s and early 30s. I found that not everyone could or would be interested in driving things where they needed to go to successfully ship a product. You may someday surprise yourself at how your interests and capabilities evolve.
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