Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
41–50 of 674 posts
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#42Earlier 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.
Sure, neither do I (now). At that point in my career though, it was incredibly helpful and levelled me up significantly in a relatively short space of time.
But agreed that your manager should set goals rather than plans. Fun fact, at FB at the same time all ICs came up with their own goals rather than these being passed down from management.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#43Management is just a way to coast. I don't understand why we need to "manage" grown up adults. What we need are team leads who code and architect. Then give them the autonomy to run teams.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#44I 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…
There's nothing wrong with that because you might not even want to go up that high.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#45Management is just a way to coast. I don't understand why we need to "manage" grown up adults. What we need are team leads who code and architect. Then give them the autonomy to run teams.
> Then give them the autonomy to run teams.
"running teams" is literally management
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#46Earlier 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'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
Technical skills may or may not be required, but understanding is...
"Each of my managers explained carefully his own theory of what had gone wrong and all the theories were different. At last, there breezed into my office the most senior manager of all, a general manager of our parent company, Andrew St. Johnston. I was surprised that he had even heard of me. "You know what went wrong?" he shouted--he always shouted-- "You let your programmers do things which you yourself do not understand." I stared in astonishment. He was obviously out of touch with present day realities. How could one person ever understand the whole of a modem software product like the Elliott 503 Mark II software system? I realized later that he was absolutely right; he had diagnosed the true cause of the problem and he had planted the seed of its later solution. "
- C.A.R Hoare, 1980 Turing Award speech
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#47The 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.
When the EM becomes an IC, how does this help the team grow their own skills and not get distracted by problems the EM should be moving out of their way?
When the EM is an IC, what stops them from either interfering with small stuff (I had an EM -- back then we called them "managers" -- stop us for a week trying to determine whether we should use List or Vector in Scala. Nobody was happy) or taking the big interesting problems for themselves?
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#48Management is just a way to coast. I don't understand why we need to "manage" grown up adults. What we need are team leads who code and architect. Then give them the autonomy to run teams.
Resolving interpersonal disputes and guessing how much you have to pay someone to get them to stay, and software architecture, are two (three?) totally unrelated skillsets.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#49I 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 in a role like this for many years in a small company. I doubt it would really work in a rigid FAANG environment with formalities like levels and performance reviews and all that - it would get too political and competitive.
Other managers will always try to change your mind on this. When layoffs come around, they usually are more likely to get laid off and their tech skills are now stale and they have to rely on their 'network' to get another management job if they're lucky. Not a position I want to put myself in.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#50I 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…
Every role has a plateau at any given company.
More importantly, why would one always want to "go beyond" any specific role, assuming the pay is good?