51–60 of 674 posts
The 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.
Management 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
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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.
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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 interestin…
I 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.
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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,…
Technical skills are DEFINITELY required to be an IC. Understanding without the ability to implement makes for a lousy IC.
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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.
Imagine (10 years ago) being able to use an FB version of Siri/Alexa to "connect me to that girl Megan from my 5th grade classroom". Sure sounds compelling.
Instead FB released a half-assed "dailer app/widget" and forgot about it. Today that window of opportunity closed.
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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.
Yes, but you're not managing people. It's a lot of collaboration and leadership, certainly, but not doing any of the HR-adjacent bureaucracy that comes with being management.
Management 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.