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Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

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

#81

Post by TigeriusKirk »

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.

The managers I enjoyed working for the most came up through the ranks and were better at my job than I was. But that was only maybe 25% of the time in the 20ish years I spent as an IC. The worst for me were the ones with no understanding of how I did what I did.

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

#82

Post by time_to_smile »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #59

What exactly is an "individual contributor"? I'm confused. This term has come out of nowhere in the past 5 years, and it sounds like you're referring to someone who backed a kickstarter campaign. If this is the new term for "employee", I'm out. I can't stand that companies refer to their customers as "consumers".

It all came from the industry wide shift to make sure that software engineers were even more just cogs in a machine that could be hot swappable.

The growing concept of "IC" goes hand in hand with the increased focus on "leveling" for engineers, as well as the rise of delegating all product related decisions to the rising class of PMs. All of these create a structure in which every team, even across companies, starts to look more and more the same and any individual can be trivially swapped out for another with the same role and level.

In the early days of the startup boom, ~2008, engineers at startups had a lot more control over the product process. Typical startups where a CEO with some general vision of the product and a knowledge of fundraising and a technical cofounder who would handle the real implementation of the product. CEO would make sure the company was health, CTO/tech cofounder would make sure the product was built.

But this lead to a class of labor that was a bit too powerful. As you likely remember engineers used to contribute a lot more than purely churning through tickets.

Today you can think of IC as a prefix to a more complicated part number: IC-SRE-4, IC-DEVOPS-2, IC-DS-6. Then you just have to find someone claiming to be the part and send them through a leetcode grinder to verify the build quality, then plug them in and go!

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

#84

Post by RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm »

fatnoah wrote: post #16

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.

[flagged]

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

#85

Post by blsapologist42 »

r00fus wrote: post #57
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I absolutely don't know why Facebook balked at making their own phone back in the day. Facebook's entire value prop about 10-15 years ago was the fact that you could find anyone on there who you even remotely knew. 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/wid…

They tried to make their own phone but it just didn't work out. So they ended up releasing something just so they could show something after all that investment. Of course teh company was much smalelr then.

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

#86

Post by logicalmonster »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #59

What exactly is an "individual contributor"? I'm confused. This term has come out of nowhere in the past 5 years, and it sounds like you're referring to someone who backed a kickstarter campaign. If this is the new term for "employee", I'm out. I can't stand that companies refer to their customers as "consumers".

> If this is the new term for "employee", I'm out.

Can you please explain what's that offensive about calling somebody an Individual Contributor?

It's a little bit of weird jargon, but it acknowledges 2 important things (they're a person, and they're actually working) which is infinitely more respectful to the people that actually do the work than "Resource" that also gets used.

To me, using the word "Resource" to refer to people is by far the most dehumanizing term I've seen seriously used in an office.

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

#87

Post by pkd »

firstfewshells wrote: post #43

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.

Managers are an organisational necessity past a certain scale. If you have not felt the need for them I can only guess you've not been in a company big enough.

Think of it as trying to run a big country with direct democracy. Can it be done? Maybe. But there are good reasons why democracies become indirect after a certain scale.

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

#88

Post by the_af »

whatshisface wrote: post #54
the_af wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Their manager should be keeping an eye on them. That's why you have "middle management."

I thought we wanted to get rid of layers of management?

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

#90

Post by tomtheelder »

eklitzke wrote: post #37
ramesh31 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Well I guess the difference is that the top of the technical leadership track is ostensibly CTO, which is a “higher” role than you’d typically see on the IC side.

That said I totally agree with you overall and think the argument you are responding to is a little silly. You can have an absolutely fantastic career staying IC forever. The fact that you might cap out at “staff/principal/whatever engineer,” a hugely influential and generally very well paid role, should not be viewed as a downside to that track.

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