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Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
91–100 of 674 posts
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#92I had cautiously gotten into management because I wanted to learn the skills of delegatin and really building through others and growing/coaching others. I thoroughly enjoyed this. But over time what I had realized was the role had been changing (not sure if it was just for pandering) towards being a mouth piece for leadership and hr - having to relay decisions I didn't believe in (perf seasons, promo rationales, lay…
Oh how I don’t miss those days of management. It because a theory of mine that a large part of my job function was to simultaneously water down accountability from above, while adding enough complexity to the layers below me to discourage them from changing the status quo. The double edged sword being, without that authority, that same power structure is forced on me, and now I’m more aware of it.
I have a feeling being in middle management leads to that squeeze.
If you're closer to the doing, you are more isolated from the companyspeak nonsense. If you are in the upper part of the food chain, you get to enjoy more influence, freedom, a better risk/reward tradeoff, with costs you mention.
In the middle you're kind of screwed from both ends.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#93The 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 vast majority of the managers I've worked with wouldn't be particularly good ICs, not so sure of the wisdom of this move.
The point is that the company doesn't need the managers.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#94I had cautiously gotten into management because I wanted to learn the skills of delegatin and really building through others and growing/coaching others. I thoroughly enjoyed this. But over time what I had realized was the role had been changing (not sure if it was just for pandering) towards being a mouth piece for leadership and hr - having to relay decisions I didn't believe in (perf seasons, promo rationales, lay…
> As if they were on purely my own
Is this actually the expectation at the places you work?
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Here's an option you'll hate—take it, or leave" is a tried-and-true way of making people quit. "You've been re-assigned" is a common form for it to take.
Isn’t that basically constructive termination?
No, because these positions are genuinely being offered as an alternative to being laid off. If you choose not to take the new position, then you have terminated yourself.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#96Earlier 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…
> I absolutely don't know why Facebook balked at making their own phone back in the day.
Because it's really hard to make good hardware cost-effectively. The only companies that have succeeded in the phone market are practiced hardware companies, except for one software company that focused on making a adaptable OS for hardware companies to use.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#97I 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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To be slightly less cynical, I think they just mean that individual engineers at Meta are responsible for large chunks/vertical slices of work, so your work has a lot of individual impact on getting things out into the world.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Here's an option you'll hate—take it, or leave" is a tried-and-true way of making people quit. "You've been re-assigned" is a common form for it to take.
Isn’t that basically constructive termination?
Yep. Used pretty often. Attempting to fight things like that without a union backing you is scary and risky enough (plus lots of people just have no clue what the law says—which, who can blame them when it hardly matters?) that it usually works just fine. Probably a little more dangerous with employees as well-paid as at FAANG, but then again, if they ever want to work at that level anywhere else, they're not gonna want to rock the boat that way.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#99At Meta many engineers tried management and then went back to being an individual contributor. I'm not sure of the exact numbers but it was a very common career path. It did build up empathy for management on the senior IC side and meant that teams didn't get stuck with managers that didn't actually want to be a manager. If the company is not growing headcount this move makes perfect sense.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#100Follow the Jay Lenno doctrine.