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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

#101

Post by krschultz »

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…

I don't think they balked, they failed.

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

#103

Post by ketzo »

yalogin wrote: post #34

I know the general view is middle management sucks and I can see asking first level managers to become ICs may make sense in some cases, but that also means someone else is managing x times the number of employees. How is that supposed to scale?

It's a good question.

I mean, if there are lots of managers at Meta who only have 4-5 direct reports, you could see this scaling decently well -- turn two teams into one, and that's not so bad.

But I don't think one person can constructively manage more than about 20 engineers at the absolute maximum.

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

#104

Post by Hovertruck »

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.

Wow, in my 15 or so years I've never _not_ had a manager who had engineering chops. Admittedly, I prefer working for smaller companies so this has often been a hands-on CTO, and I was filtering these job opportunities for technical leaders that I respected.

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

#105

Post by benj111 »

Alupis wrote: post #95
henriquez wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are individual contributors in English? I took it to mean they were becoming contractors?

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

#106

Post by ianlevesque »

RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm wrote: post #84
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]

Okay I'll feed the troll. There are only a few places where if you implemented, for example, an effort to reduce "body dysmorphic disorder", it could instantly improve the lives of 3 billion users worldwide. Meta is one of those places.

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

#107

Post by moosedev »

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".

(Not directly answering the question asked, because sibling comments already did.)

FWIW, I've heard and used it in FAANG for well over a decade.

Usually I see HN comments using "IC" followed by someone asking what "IC" stands for. Makes a change to see someone asking for an expansion of the expansion :)

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

#108

Post by revskill »

pkd wrote: post #87
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.

Not quite. If i'm a CEO, my manager is required to know coding first. It's nonsensical and ineffecient to hire a non-coder to manage real coders ?

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

#109

Post by jedberg »

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.

At Netflix I can't think of a single manager at any level managing engineers that didn't start as one, all the way up to the CEO. In some cases they couldn't necessarily do their employee's job, but they at least understand the technical aspects well enough to make useful contributions to technical discussions.

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

#110

Post by bityard »

RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm wrote: post #84
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]

Somebody at Meta worked really hard to make sure that when I'm using Facebook on my phone to read someone's post or comment thread, it punishes me for taking a call or answering a text message by reloading my feed with a set of completely different posts when I re-enter the app, and then making it impossible to find the previous post or thread again.

No other app has gone to such extraordinary lengths to make sure you can only view a piece of content once, and then hide it from you forever after.

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