311–320 of 674 posts
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But if you were CEO and you wanted to, how would you engineer the incentives such that actually productive managers succeeded? Or is there something about corporate structure that makes it impossible?
I know HN hates him, but Elon Musk has figured this out and that's why he will always deliver outstanding returns compared to others.
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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.
This is good. We're finally pulling back on the "HRBP-sponsored" people-management hype train thats rolled through much of SV startups and FAANG over the last 5-10 years: "Focus on your people, give them the support and mentorship they need to grow. Also 1-on-1s every week." - and all that bullshit.
Taking the cynical view, that BS is there for a reason. It makes it easier to performance manage people out very very quickly.
The optimistic view is that that BS enables people to never let their productivity drop below a certain level.
The extreme cynical view is to wonder why you are being performance-reviewed every 3 months but salary-reviewed every 12.
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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.
"Managers are an organisational necessity past a certain scale." That sounds like a dubious claim, I'm sure there are exotic ways to run an organisation that doesn't need managers. For example, Pirate ships ran with a Battle Commander, Accountant and Crew.
Please note I'm not saying you can't be overprovisioned in managers. I'm replying to the parent comment that sees no need for managers.
Zuck has it right. All the worst managers/directors/VPs in engineering I've seen are people who don't contribute anything to the codebase. They actively discourage managers who want to write code from writing code. They instead encourage them to focus fully on process and sprint management. Lots of backwards ideologies in tech perpetuated by B-players who got a little too comfortable with "people management". I would…
Zuck has it right. All the worst managers/directors/VPs in engineering I've seen are people who don't contribute anything to the codebase. They actively discourage managers who want to write code from writing code. They instead encourage them to focus fully on process and sprint management. Lots of backwards ideologies in tech perpetuated by B-players who got a little too comfortable with "people management". I would…
You're pretty much just repeating the constant engineer gripe of "What do managers even do". The point of management is co-ordination and direction. They're not there to contribute to the codebase, they're there to ensure people are contributing the right things to the codebase. If you really think these managers/directors/VPs are useless, describe what you think they're meant to be doing, and how it would get done w…
I understood the role of managers after I joined a chaotic startup which hired a bunch of people but didn't think of management. It was a complete mess. Senior engineers didn't want to manage, or didn't know how to do it. And good managers are very hard to find.
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Meta expects you to have managed at least 40 ppl before considering them for a M2 role. M2s made $800k+. Why wouldn’t a manager not be motivated to grow his empire? How else do you think managers will grow to VPs? We discuss ideals here but the reality on the ground is vastly different.
Yeah. To become a D1 you need to be an M2 who successfully manages (ideally) more than one other M2, who themselves might manage M2s or M1s or a combo. So you get really large chains of people at the same level in a reporting line, all managing and trying to show that they should be D1s.
Maybe this works with managers overseeing 1 or 2 people. But any broader than that is likely to be counter productive. Managers don’t just have 1:1s. They set direction, clear obstacles (both upcoming and here now), ensure quality work, etc. that scales somewhat linearly with team size, plus or minus depending on the individuals. If you remove a bunch of managers making them ICs, now the remaining managers have that…
In a smaller company (100 people) I was able to manage 10 people and still had time to write some non-critical code. That's because there was little overhead - just 2 PMs to work with, not many meetings.
Then in a large org (5,000+) it became much harder. Even though I had only 5 reports, I had to attend plenty of cross-dept meetings, had multiple stakeholders, and in order to get anything done I had to talk to 5 different people.
In order to "flatten" the organization, first this complexity must be tackled. If there's s lot of overhead to get things done, removing managers won't help, because now ICs will have to do the job that previously was done by managers
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>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.
Potentially inflammatory story, but I think about it occasionally, and this is a good context. I was out having a meal with old college buddies; most of us are developers, but some have become team leaders and managers. I will call it a statistical anomaly, but the worst engineers are now in 'people management' positions. The discussion ended with a guy boasting about how his team has X people, and he's looking to gr…
Building empires is quite standard in management. I work at $BIGCO as a manager and have been told that, in practice, if I want to get a promotion to the next level, I'll need to grow my team large enough to have other managers reporting to me first. So my primary target is to convince the powers that be to give me headcount, and what my team actually does is strictly secondary. Now I'm a mere peon, but this replicat…