Meta Layoffs

My job also calls this a manager. I’m the technical team lead and my boss (our manager) manages 3 separate teams consisting of a QA, 3-4 devs, and a then we have a PO (who is part of a separate management structure and reports to a different person).

Boss is ultimately responsible for hiring/firing/pay (aside from some minor HR stuff) although he mostly relies on my assessment of people’s technical acumen. He attends our daily standups and likes to show up for important meetings. He also handle big picture estimations of how long our dev process is going to take, with my input.

Does that make me the devs manager? Maybe? So far the position is like a 70% technical 30% managerial position it feels like.

>To me, although I’d certainly concede that WFH pares down meeting culture and certainly has benefits in logistics, it’s always been fairly obvious that in-person collaboration is more effective, produces a much stronger culture, and I suspect is important especially to larger orgs because it helps to even out performance.

The anti-WFH screeds are always nearly indentical: extremely vague and non-quantifiable in a way that makes them technically impossible to argue against. I can't argue against the idea that they produce a much "stronger culture" I guess because how would anyone even begin to prove that one way or another? We probably couldn't come to a consensus on what that even means.

If coming in to the office had the positive impact pro-office people said it did I promise you that by now, 3 years after COVID lockdowns started, someone would have managed to put together some actual hard data instead of the same "culture", "watercooler ideas", "ad hoc collaboration" nonsense we've been seeing constantly since then.

> in-person collaboration is more effective, produces a much stronger culture

I believe the second part but not the first. The most productive collaborations I've had by far have been virtual. People rapid fire exchanging ideas, testing things out on slack, quickly sharing screens to solve a problem and then jumping out again to focus on the next bit, etc. When it works well it's exhilirating. Everyone will have encountered situations when it worked badly. But nothing is as unproductive 12 people spending hours in a room where it inevitably gets dominated by 1 or 2 extroverts and the rest sit back passively. Doing it well either way is hard.

Office structure doesn't affect what products people are willing to pay for.

This reads to me "poor" management that everyone else needs to compensate for. I would be interested to see if moving managers back into more IC roles improves the purpose of meetings, focuses on better training, provides more push-back useless projects, etc as they are now part of the pulse verses being an observer.

> High caliber, experienced employees probably get just as much done at home at > the office, or maybe more,

So you remove the location and high caliber, experienced employees can adapt and probably need very little management. I think these types of people need less "team cohesion" and could probably be dropped in at any company and make the same impact. They most likely ask a lot of internal questions and look at the bigger picture of where things are going. Its usually why they know when to leave a company, they are part of the pulse and loose enough of them and you flat line.

> but junior employees with less direction struggle more

My understanding here would be this is why a manager would be needed, however since they have people who don't know the flow of things they need the IC's to now become trainers and perform on-boarding, while also staying current themselves. Shouldn't these struggles have come up in all the 1-on-1's and performance review's. What were all these managers doing during their WFH?

>and WFH provides the ultimate cover for less motivated people (which in a larger company will always be > a percentage of the total) that might otherwise be held more accountable in-person.

This one is always subjective but I'm sure a percentage of people were let down by all the interview hoops they went through and mock white-board "thought" experiments only to get to work on some mundane task that they are supposed to be "motivated" to do. Again, though would this accountability be seen in all the 1-on-1's and meetings that managers were having with people. Who's to say "less motivation" was just getting the work that was asked, done. At a certain price point compared to your peers and manager why would you go out of your way to fix processes or other items unless it made your work easier? I'm sure there was a person hired to specifically address that, what they doing?