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Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers

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Re: Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers

#111

Post by candiddevmike »

ditonal wrote: post #82
greatpostman wrote: post #11

I have a long held belief that engineering managers are mostly a scam, and are actually just overpaid scrum masters. This is from working at some top companies

Silicon Valley used to have engineering managers who managed engineering. As the money got bigger we got more grifters / professional manager types. First thing they do is rebrand middle management as “leaders” and the other thing they do is make management non technical. This has even bled into making higher level IC engineering roles being “above” coding. “Staff engineers don’t code, they set high level architectur…

This is how you get the Office Space "I have eight different bosses" environment. And they all play "hide the problem, fluff the status" games so the leaders above++ have no idea how big of a shit show the ground level is.

Re: Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers

#112

Post by TylerE »

alisson_dover wrote: post #95
gruez wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LI has a distinctive lack of chill right now contrary to the company image I don't get it. Did linkedin have an image of being a chill place to work?

Yes, for sure. Don't know if being acquired by MS resulted in this reputation (MS has had the same reputation for decades) but they are well known as a chill workplace.

Did MS have that reputation? All I remember are endless posts bitching about stack ranking... and that was 20 years ago.

Re: Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers

#113

Post by lovich »

greatpostman wrote: post #11

I have a long held belief that engineering managers are mostly a scam, and are actually just overpaid scrum masters. This is from working at some top companies

Bruh, I don't know where you've been but "Engineering Manager" positions are the new "Devops" from 10 years ago in terms of needing to do multiple jobs. Every position I've both applied for and gotten has required that I can

-Complete technical tasks at the minimum of a senior engineer level if not staff/principal

-Train the -Project Management

-System Design, to the point that I am willing to put my name on each and every design as the architect

-Understand all the projects my team owns to the level that I can answer extremely explicit technical questions from other teams line engineers immediately in that meeting and not need to refer to my team's expertise

-Be on call 24/7. This isn't asked explicitly, but I am told that I need to be available to support my team for every on call event, which funnily enough means I cover 100% of the on 24/7 call schedule my team has

-People Management

-Employee growth

-Vendor Management

-more I am probably forgetting

I am not super incensed about this because the total comp has kept increasing as the expectations grow, but I am now 3 jobs in a row with companies expecting this combination of perfect high level engineer and perfect MBA accredited business leader in one role. If you have engineering managers that legitimately seem like overpaid scrum masters you should probably look to join a more mature software company.

Also if you're at a FAANG or close to FAANG startup and still feel this way, odds are that you have no idea what goes into 90% of running a team in an well running business and think that the company is making bad decisions because they don't dump 90% of their revenue into feature development instead of stupid choices like fulfilling government mandated regulation.

Edit: Also I've worked on teams with Scrum Masters. Its been more than 7 years since I last came across someone with that title. My Scrum Master equivalent planned tasks equate to less than 6 man hours total a week and 5 of that is the standup set for 15 minutes for 4 engineers a day that we normally end 5 minutes in

Re: Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers

#114

Post by kilbuz »

vjust wrote: post #89
booleandilemma wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My manager does little else besides asking what everyone is working on every day. We could automate her position with a slack bot and get the same results.

Give me a date when it will be done. That’s mgmt for you

Why don't you just tell me when you want it done? (said in Kramer MoviePhone voice)

Re: Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers

#115

Post by osigurdson »

darth_avocado wrote: post #5

Typical ratio of people to managers in a company is about 1:4, so that tracks. And before this becomes controversial, I don’t mean every manager has 4 reports, but because organization is a tree, for every 4 ICs, there’s one manager. For example, you could have 3PMs, 3 designers and 10 engineers, but the org could have 4 managers: 1 PM manager, 1 Design manager, 1 eng manager with 7 reportees and a sr manager with 3…

I do think all of these various kinds of managers - none with any actual clout, is part of the problem. It is although the structure is designed by employees for employees, not stakeholders.

Re: Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers

#116

Post by xyst »

greatpostman wrote: post #11

I have a long held belief that engineering managers are mostly a scam, and are actually just overpaid scrum masters. This is from working at some top companies

It’s the one profession that should be automated heavily via AI or whatever.

I have worked at orgs that have chains of middle managers. Each one of them asking for updates on the same shit.

Re: Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers

#117

Post by jwond »

gruez wrote: post #31
kuchenbecker wrote: post #15

I'm at LI and my reporting chain is Sr mgr > Sr Director > VP > Sr vp > CEO. A year ago it was mgr > sr mgr > director > sr Director> vp> svp > ceo. No one in my management chain was impacted but the flattening has been happening organically as folks leave. LI has a distinctive lack of chill right now contrary to the company image, but generally things are just moving faster.

>LI has a distinctive lack of chill right now contrary to the company image I don't get it. Did linkedin have an image of being a chill place to work?

I am reminded of this video of a young woman showing a "day in the life" of a LinkedIn employee

https://youtu.be/X5TZVhKDwpk

Re: Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers

#118

Post by throwawaysleep »

DamnYuppie wrote: post #110
throwawaysleep wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrum masters are the real scam. Let some non technical with neither a background in engineering or tech or management run things.

I think even worse than that are Product Managers who want to run their own developers using Scrum.....just no.....

I prefer those because at least a product manager is busy. Scrum Masters are so often bored to tears and end up generating all sorts of meetings as a result.

Re: Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers

#119

Post by ryanSrich »

jwond wrote: post #117
gruez wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LI has a distinctive lack of chill right now contrary to the company image I don't get it. Did linkedin have an image of being a chill place to work?

I am reminded of this video of a young woman showing a "day in the life" of a LinkedIn employee https://youtu.be/X5TZVhKDwpk

This is absolultey insane.

Re: Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers

#120

Post by iamthemonster »

ditonal wrote: post #82
greatpostman wrote: post #11

I have a long held belief that engineering managers are mostly a scam, and are actually just overpaid scrum masters. This is from working at some top companies

Silicon Valley used to have engineering managers who managed engineering. As the money got bigger we got more grifters / professional manager types. First thing they do is rebrand middle management as “leaders” and the other thing they do is make management non technical. This has even bled into making higher level IC engineering roles being “above” coding. “Staff engineers don’t code, they set high level architectur…

Wow. You've also just described oil and gas Operator engineering departments perfectly. It's got to the point in oil and gas operating companies, where even the simplest piece of technical work is outsourced, and even if you wanted to produce quality engineering deliverables yourself, it's hard to hunt down someone who is willing to review and sign them off because so few have that competency themselves. Of course nobody admits to that, so they're just slippery and try to reassign or deprioritise any work that involves actually doing a calculation.
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