Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am reminded of this video of a young woman showing a "day in the life" of a LinkedIn employee https://youtu.be/X5TZVhKDwpk
I never understood how much of these videos was parody.
Approx 0.00%
Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers
251–260 of 289 posts
Re: Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was thinking about this in mathematical terms recently, in terms of what's efficient vs. what can scale . In general, managers can't do things for reports that don't scale fairly across their whole team, because otherwise it'll give the appearance of favoritism for those reports who get favors and demotivate the rest. So to a first approximation, a manager with N reports can devote at most 1/N of their time to making…
This makes sense. What are some examples of things that a manager can do which will save time for an IC? A mature team will hopefully have implemented efficient workflows.
Most teams aren't mature and the ones that are didn't get that way by overextending their managers.
Re: Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers
#253wsa31e`
Re: Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers
#254Re: Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers
#255I see all the comments about how managers are necessary. Let’s assume we can automate more and more HR tasks, what are managers required for besides that?
I can say confidently that <5% of my time as an EM has anything to do with HR.
Re: Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was thinking about this in mathematical terms recently, in terms of what's efficient vs. what can scale . In general, managers can't do things for reports that don't scale fairly across their whole team, because otherwise it'll give the appearance of favoritism for those reports who get favors and demotivate the rest. So to a first approximation, a manager with N reports can devote at most 1/N of their time to making…
This makes sense. What are some examples of things that a manager can do which will save time for an IC? A mature team will hopefully have implemented efficient workflows.
The biggest one I've encountered is just scouting out problems before handing them off to an IC, to ensure they're framed correctly and the IC will be able to make rapid progress on them.
Some of the levers a manager can pull to make the IC's job easier are: 1) negotiating with PM/UX to accept a solution that might have 80% of the user benefit but is 10x easier to implement 2) lining up commitments from partner teams before committing their own resources 3) lining up schedules so that all the people on a project are working on it at the same time, regardless of which team they're from 4) arranging to colocate people from different teams who will be working on the same project, to cut communication overhead 5) doing #1 to change the architecture and eliminate the need for partner teams altogether, avoiding #2-4 and cutting communication overhead 6) pointing the report at a potential solution early so they waste less time hunting around 7) answering simple questions from other teams so that it doesn't take your own engineers out of flow 8) buying off-the-shelf solutions when appropriate to scale down the project 9) killing infeasible projects before they get to the engineers.
All of these require time and technical knowledge, though. An engineering manager with 16 directs is unlikely to have time to do anything other than performance reviews, meetings, and reassigning work that comes down from product/UX/sales. A tech-lead manager with 4 directs can devote some of their time to architecture & design, which then feeds back into resourcing and project assignments.
Re: Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers
#257Re: Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"bitching" implies that it wasn't hopelessly toxic and problem-inducing
Re: Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or, you know, the people dealing with the advertisers ("partners") are gone and no money is coming in. But sure the servers are still running ;)
no idea why you need a dedicated person for dealing with the advertisers. it seemed to be just pressure from adl to scare the advertisers away, or otherwise adl will generate controversy a very slimy and backwards model
> a very slimy and backwards model
perhaps it is, but that's the business a lot of big tech is in. ads drive everything. google is an advertising company with a lot of data mining on the front-end.
if your ad game and monitization isn't tight then you don't have a company, you have a public service, and one that will gas out pretty quickly.
Re: Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
> India Ok, so, I have a friend who works big tech and he has no chill for Indians (SWEs, PMs, etc). Is there a grain of truth to the “lazy Indian” trope? I always assumed, especially first generation immigrants, would be working balls-to-the-wall. Am I wrong? Is there some sort of incentive misalignment in the H1B program? Is it cultural (e.g. like “island time”, which I’ve learned is at least partially attributable…
> Ok, so, I have a friend who works big tech and he has no chill for Indians (SWEs, PMs, etc). Is there a grain of truth to the “lazy Indian” trope? Indian here. First generation, naturalized American, et cetera. I'll be honest and say that my initial response was, “Ugh! Your friend is a big old racist”. Moving on from that reflexive thought, I'll attempt to answer your question of: > I’m asking is there a perceptual…
> But then that brings me to the part about “friend who works big tech and he has no chill for Indians”. Like, Indians period?
I very much like a lot about Indian culture and people, and I've met a couple of very sharp Indian programmers who I'd gladly work with again, but I think it's understandable that some tech workers in countries like the US have a reflexively negative impression of working with them even before considering some of the cultural differences in the workplace.
* I feel very bad in these interactions, but it is an immense struggle to understand some very thick accents that some Indians have. To be frank, remote work has made this communication even tougher, as any imperfection in the audio makes already difficult communication very awkward. There's only so many times you can say "I didn't quite catch that" or "Can you please repeat that, the audio glitched out" before it becomes obvious that you just can't have a normal discussion with them.
* Many peoples' experience with Indians is through very low-quality recruitment sweat shops. Traits these recruiters exhibit include being bad communicators, pushy, disrespectful of social norms, have questionable motives, barely understand anything about the tech they're recruiting for to the point of even getting the names of technologies they're looking for wrong, and are rarely worth dealing with.
* I don't blame Indians for doing this out of their own self-interest, but nepotism seems to be rampant. Any company that gets a few Indians in positions to hire eventually seems to focus on hiring their own people first. Not good for your future in a company if you're not in that group.
* I don't blame anybody for trying to seek the best deal they can in life, but the H1B program has shitty properties for both immigrants as well as the existing workers in countries who get displaced. The main beneficiary of the H1B program is companies that use it to drive wages down. Hard to have reflexively pleasant feelings about this circumstance, despite it not being their fault.