11–20 of 481 posts
Now we'll get to see which is more powerful: the invisible hand of the free markets, or the human tendency of power to accrete with autocrats, who seem to struggle immensely with the idea of letting people have the freedom to control their work environment and hours.
> is highly dependent on how well it’s managed. That's the kicker, right there. I am kind of in despair, at the quality of tech managers; especially "first line" managers, these days.
I see an absolutely shocking number of managers promoted from the IC ranks, who not only have no preparation for management, but no experience at any other company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle > A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
It's an open secret that it is no longer day 1 at Amazon.
> is highly dependent on how well it’s managed. That's the kicker, right there. I am kind of in despair, at the quality of tech managers; especially "first line" managers, these days.
I see an absolutely shocking number of managers promoted from the IC ranks, who not only have no preparation for management, but no experience at any other company.
They don't do strategy, but they do tactics, like nobody's business, and are often highly valuable input into development of strategies. They are given tremendous agency, and are highly trained. The military does a great job of training and retaining highly-experienced, and highly-skilled NCOs.
First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks. They don't like their jobs, and want to get out, as quickly as possible.
In unions, foremen are often quite happy with their roles, and don't really want to go beyond (they wouldn't mind more perks and pay, but they like their jobs).
Like bad tech career ladders, the manager career ladders are also pretty terrible.
Since most companies that are enforcing RTO aren't doing this, it only makes sense that it is a covert mass layoff. They just want people to quit because they were planning on culling the herd anyway, and would prefer it be a self-selection of those who aren't willing to put up with bullshit.
Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence, often it's something they're very grumpy about (hardly the best state of mind for good judgement) and often based on the assumption that company productivity is based on workers doing what they do (usually far from the truth, workers in general don't have anything like the same composition of tasks that CEOs do).
It's unfortunate to that it has divided into camps, as there are bound to be cases/roles/groupings of workers where one approach comes out better and others where it's worse. But very quickly everyone went pretty much for one-size fits all (with a few exceptions).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see an absolutely shocking number of managers promoted from the IC ranks, who not only have no preparation for management, but no experience at any other company.
In the (US) military, the sergeants run the army. NCOs are highly-trained, and have been the secret of managing battlefield chaos, for generations. They don't do strategy, but they do tactics, like nobody's business, and are often highly valuable input into development of strategies. They are given tremendous agency, and are highly trained. The military does a great job of training and retaining highly-experienced, a…
This is because most companies don't have a promotion track above "Senior Software Engineer" that doesn't involve people-management, which is an entirely different job. It's as if you ran a restaurant and in order for your highest rated chef to get promoted, he had to learn how to make kitchen cabinets. You'd have a bunch of people who loved cooking but had to build cabinets instead because that's the only way their career could grow.
And even at the BigTech companies who claim to have "parallel" technical promotion tracks that don't involve people management, it's often not truly parallel. If you work in one of these companies, count how many Directors and VPs are in your company, and then compare it to how many technical people there are at equivalent levels who are not managing people. I bet there are at least 10x as many Directors and VPs if not 100x than super-senior-staff-ultra-mega Engineers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see an absolutely shocking number of managers promoted from the IC ranks, who not only have no preparation for management, but no experience at any other company.
There is no guaranteed way to create managers from scratch, business specialists don't understand the technical facts well enough to resolve the kinds of disputes that arise at the project manager level, and as you observe ICs are not always inclined to make other people's work their primary concern.
It's good to see some serious arguments for WFH. Globally much of the pro-office camp's public position is driven by personal leanings of CEOs who genuinely seem to have made the decisions without evidence, often it's something they're very grumpy about (hardly the best state of mind for good judgement) and often based on the assumption that company productivity is based on workers doing what they do (usually far fro…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the (US) military, the sergeants run the army. NCOs are highly-trained, and have been the secret of managing battlefield chaos, for generations. They don't do strategy, but they do tactics, like nobody's business, and are often highly valuable input into development of strategies. They are given tremendous agency, and are highly trained. The military does a great job of training and retaining highly-experienced, a…
> First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks. This is because most companies don't have a promotion track above "Senior Software Engineer" that doesn't involve people-management, which is an entirely different job. It's as if you ran a restaurant and in order for your highest rated chef to get prom…
And the promotion to upper technical levels involves - once again - larger influence over people as opposed to technical growth.