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 think that the role of an "Engineering Manager" or "Tech Lead" or "Team Lead" etc. should all be pretty interchangeable, or at least have very high overlap.
Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
111–120 of 674 posts
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, because these positions are genuinely being offered as an alternative to being laid off. If you choose not to take the new position, then you have terminated yourself.
What are individual contributors in English? I took it to mean they were becoming contractors?
Anyone non-tech I know would just call it "labor", as opposed to management. The people who mostly do the things that make the stuff, rather than mostly telling others to do the things to make the stuff.
Again, people'd just say "labor" in other contexts. Or maybe "workers". I'm not sure where "IC" came from but I've never seen it outside of tech, and that, mostly online.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#113I think this is a great move. My understanding is that some reporting chains in facebook have 12 links between IC and Zuckerberg, which is crazy inefficient. Enormous organizations are able to run effectively with 5-6 links from IC to CEO. Managers managing managers managing turtles all the way down is a horrible form of "administrative bloat". You see bloat like this in enormous organizations like colleges, governments, and now monopolistic tech companies. This is besides the point that I don't think that big tech has successfully groomed many managers into people are capable of actually managing businesses; they don't drive value, they preside over decisions and make a case for higher headcount in the next planning cycle.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Okay I'll feed the troll. There are only a few places where if you implemented, for example, an effort to reduce "body dysmorphic disorder", it could instantly improve the lives of 3 billion users worldwide. Meta is one of those places.
I don't see their comment as trolling. Reducing the negative impact Meta already has is a more accurate description. Given their track record so far, you'd be a tiny minority to even get to work on that instead of ad/user engagement optimization for example.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, because these positions are genuinely being offered as an alternative to being laid off. If you choose not to take the new position, then you have terminated yourself.
What are individual contributors in English? I took it to mean they were becoming contractors?
Individual contributors is just a fancy name for a software engineer without direct reports. Aka you'd stop being a manager and just write code (for the most part).
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, because these positions are genuinely being offered as an alternative to being laid off. If you choose not to take the new position, then you have terminated yourself.
What are individual contributors in English? I took it to mean they were becoming contractors?
Non-managers, they aren't responsible for anyone but themselves. I know nothing of Meta's specific titles but I'd expect that e.g. the first level of full time engineering manager would convert to a full time senior or staff engineer.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look man, Apple tanked Facebooks valuation, not the Metaverse. And that's presumably why he wants the Metaverse, so he's not just a sharecropper on someone else's digital platform.
I absolutely don't know why Facebook balked at making their own phone back in the day. Facebook's entire value prop about 10-15 years ago was the fact that you could find anyone on there who you even remotely knew. Imagine (10 years ago) being able to use an FB version of Siri/Alexa to "connect me to that girl Megan from my 5th grade classroom". Sure sounds compelling. Instead FB released a half-assed "dailer app/wid…
> I absolutely don't know why Facebook balked at making their own phone back in the day.
Why would that have gone any better for them than it went for Amazon and Microsoft?
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn’t that basically constructive termination?
No, because these positions are genuinely being offered as an alternative to being laid off. If you choose not to take the new position, then you have terminated yourself.
If an actual layoff is the alternative, rather than being fired for-cause (after failing at being an IC, perhaps) or quitting, then yeah, it's not really constructive termination. I can't read the article to see if that's the case, though.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#119I've said it before on here: being a lower-level manager in a large company is worse than an entry-level job.
No one cares about your job experience (all those painful internal tools you now have to use to manage and report on your team) so you're just expected to grit through all the broken processes and inefficiencies (kiss your evenings and Sunday afternoons goodbye), and you are mostly powerless, particularly in orgs with centrally managed budgets.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on the company, of course (and I've no idea how it works at Facebook), but some companies make their EMs out of ICs (much like Pokemon, I assume touching a special rock is required to effect the evolution) and it's somewhat common for EMs to re-IC-ify on their own anyway.
When the EM becomes an IC, how does this help the team grow their own skills and not get distracted by problems the EM should be moving out of their way? When the EM is an IC, what stops them from either interfering with small stuff (I had an EM -- back then we called them "managers" -- stop us for a week trying to determine whether we should use List or Vector in Scala. Nobody was happy) or taking the big interestin…
I don’t really understand the first question, but do you mean that the capacity of an EM to spend time on growing team skills is reduced? There is a limited amount of time a manager can spend on that. If it’s a small team, then they could do a good job at it whilst doing small bits on the side.
For the 2nd, I imagine that if you are a manager and an IC on the side, then you don’t have the time to spend on big projects. It’s more likely you’ll be filling in gaps or doing the uninteresting but necessary work. There’s nothing stopping you from attempting to hoard the interesting projects, but then your performance on either role or both will likely suffer. That’s not really a new failure mode - any manager can be bad.
As a manager + IC, you shouldn’t be leading projects, since that’s a useful skill for your reports to develop. I guess there may be exceptions if your team is particularly junior. Ideally, if you are not micromanaging, you only participate on a big project if required or asked, not because you want to. Your main role is the people management side and to help with planning, prioritisation and communication.