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Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

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Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#161

Post by Clubber »

basisword wrote: post #97

I don't understand the shit 'managers' get on here. I've been in this industry for 15+ years and with one or two rare exceptions every manager has been great. They respect my time, when I need something they're incredibly helpful, and they care about my career development. IMO the culling over managers over the past few years is really a way to make sure you don't have someone you can discuss career development, prom…

I've had mostly bad managers. Most of them maybe wrote code for a year or two and think they understand team dynamics and how to build software. They then burden a good running team with whatever cult processes of the day is without taking any time to understand those team dynamics and which processes fit in those dynamics. It's like a coach that calls nothing but pass plays for a run centric team and makes the 180lb guy play lineman and the 300lb guy play defensive back while thinking 20% turnover is good. No higher understanding of software development what so ever. For me and my teams, they've mostly been a burden.

A good manager protects the team from political shit rolling down hill. They understand who is good at what and allows people to thrive in what they are good at. They keep the team focused, and reward and acknowledge teams for their milestones. They explain to the team why they are doing something and what they hope to achieve while asking the team for their thoughts and adjustments. They also go to bat for the team when it's time for praise, raises and recognition. They privately criticize and publicly praise. They know when a team member is a liability and act accordingly. Most today are just ladder climbers or people who have been Peter principled or nepotism-ed into their role.

I've been in the field for nearly 30 years now. Managers in the late 90s, early 00s were way better than the lot I've experienced since.

Here's a decent summary of how we got here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6gMf5zR2c4

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#162

Post by sgarland »

Aurornis wrote: post #53
bb88 wrote: post #24

I'm going to make the observation that politics in a company is caused by management. The more "politics" you have at a company, the more you pay in a "political tax". Effort which should benefit the company is delayed or made harder as employees have to bob and weave to get through the politics. I do believe if you want real culture change in a company, the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because tha…

The most egregious office politics I've ever experienced came from the company that had a pathological aversion to managers. They aimed for minimizing managerial positions to an extreme. The result was that a lot of ICs were playing hardball politics with nobody to keep them in check. Really opened my eyes to the reality of office politics.

Those people are also dead weight. I despise the fact that I have to play politics at work. Work should be based on results, period. Spending time politicking is not producing results; at best, it’s eventually producing via cajoling what could have been accomplished in 1/4 the time if you’d been left alone and trusted.

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#163

Post by karmakaze »

My experience is that most managers are between good and okay, some are great, countably few are obstacles. What's different are many layers of middle managers which I don't deal with directly. A fair number, though not much fault of their own create broken telephone communication pathways. Some are actively out for themselves and growing their little empires, alignment be damned. It's good to maintain good technical communication signals with fewer mis-translation points, so flatter orgs are more agile.

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#165

Post by fatnoah »

hnthrow90348765 wrote: post #133
ketzo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way people on HN sometimes talk about "management," you'd think the universal experience is 1% good, 9% benign, 90% actively seeking the downfall of civilization Managers seem like a good example of the "toupee problem" -- the ones you notice, and really remember, are the bad ones; the best, you might never see at all.

The economic cards seemed more stacked against workers, so resentment for managers builds more quickly than the opposite direction. Management who resents their workers can also fire them. Workers who resent their managers must go find another job. And offshoring/nearshoring for workers happens more than managers. Would be interested in comparing the interview processes for ICs vs. managers at Amazon. Probably no lee…

> Probably no leetcode-equivalent for managers?

For FAANG, most front-line manager roles have a leetcode style coding round, though it may be easier and/or weighted less heavily than for an IC.

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#166

Post by donnachangstein »

protocolture wrote: post #149
ketzo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way people on HN sometimes talk about "management," you'd think the universal experience is 1% good, 9% benign, 90% actively seeking the downfall of civilization Managers seem like a good example of the "toupee problem" -- the ones you notice, and really remember, are the bad ones; the best, you might never see at all.

I think you also need to account for the amount of bad. Like a bad programmer can push terrible code, get caught at review and performance managed. But a bad manager can cause much more harm. An organisation with bad management can punch itself in the face very hard and cause significant issues. Like I have only seen a terrible management culture in 2 of my employees, but for 1 of them, it lead to: 30 or 40 careers d…

> Like a bad programmer can push terrible code, get caught at review and performance managed. But a bad manager can cause much more harm. An organisation with bad management can punch itself in the face very hard and cause significant issues.

Ironically every place I've worked, a lot of these bad programmers got placed into the management pipeline, because they had not the skills to hack it as an IC, so it was a worst case scenario of "fake it till you make it".

You could be the most incompetent programmer in the world, but a suave bullshitter is a shoe-in for management, where they now get to tell the competent programmers how to do their jobs.

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#167

Post by bsimpson »

rsynnott wrote: post #156
timc3 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you must have grow up at a particular time which didnt have them. There was a time period where it would be unusual to have a TV or VCR without them.

European TVs generally used SCART cables (a sort of 1970s analog HDMI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCART ), from the 1980s until HDMI took over. It was, indeed, fairly common for a TV or VCR or games console to have _only_ SCART. Odd standard; it had both composite and RGB lines, but also control lines, so, like HDMI-CEC, you could set it up so that your VCR couldn’t quite control your TV. It also supported daisy-c…

I feel like the US has a history of inventing a thing and having an early version of it become popular. By the time it's mainstream in Europe, it has been improved and standardized, giving the appearance that Europe has more modern technology.

Perhaps the most famous example of this is magstripe card in the US vs EMV chip cards in Europe. The US had credit cards first, but standardized on swiping magnetic stripes. By the time they were widespread in Europe, the technology had advanced, so someone from the 2000s might think Europe did credit cards better. (The M and the V in EMV actually stand for the American companies MasterCard and VISA.)

I wonder if there's a term for this phenomenon.

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#168

Post by donnachangstein »

Myrmornis wrote: post #135
basisword wrote: post #97

I don't understand the shit 'managers' get on here. I've been in this industry for 15+ years and with one or two rare exceptions every manager has been great. They respect my time, when I need something they're incredibly helpful, and they care about my career development. IMO the culling over managers over the past few years is really a way to make sure you don't have someone you can discuss career development, prom…

My experience has generally been that a group of intelligent adults are capable of both planning and steering the course of their development efforts as well as carrying out those development efforts. It's not unprecedented, or a particularly radical thesis: in university research labs, as a PhD student, post-doc, or professor, you manage yourself (PhD students meeting with their advisor once every few weeks). Sure,…

> in university research labs, as a PhD student, post-doc, or professor, you manage yourself

That is not the real world.

Turns out working for your brother-in-law they let you manage yourself too.

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#169

Post by nine_zeros »

vkou wrote: post #132
nine_zeros wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And because they are only doing administration and reviews, they are even lesser required.

Yes, you can always push that admin and coordination and communication work down to the ICs. I'm sure you'll be thrilled to get that added to your plate.

Are you talking about the same admin and coordination required to keep 10 layers of management updated?

Easy enough to solve, just remove a few layers.

Re: Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly

#170

Post by [deleted] »

ketzo wrote: post #107
steveBK123 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely unique experience for you probably. I think career wise in 20 years I'd break down my experience as - 25% benign, 25% malign, 50% good. This is across 6+ companies, 15-20 managers.

The way people on HN sometimes talk about "management," you'd think the universal experience is 1% good, 9% benign, 90% actively seeking the downfall of civilization Managers seem like a good example of the "toupee problem" -- the ones you notice, and really remember, are the bad ones; the best, you might never see at all.

[deleted]
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