171–180 of 187 posts
Ah. I understand. So there are people that will set a company/team above their own interest and are reasonably intelligent at the same time?
They're just looking for good liars, nothing else.
Throwaway for obvious reasons. I have first hand experience with both FB and Google. When it comes to office politics, Google is currently turning into shit pretty rapidly, comparatively speaking. It's still miles better than most other companies, but the deterioration is now beyond the point of no return. There are _tons_ of layers of management, and 90% of the time, you'd be hard pressed to see what they actually d…
My new project is actually quite interesting. There's very little politics involved too, which is a plus, and I'm glad I'm not writing yet another chat app that we will deprecate in 2 years time.
The worst part about Google for me is the level of incivility. This is what, the 4th time a senior exec has to call people out and tell them to behave on memegen? And it's only getting worse.
Also, considering how mediocre many Google engineers are, I never understood where all that arrogance comes from.
Edit: fix typos.
"At Facebook, moving into management is not a promotion. It’s a lateral move, a parallel track. " This is nice in theory. But when your "peers" with Manager in their title have access to more information and more decision-making power, it is not in fact a parallel track. Just saying people are equal doesn't make it so, and it doesn't change the underlying organizational structures.
I wanted to make the same point. Many large software companies have very similar structure. Since I had personal experience working in these companies here what I found as problem: - Management has decision making power. - Management has ability to control $$ (bonus allocation, etc.) - Management has access to more information than employees on "individual contributor" track It is important to note that system work u…
Companies that are set up well also give minimal control over bonus allocation or salaries. These things should be controlled by HR and recruiting, along with salary and compensation policies based on role and level. Managers supposedly have the best view on IC performance, so within some band they should be able to influence rate increases and promotions. Anything outside of that would need to be a conversation between the manager/IC and HR. My advise here is if you feel there is a deviation in your pay, get your manager to bat for you, do not go to HR yourself.
And by design, management will have access to more information than individual contributors, but that's the purpose of the role. This person brings in information, priorities, and resources to the team to execute. This is where the "power" idea comes in, but anyone in this position long enough would tell you its more of a "responsibility." It's not always clear what is right and what isn't, nor even a way to really prove it ex post facto. Could it give someone enough perspective to make self-interested decisions that ICs could not? Probably.
I suppose the question is, is that bad and how is it bad, and how would you eliminate it?
Edit: My wishful novelist inside me says its the software program that automates resource allocation, charter, and IC development. You could essentially build an autonomously managed organization with IC roles being the only true human employees.
I have a bunch of friends at Facebook - and from what I hear, this article is not very far off from what is happening. And it's all about many of the seniors leading with example. Take Philip Su, who was the site lead for Facebook London. In most organizations, that would translate to "manager of everything happening at Facebook". After 3 years he decided to take another lateral move - to move back to software develo…
The Philip Su example is great, but being an early employee and a manager has basically has insurance against getting fired and he can do what he pleases. That IMHO does not reflect the life of an average facebook employee.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that most companies have a small handful of such people, and lots of vice presidents. They want you to think it's equivalent, but the reality is that, Facebook and anywhere, there's only so far you can go on the technical track.
Exactly. Managers decide who is high level on the engineering side and also want to save money and have high management salaries. It's completely stupid to think that there won't be 500 VP's and 3 distinguished engineers in this situation, which is how it exactly is at the large tech companies.
Thus, if 1% of engineers are in the highest, distinguished level then 1% of managers should be in the highest managerial level. If those 500 VPs amount to 10% of all managerial positions then they should be comparable in impact and salary to all those engineers whose engineer contributor level amounts to 10% of all engineering positions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're absolutely right, in general, but I've been at Facebook for 5 years now, and the one thing I'll say about it is that once you establish a track record of 1) doing good work and 2) making good long-term decisions, that trumps any considerations around level. The culture is definitely such that the very senior folks (Director++) will value trust over level, so it's very much "influence over authority." P…
While this system does work well for very meritocratic groups, it is a mostly anecdotal/self-constructed replacement for defined/quantified hierarchy. The "influence over authority" framework is the adhoc social group hierarchy that is replacing a defined hierarchy, and is very susceptible to silos, clicks, and favoritism; regardless of the accuracy of the merit calculations by the members, of the members. I am not k…
In case this wasn't a phonetic typo and you're really not aware, the word you are looking for is "cliques". Cheers!
I can't speak about FB personally, but I learned the hard way my first few years out of college that at most companies managers are simply given more respect, power, and money than engineers in general. It takes an extraordinarily talented high-impact developer who revolutionizes the company's technology in order to match a run-of-the-mill Director or VP who just shows up to work and "manages" teams of developers --…
I really don't understand this view. They're different jobs. If you want to have the power an exec has become an exec. More than likely you cannot do both effectively at the same time. Yes, there are shitty managers but there are also a lot of them doing stuff an engineer doesn't have the skills to do. In all industries people think they could do a better job than their boss - usually it's not true and if it is learn…
and the engineers have skills most managers don't. One set just happens to lead to easier power and money, for some reason.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
our company (few 1000 devs) has a parallel hierarchy of ICs going all the way up to VP reporting directly to CEO. They are one of the most respected and influential people in company. While each team has complete freedom in terms of tech stack and other decisions, they drive company wide things like migration to cloud, inhouse big data platforms.
But do they get a seat at the table when the company sets its strategic direction? Likewise, do they get a say when the company decides how the budget is allocated and to whom? In my experience if the answers to these questions are no then the company is still being run by PHBs with PHB priorities and PHB viewpoints in which technical people are largely interchangeable cogs.
I do ask you to take the flip side. Do you want your non tech savvy PHBS at your meeting setting your technical direction? Should they tell you what Web framework to use? What IDE? Tabs vs spaces? OOP vs FOP?
Most engineers who I know are really mad about not helping more with business decisions, but they won't listen to a pointy hair boss making technical decisions. Why is that?
Throwaway for obvious reasons. I have first hand experience with both FB and Google. When it comes to office politics, Google is currently turning into shit pretty rapidly, comparatively speaking. It's still miles better than most other companies, but the deterioration is now beyond the point of no return. There are _tons_ of layers of management, and 90% of the time, you'd be hard pressed to see what they actually d…
I'm not sure that Google is turning into shit. It seems to me it's always been like that. I've been at Google for 4 years and noticed very quickly that turning software engineers into managers could not possibly work. I've switched teams recently and am happier for the time being, but my previous manager sucked ass. My new project is actually quite interesting. There's very little politics involved too, which is a pl…
As to the quality of engineers, I've worked with some AMAZING people at Google, far and away the best I've ever seen in my long career. After a while Google skews your perception as to what it means to be "good", because even the very worst SWEs at Google are well above average in the industry. Google would not be able to function without this, given that it takes a full 3-4 months to just become productive with its internal infra and kinda-sorta figure _some_ things out.
Throwaway for obvious reasons. I have first hand experience with both FB and Google. When it comes to office politics, Google is currently turning into shit pretty rapidly, comparatively speaking. It's still miles better than most other companies, but the deterioration is now beyond the point of no return. There are _tons_ of layers of management, and 90% of the time, you'd be hard pressed to see what they actually d…
I'm not sure that Google is turning into shit. It seems to me it's always been like that. I've been at Google for 4 years and noticed very quickly that turning software engineers into managers could not possibly work. I've switched teams recently and am happier for the time being, but my previous manager sucked ass. My new project is actually quite interesting. There's very little politics involved too, which is a pl…
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