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Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

bloomberg.com

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Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

#171

Post by SilverBirch »

throwaway4837 wrote: post #111

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…

You're pretty much just repeating the constant engineer gripe of "What do managers even do". The point of management is co-ordination and direction. They're not there to contribute to the codebase, they're there to ensure people are contributing the right things to the codebase. If you really think these managers/directors/VPs are useless, describe what you think they're meant to be doing, and how it would get done without them.

Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

#172

Post by 29athrowaway »

throwaway4837 wrote: post #111

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…

If coding is beneath you, working in software is beyond you.

If you are a people person and love helping people so much, go work as a social worker, no?

Managers are employees same as ICs. An IC can have more impact than a manager.

http://programming-motherfucker.com/

Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

#173

Post by rsynnott »

hello_moto wrote: post #158
the_af wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought we wanted to get rid of layers of management?

This is effectively demoting and laying off middle management. These SDMs won't be an IC _and_ manager. These SDMs are demoted.

Eh, not necessarily demoted; many companies, and I'd assume Facebook, would have IC levels parallel to their EM levels. They might be looking at... sidemotion?

Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

#174

Post by eftychis »

zabzonk wrote: post #156
eftychis wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individual Contributor. Don't ask me why in heavens that term makes any sense outside one that is myopic or only works with extremely fresh out of school junior engineers and unskilled workers. Edit: P.S. Not sure why a couple of people decided to downvote this opinion. Also to other commenters: it sounds to me less as a be a team player title (like the soldier one suggested) and more like an isolated resource that m…

when did this appear? i literally have never seen it before i read this post, and it makes no sense at all to me.

I am not sure. It has been around for at least 5 years I would say. I guess at some point they needed a nice sounding alternative category to people not becoming managers.

Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

#176

Post by prepend »

KaiserPro wrote: post #164
throwaway4837 wrote: post #111

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…

> They instead encourage them to focus fully on process and sprint management. Thats literally the point. Its totally fucking batshit that somewhere like meta still uses spreadsheet to plan. This is why properly trained people should be doing management. Project management at scale is not something you "dip into" its a full time job to project manage and people manage. Its not something most ICs should be doing. A co…

Chief surgeons do all those things you describe. Check out the job description [0] as they are basically department heads doing recruiting, budgeting, supervising, etc. Chief Surgeon doesn’t mean best surgeon.

[0] https://www.betterteam.com/chief-surgeon-job-description

Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

#177

Post by s1mon »

This is interesting. During my last job search I talked to colleagues who had positions at Oculus and Tesla. Both of them talked about things being set up for either management or IC, but not both. I prefer to do some of both. Just management would lead to my IC skills getting rusty, which would mean that some of the management that I do would become more and more disconnected from current practices. Just being a high level IC can divorce you from determining the direction of your work. High level ICs who've never dealt with the realities of managing projects or programs can be frustrating to deal with since they may not understand why things can't always be done in the perfect way.

Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

#178

Post by ThalesX »

Potentially inflammatory story, but I think about it occasionally, and this is a good context.

I was out having a meal with old college buddies; most of us are developers, but some have become team leaders and managers. I will call it a statistical anomaly, but the worst engineers are now in 'people management' positions.

The discussion ended with a guy boasting about how his team has X people, and he's looking to grow it to Y this year. Naturally, we asked if he needed that much headcount. Turns out, no. It's their way of assessing value and getting promoted. He gave almost 0 fucks about the quality of the people employed and how adding them to the team would impact quality. The only thing on his mind was getting that number up to pump up his CV for the following position of managing people.

I'm gladly reporting that he managed to do that and has indeed been promoted, and I still can't say what he does for a living apart from 'enable engineers to grow their careers.'

I've also been in positions where my 'people managers' advised me against my interests. Unfortunately, I am my own people manager, so I took my own advice, which worked out wonderfully. I wake up from time to time thankful that I didn't follow the advice of my managers and was able to see some of them in the audience from the stage.

Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

#179

Post by neosat »

FB and Zuck have always prioritized a culture of building, and created a place (at least in the early days) where builders could thrive. Over time with massive hiring this obviously changed. If they need to further 'trim the fat' Part of this move could also be as a mechanism for selecting out people who are not comfortable with IC responsibilities as a way to identify people who would not have been a fit for FB in the early days, and thus an attempt to revise at least some of the early culture.
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