Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by the_af » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 9:05 PM UTC

Izkata wrote: post #161

the_af wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others have answered what the words "IC" mean, but let me add that this is the usual name for the technical career track, i.e. the not-management track, meant for people who do not want to manage teams of people. Strictly speaking, the roles of Engineer Manager and IC are incompatible; you cannot want to manage people and at the same time want to stay out of it. So in this particular context, "EM+IC" is a misnomer fo…

> this is the usual name I dunno if it's just me, but it seems like the term came out of nowhere just a couple years ago.

True! I meant the usual name now. For me it's the same as Engineer Manager: it seems to have come out of nowhere but it's the standard now. Before we called them simply "managers" (or sometimes "team leaders" of the non-technical variety).

PS: are you by any chance the same Izkata as the one in scifi.se?

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

#202

Post by the_af » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 9:07 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #169

the_af wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, generally the team would still have an EM, just not that EM If there is an EM role, I don't see the problem. I took TFA to mean "become an EM who also codes". > What stops any IC doing that? Nothing, but an IC has by definition time to tackle big problems. Also, other ICs are their peers. An EM+IC has no time to tackle big problems -- or if they do, then they are neglecting their management role -- and so by…

> I took TFA to mean "become an EM who also codes". I don't _think_ that's what they're saying. I read it as "we have too many EMs; would some EMs like to un-EM, please?

Oh. In that case I misunderstood TFA. Wouldn't be the first time! In that case, I agree with you: no problem with an EM going back to an IC role.

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

#203

Post by bink » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 9:07 PM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #99

At Meta many engineers tried management and then went back to being an individual contributor. I'm not sure of the exact numbers but it was a very common career path. It did build up empathy for management on the senior IC side and meant that teams didn't get stuck with managers that didn't actually want to be a manager. If the company is not growing headcount this move makes perfect sense.

That's a pretty common thing once ICs reach a certain age. I've seen it everywhere I've worked. Sometimes it's because they fear age discrimination but more commonly I've found it caused by the organization not providing a great career path beyond a certain level. With wisdom comes the ability to accept that it's OK to stick at an engineering career level for years at a time.

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

#204

Post by LambdaComplex » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 9:07 PM UTC

zabzonk wrote: post #191

sbrother wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TLM is the term I've heard for that more often.

what does TLM mean? i wish that all you folks out there would understand that nobody outside your bubble knows what these daft abbreviations stands for, much less mean.

Tech Lead Manager is my guess. I'm familiar with the term "tech lead," at least.

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

#205

Post by rsynnott » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 9:08 PM UTC

hello_moto wrote: post #195

rsynnott wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> would have IC levels parallel to their EM levels. They might be looking at... sidemotion Sure. Many companies do this too. Like Senior Engineer at the level of Engineering Manager and Staff at the level of Senior Engineer Manager. They don't have direct report and they still write code. Same payband and leveling but different job function. But at the end of the day, the ICs still have to "report" to Management: Sen…

Well, sure, but in a company of any size managers also have to report to managers; it's managers all the way up.

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

#206

Post by ratorx » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 9:08 PM UTC

the_af wrote: post #135

ratorx wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 project…

> 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. Yes, that's part of what I mean (but also: dealing with red tape, bureaucracy, and removing impediments) and no, the amount of time that can be used for this is basically u…

I don’t think you treat the team manager as a senior IC. You treat them as a mid-level IC with a part-time job. If you are a manager you can’t also be considered a full-time senior IC (except in very specific cases, which should be transitionary) for the purposes of work allocation, because you can’t dedicate your full time to the job.

I don’t think management is unlimited work, at least not always. There are a fixed set of people on the team doing a fixed number of things who can only grow at a fixed rate. I agree that it could be a full time job or more, but I think that depends on the specifics. Obviously managers shouldn’t be forced to be ICs in all situations. If management is taking up all your time, you can retract from the IC pool. However, I think it’s valuable to consider and push for organisational changes to allow yourself to enter the IC pool again (maybe handing off some responsibilities to a new team etc.).

> failure mode driven by two conflicting goals

Again, I think this strongly depends on how you allocate yourself. There is room for a pre-emptible IC, that is not always available. However, it’s situation dependent whether this is useful or not. The conflicting goals theory only applies if you try and optimise for both. Your IC performance can suffer, whilst still being a net positive, again depending on the specific situation. That’s kinda upto you as a manager to quantify though. The article is more good advice on how not to approach this dual situation. If you know how to prioritise being a manager though, the points don’t apply.

On the flip side, sometimes your management performance HAS to suffer to meet critical deadlines because the entirety of the normal IC pool has other critical deadlines. It’s also upto you to avoid these situations, and if they happen then strongly push back on your leadership to prevent them happening again.

Your primary goal as a manager is to ensure team productivity and deadlines. If you can’t recognise that you are a detriment and step back (or at the very least step back when you get feedback from others who do), then that suggests that other aspects of your management are lacking as well, so it seems like the same failure mode.

The benefit to keeping yourself in the IC pool is that you can keep your skills at least slightly fresh. Even if you are no longer a full senior IC, not having any technical skills means an inability to make technical judgements if required.

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

#207

Post by AlgorithmicTime » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 9:08 PM UTC

rich_sasha wrote: post #92

buffet_overflow wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh how I don’t miss those days of management. It because a theory of mine that a large part of my job function was to simultaneously water down accountability from above, while adding enough complexity to the layers below me to discourage them from changing the status quo. The double edged sword being, without that authority, that same power structure is forced on me, and now I’m more aware of it.

I have a feeling being in middle management leads to that squeeze. If you're closer to the doing, you are more isolated from the companyspeak nonsense. If you are in the upper part of the food chain, you get to enjoy more influence, freedom, a better risk/reward tradeoff, with costs you mention. In the middle you're kind of screwed from both ends.

[dead]

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

#208

Post by Moissanite » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 9:09 PM UTC

hotpotamus wrote: post #168

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…

I've always like the term soldier. It's what organized crime syndicates, armies, and ant colonies all use. The worst is when someone gets called a "resource", but I can't get too exercised about IC.

As a consultant, I've become accustomed to being referred to as "the resource" by operations people. However, the day an engagement manager refers to me directly as "resource" is the day I openly start referring to them as my secretary.

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

#209

Post by roughly » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 9:09 PM UTC

SilverBirch wrote: post #171

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 w…

This is the sort of thing that you don't recognize until you become a manager, and then you do and you watch everyone on your team run around like a bunch of kids chasing whatever caught their attention that day and it all becomes a lot clearer.

"Why are we doing this" and "how does it align with the business's goals" and more pointedly "what are we not doing so we can do this instead" and "is that the right trade-off" are all questions even very technically gifted engineers seem to have a really hard time answering.

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

#210

Post by warner25 » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 9:10 PM UTC

0xB31B1B wrote: post #113

I 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, governme…

Wow. I'll say that even in the Army, famous for its bloat, there are arguably fewer than 12 links (following the legal chain of command) between the lowest ranking private and the President of the United States...

Private -> Team Leader -> Squad Leader -> Platoon Leader -> Company Commander -> Battalion Commander -> Brigade Commander -> Division Commander -> Corps Commander -> Combatant Commander -> SECDEF -> POTUS

Of course we also pad that with a lot of senior enlisted advisors, executive officers, chiefs-of-staff, deputy commanders, etc. who can effectively be additional buffers between each echelon.