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Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

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

#211

Post by ThalesX »

alas44 wrote: post #183
ThalesX wrote: post #178

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 gr…

Out of curiosity what were your own advice vs your manager's (I guess career related)?

Career-related. Most of it is low-level stuff, like what I'd be expected to do for my yearly reviews vs. what I wanted to do. I'll mention two stories that just sprang to mind, though there are more.

1 - I was working in a rich .NET environment; JavaScript was beginning to show its teeth and wasn't taken seriously by 'serious' programmers. I was going with my manager through the SMART objectives I needed to do for the year, and I mentioned wanting to learn about this new thing NodeJS and JavaScript on the server side. He kept pushing that I should do a presentation on our use of Entity Framework to get some clout against the Java department. I insisted that I was more interested in learning something new than just doing some presentation that has been done by almost every engineer on our team. He accused me of being an ego-driven engineer and wouldn't accept it. I learned NodeJS that year, did a presentation on it (it was fun, not a single senior thought this was worthwhile), and ultimately ended up using it a lot, and that headstart helped me.

2 - I was talking to the head architect in a large multinational, expressing my interest in joining the 'architect guild.' My manager informed me that I was too young (about 28 then) to consider this career move and that architecture is for older people. I found that to be rather stupid, and when I got offered a CTO role and the possibility to architect a system, I talked to my manager about it, telling him that I was very interested in being in that kind of role and asked if there's any way I could find it inside the company. He told me that 99% of startups failed and that my choice was between employment and ending up on the streets. I took the chance and couldn't help but smile, getting our first million dollars with him in the audience, front row seats paid by the corporation.

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

#212

Post by ghostpepper »

alas44 wrote: post #183
ThalesX wrote: post #178

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 gr…

Out of curiosity what were your own advice vs your manager's (I guess career related)?

Not the OP but it’s not uncommon for a manager to need one of their IC reports to replace them (and therefore go into management themselves) before the senior manager can move up.

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

#213

Post by wrigby »

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.

TLM (at Facebook) stands for Tech-Lead Manager - it’s a hybrid role, with engineering duties and people management duties.

From what I remember, it wasn’t intended as a long-term position, but was used in stop-gap circumstances (manager quits, tech lead temporarily takes on some people management duties) or for when an engineer was considering transitioning to the management track.

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

#214

Post by dqpb »

RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm wrote: post #84
fatnoah wrote: post #16

I love management and, after over 17 years in an IC capacity, find that it fulfills me in a way that writing code stopped doing. I was also a manager at Meta in a past life, and really didn't love the experience due to the nature of the company and roles of manager. I do think I'd really like being an IC there, due to the high level of autonomy and focus on doing impactful work.

[flagged]

Meta created pyTorch

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

#215

Post by icedchai »

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…

It's not that they are useless, it's that there are often too many of them. At a previous SV org I worked for, they had roughly 1 "dev manager" for every 4 engineers. You could have 1 for every 10 and achieve the same result.

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

#216

Post by com2kid »

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.

It has been in common use for at least 15, if not 20 years.

Very common phrase in the tech industry.

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

#217

Post by posharma »

ThalesX wrote: post #178

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 gr…

Meta expects you to have managed at least 40 ppl before considering them for a M2 role. M2s made $800k+. Why wouldn’t a manager not be motivated to grow his empire? How else do you think managers will grow to VPs? We discuss ideals here but the reality on the ground is vastly different.

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

#218

Post by bradleyjg »

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…

When was Zuck’s last PR?

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

#219

Post by rippercushions »

ThalesX wrote: post #178

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 gr…

Building empires is quite standard in management. I work at $BIGCO as a manager and have been told that, in practice, if I want to get a promotion to the next level, I'll need to grow my team large enough to have other managers reporting to me first. So my primary target is to convince the powers that be to give me headcount, and what my team actually does is strictly secondary.

Now I'm a mere peon, but this replicates up the chain increasing an order of magnitude each level, meaning up top you get VPs backstabbing each other to take over the victim's headcount and wrangle that sweet SVP promotion.

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

#220

Post by fdgsdfogijq »

ThalesX wrote: post #178

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 gr…

I experienced the exact same thing, and have watched the mediocre engineers that went straight for management move up the chain. IC engineering just doesnt have that good of career advancement. The cynical career advice is to just move into management as soon as possible.
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