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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

#241

Post by qualudeheart »

posharma wrote: post #228
fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. IC career is not as sexy as HN makes it to be. People pursuing IC careers are doing it for personal reasons, definitely not for growth. Compared to management it takes an order of magnitude more time, influence and energy to get promoted in the IC ladder beyond staff.

Intelligence Community?

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

#242

Post by hourago »

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'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.'

And that is the kind of person that survives purges like the one Meta is doing. The managers that did not grow an empire, the managers that did their jobs and cared for their teams are the ones that will be removed.

When an organization incentivizes managers, directors and vice-presidents to grow empires, when the axe comes down it does it on the people that did not play the game.

I do not understand why some people gets so happy when management gets the axe. Do you think that good managers that cared for the team instead of their own career are the ones that stay?

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

#243

Post by ThalesX »

brundolf wrote: post #229
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…

To counter-anecdote: I've basically never had a bad manager. Several have been exceptional, shielding me from the whims of higher-ups while making sure I don't burn out by encouraging me to take more time off, etc It probably helps that I've only ever worked at small-ish companies, and it might also help that my managers have pretty much all been technical (either while managing or at some previous time) I would gues…

I'm glad you had this experience! :)

Do you think it's a local vs. global maxima situation? I've had a moment in my life where I had to work 16 hours / day for two months, but in the end it was worth it for me. Time out would have been the wrong advice in that situation. I've also had situations where the whims of higher-ups were misunderstood by my direct manager and direct communication unraveled the mistery. Shielding would have been the wrong help in that situation.

What does small-ish mean? I find that most small-ish (what I consider small-ish) companies had a rather flat hierarchy. Managers if anything were contributors and their managerial role was aggregating feedback for the executives so they don't get every IC knocking at their door.

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

#244

Post by zabzonk »

com2kid wrote: post #216
zabzonk wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i have worked in tech for over 40 years at all levels and, as i said, i have never come across the term before today.

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

#245

Post by the_af »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #224
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…

To clarify, EM stands for Engineering Manager not Engineer Manager. EMs are generally expected to be technical, but not be engineers writing code on top of being a manager.

Yes, agreed: Engineering Manager.

I often make this mistake because English is not my first language, and I confuse "engineer" with "engineering": in both cases it sounds to me "a manager who manages engineers", not "a manager who is an engineer him/herself". Kind of like a "Product Manager" is a manager who manages the product, not a manager who is a product!

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

#246

Post by qualudeheart »

cletus wrote: post #192

This is long overdue. Years ago playing Civ 4 I distinctly remember hearing Leonard Nimoy's voice say "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy". That's what management in these companies is like. It became a meme that every 6 months you'd get an email saying "your manager's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new manager". You'd never seen, heard of or let alone met any of…

Really agree of the emtsverse. Out of my dunbars number friend group I only know one VR enthusiast.

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

#247

Post by pc86 »

indigochill wrote: post #227
rippercushions wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 replicat…

But if you were CEO and you wanted to, how would you engineer the incentives such that actually productive managers succeeded? Or is there something about corporate structure that makes it impossible?

I would think an easy way - and coincidentally, the best for business - would be to make it too dangerous to be the stereotypical office politics back-stabbing VP type. Make it known that that behavior will land you out on your ass, with no severance or parachute, and no recommendations for future employment.

But, I've never seen that in practice. Maybe the politics of the C suite mean you want those office politics back-stabbing folks around to take those high level positions?

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

#248

Post by ghaff »

brundolf wrote: post #229
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…

To counter-anecdote: I've basically never had a bad manager. Several have been exceptional, shielding me from the whims of higher-ups while making sure I don't burn out by encouraging me to take more time off, etc It probably helps that I've only ever worked at small-ish companies, and it might also help that my managers have pretty much all been technical (either while managing or at some previous time) I would gues…

Not that everyone was perfect, but I've only once had a manager that made me go to my skip-level manager and tell him that they needed to put me somewhere/anywhere else or I was out. Didn't hurt that I had a good relationship with skip-level and and he wasn't wowed by my manager either.

Did a bunch of legacy stuff for a while but ended up fine.

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

#249

Post by zabzonk »

capitalsigma wrote: post #225
zabzonk wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so i guess that managers are not individuals and don't contribute? might be true. but i've been a manager and an individual and contributed code. well, who knows?

The point is that ICs are judged based on their individual contribution s, i.e. their own code, design docs, etc, whereas managers are judged based on their team's contributions

i have never, ever come across a programmer working on a system of any complexity that did not depend on contributions from other programmers.

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

#250

Post by ThalesX »

hourago wrote: post #242
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'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.' And that is the kind of person that survives purges like the one Meta is doing. The managers that did not grow an empire, the managers that did their jobs and cared for their teams are the ones that will be removed. When an organization in…

> I do not understand why some people gets so happy when management gets the axe. Do you think that good managers that cared for the team instead of their own career are the ones that stay?

I am not happy for any axing. In case this question was directed at me. I am happy for expecting managers to also be able to contribute to the product instead of just managing people.

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