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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

#251

Post by ZephyrBlu »

RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm wrote: post #133
ianlevesque wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay I'll feed the troll. There are only a few places where if you implemented, for example, an effort to reduce "body dysmorphic disorder", it could instantly improve the lives of 3 billion users worldwide. Meta is one of those places.

> Okay I'll feed the troll. I'm not trying to troll. I just genuinely don't understand why someone would consider working there as a positive thing. So I would like to know! But I have no way to figure it out as I know zero people who work there, and talking to a human who works at these companies is impossible because their websites are geared towards not allowing you to talk to them. So now that I just saw someone…

It's hard to believe you're not trolling when you present "millions of teenagers with body dysmorphic disorder thanks to Instagram" as the only kind of 'impactful' work.

What about people working on WhatsApp, or infra, or people working at FAIR or people building React, etc? The list goes on.

Meta creates a shit ton of positive impact which is not at all related to "millions of teenagers with body dysmorphic disorder thanks to Instagram".

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

#252

Post by adventured »

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?

First, you have to hire exceptional people, if you can.

If you can't get good enough people, you're going to fail hard inevitably no matter what you do (if you've got a quasi monopoly moat it may take a long rot to get there).

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

#253

Post by icedchai »

zabzonk wrote: post #199
coliveira wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is FAANG speak. They created this role for people who are not (directly) involved in management.

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?

As usual, "it depends." Many individual contributors don't actually contribute, either. Some actually have negative net contribution.

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

#254

Post by pc86 »

mnd999 wrote: post #240
posharma wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Directly and at the same time? I’m relatively new to this game, but that seems like far too many.

Depends on your definition of "direct," but it includes skip-levels. This is what some of the other comments were referring to with growing your team large enough you end up with managers reporting to you.

I've been an IC reporting to a manager, who himself reported to a manager (as opposed to director or senior manager), and while the second one was technically my skip it was more like I just had two direct supervisors.

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

#255

Post by ZephyrBlu »

the_af wrote: post #245
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

No worries, just wanted to make sure people didn't get confused and think it was a dual Engineer/Manager role :).

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

#256

Post by mulligan »

mnd999 wrote: post #240
posharma wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Directly and at the same time? I’m relatively new to this game, but that seems like far too many.

no, he's referring to the total size of the team, not directly

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

#257

Post by redtriumph »

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…

Shoutout to fellow Civ player!

Just curious: Is Civ something very popular at FB or something? I know Zuck himself plays Civ [0].

[0] https://www.facebook.com/civ/posts/thanks-mark-zuckerberg-fo...

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

#258

Post by kerpotgh »

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…

My experience is the exact opposite. Managers who code are usually talking about minutia bordering on micromanagement, never put or have enough time to develop people skills, ignore career development and growth, have little to no project management skills, do a terrible job with cross team planning etc.

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

#260

Post by Tyr42 »

pc86 wrote: post #247
indigochill wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mean, then the backstabbers just need to frame someone for backstabbing and get their path cleared up.

You also need a good way to tell apart the backstabbers from the good guys.

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