Hmm, it might be a good time to join Meta without the management dumpster fire going on. There are plenty of tech companies with little to no management like Valve or JetBrains doing well, so it might help Meta as well.
Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
261–270 of 674 posts
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#262Potentially 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…
"He gave almost 0 fucks about the quality of the people employed"
"[He] enables engineers to grow their careers."
Just what exactly was accomplished here?
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Shiel…
> I've also had situations where the whims of higher-ups were misunderstood by my direct manager and direct communication unraveled the mistery
I'd guess this is more likely to happen with non-technical managers. Not sure, but that's a guess
> What does small-ish mean?
My current company (~300) is by far the largest I've worked at. Next-largest was about 100
> had a rather flat hierarchy
Yeah, that tends to be true in my experience and probably contributes to this
> 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
Most of my managers have had a tremendous amount of professional humility, which I think is key. The main jobs they've covered (in different portions at different companies, and sometimes with some IC thrown in too) were:
- People-manager: make sure people are unblocked, happy, not burning out, working on things that play to their strengths, feeling good about their career and work and not on the verge of leaving. Really a support-role
- Shield: go to the stakeholder meetings, field requests made toward the team, manage the jira tickets. Then take all that and digest it, bring it to the team to discuss capacity and direction, and then take the results back to the outside stakeholders and use managerial authority to push back if needed
- Product expert: stay in the headspace of the user, features, experiments, overall goals/roadmap, and represent those priorities to the ICs. This one's a fine line- it's easy for them to go off into the clouds and pass things down one-directionally. But when it's collaborative, and we're discussing things as a group with different individual focuses, it works fantastically
At my current company we actually have two managers per team- one of the first kind, one of the third kind. This can work really well
The most important component for all of these to work well is for the manager to see themselves as a team member, not a boss. These teams (when they worked well) did not operate on a hierarchy unless a tie had to be broken. Normally, we were all just collaborators with different specialties, who brought our different perspectives to the table and advocated for what we saw to be important. I can't emphasize enough how well this works when you can get everybody in that frame of mind
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#264I 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…
If you want a flatter org structure, it seems like it would be easier to achieve this if manager/IC roles were distinct. If a manager is also writing code, then they won't have the time to manage as many other employees, and the total number of managers/layers would need to increase.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Individual Contributor
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#266Management is just a way to coast. I don't understand why we need to "manage" grown up adults. What we need are team leads who code and architect. Then give them the autonomy to run teams.
Managers are an organisational necessity past a certain scale. If you have not felt the need for them I can only guess you've not been in a company big enough. Think of it as trying to run a big country with direct democracy. Can it be done? Maybe. But there are good reasons why democracies become indirect after a certain scale.
"Managers are an organisational necessity past a certain scale." That sounds like a dubious claim, I'm sure there are exotic ways to run an organisation that doesn't need managers.
For example, Pirate ships ran with a Battle Commander, Accountant and Crew.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
[deleted]
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#268Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#269Earlier 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?
Give them a budget and agree on a set of accountabilities. The same model as buying a managed software consulting project.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#270Earlier 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?
Step 1: Read every Dilbert comic
Step 2: Realize that what you requested is impossible for sufficiently large organizations
Step 3: Negotiate a golden parachute for yourself. Don't hate the player, hate the game