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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

#271

Post by bagels »

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…

Most of the reporting chains for ICs were ~8 steps away from Zuck, from what I recall.

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

#272

Post by nocsi »

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…

If you think about it, middle managers are nothing more than recruiters. If the metric really is the number of heads their team grows, then the only thing they'd do is increasing their team size. In some areas, recruiters make 40-80k a referral on senior/specialties.

The other thing is team growth is a defensive measure against recession layoffs and probably keeps eyes off a team if they've recently grew. It's either grow or die.

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

#273

Post by Mountain_Skies »

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?

Lots of people who aren't part of the "working class" do plenty of work but that's the nomenclature society uses for some reason so if you want to communicate with everyone else, you have to go along with it.

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

#275

Post by SkyPuncher »

hiddencost wrote: post #125
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 much the opposite: the managers who want to write a lot of code usually are so focused on their contributions they fail their other responsibilities. The ones who are trying to set product direction are usually harmful, too. The managers I've had the best experience with are the ones who focus on helping their ICs navigate the larger organization, dealing with human issues, and helping the ICs unders…

Writing code as a manager is my number 1 stressor.

As a manager, I have to deal with so much random bullshit. I don't mind it, but it's extremely difficult to manage that bullshit alongside code and sprint commitments. "I couldn't deliver" is remembered far more clearly than "I couldn't deliver because I was helping the team with X other thing that was far more important.".

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

#276

Post by com2kid »

zabzonk wrote: post #244
com2kid wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just in the past week "IC" has appeared in 2 front page stories on HN.

Are you US based? Beginning my career in the mid 00s I was exposed to "IC" pretty much day 1 starting at Microsoft.

Other people around me in adjacent sectors also use the phrase to refer to non-managers, it is pretty common daily parlance, I am 99% sure I can ask any of my knowledge worker friends and they'll know what I am talking about.

Google trends show "individual contributor" has been a pretty popular phrase since at least 2011.

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

#277

Post by fortituded0002 »

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've also been in positions where my 'people managers' advised me against my interests.

Generally curious here - do you mind adding some examples/details? Looking back at my career I can't think of a time when any 'people manager' advised me against my own interests. I am no longer an IC and since I haven't experienced this, I worry it's a blind spot in how I'm interacting with others.

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

#278

Post by Bahamut »

This is a kind of interesting change to see FB make to me (I had heard about this a couple of weeks ago from my brother, who was one of the ICs affected by the layoffs), as recently while I've been promoted into management at a different one of the FAANGs, I'm still doing a fairly heavy amount of coding out of necessity, maybe even moreso in some ways since my team isn't able to handle the amount of projects/work given to us without covering some of the most undesirable work.

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

#279

Post by ninjagoo »

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?

There might be fundamental incompatibilities here because of orthogonal goals - if you're an ambitious person in a corporate hierarchy won't one (or maybe even primary) goal be to climb the ladder? And if you're a founder won't your goal be to 'grow the product or service'?

Now one way to climb the ladder may be to grow the product or service, but in a larger org the ability to influence a product or service in a major way might be a bit limited, with decision-making at the business level being controlled by upper echelons. So the ladder-climbing process would select for different skills and temperament than founding/running a company.

Essentially, in a corporate hierarchy, we're asking people with ladder-climbing skills to become business people as they reach the top, and not everyone can make that transition successfully. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that very few can actually make that transition successfully.

Human brains learn through feedback [1]. To become a good business person, you need to run a business and get feedback just like a real founder/CEO, including business failures. Your question essentially becomes - how can a CEO structure incentives so that managers at all levels become good business people?

It's a great question, to which there is no simple answer that I know of. Would appreciate any pointers to potential solutions.

One way could be to treat each team at a certain level (say no more than 50 people) as a business of its own. It might not be the most efficient way for the corporation to deliver on its objectives, but it would likely create a lot of business-savvy managers. But now you have a pool of business-savvy folks that want to get paid like founders, and that might not be possible in a corporation. In terms of (in)efficiency, you could have duplicate teams that provide similar services, wasting resources, and adding costs to spin up new teams as existing ones fail or move on.

Something like this might be more feasible at a societal level - a capitalistic structure that encourages the growth of smaller size businesses while inhibiting the growth of mid- to large corporates.

Open source organizations actually seem to be the closest that I've seen that seem to operate this way.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA

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

#280

Post by mooreds »

rippercushions wrote: post #219
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 replicat…

I remember in my first job, one of the older guys telling me that at a certain size of company, it's all about the turf battles between the upper level managers. And as a line level employee, you just want to be on the right side of the battle.

Sounds pretty miserable to me; I suppose that's why I've stayed at smallcos/startups my entire career.

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