Earlier quoted context omitted.
My then manager, that become a director after he grew the team large enough, was writing code after 12 hours of meetings.
That's just sad.
Why? He probably loved it
Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
281–290 of 674 posts
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#282Earlier 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.
> It has been in common use for at least 15, if not 20 years.
I've been in the industry since 1998. The first time I saw it was on HN a few years ago (maybe 3 or 4).
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#283Earlier 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?
Hire people with the right kind of ambition, says Ben Horowitz: https://www.fastcompany.com/1685869/right-kind-ambition
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#284This 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…
By that structure, the maximum number of people that such a company should have is 7×7×7×7×7 = 16807 Given the best practices of number of direct reports [1].
How would you deal with the rest 30,000+ Full time employees that Facebook has?
[1] https://www.inc.com/jim-schleckser/how-many-direct-reports-s...
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#285Potentially 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.
If you are encouraging the people you manage to make personal decisions which benefit your employer more than they benefit those individuals then it's very possible you're running afoul of this. They would likely be things similar to what's described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34699720 (not my stories, just realized they're relevant to this question).
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#286I 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.
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Meta's has a corporate value for "Focus on long-term impact" which is trying to counter short-term gains that don't produce over time. They also talk about how you can make a "big impact" as an IC there, which from what I know is true since you can work on big projects, but they aren't necessarily the projects you'd want to work on if you have some form of value system that includes empathy.
Years ago, I met someone that boasted about doing auto-play for videos in your feed so that get sucked into related video after related video. He was particularly proud of implementing a feature (he worked it out with the PM) where you could only delete one video at a time from your history instead of in batch. The goal was to make it harder to purge your data and frustrate the customer so they give up. Ultimately they wanted more data on you so that they could further "optimize" the app to better suit/manipulate you. Pretty sure this is what they mean by their company core value of "focus on long-term impact."
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They instead encourage them to focus fully on process and sprint management. Thats literally the point. Its totally fucking batshit that somewhere like meta still uses spreadsheet to plan. This is why properly trained people should be doing management. Project management at scale is not something you "dip into" its a full time job to project manage and people manage. Its not something most ICs should be doing. A co…
Chief surgeons do all those things you describe. Check out the job description [0] as they are basically department heads doing recruiting, budgeting, supervising, etc. Chief Surgeon doesn’t mean best surgeon. [0] https://www.betterteam.com/chief-surgeon-job-description
Sorry you are right, I meant a consultant.
But it is a bad analogy, as you've implied. What I was trying to get across is managers should be specialised, they should be someone who might or might not have been a programmer, but is now specifically managing people, or projects.
Managers who code, do exist, as to engineers who manage. But its better at large companies to have specialists to manage projects and people. With support, training and performance management, you tend to get a better outcome.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think you treat the team manager as a senior IC. You treat them as a mid-level IC with a part-time job. If you are a manager you can’t also be considered a full-time senior IC (except in very specific cases, which should be transitionary) for the purposes of work allocation, because you can’t dedicate your full time to the job. I don’t think management is unlimited work, at least not always. There are a fixed…
Thank you for your reply. All I can say is that in my experience I've only witnessed (and on occasions been, sadly) the dysfunctional kind of EM+IC. I've never witnessed it working well, which is what I'm basing my objections on. The best managers I had were full-time managers (with an engineering background, which meant they understood the technical constraints); the worst managers I've had were either 100% non-tech…
Yeah, there’s definitely room for error. I just don’t think the idea should be discounted in all situations :)
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If this is the new term for "employee", I'm out. Can you please explain what's that offensive about calling somebody an Individual Contributor? It's a little bit of weird jargon, but it acknowledges 2 important things (they're a person, and they're actually working) which is infinitely more respectful to the people that actually do the work than "Resource" that also gets used. To me, using the word "Resource" to re…
Individual Contributor is problematic in that it implies that contributions are primarily made by individuals rather than team efforts. It also implies that manager roles are not contributing which is also often not the case. It's quite individualistic. Much like "talent" which is the latest attempt to imply people are resources without using the word resources.
> it implies that contributions are primarily made by individuals rather than team efforts
> It's quite individualistic.
A team always exists, but humans are not exactly the Borg.
I think it's ok to recognize that individuals with differences exist.
Feel free to dislike the term individual contributor if you want to though. That's your right as an individual contributor to HackerNews.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
no, i am not us based, though i have worked there. but so what?
is "knowledge workers" still a thing? it was meaningless when it was introduced in the 60s, even more so now.
another bubble creature, i guess.