31–40 of 166 posts
I don't want any job at all. Does that make me a good manager
The professional managers should be in a deputy position to the promoted ICs. This way they can bring their skills and expertise in management and empower the promoted ICs who understand the business or problems deeply.
The professional managers can be pretty useful if they don't have people reporting to them and help with processes, compliance, planning, making presentations and excel tables and yet the capacity for damage will be limited as the promoted ICs will need approve anything.
DEC apparently had "administration" instead of management, implying it didn't rule but rather assist, but I don't know the exact details.
I wonder what kind of people are these Steve Jobs cultists... Most of the "wisdom" of all "Steve Jobs said..." is just subjective interpretation of vague and ambiguous statements. Truth, the guy had a lot of successes. But if you look at them most were just accidental and he only recognized them as success when they hit him in the face. * Apple didn't "invent" the Mac, all of it's technologies were copied straight ou…
“Musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra.”
Empirically speaking 90% of the managers out there became so because they were intentional in becoming managers. The reasons are myriad. Most want the power so they can hire or fire. Others with reaching the job safety inherently built into the role.
A lot of IC historically become managers not because they particularly care about doing performance reviews but because they want more influence and to work at a larger scale. This leads to a situation of people managers who care less about managing people than managing delivery and technology strategy. The best of those also have a lot of empathy and inadvertently are good at people management. Another reason, often…
I am so tired of the competitiveness in engineering to make the next pay band.
You cant rely on a portion if teammates because they are jockeying for position and in other situations your opinion isnt valued because you are not high enough on the engineering ladder.
I wonder what kind of people are these Steve Jobs cultists... Most of the "wisdom" of all "Steve Jobs said..." is just subjective interpretation of vague and ambiguous statements. Truth, the guy had a lot of successes. But if you look at them most were just accidental and he only recognized them as success when they hit him in the face. * Apple didn't "invent" the Mac, all of it's technologies were copied straight ou…
I'm predisposed to dislike Steve Jobs (I'm predisposed to dislike anyone who exploits other people tbh, so virtually all high-profile CEO). But there's already 5 pretty big successes in your list. At which point it stops being statically improbable he isn't exceptionally talented by some kind of metric?
Leaders who don't want to be leaders are bad leaders.
I lead a guild once, because I wanted to decide how my time was spent and didn't want other people to decide for me. I didn't want to be a leader. I don't want to tell people what to do. I don't want to give orders everyone else has to follow. I like the team approach. But people are conditioned to follow. Except they aren't following... when you apply too much pressure.
I set up a website to plan raids. Paid for a domain. Went through the hassle to configure it and a discord server and a bridge between those and all I wanted was that people fucking sign up or off from raids. I asked them when they're available and made a plan most people are comfortable with. Only 5 out of 30 people did even register on the site. They joined the guild because it was advertised as a raid guild with social spots but raid being the main theme. A RAID GUILD. After 2 months I was so stressed out that I simply abandoned the guild and left the game.
I can't do everything alone. When I said that I never felt so stressed out in all my life 2 people offered to help with leading raids but at that point it was too late. Some players joined from other guilds, got spell upgrades for free, then left the guild. Some people joined from other guilds to cause drama and distress.
This is of course not real life. But it's close. You don't pay your members money for work and can't expect they follow guidelines. But holy crap, can you at least expect some interest in the main theme of the guild and them to sign up on the site and sign on and off of raids?
I never wanted to be leader. I feel well in the role of an advisor, someone who helps lead. But not the sole person responsible for everything. I'm not perfect. No one is. I was overwhelmed because every piece of the hierarchy in the end asked me what to do. And if I postponed answering things would get worse.
In software development I can be agile and change things around, but people demand stability. They want a bed already made but are not willing to do the effort to build that bed.
In retrospect I should've continued and "fired" 90% of the members even if that meant the end of independent raiding. But I was too stressed out and losing key people, because that game was designed around key roles being present in a raid. I didn't make the necessary decisions because I didn't want to lose anyone and not piss anyone of. But in the end key people left regardless. So lesson learned if you do something, focus on just doing that one thing and don't get ballast on board in the first place. It's better to have a small, dedicated group, seeing eye to eye, than a large group where the majority doesn't care about success.
Anyhow, see I wasn't a good manager, despite me not wanting to be a manager.
The good kind Jobs refers to are people who see the necessity and that no one is doing it (or doing it well). They aren't the kind of people who don't understand people and fall into the trap of simply controlling and micro-managing people.
Let me give you an example of the bad kind. Google's SWE ladder goes all the say from L3 (new grad) to L9 (ignoring exceptions like Google Fellow and execs). There is an expectation of growth from L3 to L5 (Senior SWE). There is a lot of reward if you can get promoted to L6 (Staff SWE) but it is incredibly difficult. It requires a lot of luck (eg being on the right project that doesn't get cancelled). Getting to L6 now is much harder than it was 10-15 years ago.
One of the things Ruth Porat did when she came in was to control costs by reducing the promotion target percentage because it wasn't visible to people (there was a leaked memo). All promo candidates go to committee and effectively get stack ranked across committees. There is a quota ("target percentage") of who gets promoted. This creates a backlog and raises the bar for getting promoted. It gives more time for your impact to dissipate or your project to get cancelled (which was your promotion case).
Compare this to getting promoted as a manager. Your manager level (M0 to M2, which is the same level as L5 to L7) is effectively a function of your head count with the added requirement that M2 requires you to have managers as reports. So if you're an M0 (which is rare), getting to M1 is typically as easy as getting to 10-15 reports (as long as you don't screw up so badly).
So there is a breed of SWEs that bridge these worlds. They're half an IC and half an EM in the hopes that this gets them over the line.
In my experience, these managers were generally the absolute worst. They had no interest in ever being a amanager and were just ticking a box for an L6 promotion case. Career development tended to be zero. Everything was seen through the lens of what helped them get promoted. If that means throwing someone under the bus, so be it.
I think one of the best things Facebook did was they effectively didn't allow this. Having reports as an IC generally wasn't allowed. Being an L5 with reports was mostly not allowed. I mean there were some exceptions in some orgs and for some people but it was exceedingly rare. You'd see people ask "why can't I be a manager at L5?" and you heavily suspected the main motivator for this question was an inability to get promoted to L6 as a SWE.
Ever since Steve Jobs implemented the functional organization, Apple’s managers at every level, from senior vice president on down, have been expected to possess three key leadership characteristics:
1. deep expertise that allows them to meaningfully engage in all the work being done within their individual functions
2. immersion in the details of those functions;
3. and a willingness to collaboratively debate other functions during collective decision-making.
When managers have these attributes, decisions are made in a coordinated fashion by the people most qualified to make them.
Article: https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio...