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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

#301

Post by pkd »

revskill wrote: post #108
pkd wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not quite. If i'm a CEO, my manager is required to know coding first. It's nonsensical and ineffecient to hire a non-coder to manage real coders ?

I don't think I was claiming that. Managers should definitely be able to code. That does not mean that we don't need managers.

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

#303

Post by KaiserPro »

29athrowaway wrote: post #172
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…

If coding is beneath you, working in software is beyond you. If you are a people person and love helping people so much, go work as a social worker, no? Managers are employees same as ICs. An IC can have more impact than a manager. http://programming-motherfucker.com/

> If coding is beneath you, working in software is beyond you.

maybe the problem you are trying to solve isn't code.

> ICs do not need managers, managers need ICs.

Given the level of infantilisation at meta, and big tech in general, I think this is clearly not the case. "self management" (ie bottoms up management) stopped working at meta many many years ago.

> Some managers have negative productivity.

So do a lot of ICs "I'm rewriting x in NEW_LANGUAGE because its faster" & "just read the code, that's where all the answers are" & "no you're doing it wrong, just re-write this major system to make it do something completely different because I've not taken the time to listen to your problem" Meta is a massive pile of "not invented here" tech debt, that was half arsed for impacc and then abandoned. Most of that is IC ill disciplined "oh but I'm BORED I'm going to make a new x".

Don't get me wrong. I've had some complete bellends of managers, but that's not a function of them being a manager, that's a function of no training and ineffective performance management.

Writing code is easy,

Writing good code is not so easy

Reusing other people's code is hard

Making an entire company reuse code is fucking difficult.

Getting prima-donnas to document code so that other people can use it quickly, super fucking difficult.

Managing programmers so they don't start gnawing at the furniture, rebuild everything every six months, wank over the interns and getting them produce a viable product, one that they can't/don't/wont use is top level hard. It's something I don't want to do.

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

#304

Post by gruffin »

posharma wrote: post #217
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…

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.

> Meta expects you to have managed at least 40 ppl before considering them for a M2 role

Not true. At least not as of late. M2 promos can lean on different things, e.g. delivered impact, over established people scope. But the person trying to promote you need to be able to do that well. Source: Have done M2 promotions at Meta.

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

#305

Post by scarface74 »

deltree7 wrote: post #293
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 know HN hates him, but Elon Musk has figured this out and that's why he will always deliver outstanding returns compared to others.

His company hasn’t delivered outstanding returns as far as profits. Tesla’s stock is mostly hype.

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

#306

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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…

Empire building was a major problem at a local company I worked for.

They got around it by setting up multiple reporting chains and co-managers. If you were a manager at a certain level and you worked with certain departments, you got to say that all of the people in that department "reported to" you.

It created a laughable situation where there were only a few thousand people in the company, but I knew several dozen managers who had 200-400 people "reporting" to them. Individuals could technically "report to" a dozen managers, though they may never interact with those managers.

They all proudly display their number of reports on their LinkedIn profiles.

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

#307

Post by satvikpendem »

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…

Isn't this exactly what the book Bullshit Jobs is about? People build mini empires as a proxy for value.

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

#308

Post by scarface74 »

ThalesX wrote: post #250
hourago wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm gladly reporting that he managed to do that and has indeed been promoted, and I still can't say what he does for a living apart from 'enable engineers to grow their careers.' And that is the kind of person that survives purges like the one Meta is doing. The managers that did not grow an empire, the managers that did their jobs and cared for their teams are the ones that will be removed. When an organization in…

> I do not understand why some people gets so happy when management gets the axe. Do you think that good managers that cared for the team instead of their own career are the ones that stay? I am not happy for any axing. In case this question was directed at me. I am happy for expecting managers to also be able to contribute to the product instead of just managing people.

The skills I want from a good manager are mostly orthogonal to what I want from a coworker working on a project

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

#309

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

icedchai wrote: post #215
SilverBirch wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're pretty much just repeating the constant engineer gripe of "What do managers even do". The point of management is co-ordination and direction. They're not there to contribute to the codebase, they're there to ensure people are contributing the right things to the codebase. If you really think these managers/directors/VPs are useless, describe what you think they're meant to be doing, and how it would get done w…

It's not that they are useless, it's that there are often too many of them. At a previous SV org I worked for, they had roughly 1 "dev manager" for every 4 engineers. You could have 1 for every 10 and achieve the same result.

I’m not sure if that’s true. 1 dev manager for 10 engineers might be tough. The sheer number of 1:1s would be insane, much less keeping track of the career trajectory of 10 different people at 10 different parts of their lives. I guess this would be less difficult if everyone was already at senior or staff level, but you’d still have so much of that managers time sucked into 1:1s, reviews, and team retrospectives. I’m not even a manager and I start to feel neglected as an engineer once my manager juggles more than 6 other people, because I see they start to forget what I’m working on, and those 6 start to compete for attention to get promotions…

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

#310

Post by istjohn »

omeze wrote: post #127
artifaxx wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see their comment as trolling. Reducing the negative impact Meta already has is a more accurate description. Given their track record so far, you'd be a tiny minority to even get to work on that instead of ad/user engagement optimization for example.

For every teen with poor body image issues there are likely 5 people served by Facebook in some way that they deeply appreciate. I talk to family members in Algeria who I'd never be able to reliably keep in touch with otherwise, and friends in Europe love FB marketplace. Yes, a service for 2-3 billion people has drawbacks. It's disingenuous to say that it doesn't improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people, t…

Facebook's algorithms fueled the genocide in Myanmar. How many muslim lives is FB marketplace worth?

Do you talk to family members in Algeria through FB or WhatsApp? WhatsApp would have been just fine if Zuckerberg didn't buy it before US regulators rolled out of bed.

I think it's hard to argue that anyone's life is improved by a company that shows such a lack of respect for its users. We could have social networks that respect us, but Zuckerberg systematically purchased them or squashed them in the cradle.

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