321–330 of 674 posts
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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.
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@dang can we pin this?
It'd be nice to have @ work on HN.
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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.
Yeah. To become a D1 you need to be an M2 who successfully manages (ideally) more than one other M2, who themselves might manage M2s or M1s or a combo. So you get really large chains of people at the same level in a reporting line, all managing and trying to show that they should be D1s.
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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.
Every country, and even different regions of a country, has linguistic differences. This is true even if all the countries being talked about have the same national language.
For example, nobody in the US tech sector is going to know what a Boffin is unless they read The Register.
Even on the west coast of the US, vocabulary is different between California and the Pacific Northwest, although things started to merge together when the Silicon Valley based tech companies began opening offices up in Seattle.
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…
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...
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As a consultant, I've become accustomed to being referred to as "the resource" by operations people. However, the day an engagement manager refers to me directly as "resource" is the day I openly start referring to them as my secretary.
i keep envisaging what some of these uber stupid job names would look like on a business card i might have to give to a client: zab zonk the resource zab zonk individual contributor jesus wept
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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.
I think once a company hits around 2-5k office workers, the whole company can be occupied with internal processes, without delivering any value at all.
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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…
If you think developers are prima donnas wait until you hear about managers. Compared to developers, many of them fit much more into the prima donna description.
Most managers don't document anything and when they do, it is of low quality and goes unmaintained quickly.
Most managers out there are redundant and have no idea about what leadership is. They just get an orgasm each time they say no and conflate that with being a true leader.
The reason hackathons produce amazing results is because it is what happens when managers get out of the way for 1 day: improvement driven by builders that care about the product, not office politics.