Happening at Microsoft too!
Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
331–340 of 674 posts
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#332Earlier 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 guess you have never been a manager.
There is no way you can manage 10 engineers and still have good technical knowledge of what they do and provide directions.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#333This 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...
> By that structure, the maximum number of people that such a company should have is 7×7×7×7×7 = 16807
That actually sounds like pretty reasonable limit. There are very, very few organizations that should exceed this size in my view. In fact, even 16807 sounds far larger than ideal in most cases.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#334Potentially 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…
There's nothing surprising about this. I work at FANGMA and I see this very very often.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not talking about promotions particularly.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#336Frankly most of what managers and middle managers do can be codified to a large extent like scheduling , tasking , following up , projections and planning. Yet instead of sticking to only these things often managers end up being the most insecure person in the team .. always looking over their shoulders to who is gaining more traction than them and continuously inventing BS projects to keep the minions busy or to boost their credibility for the next position.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Communication overhead, like edges in a graph, scales quadratically. The computing analogy is going from 1 core to 8 core CPU gives far less than 8x performance if your task is not parallelizable. The solution is compartmentalization and clear interface boundaries, which is why microservices are so popular. Instead of 5k people working on 1 project, have 100 projects each with 50 people plus a few architects who defi…
Oh, so that's why the linux kernel uses microservices so much.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#338At a previous company, I reported to a "group leader" who had no other reports. That person reported to a director who had zero other reports. That person reported to a VP who had one other report.
The overhead of stakeholder management is out of control. With this structure, the leadership wanted all roadmaps and planning to be bottoms-up, which just meant a lot of thrash as every layer tried to figure out what the layer above wanted.
I admire how Airbnb has switched to a top-down structure, which eliminates a lot of the unnecessary administrative bloat at companies. It means that the most experienced people are steering the ship. https://fourweekmba.com/airbnb-organizational-struture/
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#339Good managers are few and far between and there are many ways to fail in the role. If you have low level ICs then you’ve got to be contributing as well, leading from the front. If you have high performing ICs then you need to instead be a coach, protecting and representing your talent to the next level up.
The best engineering teams need the latter but a lot of managers come up through the ranks looking for a role like the former. I know Meta played that game for a long time and I can completely see why they want to walk it back. They need their high performing ICs to actually do stuff again and start shipping diffs. The luxury of being there to level up the noobs is over, for now.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It’s easy to say that but there’s lots of large, old, dysfunctional dinosaurs shipping oil, cars, or life insurance policies day in and day out.
Meanwhile there’s plenty of small, nimble, managed-by-best-practices would be disruptors not shipping much of anything.