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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

#351

Post by wonderwonder »

scarface74 wrote: post #308
ThalesX wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I am in a weird spot where I am a manager and expected to be an individual contributor. I am also supposed to play several other roles as well. You are right, the skill sets are vastly different. It is incredibly difficult to have to context switch between manager mind set and developer multiple times a day. Both of my roles likely suffer due to my restrictions on being able to focus on one.

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

#352

Post by dan-robertson »

version_five wrote: post #269
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?

Give them a budget and agree on a set of accountabilities. The same model as buying a managed software consulting project.

Paying for consultants often isn’t a good use of money though, right? Like often the problem is that the right metrics are hard to know in advance and they are typically games in a way that makes it easy for the consultant to meet them without actually delivering what is desired. I think they also make it hard to take (calculated) risks which isn’t necessarily what you’d want.

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

#353

Post by scarface74 »

rippercushions wrote: post #347
scarface74 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You act as if this behavior is unique to management. Every leveling guideline I’ve seen for any big tech company (including the one I work for) requires you to demonstrate “scope” and “impact”.

For ICs those are usually measured with product metrics, not butts in seats.

How many Google engineers got promoted by launching a product that was cancelled soon after?

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

#354

Post by Patrol8394 »

This, I can agree with. I know first hand failed software engineer that turned into engineer management at FB just because they didn’t know how to do anything. So management was their escape route to success. Shuffling things around, rarely adding value.

They should either prove themselves valuable or just leave.

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

#355

Post by MuffinFlavored »

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…

> 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.

Imagine if at $BIGCO they told you that in practice, you need to reduce headcount and run as lean as possible so that your team brings as much monetary value for the company with the least amount of expense instead...

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

#356

Post by icedchai »

rwalle wrote: post #332
icedchai wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have, though the team size was 7 (company ran out of cash.) 10 may be too many. But 4 is way too small.

Also, I want to add that the team with the manager of 4 engineers, he provided no technical direction. That was my job as the "tech lead."

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

#357

Post by Xeronate »

KaiserPro wrote: post #164
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…

> 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…

My team at Amazon still uses spreadsheets and I much prefer it to Jira.

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

#359

Post by gymbeaux »

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…

I very much doubt what you’re describing is a statistical anomaly. I think just about everyone here would agree the worst devs either become managers, or move to QA/BA.

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

#360

Post by dh2022 »

pc86 wrote: post #247
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 would think an easy way - and coincidentally, the best for business - would be to make it too dangerous to be the stereotypical office politics back-stabbing VP type. Make it known that that behavior will land you out on your ass, with no severance or parachute, and no recommendations for future employment. But, I've never seen that in practice. Maybe the politics of the C suite mean you want those office politics…

C-suite people from different companies end up working together on company boards later in their career. To fire with cause and no severance and no parachute some back-stabbing VPs would make it more difficult to work with said back-stabbing VP later on a company board.
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