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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

#361

Post by dasil003 »

brundolf wrote: post #263
ThalesX wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad you had this experience! :) Do you think it's a local vs. global maxima situation? I've had a moment in my life where I had to work 16 hours / day for two months, but in the end it was worth it for me. Time out would have been the wrong advice in that situation. I've also had situations where the whims of higher-ups were misunderstood by my direct manager and direct communication unraveled the mistery. Shiel…

> I've also had situations where the whims of higher-ups were misunderstood by my direct manager and direct communication unraveled the mistery I'd guess this is more likely to happen with non-technical managers. Not sure, but that's a guess > What does small-ish mean? My current company (~300) is by far the largest I've worked at. Next-largest was about 100 > had a rather flat hierarchy Yeah, that tends to be true i…

You are unlikely to find empire builders in that size of company because they are too easily exposed and ousted by competent leadership. The real problems start once there is way too much going on for any one person to track the major initiatives, which I'd say is more in the 500+ realm.

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

#362

Post by [deleted] »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #337
rot13xor wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#363

Post by raviisoccupied »

I just left a (non-engineering) role where I was a people manager of 7. It was great at first but I genuinely felt my skills atrophying, so I left to join a much smaller and flatter team.

I know HN is can sometimes come across as 'management-phobic', and having been on that side of the fence there is a lot value that can be added by managers.

That said, I do wonder how many of these managers who have been asked to become ICs might actually be relieved. In an increasingly competitive economic environment, some could see this as a good thing.

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

#364

Post by potatolicious »

indigochill wrote: post #227
rippercushions wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

A few thoughts having worked at a bunch of large companies before, with varying degrees of rewarding empire-building.

- The orgs most susceptible to rampant empire-building are ones where execs seem disconnected from the product. IMO the best way to discourage rampant headcount growth is for upper-level execs to scrutinize hiring needs. Some orgs (especially pre-2022) have been apt to approve headcount growth without sufficient oversight as to what the new people are actually supposed to be doing, and whether or not they're necessary. Loose hiring policies result not only in corp bloat and high expenditures, but reward empire-builder managers more than product-oriented managers.

- To double down on that point, part of the problem is that in too many companies execs and managers don't speak product. The point of hiring is ostensibly to ship more/different/better product, but when execs themselves do not speak product hiring becomes divorced from this underlying goal. You hire so your seniors have juniors to mentor. You hire so a manager can get promoted. You hire to "expand your scope". But at the end of the day there is only one valid reason to actually hire: so the company can produce more/different/better products that it otherwise cannot do without hiring. This is especially true at companies like Google and Meta where the PM track and Engineering tracks are fully decoupled.

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

#365

Post by zabzonk »

tuckerman wrote: post #328
zabzonk wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nobody has IC as a title, it’s a whole class of job families that don’t require/revolve around managing other employees. Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Data Center Technician are all ICs. It’s just a more positive way of saying “not people manager”, especially when you are trying to build a culture that going into people management shouldn’t be the only career path.

why do you need to say "not manager"? most people are in the nature of things not managers. and if you do need, for bad, bad reasons want to differentiate them, how about NMs? oh, but that would be to obvious for the current crop.

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

#366

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#367

Post by count »

bradleyjg wrote: post #340
andix wrote: post #297

Earlier 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.

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.

I think upon examination, the folks actually shipping things at those old dinosaurs are by and large unaffected by the constantly changing upper reaches of their org chart, which just becomes a drain on profits.

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

#368

Post by nishs »

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.

> M2s made $800k+. Why wouldn’t a manager not be motivated to grow his empire?

Possibly by not being singleminded or crazy about money.

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

#369

Post by icedchai »

chris11 wrote: post #321
scarface74 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Twitter is private, but Elon definitely destroyed value when he took it over.

Well, he did overpay by at least 50%.

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

#370

Post by zabzonk »

com2kid wrote: post #276
zabzonk wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have worked in tech for over 40 years at all levels and, as i said, i have never come across the term before today.

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…

you said 20 years, now it seems to be down to 12
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