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Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

bloomberg.com

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

#381

Post by davidw »

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 read this stuff and I want to check out of the corporate world completely. Yeesh.

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

#382

Post by tinglymintyfrsh »

(Can't post on /. and not interested in creating an account.)

This "news" item mischaracterizes reality. It's not "many". It's "few" or "some" because no managers will get 20-50 IC direct reports of SWEs or PEs. It's flattening some spots of unnecessary middle management. That's it.

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

#384

Post by gardenhedge »

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.

These bigger companies have moats e.g. life insurance is difficult business to get into and disrupt. They also have strategies to acquire smaller companies and to expand in different markets. This essentially allows them to run for a long, long time once their brand is good.

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

#385

Post by tinglymintyfrsh »

krschultz wrote: post #99

At Meta many engineers tried management and then went back to being an individual contributor. I'm not sure of the exact numbers but it was a very common career path. It did build up empathy for management on the senior IC side and meant that teams didn't get stuck with managers that didn't actually want to be a manager. If the company is not growing headcount this move makes perfect sense.

I don't speak for anyone or any org.

This is a normal thing. There's a normal fluidity based on what someone wants to do, IC or manager. There isn't really a pay difference.

Being a Meta manager is a lot of work, especially the formality, structure, and data-drivenness of performance reviews.

Almost anyone can move back and forth if they want and have some interest.

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

#386

Post by karaterobot »

It's too bad, because the best managers I've worked with were not good ICs, but they did multiply the effectiveness of the ICs they worked with, and so were absolutely invaluable to the company in a way that may not have shown up on paper. If those people exist in FB, as I'm sure they must, then they'd presumably get jettisoned as a result of this choice. That would be bad long term.

I used to despise managers, until I met two really good ones. This is after working with hundreds of them as a consultant. Actual, natural-born managers are such an incredibly rare species that you can go a long time without seeing any in the wild. It's basically the equivalent of the legendary 10x programmer — you hear about them, but it's rare to actually meet one, and there are sure a lot more people claiming to be one than who actually are.

My theory is that there are a set number of great managers in the world, and that number doesn't scale with the number of people who take on the role. They're just out there, being awesome, while a bunch of pretty lousy ones share their job title.

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

#387

Post by munificent »

count wrote: post #367
bradleyjg wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The real lightbulb moment is when you realize this observation applies to almost all social structures: your school's PTA, government, militaries, large families, etc.

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

#388

Post by throwawaylinux »

brundolf wrote: post #229
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…

To counter-anecdote: I've basically never had a bad manager. Several have been exceptional, shielding me from the whims of higher-ups while making sure I don't burn out by encouraging me to take more time off, etc It probably helps that I've only ever worked at small-ish companies, and it might also help that my managers have pretty much all been technical (either while managing or at some previous time) I would gues…

> To counter-anecdote: I've basically never had a bad manager.

I've never had a bad manager, but I've never had a good one. Or rather I've never had one where I've really noticed what they actually did aside from doing a basic personal assistant / secretary job dealing with administrative paperwork, scheduling meetings, taking notes, conveying status reports between people and teams and tools.

I've never had personal issues with my managers and I've always got along well with them and I don't suggest its their fault that their positions exist. I just don't see the value in having organizations structured in a way that necessitates these roles.

> shielding me from the whims of higher-ups while making sure I don't burn out by encouraging me to take more time off, etc

See this is how they sell themselves, but what it really means is that your engineering firm has whimsical higher-ups who don't understand engineering or even basic people management such that they would kill your productivity and burn you out, forcing the firm to hire another layer of people to protect staff from incompetent upper management.

There could be a grain of truth to it, but it just makes the situation even more ridiculous.

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

#389

Post by wonderwonder »

scarface74 wrote: post #379
wonderwonder wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can tell you from experience that you are going to suck at both. As a code contributor, you’re not going to be able to keep your commitments because of management responsibility and as a manager you’re not going to have time to do either career development for your team or be in the room to play politics for your team. The only time that I’ve seen that work is when my former CTO would do non production code as a re…

You are 100% correct. I manage a team now that I don't really have time to guide and am probably stricter with them than I need to be because of it. Additionally I am constantly behind on my deliverables to Sr. leadership because I don't have time to focus on the constant flow of busy work they keep giving me because they need data for some report to their leaders. I have no one that I can delegate this work too. I'm also working in an agile environment and have no scrum master. In addition I don't have time to think, I am just constantly pinged and in meetings. My blocked time on the calendar is not respected. Yesterday I had 9 meetings. Its impossible to do any type of deep work. Honestly its really not great. Salary is helpful though.

I'm done complaining now :)

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

#390

Post by djbusby »

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.

Is joek? Gotta be.
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