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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

#391

Post by munificent »

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…

> Building empires is quite standard in management.

The same impulse exists in individual contributors too, which is why you see people architecting giant sprawling armies of microservices for something that could be a simple program running on a single machine.

Some people like to just show off their ability to make big things without caring enough about what it's for.

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

#392

Post by stuckkeys »

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.

Damn. Now I feel bad for our teachers since the empire starts with them and they get jack shit in return.

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

#393

Post by jhj »

arcticbull wrote: post #345
wrigby wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TLM (at Facebook) stands for Tech-Lead Manager - it’s a hybrid role, with engineering duties and people management duties. From what I remember, it wasn’t intended as a long-term position, but was used in stop-gap circumstances (manager quits, tech lead temporarily takes on some people management duties) or for when an engineer was considering transitioning to the management track.

Yeah, it's an "M0" role. Generally folks who transition from senior engineer into management become TLMs. Staff engineers transition to "M1" or a full-fledged manager. TLMs still have individual contributor responsibilities. M1s don't. The reason for that is generally that (especially junior) ICs aren't likely to push back against poor technical decisions knowing that the person they're pushing back against is also i…

> Yeah, it's an "M0" role.

Not true, TLMs can be D1+ level too at FB/Meta. Higher level TLMs more often than not tend to occur in more research-oriented organizations though (where the TLM is effectively a "principal investigator" type for some research area).

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

#394

Post by thinknubpad »

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.

It's cost-prohibitive to start a new business in those fields due to large-scale regulatory capture and capital barriers. How many new car companies have been successful in the past decade without the personal fortune of a multi-billionaire?

The existentence of one or two enormous hidebound sequoias in a forest is not a good indication of its overall health.

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

#395

Post by paweladamczuk »

Don't managers have enough work on their plate already? Looking at my past and current worplaces (granted, none of them are Meta), I can't imagine juggling individual contributions and managerial responsibilities.

Personally, I think a manager's job (in a healthy organization) is important enough to let them of the hook in terms of individual contributions.

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

#396

Post by bradleyjg »

gardenhedge wrote: post #384
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.

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.

Every day Ford has to build vehicles that at least mostly work. Every year it has to make at least some changes to its line up.

It is not a do-nothing organization lost in paper-pushing. It ships.

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

#397

Post by flashgordon »

buffet_overflow wrote: post #76
flashgordon wrote: post #67

I had cautiously gotten into management because I wanted to learn the skills of delegatin and really building through others and growing/coaching others. I thoroughly enjoyed this. But over time what I had realized was the role had been changing (not sure if it was just for pandering) towards being a mouth piece for leadership and hr - having to relay decisions I didn't believe in (perf seasons, promo rationales, lay…

Oh how I don’t miss those days of management. It because a theory of mine that a large part of my job function was to simultaneously water down accountability from above, while adding enough complexity to the layers below me to discourage them from changing the status quo. The double edged sword being, without that authority, that same power structure is forced on me, and now I’m more aware of it.

I had a couple of accidental ah-ha moments about this. Before I got into management all managers (fully up the stack) seemed like pointy hairs bosses. But what is easy to miss in Dilbert is that the PHB is really part of exec suite and rarely your front line manager. A hated front line manager might be usually incompetent or just inexperienced than evil!

The other thing was demonization of front line managers. There was always a terrible (there are definitely terrible traits) managers but never terrible "leaders". Even worse was you'd see articles by hr "influencers" expounding this. Where are the same hr loud speakers now that "leadership" is the one inflicting these layoffs and ridiculous policies?

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

#398

Post by scarface74 »

wonderwonder wrote: post #389
scarface74 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As they would say in r/cscareerquestions…

If you care about total compensation, “grind LeetCode and work for a FAANG” (haha only serious)

I went from the Dev lead in 2016 in a medium size health care company, to a senior dev/de facto “cloud architect” at a startup to mid level “cloud consultant” at $BigTech. Each job came with more money - and the current one a step change in compensation - and less responsibility and less headaches.

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

#399

Post by thinknubpad »

hiddencost wrote: post #125
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…

My experience is much the opposite: the managers who want to write a lot of code usually are so focused on their contributions they fail their other responsibilities. The ones who are trying to set product direction are usually harmful, too. The managers I've had the best experience with are the ones who focus on helping their ICs navigate the larger organization, dealing with human issues, and helping the ICs unders…

You are very fortunate to have had that experience.

Usually, when a manager/director/etc decides to write a lot of code, the result is barrages of rushed pull requests made between meetings. You will be lucky if the code in any of those PRs was actually run, and you can forget about enforcing test discipline, so you have to scrutinize them much more carefully and clean up when they get merged without incorporating your suggestions.

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

#400

Post by vineyardmike »

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.

By definition, you want some of those companies to be old and stable. You, by definition, want life insurance companies outlive your policy. You want big car companies to build tanks in an emergency. You want big companies with lots of employees doing whatever to just exist and keep the economy stable. All the “disruption” at the edges are just for show to find the next giants
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