Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by jrumbut » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 11:46 PM UTC

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 like working for people like this, because often they look to increase both quantity and quality of the people they manage (if they can call you a senior engineer, then that must make them a senior manager). So they're often quite a good advocate for your career.

They're focused on me and the other engineers, we're focused on the product, and everyone is happy.

That contrasts with product focused managers, where I've seen a tendency to burn through engineers and be very stingy with raises and promotions. So the engineers need to take time to be their own advocates and set boundaries and lot of us aren't as good at that so it becomes chaotic.

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

#402

Post by wonderwonder » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 11:47 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #398

wonderwonder wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

You are not wrong. I used to think I wanted to work in leadership and now that I'm there it kind of sucks. At least the middle manager level I am at. I have really started considering doing exactly as you suggest, just grinding for a year and then going for a FAANG position. I currently make more money than I ever imagined (I grew up on food stamps) and its far less than what FAANG SR's make. The thought of being able to make more than this with half of the responsibility sounds incredible and I am leaning in that direction.

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

#403

Post by StanislavPetrov » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 11:47 PM UTC

stuff4ben wrote: post #311

deltree7 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know HN hates him, but Elon Musk has figured this out and that's why he will always deliver outstanding returns compared to others.

How exactly has he figured this out? I see an egomaniac that drives his employees as if they're just cogs in a machine.

One thing he figured out was that he could cut 75% of the dead weight employees and still have a product that 95% of the users are just as, if not more, satisfied with (despite all the predictions of imminent destruction).

I would argue that administrative and organizations bloat is a very real problem across virtually every large business. The bigger the business, the worse the bloat problem.

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

#404

Post by superfrank » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 11:48 PM UTC

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…

Agreed. I'm a manager who doesn't write code anymore (at work) and, at best I'm adding log statements or updating documentation. I'm still encouraged to write code if I can, but it just doesn't make sense.

When I had a single digit number of developers on my team, writing code was still possible. When I started closing in on double digits, I realized that I had so many other things to do that, at best, I was only going to have a few scattered 30 minute or 1 hour blocks each day to write code. Also, a lot of my job is to handle the unknowns that come up, so I also couldn't really commit to any hard deadlines.

That means, best case scenario, I could only pick up work that wasn't high priority and that didn't require long periods of uninterrupted time. I still love writing code, but my philosophy has always been to focus on the things that only I can do. Low complexity projects that no one is waiting for can be done by just about anyone. My "staying in touch with the code" time is better spent doing PR reviews or reviewing design docs.

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

#405

Post by dijit » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 11:49 PM UTC

karaterobot wrote: post #386

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…

Any traits to identify these people?

I am a massive sufferer of imposter syndrome, I do my best to help everyone and smooth over things and set direction in a clear way with as much freedom in execution as possible.

but i am always second guessing myself. I know I am almost certainly a middling manager (if not a bad one), but I would like to improve.

Not because I love doing it, but because I don't trust that anyone else in my position (or who would take my position) actually wants to improve.

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

#406

Post by brundolf » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 11:50 PM UTC

dasil003 wrote: post #361

brundolf wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yup, there's a reason I don't work at bigger companies :)

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

#407

Post by superfrank » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 11:50 PM UTC

Izkata wrote: post #161

the_af wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others have answered what the words "IC" mean, but let me add that this is the usual name for the technical career track, i.e. the not-management track, meant for people who do not want to manage teams of people. Strictly speaking, the roles of Engineer Manager and IC are incompatible; you cannot want to manage people and at the same time want to stay out of it. So in this particular context, "EM+IC" is a misnomer fo…

> this is the usual name I dunno if it's just me, but it seems like the term came out of nowhere just a couple years ago.

I've been hearing it for about 5-7 years now, usually in the context of career paths. I think it became popular when companies realized that non all developers are made for management and you need a separate career track for people who want to advance, but don't want to be a manager.

Principal engineer, architect, etc all fall into the IC career path, while, manager, director, VP of eng, etc all fall into the management track.

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

#408

Post by mitthrowaway2 » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 11:51 PM UTC

hallway_monitor wrote: post #123

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…

Anyone without intimate knowledge of the product they are working on is useless IMO. I was in the code daily when leading a team and don't respect any development team leader who isn't.

Absolutely. Of all the companies I've worked with, the one with absolutely the most effective management was the one where every manager was also a part-time IC. The head of mechanical engineering had to design a product while managing the team. The shop manager was also working as a machinist for most of their shift, or working on jig design and metrology. The head of accounting, of course, spent most of their time accounting, and only part of it managing the accountants. The head of software also wrote software, although not as much as their subordinates, and they were reviewing the codebase all the time. Of course none of the managers would chew through their IC work as quickly as people who could devote all their hours to it, so they mainly picked up tasks that weren't critical-path to avoid becoming blockers to their team.

The CEO rotated through positions, spending several months working in customer service, inventory, accounting, and even working directly on the production line. He mainly put himself on whichever team was most short-handed, although it was more to learn firsthand what their challenges were, and how the company could allocate resources to solve them. Fortunately he was a multitalented guy who could pick up those roles productively, and also humble and down-to-earth enough to not intimidate his colleagues too much when he took over the neighboring desk.

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

#409

Post by benatkin » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 11:51 PM UTC

ianlevesque wrote: post #106

RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Okay I'll feed the troll. There are only a few places where if you implemented, for example, an effort to reduce "body dysmorphic disorder", it could instantly improve the lives of 3 billion users worldwide. Meta is one of those places.

Nothing positive "Meta" does can ever make up for the negative impact Facebook has had on the world. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59558090?

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

#410

Post by Traubenfuchs » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 11:52 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #391

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…

> 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.

I once built a series of microservices doing the same thing but with different external vendors. Originally I thought it would be best to add a dispatcher/orchestration microservice that other services would have to go through, because I thought the externally connected services would all end up with differet APIs. In the end, I managed to give all those services the same API, making the dispatcher service obsolete and overengineered. Ultimately I just shipped it because changing the architecture would have meant endless discussions with that one lead architect who actually gave nor shit about anything but pointless discussion and I was out of time. So I shipped all the services.

In the last performance review, my boss complimented the amount of new services I put into production.

I hate software engineering.