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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

#421

Post by dan-robertson »

gorgoiler wrote: post #339

Good managers are few and far between and there are many ways to fail in the role. If you have low level ICs then you’ve got to be contributing as well, leading from the front. If you have high performing ICs then you need to instead be a coach, protecting and representing your talent to the next level up. The best engineering teams need the latter but a lot of managers come up through the ranks looking for a role li…

I think my read for the reasoning is more like ‘meta made managers out of ICs in expectation of continued hiring. Hiring is not expected to continue so much so now they need fewer future managers enough to have some managers go to being ICs’

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

#422

Post by newfriend »

zabzonk wrote: post #373
com2kid wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no, i am not us based, though i have worked there. but so what? Every country, and even different regions of a country, has linguistic differences. This is true even if all the countries being talked about have the same national language. For example, nobody in the US tech sector is going to know what a Boffin is unless they read The Register. Even on the west coast of the US, vocabulary is different between Califo…

as a matter of interest what, as vaguely as you like, do you work on? because you seem uninformed to me and it is not obvious to me that you know what you are talking about. there is one tech giant that has always been based in seattle. well, make that two.

You seem to be the one who is uninformed, considering you've never heard the term IC.

Yes, everyone knows there are two tech giants based in Seattle. What this person was saying is that other large companies have also opened/grown Seattle offices in the past decade and vice versa, which has caused usage of corporate vocabulary to merge.

Maybe you should reflect on the fact that you don't seem to understand what people in this thread are talking about and stop acting like you do.

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

#423

Post by emodendroket »

mooreds wrote: post #280
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…

I remember in my first job, one of the older guys telling me that at a certain size of company, it's all about the turf battles between the upper level managers. And as a line level employee, you just want to be on the right side of the battle. Sounds pretty miserable to me; I suppose that's why I've stayed at smallcos/startups my entire career.

I have been at both and frankly I think this can be even worse at a very small company because there are no guardrails to keep it from being entirely personality-driven without even a pretense of serving some larger goal.

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

#424

Post by emodendroket »

bradleyjg wrote: post #396
gardenhedge wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I also think that it’s suffering from fewer fit-and-finish issues than the disruptors.

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

#425

Post by solarmist »

zabzonk wrote: post #290
com2kid wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

no, i am not us based, though i have worked there. but so what? is "knowledge workers" still a thing? it was meaningless when it was introduced in the 60s, even more so now. another bubble creature, i guess.

Naw, knowledge workers have developed into a real thing.

The labor group that requires significant creativity and autonomy to be effective. The artifacts they create are a minority of the value they create.

Mostly they became a real thing because traditional management techniques fail to work well with knowledge workers.

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

#426

Post by likeabbas »

I agree there are good managers, but I've only had one who I can say made my life easier and helped the team be more productive.

IMO the easiest way to solve this issue would be to normalize ICs making more than their managers. That way, only the people who really want to be managers are managing.

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

#427

Post by likeabbas »

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…

IMO the easiest way to solve this issue would be to normalize ICs making more than their managers. That way, only the people who really want to be managers are managing.

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

#428

Post by sangnoir »

the_af wrote: post #47
rsynnott wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the company, of course (and I've no idea how it works at Facebook), but some companies make their EMs out of ICs (much like Pokemon, I assume touching a special rock is required to effect the evolution) and it's somewhat common for EMs to re-IC-ify on their own anyway.

When the EM becomes an IC, how does this help the team grow their own skills and not get distracted by problems the EM should be moving out of their way? When the EM is an IC, what stops them from either interfering with small stuff (I had an EM -- back then we called them "managers" -- stop us for a week trying to determine whether we should use List or Vector in Scala. Nobody was happy) or taking the big interestin…

> When the EM becomes an IC, how does this help the team grow their own skills and not get distracted by problems the EM should be moving out of their way?

Meta EMs do people-management only, which neatly side-steps interference on tech issues.

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

#429

Post by wbl »

thinknubpad wrote: post #394
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.

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.

And nevertheless they pay out on those policies time and again, providing a lot of social value.

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

#430

Post by solarmist »

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…

Why did you have to "relay decisions I didn't believe in as if they were on purely my own"?

Why could you not say "I disagree with X, Y, and Z, but I am going to follow through with it because 1, 2, and 3"?

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