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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

#431
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 work in the insurance biz and we generally don't want to be nimble and follow best practices. That sounds crazy right? Well, best practices change over time, and fads (at least in IT if not all types of mgmt.) are far too common.

Our team has a motto of "avoiding the cutting edge" because we don't want to bleed. We still have mainframes, because the cost of migration is prohibitive. We largely host on-prem though we have some initiatives to see how the various clouds might work for us. But these initiatives have been going on for 5-6 years. Mostly because our CTO doesn't want to miss out on the cool things.

We generally don't do layoffs, 2008 was the first time in the company's history, and that was like .005% of our company staff. We're very conservative, and when you have ten figures under management, you need to be.

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

#432

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…

>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

Wow. And these "good" managers coding, how do they meaningfully pursue strategical tasks that benefit the team and organization? Do they have time for these, 1:1s, team meetings, unblocking the blocked, translating the untranslated, and generally, um, managing?

Or do they work 80 hours?

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

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As if they were on purely my own Is this actually the expectation at the places you work?

Imagine this from a military perspective. The general/field marshal etc makes the call that you're going over the top and as a smart Major or whatever you know this means most of your men are going to die. Are you going to say to your men: "Hello gents, we have our new orders, we're going to go over the top tomorrow at 8am and try and take the village one mile down the road, however, I think this is a horrible idea a…

One of my favorite war speeches is from Gladiator. Short but sweet.

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechgl...

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

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As if they were on purely my own Is this actually the expectation at the places you work?

Imagine this from a military perspective. The general/field marshal etc makes the call that you're going over the top and as a smart Major or whatever you know this means most of your men are going to die. Are you going to say to your men: "Hello gents, we have our new orders, we're going to go over the top tomorrow at 8am and try and take the village one mile down the road, however, I think this is a horrible idea a…

To me, this screams a lack of trust.

By explaining your reasoning in every situation you can will build trust, so that on the rare occasion that you need them to act without sharing, they will trust you enough to do so. For example, when in an execution environment where response time matters.

And in practice, this is how good commanders I've worked with have operated. And this is explicitly a principle of the US Army, by understanding the objective and it's purpose units are able to continue acting to fulfill their objectives even if they are cut off.

The upside of explaining whenever you can let them build a mental model to know how you would likely handle an unexpected situation, allowing them to act in your absence.

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

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 managem…

principal eng, architect et al must rely on managing devs for any meaningful project.

It's more project management than people management. You likely have to lead projects and maybe a team, but you're usually not responsible for anyone's career growth (other than your own).

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

#436
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

Classic Carl Icahn story about firing a building full of people and never discovering what they did - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSatPoD2W-o

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

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

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

#438

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…

The story of Bay Area engineering and management is so fraught that it's hard to know where to begin.

First, tech and team leads are regularly pushed out of authority by management types, like the ones you described or worse ones who get promoted by slimming a team down.

Then there's the whole fabrication of accomplishments where managers will get promoted for the work of ICs while tech leads and ICs don't.

I'm not saying get rid of management, but the Bay really needs to reassess it's incentive and management structure. If anything, let the managers be a tool to the team rather than an authority figure. Then pair them with a competent tech lead to handle things the lead or ICs can't do on their own.

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

#439

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…

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

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

First, you have to hire exceptional people, if you can. If you can't get good enough people, you're going to fail hard inevitably no matter what you do (if you've got a quasi monopoly moat it may take a long rot to get there).

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