441–450 of 674 posts
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…
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…
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The point is that ICs are judged based on their individual contribution s, i.e. their own code, design docs, etc, whereas managers are judged based on their team's contributions
i have never, ever come across a programmer working on a system of any complexity that did not depend on contributions from other programmers.
> so i guess that managers are not individuals and don't contribute?
> i have never, ever come across a programmer working on a system of any complexity that did not depend on contributions from other programmers.
No one said non-ICs aren't individuals, and no one said they don't contribute. No one said that ICs don't work with others or depend on others.
What has been said, several times, is that their contributions (i.e. the code they produce, artifacts they create, etc) are largely individual contributions. They are the ones creating the thing, and are not responsible for others.
This gets a bit murky as you move up the IC chain, in that your contributions become less tangible and are in part measured on how you lead others and make those around you more efficient. But your performance is still largely judged on what you produced.
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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 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. Imagine if at $BIGCO they told you that in practice, you need to reduce headcount and run as lean as possible so that your team brings as much monetary value for the company with the least amount of expense instead...
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I absolutely don't know why Facebook balked at making their own phone back in the day. Facebook's entire value prop about 10-15 years ago was the fact that you could find anyone on there who you even remotely knew. Imagine (10 years ago) being able to use an FB version of Siri/Alexa to "connect me to that girl Megan from my 5th grade classroom". Sure sounds compelling. Instead FB released a half-assed "dailer app/wid…
> connect me to that girl Megan from my 5th grade classroom if you only look at the tech then yeah it's compelling. but in reality it's creepy and people don't want it.
I think this is a great move. My understanding is that some reporting chains in facebook have 12 links between IC and Zuckerberg, which is crazy inefficient. Enormous organizations are able to run effectively with 5-6 links from IC to CEO. Managers managing managers managing turtles all the way down is a horrible form of "administrative bloat". You see bloat like this in enormous organizations like colleges, governme…
The vast majority of the managers I've worked with wouldn't be particularly good ICs, not so sure of the wisdom of this move. Maybe it's a way to slow roll a bunch of layoffs.
> The vast majority of the managers I've worked with wouldn't be particularly good ICs, not so sure of the wisdom of this move. The point is that the company doesn't need the managers.
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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…
The distinguishing factor I've seen is servant leadership [1]. They believe that supporting and developing their people is their main job. Execution is just a prerequisite to being able to do the rest. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership
I've never encountered a servant leadership styled EM that is not also a good IC.
High salary. That incentive ends in 6 months.
What is it exactly?