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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

#471

Post by pirate787 »

csense wrote: post #462
_9omd wrote: post #446

Chamath talked about manager bloat on a recent All-in podcast in a way that seemed to make sense. Basically there is pressure to grow your career by moving from being an IC to a manager and once a manager there are incentives to grow your number of reports. The organizational efficiency suffers when you have top tier ICs start managing teams of average people. You might get a team of 6 engineers that’s only doing 2x…

If the reward for competence is promotion, in the steady-state equilibrium everybody's incompetent at their current job: If they were competent, they would have been promoted into a different job. It's called the Peter Principle [1] and it's pretty well-known. I suppose Facebook's realized it's in a Peter Principle situation, and the remedy for it would, in theory, be to send some of the people back to previous jobs…

The answer is to pay the top IC as much as managers

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

#472

Post by likeabbas »

roughly wrote: post #209
SilverBirch wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're pretty much just repeating the constant engineer gripe of "What do managers even do". The point of management is co-ordination and direction. They're not there to contribute to the codebase, they're there to ensure people are contributing the right things to the codebase. If you really think these managers/directors/VPs are useless, describe what you think they're meant to be doing, and how it would get done w…

This is the sort of thing that you don't recognize until you become a manager, and then you do and you watch everyone on your team run around like a bunch of kids chasing whatever caught their attention that day and it all becomes a lot clearer. "Why are we doing this" and "how does it align with the business's goals" and more pointedly "what are we not doing so we can do this instead" and "is that the right trade-of…

The issue is most managers don't tend to think this specific way. They think of how to align the business goals to suit their specific needs (i.e. getting promoted).

Every single re-org I've been involved in was bureaucratic mess to give a manager a higher salary. There was no explicit reason why we needed to re-org, and no org change ever made a difference in terms of productivity. Our individual teams still operated the same.

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

#473

Post by 0xB31B1B »

yowzadave wrote: post #264
0xB31B1B wrote: post #113

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…

If you want a flatter org structure, it seems like it would be easier to achieve this if manager/IC roles were distinct. If a manager is also writing code, then they won't have the time to manage as many other employees, and the total number of managers/layers would need to increase.

yea, I don't think the manager/IC thing is a point of leverage TBH. I think the real issue here is that you have senior managers that manage 4 ICS and 1 manager of a 6 person team, and that manager should just report to a director and the senior manager should be retitled "manager" and manage 8 ICs instead of 4.

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

#474

Post by sbrother »

jhj wrote: post #393
arcticbull wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Oh that’s interesting; I haven’t heard of that at Google. Makes sense though as it maps well to a PI role in a large research org.

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

#475

Post by kerpotgh »

lxm wrote: post #453
_9omd wrote: post #446

Chamath talked about manager bloat on a recent All-in podcast in a way that seemed to make sense. Basically there is pressure to grow your career by moving from being an IC to a manager and once a manager there are incentives to grow your number of reports. The organizational efficiency suffers when you have top tier ICs start managing teams of average people. You might get a team of 6 engineers that’s only doing 2x…

Imagine what Michelangelo could’ve accomplished if he was tasked with managing a team of painters.

[dead]

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

#476

Post by ugh123 »

Can anyone explain the difference between Netflix (only a moderate layoff back in mid '22) vs. the rest of the FAANGs and tech industry? IMO its likely cultural and a demanding environment for high performing self-driven ICs with A LOT less hand holding from management on "career growth".

Am I missing something?

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

#477

Post by 0xB31B1B »

aprdm wrote: post #447
0xB31B1B wrote: post #113

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…

Do you have source for 12? That indeed seems pretty crazy.

IC reports to tech lead manager (link 1). TLM reports to senior manager (link 2) senior manager reports to other senior manager (yes, this happens, link 3), senior manager reports to director (link 4) director reports to senior director (link 5), senior director reports to VP (link 6) VP reports to SVP (link 7), SVP reports to C level (link 8) C level reports to CEO (link 9). I saw these reporting chains when I worked at FAANG, and I can imagine its pretty easy to stuff 3 more links in here to hit 12.

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

#478

Post by juve1996 »

saberience wrote: post #159
nerdponx wrote: post #94

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…

Yes but instead of doing something necessary in service to your country/protecting your home/etc, you're building some bullshit Adtech app.

Much easier to see through that bullshit and be cynical.

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

#479

Post by Izkata »

georgemcbay wrote: post #233
Izkata wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 also never saw this until pretty recently. At first I assumed people were talking about independent contractors because it was the first thing that came to mind, it possibly fit the context I saw the term used in and nobody explained the acronym they just dropped it there like I was supposed to know what it meant. Took a bit longer to realize they meant individual contributor.

> At first I assumed people were talking about independent contractors because it was the first thing that came to mind

Mine was "integrated circuit" which was like a really dystopian version of "human resources".

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

#480

Post by twayt »

csense wrote: post #462
_9omd wrote: post #446

Chamath talked about manager bloat on a recent All-in podcast in a way that seemed to make sense. Basically there is pressure to grow your career by moving from being an IC to a manager and once a manager there are incentives to grow your number of reports. The organizational efficiency suffers when you have top tier ICs start managing teams of average people. You might get a team of 6 engineers that’s only doing 2x…

If the reward for competence is promotion, in the steady-state equilibrium everybody's incompetent at their current job: If they were competent, they would have been promoted into a different job. It's called the Peter Principle [1] and it's pretty well-known. I suppose Facebook's realized it's in a Peter Principle situation, and the remedy for it would, in theory, be to send some of the people back to previous jobs…

The premise of this always puzzled me. I’ve seen many people “promoted” to a “higher” level because they displayed characteristics that they would be more successful at that role than anyone else despite lacking competence in their current role.

I’ve also seen people who are great at their current role but lack the attributes to rise into higher roles.

So the premise of competence being rewarded by promotion doesn’t really seem useful in practice.

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