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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

#531

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

likeabbas wrote: post #427
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.

Not going to happen, fundamentally just due to supply and demand.

I have been a senior/principal engineer, as well as a director/senior director. The fact is that being a manager or director is just fundamentally a much harder job than being an IC. It's not that it's inherently more difficult, it's just that the day-to-day is much more of a grind than being an IC. For people wondering why engineering interviews can be so obscure/difficult, it's often because the cost of a bad hire can be catastrophic to a manager. I had a great team of about 30 people, except for 1 person who just couldn't get along with others. I spent about 80% of my energy on that person, and it sucked.

So for people wondering why managers get paid more, it's just that it's a shittier job that fewer people want to do than program.

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

#532

Post by adriand »

mr_gibbins wrote: post #222
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…

I've recently held a senior management position then left and obtained a technical position at a different organisation. Not kidding, I nearly cried with happiness moving away from SM and into a tech position again. I was GIVEN work to do. I had NO responsibilities for others. Moreover, I was DISCOURAGED from attending unnecessary meetings. I arranged no meetings! Not one! Went from 7 direct reports to zero. No more…

I too went from management back to coding (freelance) since the start of the pandemic and I also love it. Today I happened to notice that Google Calendar was reporting an anomalous week in terms of meetings: I had 2.5 hours of meetings in my calendar this week, while my average right now is 1.2.

I average less than an hour and a half of meetings per week! I have so much more time in my life for the things I love, it’s crazy.

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

#533

Post by p0pcult »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #477
aprdm wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 worke…

>i can imagine

So, no, you haven't seen 12? Just imagined them?

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

#535

Post by msikora »

loeg wrote: post #509
knert wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed for FB once and I don’t believe this is the case there. I was told the comp levels ran parallel for ICs and Managers. They do value their ICs it seems. This was one of the main reasons I was interested in working for them. You can see it on levels.fyi

The levels are parallel but it’s easier to get promoted to level 6+ on the management track.

This is the case in my company. My boss reluctantly went to the manager track as it was quite difficult to move up on the SDE track (from the level he was on) but much easier on the manager track.

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

#536

Post by Jensson »

twayt wrote: post #480
csense wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Incompetence being rewarded as in your case doesn't seem better at all though.

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

#537

Post by loeg »

donkey-hotei wrote: post #530
loeg wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The levels are parallel but it’s easier to get promoted to level 6+ on the management track.

There is M1 and there is M2, and then there's Director. There's no level 6+ on the management track. I'll disagree with this statement by saying that I think the step function in skills between managing people and managing people who manage people is huge. There are larger gaps between M1 -> M2 -> D than IC6 -> IC7 -> IC8... but, I think the answer depends. If you are a really strong individual contributor, I presume…

> There is M1 and there is M2, and then there's Director. There's no level 6+ on the management track.

M1 corresponds to the same pay band as IC6 and M2 corresponds to IC7. D1 corresponds to IC8. (By level 6, I am referring to IC6 / M1.)

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

#538

Post by ninjagoo »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #470
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…

This is an incredible post with a lot of insight. Can you please (please!) blog some stories about what you have seen? You are lucky to "work[ing] with hundreds of them as a consultant". Do you think it can be trained into people? I do, but most companies are too lazy. Plus, it is not a one time exercise of X hours of training. It needs to be constantly monitored. In my career, I frequently see two-faced managers who…

> Below, someone mentioned "servant leadership". It is my first time to learn about term. It sounds brilliant.

It's a term from Agile/Scrum.

> Plus, the it is an interesting idea to strictly tie manager's comp to reports' comp.

Then the incentive exclusively becomes raising the reports' comp. That might be detrimental to organizational goals. Many salaries are structured as base + short-term incentive + long-term incentive, but clearly that obviously doesn't seem to work as well as it should, either. For companies, it's well-known that aligning objectives is complicated. After decades of 'Management Science', it doesn't seem to me that we are any closer to managing alignment across orgs ideally than we've been in the past. There may not be a silver bullet to this.

That said, thinking about OP's comments about natural-born managers, and how there are natural-born artists, and how generative AI like Stable Diffusion can deliver good results for those that are not natural artists, we may actually need to turn to generative AI to solve for managerial tasks in an optimal way across large orgs. That might even resolve issues with misaligned incentives. Training such an AI could be done on a curated corpus of HBR-type case studies. And you could actually test performance of different corpuses by measuring real-world performance of the corresponding business units in which these AIs operate.

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

#539

Post by rg111 »

adriand wrote: post #529
likeabbas wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But do you want managers who are people who want to be managers? It seems to me that many people who want to be managers are motivated by wanting to boss people around, i.e. they want power, not necessarily money. And some don’t want to do “the work” whatever that work might be. I really think we need more “reluctant leaders”: people who are good at leadership but don’t want to lead, and yet can be relied upon to lea…

The kind of people that find pleasure in bossing people around also tend to have fragile ego.

If you pay them less than the people they are managing, they will not tend to do take the job.

So, paying managers less may weed out people on an ego trip, in theory.

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

#540

Post by loeg »

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…

I think Zuck would really prefer the bad managers go back to being ICs, not the good ones. I am also not sure how to best make that happen.
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