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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

#541

Post by benatkin »

istjohn wrote: post #291
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to believe you're not trolling when you present "millions of teenagers with body dysmorphic disorder thanks to Instagram" as the only kind of 'impactful' work. What about people working on WhatsApp, or infra, or people working at FAIR or people building React, etc? The list goes on. Meta creates a shit ton of positive impact which is not at all related to "millions of teenagers with body dysmorphic disorder…

They said that was the first thing that came to mind. The first thing that comes to my mind is fueling a genocide in Myanmar[1], but as a parent of a girl, I couldn't care less about Meta's development of React when their own research showed that they "make body-image issues worse for one in three teenage girls." Then there was the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal. It's been clear for years that to work for…

fr. I'd like to see pg repudiate Facebook as he's said a lot of positive things about them in the past and YC partnered with them when he was still running YC. https://thenextweb.com/news/facebook-partners-with-y-combina...

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

#542

Post by ahahahahah »

RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm wrote: post #84
fatnoah wrote: post #16

I love management and, after over 17 years in an IC capacity, find that it fulfills me in a way that writing code stopped doing. I was also a manager at Meta in a past life, and really didn't love the experience due to the nature of the company and roles of manager. I do think I'd really like being an IC there, due to the high level of autonomy and focus on doing impactful work.

[flagged]

Schools have caused many millions more teenagers to have such disorder, is there no impactful work to be done in schools?

In fact, the same research that likely was used to see such an opinion for you about Instagram in fact showed that it was more likely to improve stuck disorders than to make them worse.

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

#543

Post by boringg »

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…

That and the really good managers probably dont much cred at their org since it isnt highly valued.

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

#544

Post by Olreich »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #531
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.

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 b…

I find it far more plausible that managers are paid more because of the default fiefdom hierarchy that you find in most corporate systems than because of anything inherent to the day-to-day job. CEO doesn’t think people lower on the totem pole should be paid more than them, so they hire people at lower income levels. Same for the VPs and the Directors and the layers of middle management until you get down to the ICs.

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

#545

Post by Aperocky »

facet1ous wrote: post #495
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.

Yes, absolutely this. Once you hit senior ranks in engineering at a big tech firm, it's actually very difficult to move upwards. Very few people are ever made principal engineers or senior staff or even staff level for that matter. The jump in technical ability for those levels is quite large as well and can take many years to get a single promotion since openings are pretty slim as well (some orgs will only get 1-2…

> many more opportunities for promotion.

Feels like this is generally true in the past few years where org sizes have ballooned.

Is this still true today where hiring freeze and layoffs rule most of these companies? Is the reverse happening?

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

#546

Post by dchftcs »

istjohn wrote: post #310
omeze wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every teen with poor body image issues there are likely 5 people served by Facebook in some way that they deeply appreciate. I talk to family members in Algeria who I'd never be able to reliably keep in touch with otherwise, and friends in Europe love FB marketplace. Yes, a service for 2-3 billion people has drawbacks. It's disingenuous to say that it doesn't improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people, t…

Facebook's algorithms fueled the genocide in Myanmar. How many muslim lives is FB marketplace worth? Do you talk to family members in Algeria through FB or WhatsApp? WhatsApp would have been just fine if Zuckerberg didn't buy it before US regulators rolled out of bed. I think it's hard to argue that anyone's life is improved by a company that shows such a lack of respect for its users. We could have social networks t…

>Facebook's algorithms fueled the genocide in Myanmar. How many muslim lives is FB marketplace worth? FB marketplace didn't cause those bad things. FB has done bad things due to perverse incentives, but for individuals working at the company you can't deny that at least some people can have a positive experience making positive impact to the world.

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

#547

Post by ninjagoo »

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…

> Actual, natural-born managers are such an incredibly rare species that you can go a long time without seeing any in the wild.

So how do we replicate this ability in people? For sports, there are academies to surface and nurture sporting talent. As a society, at least to me, it seems we have not been able to do something similar for "management" at societal scale. Maybe because the whole domain requires a broader set of competencies in many fields, including the specific technical domain, the humanities, business skills, and political savvy, amongst others.

Maybe we no longer need to replicate this with people. Instead, repeating what I said elsewhere in the thread: consider how there are 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 (reflecting different management styles, for example) 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

#548

Post by kqr2 »

kamaal wrote: post #511
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…

It is called 'Up or Out' culture. It is practiced everywhere, even in the military. You don't see 50+ year soldiers, do you? Except may be in 'Top Gun' sort of movies, which just only proves the point. You are supposed to retire or give way to top performers to take the top places.

Also sometimes referred to as the Cravath System:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cravath_System

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

#549

Post by Gunnerhead »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #523
ugh123 wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some organizations have tried to limit manager-bloat by offering an alternative track for ICs (senior-> staff -> principle -> whatever). But the expectations at those levels have been hard to define and individual output seems to plateau or even degrade back to 'senior' level or even less when these high ranking ICs are asked to join a plethora of meetings on behalf of the team.

It's also common at some of these companies to get "demoted" from a higher track. That basically never happens to managers.

Sorry, do you mean it’s common for someone to go from, say, L6, to L5?

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

#550

Post by ethbr0 »

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…

Middle management should be like jury duty -- something assigned randomly to a team member, then served for a set period.

And company processes should be engineered so that a bad/ineffectual manager can't break them, with everything that can be devolved to the team itself.

And hiring should be done on the basis that a new employee will likely be a manager at some point.

The best managers I've had were all reluctant, so selecting against people who want to be managers seems like a great idea.

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