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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

#561

Post by runnr_az »

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…

It me. I’m a good Dev but was never going to be one of the greats. Making the jump to manager seemed like the next logical step… and in sone ways it has been, but it’s a very different job. (Now that I evaluate other people’s dev work, I was actually a lot better than I thought I was)

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

#562

Post by vkou »

ethbr0 wrote: post #550
adriand wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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

Please, no. A good middle manager is a shit umbrella, a bad one is a shit funnel.

Most of the ICs I've worked with would not make good managers. Not because they are bad people, but because they don't currently have the skillset to manage.

I'd rather not have them spend 6 months developing their skills by managing me, only to be replaced by the next person in line.

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

#563

Post by ryloric »

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…

Hard agree, it's incredible that there's no systematic way to train such managers.

When I was younger I thought maybe that's what business schools did, but they produce a completely different kind of manager who's probably worse at managing people than they would've been had they not gone to business school in the first place.

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

#564

Post by lmm »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #552
Olreich wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, just look at comments around this topic whenever it comes up. People want ICs to get paid more because they don't want to work as managers . Heck, I most definitely agree with them - again, I was a manager, and I won't do it again either. That means I have accepted that I'll make less money, but I'm fine with that. Someone else can have that shitty job.

I don't want to clean toilets or man a register either, but people who do those things don't get paid more than me. There's something else going on with how managers get paid.

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

#565

Post by lmm »

brookst wrote: post #482
likeabbas wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same way anything is normalized. One person/company does something, posts the outcomes of it, then other people follow. I don't think many companies have tested this logic out, as management style in tech is inherited from older corps. I think this could have great benefits. If a manager's job salary is directly capped to the average of their ICs, then it's their benefit to make the best engineers and show that t…

I still don't see how you beat the market-driven salary. Don't you have to pay market rate for good managers, and market rate for good IC's? If a company unilaterally cuts manager pay, they presumably won't get great managers, or at least not good managers who also want to be paid fairly. It also means managers will only want to manage more senior IC's, so as to benefit from the higher salary, while it's the junior I…

You could drop manager pay and accept that it will mean "worse" managers, and perhaps hope to make up the difference by using the savings to pay more for ICs and hope that this will get you "better" ICs and the result will be better team performance overall.

I don't know how you'd ever make that change to a company structure though. The turkeys would have to vote for christmas.

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

#566

Post by qwerpy »

jensensbutton wrote: post #506
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.

That's an easy way to have zero managers and more problems than you started with. The vast majority of ICs are like children. It's not fun dealing with them. The only way one voluntarily takes on that role is for equal or greater pay.

100%

Tried management for a few years, dealing with the prima donnas and the deadweight on the team burned me out. Wasn’t getting paid more than I was as an IC, so it was not worth it for me by a long shot. As an IC I just have my own problems to worry about.

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

#567

Post by grogenaut »

khazhoux wrote: post #487
ncann wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Too often people feel becoming manager is the easiest way to advance their career (which most of the time equates to making more money). In many cases becoming manager is the only way to advance their career in the current org.

Management track is usually the only way to be in the room where decisions get made. Sure, the top engineers will be consulted and kept in the loop, but 99% of the strategy discussions and planning happens without them. So for people with an innate need to join in the steering of the ship, there’s only one career path.

My org of 500+ has 4 groups in it. Our annual plan had 16 major priorities, 4 of them came from me (a PE, most sr eng) directly or initiatives I pulled forward. I was in the deep meetings for my direct group. I had many discussions for the 2 ideas in other groups (one was easy actually). I'm not sure how that would rate as "excluded". I gave comment on all of the org plans and priorities in the groups (many of them have a lot of priorities I'm not spun up on yet as they're well covered or out of my wheel house). I sat in the final reviews. I'm in the promo / rating meetings. Only thing I'm really not in is the budget meetings and ceremony goal reporting meetings except when needed. That seems like a plus.

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

#568

Post by Slava_Propanei »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #553
alex_sf wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You made it much harder on yourself. You should have just fired that one person. But, management.

Definitely said from someone that has never been a manager. FWIW, it's never that easy to fire someone, and it gets even more difficult when you need to worry about protected class issues.

[dead]

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

#569

Post by zdyn5 »

jonathankoren wrote: post #558
loeg wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

I think you’re off by one. M1 is not an IC6.

M1 is indeed the same level as IC6 at Meta

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

#570

Post by grogenaut »

runnr_az wrote: post #561
donkey-hotei wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It me. I’m a good Dev but was never going to be one of the greats. Making the jump to manager seemed like the next logical step… and in sone ways it has been, but it’s a very different job. (Now that I evaluate other people’s dev work, I was actually a lot better than I thought I was)

I've noticed that many of the best devs are constantly worried about their output and quality and the worst not worried at all. This is as a Sr. IC who gets pulled in to other teams on the regular.
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