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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

#581

Post by solarmist »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #578
solarmist wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, this screams a lack of trust. By explaining your reasoning in every situation you can will build trust, so that on the rare occasion that you need them to act without sharing, they will trust you enough to do so. For example, when in an execution environment where response time matters. And in practice, this is how good commanders I've worked with have operated. And this is explicitly a principle of the US Arm…

> To me, this screams a lack of trust. It is unusual to have a team emotionally mature enough to handle actual transparency. You only have to read HN to know people live with extreme cognitive dissonance between wanting their high salaries and hating the business practices that enable them. My experience has always been that certain employees get marked as "adults in the room" and are given real transparency in 1:1s.

This is true. Especially extending it to opinions and emotions.

But understanding the purpose and why of a decision/plan is only a small piece of full transparency. And is always achievable. This is the minimal amount I consider functional. Less than this is dysfunctional.

The reset is extremely rare for teams (I’ve only had this on a team once and it was magical), but happens regularly individually 1-1.

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

#583

Post by bhawks »

ugh123 wrote: post #476

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?

Netflix job at faang is to keep the acronym family friendly. Now that Facebook is Meta it has much less work to do.

In all seriousness Netflix has approximately 10k employees. Meta is the smallest of the rest at 90k employees. The scale is radically different.

And this is not to say high employee counts are a good thing. To the contrary these behemoths struggle to operate.

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

#584

Post by querulous »

zabzonk wrote: post #249
capitalsigma wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the nuance you are missing is that individual contributors are responsible for their own work and judged based on that. they are not responsible for the work of others. managers are of course responsible for the work of those they supervise

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

#585

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

lmm wrote: post #564
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't, and not many people do, but the fact is that there are lots, and lots, and lots of people without the skill sets necessary to move to higher paying jobs, so it's still based on supply and demand. Of course, good managers should generate a lot more value than a janitor or a cashier, so there should be more available to pay them. Even if hardly anyone wanted those janitor or cashier jobs, there would still be a limit on what they could be paid based on value created (and indeed, the "labor shortage" you hear about all the time now in those lower paying jobs is due to the fact that not that many people want them but in many cases company owners can't afford to pay them more).

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

#586

Post by tekknik »

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…

A majority of them may be like this, but eventually you’ll meet that one manager that actually seems to care and goes out of their way to help you. Then you’ll realize some people that are looking to be managers are not power hungry narcissists.

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

#587

Post by brookst »

civilized wrote: post #503
brookst wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an interesting thought, but I don't know how you "normalize" it if companies find that they are more profitable paying managers more.

> if companies find that they are more profitable paying managers more. Is there any reason to believe this? Other than just assuming that whatever companies do is optimal for their profits?

I mean there are, what, millions of independently run companies in the world.

I suppose it’s possible there!s some totally novel idea nobody has tried but which would be hugely successful and revolutionize corporate practices. But I’m very skeptical there is an objectively more successful model just waiting for some company to stumble on it.

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

#588

Post by alex_sf »

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.

I have been. This is absurd.

You’re claiming that 80% of your time, 80% of your substantial pay, was spent managing the fallout of a single employee on a team of 30. It’s astonishingly inefficient and wasteful.

And while you’re emblematic of this behavior, it’s widespread in the tech industry. The vast majority of management is terrified of any sort of real conflict or intervention, so they become ineffectual and useless.

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

#589

Post by doktorhladnjak »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #39
justizin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can't be that difficult to contribute to the achievement of absolutely tanking the company's value by investing in a dead-end VR-for-work platform that was always just a distraction to avoid responding in any way to Congress pressing him about election interference.

Look man, Apple tanked Facebooks valuation, not the Metaverse. And that's presumably why he wants the Metaverse, so he's not just a sharecropper on someone else's digital platform.

> Apple tanked Facebooks valuation

No, Facebook tanked their own valuation. They monetized user data without a care for how those users might eventually feel. They became entitled about having that data and the revenue streams attached.

Apple took the opening Facebook left unguarded by realizing people actually do value privacy in their products, and made technical and marketing investments in it.

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

#590

Post by bongoman37 »

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,…

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