611–620 of 674 posts
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> It has been in common use for at least 15, if not 20 years. I've been in the industry since 1998. The first time I saw it was on HN a few years ago (maybe 3 or 4).
I just searched HN and found references 12 years ago.
Hah!
I would just love to see that thread - may it is also filled with "What's an IC?" :-)
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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…
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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…
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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…
It's not that they are useless, it's that there are often too many of them. At a previous SV org I worked for, they had roughly 1 "dev manager" for every 4 engineers. You could have 1 for every 10 and achieve the same result.
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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 b…
If I can be excused to ramble a bit...
I think the job is optimization? If so the hypothetical perfect manager would get it right really fast and have nothing to do but wait for the next dumpster fire that might never happen or some micro optimization that isn't worth much.
Measuring performance (at least in real time) seems hard if not impossible?
With a cashier it is easy, if they handle 100 products per minute, 6000 per hour, they get 12 per hour or 0.2 cents per product handled, on the average product it is a perceptional difference of zero. I, as the customer buying 100 products, don't care if I pay 20 cents or 2 euro.
I've had a hundred such jobs, did the math on many, it was spectacularly hilarious. Best one was 5 factory workers making half a million boxes of cookies in a 5 hour shift for 35 euro/day. They could easily pay 1000 euro/day, the customer wouldn't even notice it.
In stead it is really hard for them now, they cant find employees. They are far behind on schedule. Existing employees are made to work even harder.
Being unable to afford to pay more is actually not how it works. You add up what it costs to deliver a service or a product and then you conclude if its a viable business model.
It is not that the rent is to dmn high, parts or ingredients are to expensive, employees are unwilling to work for peanuts etc. There is no limit on how much a janitor costs. The market sets it, employees and employers are just dragged along - kicking and screaming if need be.
If we continue the story and say the employees want to much money we might end up back at their rent being to dmn high.
But surely no one would continue that story to the point where you cant find employees because the cookies got 1 cent more expensive?
I get 2 letters every year, one says my rent goes up by 5%, the other says my salary goes up by 1%. Both talk similarly about inflation. It's quite comical.
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Is this ironic, I can't tell? "The Mythical Man-Month" seems relevant in any case.
Has to be ironic, since that's what Michelangelo did
Potentially inflammatory story, but I think about it occasionally, and this is a good context. I was out having a meal with old college buddies; most of us are developers, but some have become team leaders and managers. I will call it a statistical anomaly, but the worst engineers are now in 'people management' positions. The discussion ended with a guy boasting about how his team has X people, and he's looking to gr…
I like working for people like this, because often they look to increase both quantity and quality of the people they manage (if they can call you a senior engineer, then that must make them a senior manager). So they're often quite a good advocate for your career. They're focused on me and the other engineers, we're focused on the product, and everyone is happy. That contrasts with product focused managers, where I'…
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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 h…
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> If coding is beneath you, working in software is beyond you. maybe the problem you are trying to solve isn't code. > ICs do not need managers, managers need ICs. Given the level of infantilisation at meta, and big tech in general, I think this is clearly not the case. "self management" (ie bottoms up management) stopped working at meta many many years ago. > Some managers have negative productivity. So do a lot of…
I edited it as you replied, but sure. If you think developers are prima donnas wait until you hear about managers. Compared to developers, many of them fit much more into the prima donna description. Most managers don't document anything and when they do, it is of low quality and goes unmaintained quickly. Most managers out there are redundant and have no idea about what leadership is. They just get an orgasm each ti…
You're assuming that I've never really worked anywhere with managers, good or otherwise.
> Most managers don't document anything
yup, and they are insufferable dicks for not doing it. But, in big companies you need to have presence, so managers that are successful tend to have a documented paper trail of "their" successes. Whether its useful documentation is very much another matter.
> Most managers out there are redundant and have no idea about what leadership is.
There are two issues here, lets do leadership first. Yes, leadership is not taught properly, and that annoys me greatly. Leadership can be taught, and its not to challenging to do. But on the flip side, leadership isn't just about keeping people happy, its about taking hard decisions and getting people to understand what they need to do.
Again, there are lots of bad examples out there.
Now as for redundant, if that was really the case, and that most manager are redundant, then surely they are ripe for "cost savings"? After all capitalism is mostly ruthless when it comes to staff costs.
The problem is that good managers increase productivity. However what "good" is can depend on where you sit on the hierarchy. If your CEO/CTO only talks to managers, then your manager controls the information flow. this is a company culture thing, and is closely coupled to how managers are expected react.
> The reason hackathons produce amazing results is because[..]
...of exposure bias. There are loads of ideas in hackathons, and lots of them are shite. But! the ones you remember are good, thus there appears to be a great signal to noise ratio. I've organised and participated in loads, they are good fun. But you can't run a company permanently in hackathon mode.