631–640 of 674 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The technical bar for EMs at Meta is quite high.
As a former EM at Meta, I beg to differ.
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…
Oddly enough, this didn't get reported on very much by the media.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Maybe the people producing the shit need to go too.
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.
Smart companies have been doing things like this for decades. The first company I worked for 20 years ago had distinct tracks for management and engineering staff once people got to a certain level.
I've fluctuated between first-level manager and IC a few times in my career. The driving force most recently has been that my manager accumulated too many people, and I was moved from a "team lead" or "project lead" to an actual people manager with a small team. When you're only managing 1-3 people, it's very easy to be asked to do this on top of being an IC, so it's a bit like the company getting a "free" level of management without the overhead.
Of course, it never works out this way in reality, because your calendar fills continuously until you've gone from a maker's schedule to a manager's schedule.
http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html>
Once you've hit peak calendar, it doesn't really matter how many people you manage any more, because your calendar can't get more full and you can't contribute less than zero individual work (ignoring countless Dilbert cartoons here).
Does this help the company? Well, maybe. It does mean your managers at least have the context of the work of their teams much better than someone who was hired in. But do it too many times, and pretty soon it's easy to have more people in charge than you actually have doing work. Does it help the contributor who becomes a manager? In my experience, not really. It's a different career path, and it's a bit like starting over. The pay won't necessarily increase significantly, the responsibilities climb, and I think most frustratingly, you're no longer recognized for your technical contributions. I'm also not sure it's all that great for the ICs under a manager with a small team. The best managers I've ever had have been the people who can dedicate 100% of their time to, well, managing. They're the ones who can give me air cover, keep me out of meetings, intercept unnecessary requests before they get to me, make the presentations for the near-constant status update requests, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
To be slightly less cynical, I think they just mean that individual engineers at Meta are responsible for large chunks/vertical slices of work, so your work has a lot of individual impact on getting things out into the world.
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]
A surprising number of teams are NOT involved in things like news feed, story ranking, "engagement", etc. Some teams, like my own, were building foundational technology for things like AR/VR, wearable devices, mapping & navigation, etc. A concrete example of "impactful" work done by such teams was just posted on LinkedIn, which is a focus on building maps geared towards pedestrians walking around, not cars driving. This is a building block for eventual AR use cases, among other things. The team building this then enables other teams up the food chain to use this in building what eventually becomes part of an end-user product.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As if they were on purely my own Is this actually the expectation at the places you work?
In general, if you want your reports to accept company decisions, it is in your interest as a manager to align your stated opinions with company policy. Openly disagreeing, or just trying to take a neutral position will only reduce faith in the company and sow unrest for which you will be held accountable.
I have absolubtely had managers that did an excellent job of making us feel like we were in it together. In fact I'd say its one of the key skills of being a manager at all?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is it possible to do both? I hear senior VPs like Craig Federighi, Jeff Dean, and others, still write code (maybe 1 day a week but still), but also call the big shots