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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

#641

Post by red-iron-pine »

bushbaba wrote: post #614
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That sounds like a company culture issue. Amazon and meta are fairly good at managing out people quickly.

FAANGs generally don't have that problem, at least not until recently.

No shortage of kids at Stanford or MIT dreaming of GOOG bucks and name recognition, and willing to work 80 hour weeks. Hell, even with AMZN's terrible reputation I still know people @ UW Seattle chomping at the bit to get in.

Not hard to fire when it's easy to replace with solid talent. Much harder for someone like P&G or Clorox or Amtrak -- they either contract out or else get what they get.

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

#642

Post by dreamcompiler »

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…

In any organization somewhere between 1% and 10% of people will suck up 80% of leadership's time if you let them.

Worse, they make the organization toxic for everybody else.

I've come to believe the most important job of a manager is to quickly identify these people and either fire them or neutralize them (i.e. put them in a closet and assign them a meaningless task).

This requires a culture shift in most organizations to understand that toxic people (e.g. bullies, narcissists, and those with other serious personality disorders) have an outsize negative impact on productivity and profits and can kill the company if you don't get rid of them quickly.

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

#643

Post by icedchai »

SilverBirch wrote: post #615
icedchai wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it can go either way (and at Meta, I have no idea), but team size tells you nothing. You can have a team of 4 highly productive engineers working on a specific project with limited scope and 1 manager can manage that very effectively. But you can't have that manager manage two teams, you're literally just splitting their focus (and with 4 people the manager can be hands-on). On the other hand you have plenty…

You are right about team size, but in many companies, the "dev manager" is certainly not hands on, even with small teams. The last team I was on, the "dev manager" never even set up his development environment. He always claimed he wanted to get more involved, but probably had too many other priorities. If you are managing a team of 4, not making any technical decisions, not writing any code either, in my opinion, it is a bad sign. You are too out of touch. Hands on is necessary with small teams.

In those environments, all the technical work and decisions are delegated to a tech lead / staff / principal eng. The "dev manager" is there for people management and high level sprint planning. Planning can be done with very little technical knowledge since the team itself does the sizing and scoping.

Obviously not every company is the same, but that was my experience at a mid-size SV tech company.

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

#644

Post by LadyCailin »

shagie wrote: post #502
1over137 wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "IC" mean in this context?

Individual contribuitor. In most cases, this is roughly "people who write code." https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/what-is-a...

Not strictly. Architects I think are generally considered ICs. An IC is basically anyone that doesn’t have people under them officially in the org hierarchy, even if they do thought leadership, like a tech lead or architect.

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

#645

Post by lightbendover »

I am infinitely more happy as a PE than as a manager. I get to spend all of my time on technical strategy, have nearly authoritative control over no just my org but over sister orgs as well, and no need to write performance reviews and do the whole HR song and dance. Being a manager was absolute hell in big tech, not even sure why I pursued it in retrospect when I had the technical skills to be an IC at the same level and beyond.

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

#646

Post by 29athrowaway »

KaiserPro wrote: post #620
29athrowaway wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> wait until you hear about managers. 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 mat…

It is another aspect of cargo cult and checklist driven leadership.

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

#647

Post by mavelikara »

_9omd wrote: post #446

Chamath talked about manager bloat on a recent All-in podcast in a way that seemed to make sense. Basically there is pressure to grow your career by moving from being an IC to a manager and once a manager there are incentives to grow your number of reports. The organizational efficiency suffers when you have top tier ICs start managing teams of average people. You might get a team of 6 engineers that’s only doing 2x…

David Sacks, not Chamath.

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

#648

Post by RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm »

fatnoah wrote: post #638
RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> There must be something else which you are thinking about when wording it with this positive connotation? 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 o…

Thank you for taking the time to answer my question! :)

I suppose it's a matter of weighing "a set of many small utilities which make life a bit easier for N people" against "two big dangerous social networks which make life a lot harder for M people". Because the money from the former helps the latter as well.

How you decide to judge this is up to you :)

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

#649

Post by cptcobalt »

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…

and good managers probably started out as bad managers until they figured it out!

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

#650

Post by fnordpiglet »

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 fundamentally disagree, as a similarly senior person at various globo mega FAANG corps, my observation of the dynamics is managers are paid more at some companies because managers set compensation and there is a social barrier to paying subordinates more than their managers. At other globo mega FAANG corps you get paid what is required to retain you. Most engineers make less than there managers simply because the managers are more senior in their career and have a lot of options at competitors. But exceptional engineers are wildly rare and in demand breaking the highest pay bands. This also holds for other fields where there’s the two sigma IC who is a rain maker - sales, trading, etc. I’ve never seen a company that’s unable to fill even its most senior ranks readily, but I’ve seen many that can’t retain star traders or sales people or engineers and it’s usually an unwillingness to break the social taboo of “overpaying” an IC. Those companies don’t understand how markets work and generally their competitive performance is lower than the companies that pay what they have to pay.

I’d note shittiness of the job is not a compensation decision factor. Otherwise slaughterhouse employees and social workers would be paid better than any of us.

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