How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics • Hacker News Board

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#71

Post by lifeisstillgood » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 9:36 PM UTC

* "Influencer" - you can say that well respected technical people have as much influence as management - but if you spend most of your day coding you don't have the same information about the organisation so you just won't know there are decisions being made that you can influence. Management is like politics - it is a full time job.

* at some point companies need to become more democratic. Yes "influencers" should be involved in these discussions, and management should almost be the press - letting people know these decisions are underway.

* I personally think if we spend more time writing good discussion documents around our projects we will be able to write good discussion documents about our organisations

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#72

Post by jankassens » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 9:37 PM UTC

1024core wrote: post #12

> Take the incentive out of “climbing the ladder.” In other words, pay everyone the same? Of course the author didn't mean that; and pay and power are the primary drivers of upward mobility. If I get paid as much as Zuck's SVPs, sure, I won't feel the urge to climb the ladder; but until that happens, I will.

There are definitely Individual Contributors who are on the same compensation level as directors. These are the engineers who revolutionize how the company operates, such as inventing HHVM and saving tons of resources.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#73

Post by devy » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 9:37 PM UTC

Retra wrote: post #40

devy wrote: post #27

"Take the incentive out of “climbing the ladder.” Some of the organization structure setup is not unique to Facebook. My former boss was a long time Microsoft employee, from what I heard from her anecdotally, Microsoft has long been setup with dual tracks for technical employees. The management track and the engineer track. One moves from engineer track to management track is a true lateral move in that salary don't…

IBM is set up the same way, to a degree. They have "IBM fellows" who are essentially executive-level engineers. I don't think it extends all the way down though.

Yeah, IBM might have been one of the earliest tech giants to setup dual track organizational structure although I don't know for sure.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#74

Post by mVChr » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 9:38 PM UTC

p4wnc6 wrote: post #32

Have only heard negative things about FB office politics from the folks I know who work there.

FB is big enough I'm sure different teams vary pretty widely. Even at the ~300 person company I was at previously the difference between project team culture and manager interference was pretty huge.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#75

Post by trbvm2 » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 9:39 PM UTC

ctrlalt_g wrote: post #46

1024core wrote: post #12

> Take the incentive out of “climbing the ladder.” In other words, pay everyone the same? Of course the author didn't mean that; and pay and power are the primary drivers of upward mobility. If I get paid as much as Zuck's SVPs, sure, I won't feel the urge to climb the ladder; but until that happens, I will.

"Climbing the ladder" has the connotation of stepping on other people in order to get ahead. Thinking about the analogy, if there are a bunch of people trying to climb the same ladder as you are, you have to pull people off or climb over them. It's possible to create an incentive structure that discourages cannibalizing your coworkers.

"you have to pull people off or climb over them" Or make a wider ladder?

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#76

Post by criley2 » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 9:41 PM UTC

proksoup wrote: post #43

dreamsofdragons wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you set up the culture right, this isn't as big of a problem as you might think. On our team, it doesn't matter if you're the manager or not, the decisions for the product are made by consensus of the team. Sure management will still do approvals for time off and deal with the skinned knees and runny noses. But for day to day operations, it's peers working for a common cause.

I've found consensus decision making to be frustrating in the environments I've encountered it. A lot of flip flopping and lack of follow through. Who made that decision? We did. Can we give up on that and try something else? Of course. I kinda like to have at least a shepherd for the day to day decisions, if not a commander. In practice in my current environment it's been the occasional PM that takes some ownership…

In my utterly-average agile environment, it's not hard.

Your peers form an agile group to deliberate. You have non-management product owners and stakeholders to guide you (shepherd you).

You have a supervisor who deals with HR business like time off, but is unrelated to your product decisions.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#77

Post by ctrlalt_g » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 9:41 PM UTC

eropple wrote: post #57

ctrlalt_g wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Climbing the ladder" has the connotation of stepping on other people in order to get ahead. Thinking about the analogy, if there are a bunch of people trying to climb the same ladder as you are, you have to pull people off or climb over them. It's possible to create an incentive structure that discourages cannibalizing your coworkers.

What do you envision that looking like? It feels inherently rivalrous, at least to some degree.

I'm not sure, but when I was in the military, my SSgt told me not to burn bridges because I might end up in a situation where my life depends on that person helping me out. I thought that was an interesting incentive to cooperate. So maybe a reputation system can work, but I'm not good enough with people to know.

To be clear, I'm fine with rivalry and competition. I just think there's a sane and reasonable way to do it.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#78

Post by officepolitics » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 9:44 PM UTC

> Managers focus on building a great team, creating a vision for how that team will execute its goals, and helping the people on that team develop in their careers. They are put in those positions because of their strong people skills. They aren’t there to tell teams what to do.

That almost brings a tear to my eye. This is such a huge contrast to what my current experience is at BigCorp. And that's just a few miles away from Facebook.

The question then becomes, how much power does a manager have at Facebook? Can they block you from transferring to another team? Can they block your vacation/time off requests? Are they the only ones responsible for doing the performance reviews? Is said performance review audited so as to contain verifiable facts?

> We make escalation “legal” by making sure people know they won’t be blamed or punished for speaking up or asking hard questions.

I really wish that was expanded on. Theoretically, I could escalate. In practice, that would backfire horribly. After all, if there's no accountability, what's preventing your manager from simply retaliating by giving you a hard time, possibly a while after the escalation happened? There are lots of subjective ways your work can be criticized/sabotaged which are not obviously connected to the escalation.

> Obviously, these strategies are at their most effective when the whole company adopts them.

Actually, it is way, way worse when the whole company doesn't support that. You can move from a great project to your own personal purgatory.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#79

Post by zzzcpan » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 9:44 PM UTC

It's really unclear whether whatever they are doing actually does anything. And the author doesn't sound like he has any idea on what matters for productivity, given that productivity is what they were after.

But at least it's clear that anyone can get far in management as long as they don't screw up too much.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#80

Post by freyir » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 9:49 PM UTC

trbvm2 wrote: post #75

ctrlalt_g wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Climbing the ladder" has the connotation of stepping on other people in order to get ahead. Thinking about the analogy, if there are a bunch of people trying to climb the same ladder as you are, you have to pull people off or climb over them. It's possible to create an incentive structure that discourages cannibalizing your coworkers.

"you have to pull people off or climb over them" Or make a wider ladder?

> Or make a wider ladder?

What do you do next with your glut of senior managers?

Or on the compensation side, there may not be resources to pay everyone as much as they'd like.