How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics • Hacker News Board

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#91

Post by datashovel » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 10:57 PM UTC

I think this concept works well until you consider "lateral movement" between companies. ie. it works as long as a developer leaving / laid-off-from the company will be compensated at their new job just as well as the manager will.

Don't get me wrong. Some people will embrace this. Namely those who aren't interested in managing others. But it seems a bit disingenuous to say you can "level the playing field" by having a value structure that doesn't map well to how most other companies' value structure is set up.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#92

Post by warcher » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 11:07 PM UTC

I think the root of office politics comes when positions and influence within the company become a zero sum game. It wasn't until relatively late in Microsoft's career that you started hearing about all the reindeer games in Redmond. I'll be interested in seeing how this culture develops as Facebook reaches a growth fixpoint.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#93

Post by kawera » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 11:15 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.

3M is another company with similar dual track system for engineers/scientists.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#94

Post by biztos » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 11:26 PM UTC

wskinner wrote: post #8

"At Facebook, moving into management is not a promotion. It’s a lateral move, a parallel track. " This is nice in theory. But when your "peers" with Manager in their title have access to more information and more decision-making power, it is not in fact a parallel track. Just saying people are equal doesn't make it so, and it doesn't change the underlying organizational structures.

Follow the money, right?

If, say, a Software Architect and a Senior Director have the same pay and the same perks and the same bonus structure, and it really does take a talented person the same amount of time to climb that high from (say) Software Engineer and Manager, then they're parallel.

If any of that favors one side over the other then they're not.

I doubt any company is going to give access to enough data to prove or disprove the claim; but the default believability isn't very high.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#95

Post by pm » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 11:27 PM UTC

Mithaldu wrote: post #83

alexgartrell wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're absolutely right, in general, but I've been at Facebook for 5 years now, and the one thing I'll say about it is that once you establish a track record of 1) doing good work and 2) making good long-term decisions, that trumps any considerations around level. The culture is definitely such that the very senior folks (Director++) will value trust over level, so it's very much "influence over authority." P…

The last time i was at a place where trust went above everything, literally all the code was the worst horrible shit, because they sold tyres and that being a solid business had run into zero trouble, ever, and thought that the developer who'd been with them for over a decade was the best, since "he has never made a wrong decision" (i.e. the company hadn't gone bankrupt yet), despite his code managing to create, just…

The place I'm currently about to leave had a similar situation in times past, due to the fact they weren't a software organisation. Facebook is a software organisation, so the same situation would rarely apply. However, I think you should trust but verify. If you're unable to accomplish the verify part (for whatever reason), you'll have problems.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#96

Post by mymosh » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 11:29 PM UTC

rhc2104 wrote: post #58

r00fus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly, who decides who's manager next quarter/year? I've never seen non-managers exercise much leverage on this front. Being able to determine who works with whom is a very powerful position.

Actually, I planned on writing a blog post on this at some point. I work at Hired, and we had an interview process to determine who (internally) would become the next manager. This involved three interviews with engineers, and a presentation with management.

That sounds humiliating for candidates who don't make it. Especially having to go back to work with the engineers that rejected them.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#97

Post by biztos » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 11:30 PM UTC

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…

At most companies, Distinguished Engineer is the "technical track" equivalent of Vice President.

So making more than a mid-level manager may not be all that great. :-)

(I imagine Distinguised Engineers at MSFT do very well, and when you factor in quality of life may be happier with their jobs than VPs. But that doesn't make it parallel.)

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#98

Post by negamax » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 11:32 PM UTC

Lost job recently to office politics at a fortune XXX. It sounds good in theory but I doubt Facebook or any Corp will ever manage to get people put self secondary (tertiary according to article). Or may be they have.. They are awfully successful and it has to come with great team spirit

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#99

Post by majormajor » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 11:34 PM UTC

dreamsofdragons wrote: post #24

wskinner wrote: post #8

"At Facebook, moving into management is not a promotion. It’s a lateral move, a parallel track. " This is nice in theory. But when your "peers" with Manager in their title have access to more information and more decision-making power, it is not in fact a parallel track. Just saying people are equal doesn't make it so, and it doesn't change the underlying organizational structures.

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.

To illustrate how consensus-decision-making can be a tricky balance, I've been in a situation before where I was managing a team of a few other developers (about 50% hands-on myself) and so tried to stay away from being "the decider" since there were others closer to the code.

The feedback my own manager shared with me that had been collected from my reports was that they appreciated what I was trying to do, but that they also wanted me to have a more active technical leadership/decision-making roles.

What I'd failed to do was talk enough specifically with the rest of the team around what they wanted the roles to be, vs just assuming they'd want maximum autonomy. This will vary depending on composition of team, familiarity of the devs on the team with the problem area and stack, etc.

It will also depend on if managers are expected to be almost-purely people-managers or if they're also expected to be domain knowledge leaders as well.

There's no one-size-fits-all approach, but the thing I've seen that separates a good manager from a bad manager is being able to adjust their approach in things like that based on the situation vs sticking to a script.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#100

Post by shekispeaks » Fri, Jul 01, 2016, 11:35 PM UTC

gregdoesit wrote: post #33

I have a bunch of friends at Facebook - and from what I hear, this article is not very far off from what is happening. And it's all about many of the seniors leading with example. Take Philip Su, who was the site lead for Facebook London. In most organizations, that would translate to "manager of everything happening at Facebook". After 3 years he decided to take another lateral move - to move back to software develo…

The Philip Su example is great, but being an early employee and a manager has basically has insurance against getting fired and he can do what he pleases. That IMHO does not reflect the life of an average facebook employee.