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When you make a decision as a manager or a director, the impact of that decision has a multiplicative force. As an individual contributor, the impact of your d

When you make a decision as a manager or a director, the impact of that decision has a multiplicative force. As an individual contributor, the impact of your decisions may be broad, but however broad your individual impact is, your manager's impact on you is [broad * number of directs], so it's always "greater" (note: not better, just greater). So in that sense, the "value" of a manager/director is "higher". IMO it's all just a series of roles, and you need someone to do both. Someone has to be designing and building code while someone else attends meetings and understands the larger context of that code, making sure the code makes sense a week/month/year later. In fact, I prefer it when managers take on a much less "HR" role, and instead act as "go-fers" for their team, a la "how can I unblock you today?". Bonus points if they can mentor, but not necessary. Being an individual contributor isn't a "demotion", but it is a change in where your impact hits (people vs. things). You need both, and it's fundamentally a partnership, I wish more people realized that.

CivBase 6y ago
> So in that sense, the "value" of a manager/director is "higher". That depends on how high the multiplier is and how many direct reports a manager has. A manager with 5 direct reports and a multiplier of 110% is only producing as much net value as 0.5 of his/her reports. A manager with 20 direct reports and a multiplier of 106% produces a net value of 1.2 of his/her reports. It's not safe to say that managers in general produce more value. Some do, some don't. It depends on their ability and the abilities of those they share a management relationship with. But the same could be said about engineers/architects/devs.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  Much more importantly, it depends on the multiplicative effect that an engineer is positioned to have. It's 2002. Does a Kohls Director Of Whatever with tens of direct reports and thousands of people below those reports have more leverage than a single engineer at Amazon? It's 2021. Does a manager of hundreds of warehouse workers have more leverage/impact potential than a single engineer in a robotics R&D division?
- TameAntelope 6y ago
  Totally fair. The potential impact a manager can have is much higher (good manager multiplying their positive impact across good engineers), but an ineffective manager can be less impactful (or even actively harmful) to their direct reports (bad engineer multiplying their negative impact across bad engineers).
  - makapuf 6y ago
    Problem is, an 1x manager with 2x engineers will often be credited for it.
throwawaygh 6y ago
> When you make a decision as a manager or a director, the impact of that decision has a multiplicative force. Every time I hear this explanation, I can't help but think "so we're still smoking Luck Strikes, huh?" When you make a decision as a software engineer, the impact of that decision can often have a multiplicative or even exponential force. The goal of 21st century organizations -- especially software organizations -- should be to make things scale in way that's at most sublinear with the number of people you throw at it. Automation prints money and businesses that can harness automation have huge profit margins. People are expensive and body shops are shitty companies waiting to be replaced when technology catches up with whatever work they're throwing bodies at. It's not 1960 anymore. Invest in your automators and treat your people managers as a low-value-add cost center.
- TameAntelope 6y ago
  One question for you: how does an engineer know what to automate?
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    How does a people manager know what to automate? And, more importantly, what might be the massive unintended consequences of routing your org's permission structure in the same way you route its head-count? Strategic decision-making is not the same as people managing, and people managing can even create blind-spots that get in the way of good decision-making.
    - TameAntelope 6y ago
      A manager (who said anything about people manager? I even explicitly said otherwise) knows what to build because she's coordinated with the groups who spend their entire day focusing on the customer, as well as the other developer groups to make sure everyone isn't working on the same thing, as well as leadership so they know what's being built and how it aligns with their goals and vision into the market (because that's what their expertise is in), as well as within her own team to make sure people are building things that can work together smoothly/cleanly, as well as covering for people who have illness/unavailability, and so on... Would you rather have developers wearing every hat in an org? When would they find time to code? I know many developers who don't want to have to do all of that work simultaneously, and are extremely grateful for a manager who can take many of these tasks off their plate. When was the last time you tried to add a recurring meeting to a development team's calendar? They... don't like it, in my experience, and I respect the hell out of that.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kingdomcome50 6y ago
> When you make a decision as a manager or a director, the impact of that decision has a multiplicative force. The above resonates as an exercise in tautology to me. If the job of a manager is defined as a position in which a person's decisions will have a multiplicative force... well... then of course their decisions will have a multiplicative force! Though I'm not sure the above is even remotely true for the vast majority of management-type positions, save those at the highest-level. And even if it is... then it of course a fact that the value derived from an individual in such a position is therefore not related to the "multiplicative force", rather, the decisions themselves. I'd wager most managers come from two camps (the first two below): 1. Those that are ex individual contributors who have accumulated enough seniority and experience to best-understand not "what to build", but rather, "how to build it best". And are therefore given the authority, responsibility, and pay-check to do so. 2. And those who are not really managers at all, and whose job would be more accurately named "coordinators". This seems to be the role you are hitting on at end. You know, the guy who asks the engineers "how can I unblock you today?" and whose explicit role is to have the authority to act on the answer. Notably, not synthesizing the answer in the first place. 3. The third camp is of course the ones to which you seem to be alluding in your comment. The high-level, c-suite, "director of strategy"-type roles. And you are exactly right about them. Clearly the person deciding which widget needs to be built is in a position of tremendous responsibility when the value they can add (and remove) is extremely consequential (assuming the resources required to do so are equally consequential). There aren't many roles like this in a company. It's the second group of "managers", I think, that the OP is confused about. They don't actually make that many decisions, and the ones that they do make are rarely different from the one their most competent reports wouldn't also make. Sure these "managers" sit in meetings and talk about the larger context of the code, the product vision, etc., but only insofar as that its useful to have someone who can distill and relay this information back to the engineers building the product. Because as an engineer it is, of course, nearly impossible to build a truly great product if you don't understand its larger context. It is this group of managers where the tautology is glaring. It is their job to carry-out the work necessary to multiply force. The work isn't all that creative, doesn't require much judgment, and rarely requires much expertise. The value isn't in multiplying force, it's in just showing up... To clarify, I'm not suggesting managers don't have value, and certainly don't believe there doesn't exist a spectrum between those in the position. Some people multiply force more than others. They know to ask "how can I unblock you today?". They know that Jim doesn't like to be bothered before 11AM. That Susan is more productive if she has a tight feedback loop. Or that Ron isn't as good as Pam at test coverage. They know how to find and exploit people strengths while also minimizing their weaknesses. This is valuable. Even so I'd wager most of the time a manager's pay is calibrated such that they make more than those whom they manage regardless of the value these people (the people being managed) contribute and without any sort of rigorous appraisal of how much value they bring or how much force they multiply. How could you? The skills illustrated above can't easily be captured in a pay band...
johnfn 6y ago
> As an individual contributor, the impact of your decisions may be broad, but however broad your individual impact is, your manager's impact on you is [broad * number of directs], so it's always "greater" (note: not better, just greater). But this is obviously false, right? If the IC is truly a spectacular IC, then it's likely that no matter which manager they're under, they will have large impact. The impact of the manager isn't the entire impact of their directs, but rather the relative difference between the impact of their directs and the impact their directs would have under a different manager. Which is substantially less, and could easily be less than the impact of a particularly strong IC.

CivBase 6y ago

> So in that sense, the "value" of a manager/director is "higher". That depends on how high the multiplier is and how many direct reports a manager has. A manager with 5 direct reports and a multiplier of 110% is only producing as much net value as 0.5 of his/her reports. A manager with 20 direct reports and a multiplier of 106% produces a net value of 1.2 of his/her reports. It's not safe to say that managers in general produce more value. Some do, some don't. It depends on their ability and the abilities of those they share a management relationship with. But the same could be said about engineers/architects/devs.

throwawaygh 6y ago
Much more importantly, it depends on the multiplicative effect that an engineer is positioned to have. It's 2002. Does a Kohls Director Of Whatever with tens of direct reports and thousands of people below those reports have more leverage than a single engineer at Amazon? It's 2021. Does a manager of hundreds of warehouse workers have more leverage/impact potential than a single engineer in a robotics R&D division?
TameAntelope 6y ago
Totally fair. The potential impact a manager can have is much higher (good manager multiplying their positive impact across good engineers), but an ineffective manager can be less impactful (or even actively harmful) to their direct reports (bad engineer multiplying their negative impact across bad engineers).
- makapuf 6y ago
  Problem is, an 1x manager with 2x engineers will often be credited for it.

throwawaygh 6y ago

> When you make a decision as a manager or a director, the impact of that decision has a multiplicative force. Every time I hear this explanation, I can't help but think "so we're still smoking Luck Strikes, huh?" When you make a decision as a software engineer, the impact of that decision can often have a multiplicative or even exponential force. The goal of 21st century organizations -- especially software organizations -- should be to make things scale in way that's at most sublinear with the number of people you throw at it. Automation prints money and businesses that can harness automation have huge profit margins. People are expensive and body shops are shitty companies waiting to be replaced when technology catches up with whatever work they're throwing bodies at. It's not 1960 anymore. Invest in your automators and treat your people managers as a low-value-add cost center.

TameAntelope 6y ago
One question for you: how does an engineer know what to automate?
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  How does a people manager know what to automate? And, more importantly, what might be the massive unintended consequences of routing your org's permission structure in the same way you route its head-count? Strategic decision-making is not the same as people managing, and people managing can even create blind-spots that get in the way of good decision-making.
  - TameAntelope 6y ago
    A manager (who said anything about people manager? I even explicitly said otherwise) knows what to build because she's coordinated with the groups who spend their entire day focusing on the customer, as well as the other developer groups to make sure everyone isn't working on the same thing, as well as leadership so they know what's being built and how it aligns with their goals and vision into the market (because that's what their expertise is in), as well as within her own team to make sure people are building things that can work together smoothly/cleanly, as well as covering for people who have illness/unavailability, and so on... Would you rather have developers wearing every hat in an org? When would they find time to code? I know many developers who don't want to have to do all of that work simultaneously, and are extremely grateful for a manager who can take many of these tasks off their plate. When was the last time you tried to add a recurring meeting to a development team's calendar? They... don't like it, in my experience, and I respect the hell out of that.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kingdomcome50 6y ago

> When you make a decision as a manager or a director, the impact of that decision has a multiplicative force. The above resonates as an exercise in tautology to me. If the job of a manager is defined as a position in which a person's decisions will have a multiplicative force... well... then of course their decisions will have a multiplicative force! Though I'm not sure the above is even remotely true for the vast majority of management-type positions, save those at the highest-level. And even if it is... then it of course a fact that the value derived from an individual in such a position is therefore not related to the "multiplicative force", rather, the decisions themselves. I'd wager most managers come from two camps (the first two below): 1. Those that are ex individual contributors who have accumulated enough seniority and experience to best-understand not "what to build", but rather, "how to build it best". And are therefore given the authority, responsibility, and pay-check to do so. 2. And those who are not really managers at all, and whose job would be more accurately named "coordinators". This seems to be the role you are hitting on at end. You know, the guy who asks the engineers "how can I unblock you today?" and whose explicit role is to have the authority to act on the answer. Notably, not synthesizing the answer in the first place. 3. The third camp is of course the ones to which you seem to be alluding in your comment. The high-level, c-suite, "director of strategy"-type roles. And you are exactly right about them. Clearly the person deciding which widget needs to be built is in a position of tremendous responsibility when the value they can add (and remove) is extremely consequential (assuming the resources required to do so are equally consequential). There aren't many roles like this in a company. It's the second group of "managers", I think, that the OP is confused about. They don't actually make that many decisions, and the ones that they do make are rarely different from the one their most competent reports wouldn't also make. Sure these "managers" sit in meetings and talk about the larger context of the code, the product vision, etc., but only insofar as that its useful to have someone who can distill and relay this information back to the engineers building the product. Because as an engineer it is, of course, nearly impossible to build a truly great product if you don't understand its larger context. It is this group of managers where the tautology is glaring. It is their job to carry-out the work necessary to multiply force. The work isn't all that creative, doesn't require much judgment, and rarely requires much expertise. The value isn't in multiplying force, it's in just showing up... To clarify, I'm not suggesting managers don't have value, and certainly don't believe there doesn't exist a spectrum between those in the position. Some people multiply force more than others. They know to ask "how can I unblock you today?". They know that Jim doesn't like to be bothered before 11AM. That Susan is more productive if she has a tight feedback loop. Or that Ron isn't as good as Pam at test coverage. They know how to find and exploit people strengths while also minimizing their weaknesses. This is valuable. Even so I'd wager most of the time a manager's pay is calibrated such that they make more than those whom they manage regardless of the value these people (the people being managed) contribute and without any sort of rigorous appraisal of how much value they bring or how much force they multiply. How could you? The skills illustrated above can't easily be captured in a pay band...

johnfn 6y ago

> As an individual contributor, the impact of your decisions may be broad, but however broad your individual impact is, your manager's impact on you is [broad * number of directs], so it's always "greater" (note: not better, just greater). But this is obviously false, right? If the IC is truly a spectacular IC, then it's likely that no matter which manager they're under, they will have large impact. The impact of the manager isn't the entire impact of their directs, but rather the relative difference between the impact of their directs and the impact their directs would have under a different manager. Which is substantially less, and could easily be less than the impact of a particularly strong IC.