4 ms·

Maybe there is one good trend that will come out of this - sack managers throughout the industry. Promote tech people where necessary, and have devs work direct

Maybe there is one good trend that will come out of this - sack managers throughout the industry. Promote tech people where necessary, and have devs work directly with stakeholders. Also trim pdf certified scrum masters. Time to lean things out.

Nav_Panel 4y ago
I'm not confident this will lead to industry-wide trends, at least not immediately, because Twitter is specifically a massive company making negative profit. If Twitter was profitable, then this entire thing wouldn't have happened; they need to get lean because they're losing $$. In my eyes, this is not TOO much different than the kind of radical reorg that might take place at a company like Twitter anyway (although ofc I've never seen it first-hand), just weird that it's playing out entirely in public. That said, I think the public strategy is potentially interesting, as the engineers who remain at the company will probably feel like they're a part of a very exciting moment, will feel more aligned with leadership, etc.
- homeland221 4y ago
  Twitter old managements are not that commercial savvy. They only introduced blue mark like a couple years back even though Twitter has been more than a decade old. Also, almost every governments and celebrities in the world has twitter. That are gold mines. Imagine USA defence department or IRA being forced to pay 1 K usd a month (this is already consider low ), if not the twit handles given to North Korea or Putin to mess with. The old twit mgmnts are rather incompetent with their pursuit of affirmative, diversity, race theory type of agenda in the last 3 years. You can see those with conservatives view largely will get suspended while liberals and lefties (some questionable middle east groups) are allowed. I doubt that attracts ads money.
  - type-r 4y ago
    Twitter verification was introduced over 13 years ago, a little over 3 years after Twitter was founded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_verification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_verification
- MonkeyClub 4y ago
  > If Twitter was profitable, then this entire thing wouldn't have happened; they need to get lean because they're losing $$. Exactly. It seems that EM overpaid for a dud, and now wants to compensate any way possible. But could he please let us know what percentage of users is bots?
jasonpeacock 4y ago
I thought we were all in clear agreement that promoting engineers into managers creates poor managers? Engineers are good engineers, management is an entirely different skill set. Promoting engineers into managers loses you a good engineer and creates a poor (and unhappy) manager. If the person wants to be a manager, great! But otherwise, don't do it.
- uchman 4y ago
  variant of Peter principle
  - yrgulation 4y ago
    See, thats what incompetent management doesnt understand. Management is not about status or power or rising among ranks just to score points, its about who can best organise and coordinate. Power hungry managers dont belong in tech or science jobs.
    - xiphias2 4y ago
      Not even organise / coordinate, that's not the most important thing that I get from the best manager, actually that's the easy part. The best managers I had were helping me debug things when I get stuck. When there's a seg fault in a multithreaded program, or the project just doesn't seem to go anywhere for some time because I don't really know what to do or I'm going in a bad direction with my local improvements, somebody more mature than me / person with more experience just knows what to do.
- faangiq 4y ago
  No, almost no one agrees with that except for entrenched MBAs and capital allocators.
  - el_benhameen 4y ago
    Almost no one agrees with the idea that you shouldn’t promote people into jobs they don’t want and aren’t good at? I’m as anti-MBA dictatorship as the next person, but c’mon.
db1234 4y ago
Zappos' experiment with holacracy was not a success https://www.yahoo.com/now/zappos-quietly-backed-away-holacracy-090102533.html https://www.yahoo.com/now/zappos-quietly-backed-away-holacra...
koonsolo 4y ago
Reading through the responses here there seem to be 2 kinds of ways to look at things: 1. Manager needs to be the most knowledgeable, and steer the team with the correct decisions. 2. Manager cannot be close to the code due to other responsibilities, and so needs to trust their team for the technical things. Personally I have the following opinion: a lot of companies can follow 1, since once you know how to flip burgers, you know. The smarter people rise and can have more influence. However in knowledge work, the people most knowledgeable are close to the code. When you move up, you will know less and less (code evolves quickly). I'm 20 years in the software development business, and I only work for managers that understand they don't know, and trust & empower their team to take the right technical decisions. It really surprises me that some developers here think differently.
MattPalmer1086 4y ago
I have seen this kind of call throughout my career. Developers say useless people who aren't devs should just get out of their way. Where before there were teams of QA people, project managers, IT administrators and support personnel, it has all been subsumed into the various "agile" DevOps methodologies. I now hear devs complain that they have to do everything. Promoting devs to do all the things that devs don't do is not the solution. It shows a deep lack of awareness of all the boring things (to devs anyway) that have to happen so that devs can get on with writing code. This is not to say that all managers are great; there are many bad or mediocre managers, just as there are many bad or mediocre devs. They are different skill sets though.
mmcnl 4y ago
In my experience, most developers hate interacting with stakeholders. They start complaining about having too many meetings, etc. Also I think it's difficult to handle both roles simultaneously. There's a lot of context-switching involved. Hence the existence of scrum masters. Perhaps it's different when you have the resources to attract top-tier talent.

Nav_Panel 4y ago

I'm not confident this will lead to industry-wide trends, at least not immediately, because Twitter is specifically a massive company making negative profit. If Twitter was profitable, then this entire thing wouldn't have happened; they need to get lean because they're losing $$. In my eyes, this is not TOO much different than the kind of radical reorg that might take place at a company like Twitter anyway (although ofc I've never seen it first-hand), just weird that it's playing out entirely in public. That said, I think the public strategy is potentially interesting, as the engineers who remain at the company will probably feel like they're a part of a very exciting moment, will feel more aligned with leadership, etc.

homeland221 4y ago
Twitter old managements are not that commercial savvy. They only introduced blue mark like a couple years back even though Twitter has been more than a decade old. Also, almost every governments and celebrities in the world has twitter. That are gold mines. Imagine USA defence department or IRA being forced to pay 1 K usd a month (this is already consider low ), if not the twit handles given to North Korea or Putin to mess with. The old twit mgmnts are rather incompetent with their pursuit of affirmative, diversity, race theory type of agenda in the last 3 years. You can see those with conservatives view largely will get suspended while liberals and lefties (some questionable middle east groups) are allowed. I doubt that attracts ads money.
- type-r 4y ago
  Twitter verification was introduced over 13 years ago, a little over 3 years after Twitter was founded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_verification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_verification
MonkeyClub 4y ago
> If Twitter was profitable, then this entire thing wouldn't have happened; they need to get lean because they're losing $$. Exactly. It seems that EM overpaid for a dud, and now wants to compensate any way possible. But could he please let us know what percentage of users is bots?

jasonpeacock 4y ago

I thought we were all in clear agreement that promoting engineers into managers creates poor managers? Engineers are good engineers, management is an entirely different skill set. Promoting engineers into managers loses you a good engineer and creates a poor (and unhappy) manager. If the person wants to be a manager, great! But otherwise, don't do it.

uchman 4y ago
variant of Peter principle
- yrgulation 4y ago
  See, thats what incompetent management doesnt understand. Management is not about status or power or rising among ranks just to score points, its about who can best organise and coordinate. Power hungry managers dont belong in tech or science jobs.
  - xiphias2 4y ago
    Not even organise / coordinate, that's not the most important thing that I get from the best manager, actually that's the easy part. The best managers I had were helping me debug things when I get stuck. When there's a seg fault in a multithreaded program, or the project just doesn't seem to go anywhere for some time because I don't really know what to do or I'm going in a bad direction with my local improvements, somebody more mature than me / person with more experience just knows what to do.
faangiq 4y ago
No, almost no one agrees with that except for entrenched MBAs and capital allocators.
- el_benhameen 4y ago
  Almost no one agrees with the idea that you shouldn’t promote people into jobs they don’t want and aren’t good at? I’m as anti-MBA dictatorship as the next person, but c’mon.

db1234 4y ago

Zappos' experiment with holacracy was not a success https://www.yahoo.com/now/zappos-quietly-backed-away-holacracy-090102533.html https://www.yahoo.com/now/zappos-quietly-backed-away-holacra...

koonsolo 4y ago

Reading through the responses here there seem to be 2 kinds of ways to look at things: 1. Manager needs to be the most knowledgeable, and steer the team with the correct decisions. 2. Manager cannot be close to the code due to other responsibilities, and so needs to trust their team for the technical things. Personally I have the following opinion: a lot of companies can follow 1, since once you know how to flip burgers, you know. The smarter people rise and can have more influence. However in knowledge work, the people most knowledgeable are close to the code. When you move up, you will know less and less (code evolves quickly). I'm 20 years in the software development business, and I only work for managers that understand they don't know, and trust & empower their team to take the right technical decisions. It really surprises me that some developers here think differently.

MattPalmer1086 4y ago

I have seen this kind of call throughout my career. Developers say useless people who aren't devs should just get out of their way. Where before there were teams of QA people, project managers, IT administrators and support personnel, it has all been subsumed into the various "agile" DevOps methodologies. I now hear devs complain that they have to do everything. Promoting devs to do all the things that devs don't do is not the solution. It shows a deep lack of awareness of all the boring things (to devs anyway) that have to happen so that devs can get on with writing code. This is not to say that all managers are great; there are many bad or mediocre managers, just as there are many bad or mediocre devs. They are different skill sets though.

mmcnl 4y ago

In my experience, most developers hate interacting with stakeholders. They start complaining about having too many meetings, etc. Also I think it's difficult to handle both roles simultaneously. There's a lot of context-switching involved. Hence the existence of scrum masters. Perhaps it's different when you have the resources to attract top-tier talent.