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Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave

• Marco3077 4y ago
  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kyumpany.playservicesupdate https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kyumpany.p...
  • bagels 4y ago
    Definitely not relevant to the conversation, but also probably this is a malware link. Wish there were a way to flag comments.
• nh23423fefe 4y ago
  This actually sounds like a meaningful change, unlike proposals from the peanut gallery "to fire the CEO for layoffs," instead demand more output from those you keep in exchange for a job.
  • disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    And to be fair, until about 2015 or so, all managers at FB were expected to be able to do their reports job. This is definitely a good move, as I've heard some horror stories of management bloat at FB since I left in 2018.
    • irrational 4y ago
      That is interesting. I've been working in the field professionally for 22+ years and I've never had a manager that had any technical skills. None of them could even begin to do my job.
      • disgruntledphd2 4y ago
        That must suck (unless you're really senior in which case it's normal). Hilariously enough, I learned so much more from my one non technical manager at FB but having leaders that understand what you do is incredibly helpful.
      • cmrdporcupine 4y ago
        Pretty much all my Google managers were ex-ICs who would have been fully capable of jumping into the codebase if they had to. Some of them still did, if they could squeeze it in.
      • cheeze 4y ago
        Most FAANG companies grow managers from within, with many managers starting as ICs. Anecdotally, I've never had a manager that wasn't super technical. They wouldn't last.
        • irrational 4y ago
          Yeah, I've never worked for a FAANG company. I do work for a Fortune 100 company, but it is not a tech company (When I was hired, I was once in a meeting where I heard the founder of the company say that we would never have an IT department because we were not a tech company. We do have an IT department now, but that happened after the founder gave up the reigns.)
      • xxpor 4y ago
        OTOH, if I tried to be a manager, even if I could do it, I'd be incredibly bad at it.
      • smeej 4y ago
        I don't need my manager to know how to do my job. I just need my manager to know they don't know how to do my job and stop telling me how to do it. Tell me what needs to be done. Trust me to figure out how.
        • dieselgate 4y ago
          Kind of my thoughts as well - it's "cool" there are technical managers out there and engineering managers should be technical "enough" but I'd never expect them to be competent with all the ICs' jobs
        • disgruntledphd2 4y ago
          Sure, neither do I (now). At that point in my career though, it was incredibly helpful and levelled me up significantly in a relatively short space of time. But agreed that your manager should set goals rather than plans. Fun fact, at FB at the same time all ICs came up with their own goals rather than these being passed down from management.
      • pjmorris 4y ago
        > I've been working in the field professionally for 22+ years and I've never had a manager that had any technical skills. None of them could even begin to do my job Technical skills may or may not be required, but understanding is... "Each of my managers explained carefully his own theory of what had gone wrong and all the theories were different. At last, there breezed into my office the most senior manager of all, a general manager of our parent company, Andrew St. Johnston. I was surprised that he had even heard of me. "You know what went wrong?" he shouted--he always shouted-- "You let your programmers do things which you yourself do not understand." I stared in astonishment. He was obviously out of touch with present day realities. How could one person ever understand the whole of a modem software product like the Elliott 503 Mark II software system? I realized later that he was absolutely right; he had diagnosed the true cause of the problem and he had planted the seed of its later solution. " - C.A.R Hoare, 1980 Turing Award speech
        • John23832 4y ago
          Good understanding is a management trait. It’s great that managers have that, when managing. Technical skills are DEFINITELY required to be an IC. Understanding without the ability to implement makes for a lousy IC.
      • dekhn 4y ago
        That is interesting. I've been working in the field professionally 20 years (I'm not including grad school or postdocs) and every manager I've had had technical skills (deep ones) although most of them couldn't have done my job exactly the same way I did. Some would have done it better. Others, worse. Even others- would have cancelled the project, or morphed it into something else entirely.
      • TigeriusKirk 4y ago
        The managers I enjoyed working for the most came up through the ranks and were better at my job than I was. But that was only maybe 25% of the time in the 20ish years I spent as an IC. The worst for me were the ones with no understanding of how I did what I did.
      • Hovertruck 4y ago
        Wow, in my 15 or so years I've never _not_ had a manager who had engineering chops. Admittedly, I prefer working for smaller companies so this has often been a hands-on CTO, and I was filtering these job opportunities for technical leaders that I respected.
      • jedberg 4y ago
        At Netflix I can't think of a single manager at any level managing engineers that didn't start as one, all the way up to the CEO. In some cases they couldn't necessarily do their employee's job, but they at least understand the technical aspects well enough to make useful contributions to technical discussions.
    • pbalau 4y ago
      My then manager, that become a director after he grew the team large enough, was writing code after 12 hours of meetings.
      • cheeze 4y ago
        That's just sad.
        • blsapologist42 4y ago
          Why? He probably loved it
• bennysonething 4y ago
  I want my career path as a developer to never be anything but individual contributor. I like teaching newer Devs but I don't want to manage them. Maybe I'm being naive?
  • serpix 4y ago
    my advice is to keep doors open. You will age and your needs and expectations may change. You can always start a transition to take on more managerial duties while doing individual contribution.
  • engineer_22 4y ago
    That's called "technical track"
  • penjelly 4y ago
    same, im not interested in managing people for at least next 5-10 years.
  • ramesh31 4y ago
    >I want my career path as a developer to never be anything but individual contributor. I like teaching newer Devs but I don't want to manage them. Maybe I'm being naive? You can do this, but you will have to accept the plateau. There's really nowhere to go beyond Staff/L6, unless you're some super genius full of brilliant ideas or luck into being involved in a game changing product launch. Everything beyond that becomes politics.
    • WkndTriathlete 4y ago
      Not all companies have that plateau.
    • eklitzke 4y ago
      The same applies to being a manager though. You're not going to get promoted forever in any role, at some point you'll hit a terminal level, whether that's in an IC track or a management track. And it's not a problem as long as you find your work fulfilling.
• switchbak 4y ago
  The vast majority of the managers I've worked with wouldn't be particularly good ICs, not so sure of the wisdom of this move. Maybe it's a way to slow roll a bunch of layoffs.
  • andrestc 4y ago
    The technical bar for EMs at Meta is quite high.
    • kevinventullo 4y ago
      As a former EM at Meta, I beg to differ.
      • disgruntledphd2 4y ago
        Harsh, but potentially fair. I think that pre-2016, there was definitely more expectation that managers should be graduates from IC ranks, but that got lost around one of the (many) doublings of headcount FB experienced over the last decade.
    • ryan_lane 4y ago
      Most of the worst managers I've worked with now work at Meta.
  • disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    It's definitely a way to reset the culture and get rid of people who don't fit what Mark is trying to achieve.
    • justizin 4y ago
      It can't be that difficult to contribute to the achievement of absolutely tanking the company's value by investing in a dead-end VR-for-work platform that was always just a distraction to avoid responding in any way to Congress pressing him about election interference.
• chitowneats 4y ago
  If this headline doesn't get the HN commentariat excited I don't know what would.
  • behnamoh 4y ago
    Probably the announcement that all managers should start using NixOS and convert all their code base to a combination of Rust and Lisp.
• User23 4y ago
  Then in six months promote the ones that stayed back and you've effectively purged your middle management of deadweight.
• fatnoah 4y ago
  I love management and, after over 17 years in an IC capacity, find that it fulfills me in a way that writing code stopped doing. I was also a manager at Meta in a past life, and really didn't love the experience due to the nature of the company and roles of manager. I do think I'd really like being an IC there, due to the high level of autonomy and focus on doing impactful work.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • ketzo 4y ago
      To be slightly less cynical, I think they just mean that individual engineers at Meta are responsible for large chunks/vertical slices of work, so your work has a lot of individual impact on getting things out into the world.
      • fatnoah 4y ago
        This is the "correct" interpretation. Of course, it's sometimes a perverse incentive since getting something out and moving a needle or getting another team to use your work is also "impactful", and leads to many of the negative (intentional or not) issues caused by the apps.
    • ianlevesque 4y ago
      Okay I'll feed the troll. There are only a few places where if you implemented, for example, an effort to reduce "body dysmorphic disorder", it could instantly improve the lives of 3 billion users worldwide. Meta is one of those places.
      • artifaxx 4y ago
        I don't see their comment as trolling. Reducing the negative impact Meta already has is a more accurate description. Given their track record so far, you'd be a tiny minority to even get to work on that instead of ad/user engagement optimization for example.
• perfecthjrjth 4y ago
  What a 'brilliant move' to purge the middle management! At many places, all but the super smart love to climb the management ladder. This strategy will force them out.
• drewcoo 4y ago
  That almost makes sense to me. Are they re-interviewing to be ICs? (paywall)
• bsg75 4y ago
  Interesting opinion contrast to this posted 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34531284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34531284
• yalogin 4y ago
  I know the general view is middle management sucks and I can see asking first level managers to become ICs may make sense in some cases, but that also means someone else is managing x times the number of employees. How is that supposed to scale?
  • ketzo 4y ago
    It's a good question. I mean, if there are lots of managers at Meta who only have 4-5 direct reports, you could see this scaling decently well -- turn two teams into one, and that's not so bad. But I don't think one person can constructively manage more than about 20 engineers at the absolute maximum.
• Baader-Meinhof 4y ago
  http://archive.today/ddhH9 http://archive.today/ddhH9
  • dado3212 4y ago
    @dang can we pin this?
    • behnamoh 4y ago
      It'd be nice to have @<user_name> work on HN.
      • Karawebnetwork 4y ago
        You can somewhat find it https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=0&prefix=true&query=%40dang&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=0&prefix=true... but it ignores the @
• firstfewshells 4y ago
  Management is just a way to coast. I don't understand why we need to "manage" grown up adults. What we need are team leads who code and architect. Then give them the autonomy to run teams.
  • cauthon 4y ago
    > Then give them the autonomy to run teams. "running teams" is literally management
    • firstfewshells 4y ago
      Run teams by being hands on. Just don't sit in endless meetings and help "manage" people's careers. It's all a bunch of bs.
  • whatshisface 4y ago
    Resolving interpersonal disputes and guessing how much you have to pay someone to get them to stay, and software architecture, are two (three?) totally unrelated skillsets.
    • firstfewshells 4y ago
      You don't need to "guess" how much to pay someone. The market dictates that. HR has pay bands. Raises are always in a narrow band. I don't know what kind of disputes you're talking about. If you ask any manager - describe your responsibilities succinctly, they will most inevitably fail to do so.
      • whatshisface 4y ago
        I can imagine a company that had pay bands so narrow and bonuses so small that managers had no tools to reward high performers, and although I agree that it would take away a lot of what allows managers to do their jobs, I don't think that is the usual situation.
  • jchw 4y ago
• theandrewbailey 4y ago
  What exactly is an "individual contributor"? I'm confused. This term has come out of nowhere in the past 5 years, and it sounds like you're referring to someone who backed a kickstarter campaign. If this is the new term for "employee", I'm out. I can't stand that companies refer to their customers as "consumers".
  • fmajid 4y ago
    Someone who does not manage others.
  • jldugger 4y ago
    > If this is the new term for "employee", I'm out AFIACT, it's intended to distinguish between employees who manage people and those who don't. I.e. "the set of employees is the set of managers plus the set of individual contributors."
  • GrinningFool 4y ago
    It's recognition over the last few years that the standard eng -> sr eng -> manager isn't actually a path that all engineers want, does not always suit the employee, and does not always benefit the company.
  • blacksmithgu 4y ago
    Individual contributor means people who directly write code (individuals who contribute), as opposed to people who manage (managers and project managers).
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • time_to_smile 4y ago
    It all came from the industry wide shift to make sure that software engineers were even more just cogs in a machine that could be hot swappable. The growing concept of "IC" goes hand in hand with the increased focus on "leveling" for engineers, as well as the rise of delegating all product related decisions to the rising class of PMs. All of these create a structure in which every team, even across companies, starts to look more and more the same and any individual can be trivially swapped out for another with the same role and level. In the early days of the startup boom, ~2008, engineers at startups had a lot more control over the product process. Typical startups where a CEO with some general vision of the product and a knowledge of fundraising and a technical cofounder who would handle the real implementation of the product. CEO would make sure the company was health, CTO/tech cofounder would make sure the product was built. But this lead to a class of labor that was a bit too powerful. As you likely remember engineers used to contribute a lot more than purely churning through tickets. Today you can think of IC as a prefix to a more complicated part number: IC-SRE-4, IC-DEVOPS-2, IC-DS-6. Then you just have to find someone claiming to be the part and send them through a leetcode grinder to verify the build quality, then plug them in and go!
• dekhn 4y ago
  I've been a manager once- only because of necessity while working at a rapidly growing startup- and it's not a role for me. I loved being an IC at Google and other employers, and no matter how much I tried, I couldn't convince myself that by being a manager I'd have more impact, or achieve more of my goals, or be happier. I'd like to see more people-managers who aren't also product-managers and tech-leads: people whose job is to manage people, not work on the technical side of what the managed people work on. Some people are really good at this and should focus on it, to the exclusion of coding.
  • dilyevsky 4y ago
    > I'd like to see more people-managers who aren't also product-managers and tech-leads: people whose job is to manage people, not work on the technical side of what the managed people work on. Some people are really good at this and should focus on it, to the exclusion of coding. I’ve worked with managers like this but they were pretty rare ime. Most of the time it’s either a product person or someone who is subpar engineer grabbing the power seat bc that’s the only way they ever going to have any say in anything
  • germinalphrase 4y ago
    People with those skills probably developed them in a job that wouldn’t get a foot in the door of most tech companies.
• flashgordon 4y ago
  I had cautiously gotten into management because I wanted to learn the skills of delegatin and really building through others and growing/coaching others. I thoroughly enjoyed this. But over time what I had realized was the role had been changing (not sure if it was just for pandering) towards being a mouth piece for leadership and hr - having to relay decisions I didn't believe in (perf seasons, promo rationales, layoffs anybody?) As if they were on purely my own. Given Ive always enjoyed building this may actually be a good forcing function to go back to IC and just ... Build!
  • buffet_overflow 4y ago
    Oh how I don’t miss those days of management. It because a theory of mine that a large part of my job function was to simultaneously water down accountability from above, while adding enough complexity to the layers below me to discourage them from changing the status quo. The double edged sword being, without that authority, that same power structure is forced on me, and now I’m more aware of it.
    • rich_sasha 4y ago
      I have a feeling being in middle management leads to that squeeze. If you're closer to the doing, you are more isolated from the companyspeak nonsense. If you are in the upper part of the food chain, you get to enjoy more influence, freedom, a better risk/reward tradeoff, with costs you mention. In the middle you're kind of screwed from both ends.
      • AlgorithmicTime 4y ago
        [dead]
    • flashgordon 4y ago
      I had a couple of accidental ah-ha moments about this. Before I got into management all managers (fully up the stack) seemed like pointy hairs bosses. But what is easy to miss in Dilbert is that the PHB is really part of exec suite and rarely your front line manager. A hated front line manager might be usually incompetent or just inexperienced than evil! The other thing was demonization of front line managers. There was always a terrible (there are definitely terrible traits) managers but never terrible "leaders". Even worse was you'd see articles by hr "influencers" expounding this. Where are the same hr loud speakers now that "leadership" is the one inflicting these layoffs and ridiculous policies?
• zxcvbn4038 4y ago
  C'mon fire all the contributors and the middle managers! Elon did it and he is the smartest man in the universe. Hardcore!
• IncRnd 4y ago
  https://archive.is/20230207181413/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-07/meta-to-ask-many-managers-to-become-individual-contributors-or-leave https://archive.is/20230207181413/https://www.bloomberg.com/...
• krschultz 4y ago
  At Meta many engineers tried management and then went back to being an individual contributor. I'm not sure of the exact numbers but it was a very common career path. It did build up empathy for management on the senior IC side and meant that teams didn't get stuck with managers that didn't actually want to be a manager. If the company is not growing headcount this move makes perfect sense.
  • bink 4y ago
    That's a pretty common thing once ICs reach a certain age. I've seen it everywhere I've worked. Sometimes it's because they fear age discrimination but more commonly I've found it caused by the organization not providing a great career path beyond a certain level. With wisdom comes the ability to accept that it's OK to stick at an engineering career level for years at a time.
  • tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago
    I don't speak for anyone or any org. This is a normal thing. There's a normal fluidity based on what someone wants to do, IC or manager. There isn't really a pay difference. Being a Meta manager is a lot of work, especially the formality, structure, and data-drivenness of performance reviews. Almost anyone can move back and forth if they want and have some interest.
• dboreham 4y ago
  Follow the Jay Lenno doctrine.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• throwaway4837 4y ago
  Zuck has it right. All the worst managers/directors/VPs in engineering I've seen are people who don't contribute anything to the codebase. They actively discourage managers who want to write code from writing code. They instead encourage them to focus fully on process and sprint management. Lots of backwards ideologies in tech perpetuated by B-players who got a little too comfortable with "people management". I would think that the role of an "Engineering Manager" or "Tech Lead" or "Team Lead" etc. should all be pretty interchangeable, or at least have very high overlap.
  • hallway_monitor 4y ago
    Anyone without intimate knowledge of the product they are working on is useless IMO. I was in the code daily when leading a team and don't respect any development team leader who isn't.
    • mitthrowaway2 4y ago
      Absolutely. Of all the companies I've worked with, the one with absolutely the most effective management was the one where every manager was also a part-time IC. The head of mechanical engineering had to design a product while managing the team. The shop manager was also working as a machinist for most of their shift, or working on jig design and metrology. The head of accounting, of course, spent most of their time accounting, and only part of it managing the accountants. The head of software also wrote software, although not as much as their subordinates, and they were reviewing the codebase all the time. Of course none of the managers would chew through their IC work as quickly as people who could devote all their hours to it, so they mainly picked up tasks that weren't critical-path to avoid becoming blockers to their team. The CEO rotated through positions, spending several months working in customer service, inventory, accounting, and even working directly on the production line. He mainly put himself on whichever team was most short-handed, although it was more to learn firsthand what their challenges were, and how the company could allocate resources to solve them. Fortunately he was a multitalented guy who could pick up those roles productively, and also humble and down-to-earth enough to not intimidate his colleagues too much when he took over the neighboring desk.
  • 4y ago
• 0xB31B1B 4y ago
  I think this is a great move. My understanding is that some reporting chains in facebook have 12 links between IC and Zuckerberg, which is crazy inefficient. Enormous organizations are able to run effectively with 5-6 links from IC to CEO. Managers managing managers managing turtles all the way down is a horrible form of "administrative bloat". You see bloat like this in enormous organizations like colleges, governments, and now monopolistic tech companies. This is besides the point that I don't think that big tech has successfully groomed many managers into people are capable of actually managing businesses; they don't drive value, they preside over decisions and make a case for higher headcount in the next planning cycle.
  • warner25 4y ago
    Wow. I'll say that even in the Army, famous for its bloat, there are arguably fewer than 12 links (following the legal chain of command) between the lowest ranking private and the President of the United States... Private -> Team Leader -> Squad Leader -> Platoon Leader -> Company Commander -> Battalion Commander -> Brigade Commander -> Division Commander -> Corps Commander -> Combatant Commander -> SECDEF -> POTUS Of course we also pad that with a lot of senior enlisted advisors, executive officers, chiefs-of-staff, deputy commanders, etc. who can effectively be additional buffers between each echelon.
  • yowzadave 4y ago
    If you want a flatter org structure, it seems like it would be easier to achieve this if manager/IC roles were distinct. If a manager is also writing code, then they won't have the time to manage as many other employees, and the total number of managers/layers would need to increase.
    • 0xB31B1B 4y ago
      yea, I don't think the manager/IC thing is a point of leverage TBH. I think the real issue here is that you have senior managers that manage 4 ICS and 1 manager of a 6 person team, and that manager should just report to a director and the senior manager should be retitled "manager" and manage 8 ICs instead of 4.
    • 4y ago
• sbarre 4y ago
  I've said it before on here: being a lower-level manager in a large company is worse than an entry-level job. No one cares about your job experience (all those painful internal tools you now have to use to manage and report on your team) so you're just expected to grit through all the broken processes and inefficiencies (kiss your evenings and Sunday afternoons goodbye), and you are mostly powerless, particularly in orgs with centrally managed budgets.
  • zahrc 4y ago
    Hey that sounds just like my job!
• lucasgonze 4y ago
  I was an engineer, then a manager, and now I'm transitioning back to about 80% IC work. There were a couple big obstacles. - Getting your skills back means getting hired to do engineering in the absence of sharp skills. I had to fake-it-to-make-it for a little while. - Moving from manager to IC is a risky story on your resume, where you want to show continuous growth. You can't take just any IC role. In some way it has to show a positive career trajectory. Now that I'm over the hump things are great. I love engineering and am glad to do it all day.
• gautamdivgi 4y ago
  That’s curious. I mean why lay off ICs and ask managers to be ICs? Wouldn’t it be better to lay off managers and keep the ICs?
• jdlyga 4y ago
  Every company should set a 6 month trial period on engineers turned managers. I only know one or two engineers who ended up enjoying it. It's far, far more likely to dip your toes into it with enthusiasm and realize you hate it. It's not about not trying hard enough, about social skills, or it being "a totally new job with a new skill set and you're not used to it yet". It's about your personality type. Ask yourself: Do you like being in charge of people, or do you like being in charge of the codebase? Do you like solving your problems by asking people to do specific tasks for you, or would you rather solve a problem yourself? Would you rather take a breadth first depth first approach to you work? Are you good at planning, logistics, and deadlines, or are you more comfortable with going with the flow?
• gabythenerd 4y ago
  Where I work we just had a round of layoffs and it was almost all middle level managers. I guess now it's the time where individual contributors that directly create value are more important than people who mostly organize and communicate. Wonder what this will do to what is left of middle management.
• posharma 4y ago
  Things are not as black and white as they seem. It's a spectrum - from people who detest mgmt to people who realize the value of it. You fall somewhere in the spectrum depending on your experience in the industry and depending on your experience with past/current managers. Unfortunately, at some point managers (M1, M2, VPs, etc) take undue advantage of things in an organization and dilute the true picture to an extent that all management seems worthless. Having been on both the IC and management side I can relate to and appreciate the importance of both roles. What Meta is doing is right, but be careful when speaking about management in general.
• rqtwteye 4y ago
  My company does yearly 360s. But you only can rate peers and maybe one level up. I think they could flush out incompetent managers (there are many) quickly if people could rank managers several layers up. I can think of several directors who basically destroyed the culture of their department. They were good at talking to their uppers but made horrible decisions in hiring and management. But there was no way to raise this issue in a safe manner.
• ugh123 4y ago
  This is good. We're finally pulling back on the "HRBP-sponsored" people-management hype train thats rolled through much of SV startups and FAANG over the last 5-10 years: "Focus on your people, give them the support and mentorship they need to grow. Also 1-on-1s every week." - and all that bullshit.
  • lelanthran 4y ago
    > "Focus on your people, give them the support and mentorship they need to grow. Also 1-on-1s every week." - and all that bullshit. Taking the cynical view, that BS is there for a reason. It makes it easier to performance manage people out very very quickly. The optimistic view is that that BS enables people to never let their productivity drop below a certain level. The extreme cynical view is to wonder why you are being performance-reviewed every 3 months but salary-reviewed every 12.
    • ugh123 4y ago
      Well said! I think my experience with this was combined with a cover-your-ass HR team that was very hesitant about putting anyone on performance review (PIP, etc) without loads of documentation and 2nd/3rd chances. It seemed like we, as managers, were expected to turn a low performing IC into something magical with an indefinite timeline where we should have just pulled the plug after 6 months and moved on.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• dqpb 4y ago
  Good choice! Middle management is like that bad fat that accumulates around your vital organs.
• saos 4y ago
  Yeah I always thought manager should also be able to do the job. But that seems to have changed these last few years.
• s1mon 4y ago
  This is interesting. During my last job search I talked to colleagues who had positions at Oculus and Tesla. Both of them talked about things being set up for either management or IC, but not both. I prefer to do some of both. Just management would lead to my IC skills getting rusty, which would mean that some of the management that I do would become more and more disconnected from current practices. Just being a high level IC can divorce you from determining the direction of your work. High level ICs who've never dealt with the realities of managing projects or programs can be frustrating to deal with since they may not understand why things can't always be done in the perfect way.
  • laweijfmvo 4y ago
    Meta has something called a Tech Lead/Manager that is basically this.
  • 121789 4y ago
    Your preference is actually well reflected in the higher level IC roles at Meta/Google. You can get there by direct eng work with significant impact, but it’s more likely you are a person the company can trust with managing delivery of high complexity, high value projects while bringing other teams along the way.
• ThalesX 4y ago
  Potentially inflammatory story, but I think about it occasionally, and this is a good context. I was out having a meal with old college buddies; most of us are developers, but some have become team leaders and managers. I will call it a statistical anomaly, but the worst engineers are now in 'people management' positions. The discussion ended with a guy boasting about how his team has X people, and he's looking to grow it to Y this year. Naturally, we asked if he needed that much headcount. Turns out, no. It's their way of assessing value and getting promoted. He gave almost 0 fucks about the quality of the people employed and how adding them to the team would impact quality. The only thing on his mind was getting that number up to pump up his CV for the following position of managing people. I'm gladly reporting that he managed to do that and has indeed been promoted, and I still can't say what he does for a living apart from 'enable engineers to grow their careers.' I've also been in positions where my 'people managers' advised me against my interests. Unfortunately, I am my own people manager, so I took my own advice, which worked out wonderfully. I wake up from time to time thankful that I didn't follow the advice of my managers and was able to see some of them in the audience from the stage.
  • alas44 4y ago
    Out of curiosity what were your own advice vs your manager's (I guess career related)?
    • ThalesX 4y ago
      Career-related. Most of it is low-level stuff, like what I'd be expected to do for my yearly reviews vs. what I wanted to do. I'll mention two stories that just sprang to mind, though there are more. 1 - I was working in a rich .NET environment; JavaScript was beginning to show its teeth and wasn't taken seriously by 'serious' programmers. I was going with my manager through the SMART objectives I needed to do for the year, and I mentioned wanting to learn about this new thing NodeJS and JavaScript on the server side. He kept pushing that I should do a presentation on our use of Entity Framework to get some clout against the Java department. I insisted that I was more interested in learning something new than just doing some presentation that has been done by almost every engineer on our team. He accused me of being an ego-driven engineer and wouldn't accept it. I learned NodeJS that year, did a presentation on it (it was fun, not a single senior thought this was worthwhile), and ultimately ended up using it a lot, and that headstart helped me. 2 - I was talking to the head architect in a large multinational, expressing my interest in joining the 'architect guild.' My manager informed me that I was too young (about 28 then) to consider this career move and that architecture is for older people. I found that to be rather stupid, and when I got offered a CTO role and the possibility to architect a system, I talked to my manager about it, telling him that I was very interested in being in that kind of role and asked if there's any way I could find it inside the company. He told me that 99% of startups failed and that my choice was between employment and ending up on the streets. I took the chance and couldn't help but smile, getting our first million dollars with him in the audience, front row seats paid by the corporation.
• neosat 4y ago
  FB and Zuck have always prioritized a culture of building, and created a place (at least in the early days) where builders could thrive. Over time with massive hiring this obviously changed. If they need to further 'trim the fat' Part of this move could also be as a mechanism for selecting out people who are not comfortable with IC responsibilities as a way to identify people who would not have been a fit for FB in the early days, and thus an attempt to revise at least some of the early culture.
• Animats 4y ago
  It was once a rule at Microsoft that if you supervised less than 100 people you had to write code. Is that still the case?
• cletus 4y ago
  This is long overdue. Years ago playing Civ 4 I distinctly remember hearing Leonard Nimoy's voice say "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy". That's what management in these companies is like. It became a meme that every 6 months you'd get an email saying "your manager's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new manager". You'd never seen, heard of or let alone met any of these people. A large company like this should ahve a structure that's really no deper than: 1. CEO 2. SVP 3. VP 4. Director and really high level ICs 5. Manager and high-level ICs 6. ICs Any deeper than that is organizational bloat. The above will allow ~5000 ICs per SVP without any layer having two many branches (eg a manager should really have no more than 10-15 reports). This is better than layoffs because mid-level management is more responsible for bad company strategy than any IC is. Even though this is a step in the right direction, Zuck still faces two way bigger problems: 1. There is no vision for the company's key assets (ie FB, IG, WA). All of these seem to be relatively stagnant (if not in outright decline) and facing pressure from new platforms, most notably Tiktok as well as the behemoth that Youtube remains; and 2. There is absolutely no product market fit for the metaverse, certainly none that justifies sinking tens of billions of dollars into it. Disclaimer: ex-Facebooker. Disclaimer:
  • baggy_trough 4y ago
    FB is attempting to burn the ships by renaming to Meta and focusing heavily on that. Unfortunately, metaverse is a loser.
  • qualudeheart 4y ago
    Really agree of the emtsverse. Out of my dunbars number friend group I only know one VR enthusiast.
  • redtriumph 4y ago
    Shoutout to fellow Civ player! Just curious: Is Civ something very popular at FB or something? I know Zuck himself plays Civ [0]. [0] https://www.facebook.com/civ/posts/thanks-mark-zuckerberg-for-helping-bring-in-the-next-generation-of-civilization-/10159379478050359/ https://www.facebook.com/civ/posts/thanks-mark-zuckerberg-fo...
• tschellenbach 4y ago
  The market is healing, amazing
• sytelus 4y ago
  For this work, there should be equal rewards for ICs and managers. That is, ICs should get equal probability to get to level X in the company as managers. This actually used to be the case in old big tech, in early days. ICs can get to all the way to Director and Distinguished level with equal probability of their managers. But during last couple of decades everything changed. Big tech career ladder now states that merely making impact is not good enough but one needs to "scale" the impact. This is sheepish way of saying that one must be manager in order to claim "scaling". Consequently, there no higher level promos in big tech if you are mere IC. Unless this is solved, everything else is just talk and wishful thinking.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• bfrog 4y ago
  Didn’t google try this? What was the result?
• bitL 4y ago
  Hmm, it might be a good time to join Meta without the management dumpster fire going on. There are plenty of tech companies with little to no management like Valve or JetBrains doing well, so it might help Meta as well.
• smeagull 4y ago
  Should've just kept more of the ICs and asked the managers to leave. I'd take a less experienced person who has been doing something for the past two years over a more experienced person who hasn't.
  • NonEUCitizen 4y ago
    You're implying here that ICs are less experienced than managers, which is not the case.
• Bahamut 4y ago
  This is a kind of interesting change to see FB make to me (I had heard about this a couple of weeks ago from my brother, who was one of the ICs affected by the layoffs), as recently while I've been promoted into management at a different one of the FAANGs, I'm still doing a fairly heavy amount of coding out of necessity, maybe even moreso in some ways since my team isn't able to handle the amount of projects/work given to us without covering some of the most undesirable work.
• xivzgrev 4y ago
  Maybe this works with managers overseeing 1 or 2 people. But any broader than that is likely to be counter productive. Managers don’t just have 1:1s. They set direction, clear obstacles (both upcoming and here now), ensure quality work, etc. that scales somewhat linearly with team size, plus or minus depending on the individuals. If you remove a bunch of managers making them ICs, now the remaining managers have that much more to wrangle, and stuff will get dropped.
  • arnvald 4y ago
    I mostly agree with you and I think it highly depends on the organizational complexity. In a smaller company (100 people) I was able to manage 10 people and still had time to write some non-critical code. That's because there was little overhead - just 2 PMs to work with, not many meetings. Then in a large org (5,000+) it became much harder. Even though I had only 5 reports, I had to attend plenty of cross-dept meetings, had multiple stakeholders, and in order to get anything done I had to talk to 5 different people. In order to "flatten" the organization, first this complexity must be tackled. If there's s lot of overhead to get things done, removing managers won't help, because now ICs will have to do the job that previously was done by managers
• AndyNemmity 4y ago
  I've avoided every attempt to make me management. I've changed roles, intentionally shutdown workstreams when they were done instead of creating a new silo. I just want to work on things. I would be happy about this, but I'm sure others aren't.
• cdnsteve 4y ago
  Right, I'm sure that will work. Maybe don't lose $1B a month on a product nobody wants with Bobblehead graphics that make the Wii look good.
• yodsanklai 4y ago
  I suspect this type of blackmail isn't legal in many countries where Meta operates.
• jujube3 4y ago
  https://dilbert.com/strip/2002-05-21 https://dilbert.com/strip/2002-05-21 https://dilbert.com/strip/2002-05-22 https://dilbert.com/strip/2002-05-22
• costcofries 4y ago
  Happening at Microsoft too!
• la64710 4y ago
  Frankly most of what managers and middle managers do can be codified to a large extent like scheduling , tasking , following up , projections and planning. Yet instead of sticking to only these things often managers end up being the most insecure person in the team .. always looking over their shoulders to who is gaining more traction than them and continuously inventing BS projects to keep the minions busy or to boost their credibility for the next position.
• philip1209 4y ago
  At a previous company, I reported to a "group leader" who had no other reports. That person reported to a director who had zero other reports. That person reported to a VP who had one other report. The overhead of stakeholder management is out of control. With this structure, the leadership wanted all roadmaps and planning to be bottoms-up, which just meant a lot of thrash as every layer tried to figure out what the layer above wanted. I admire how Airbnb has switched to a top-down structure, which eliminates a lot of the unnecessary administrative bloat at companies. It means that the most experienced people are steering the ship. https://fourweekmba.com/airbnb-organizational-struture/ https://fourweekmba.com/airbnb-organizational-struture/
• gorgoiler 4y ago
  Good managers are few and far between and there are many ways to fail in the role. If you have low level ICs then you’ve got to be contributing as well, leading from the front. If you have high performing ICs then you need to instead be a coach, protecting and representing your talent to the next level up. The best engineering teams need the latter but a lot of managers come up through the ranks looking for a role like the former. I know Meta played that game for a long time and I can completely see why they want to walk it back. They need their high performing ICs to actually do stuff again and start shipping diffs. The luxury of being there to level up the noobs is over, for now.
  • dan-robertson 4y ago
    I think my read for the reasoning is more like ‘meta made managers out of ICs in expectation of continued hiring. Hiring is not expected to continue so much so now they need fewer future managers enough to have some managers go to being ICs’
• TheMagicHorsey 4y ago
  I've held a number of roles in tech from IC to sales to engineering management to product management and now back to IC. The problem with engineering management is that its difficult to quantify the things that make someone a good technical manager. I'm not even sure its always the same set of things in every organization. So its very easy for there to be many really bad EMs hiding in plain sight at places like Google and Meta. Its just really difficult to tease apart what an EM's contributions to team success actually are, and whether a team's failures and successes are even properly laid at their feet when there are so many confounding factors. I went back to being an IC because its so much easier to take the blame and praise for my work when I'm just coding. I wouldn't mind doing sales again either. But I don't ever want to manage a large team again. There's just too much bullshit ... and I'm also old now (nearly 50) and I feel like a lot of new engineers don't understand what having a job means within an org. Yes, I know you want to work on interesting things all the time, but sometimes all you get to work on is unexciting stuff. Its a job.
• curiousllama 4y ago
  God help them if there's a few dozen Director-turned-IC folks running around trying to "redefine industry practice" or something because they got overpromoted as a manager
• Patrol8394 4y ago
  This, I can agree with. I know first hand failed software engineer that turned into engineer management at FB just because they didn’t know how to do anything. So management was their escape route to success. Shuffling things around, rarely adding value. They should either prove themselves valuable or just leave.
• raviisoccupied 4y ago
  I just left a (non-engineering) role where I was a people manager of 7. It was great at first but I genuinely felt my skills atrophying, so I left to join a much smaller and flatter team. I know HN is can sometimes come across as 'management-phobic', and having been on that side of the fence there is a lot value that can be added by managers. That said, I do wonder how many of these managers who have been asked to become ICs might actually be relieved. In an increasingly competitive economic environment, some could see this as a good thing.
• standardUser 4y ago
  I've never worked for a truly large company, so maybe I lack perspective. But the idea that a company could incorrectly hire THOUSANDS of people over a few years boggles my small-company mind. Hiring is so exhausting, so time intensive and so boring. And it does nothing (directly) for the bottom line - instead it costs a ton of money! Given the ultra-mega-hyper-elaborate interview process at a lot of these companies, we're talking literal fortunes on top of fortunes worth of manpower (er, personpower?). Imagine paying hundreds of people to hire thousands of other people and then saying "oops, we overshot by 6,000 hires!". How can any person in a leadership role that is responsible for that kind of misfire possibly keep their job?
  • janfb 4y ago
    Maybe the 80/20 rule applies here: 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (or employees in this case). The problem is, that you can never be quite sure which 20% to keep and which 80% to fire. Big budgets allowed companies to play it safe. Not anymore, it seems.
  • dopeboy 4y ago
    When you believe in a new technology and mission, as many at Meta do about the metaverse and VR, hiring isn't boring. It's exciting to be able to bring on more people to execute a vision you're bought in on. I'm a founder of an 8 person startup and we're looking for an engineer right now. It's an exciting process for me to pitch the vision of the company to these candidates. It is also exhausting and time intensive - but not boring.
  • AlwaysBCoding 4y ago
    because the hiring process is on autopilot and the leadership of the company has already exited / checked out so they're not incentivized to care or be in the weeds enough to preemptively put a stop to it.
• tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago
  (Can't post on /. and not interested in creating an account.) This "news" item mischaracterizes reality. It's not "many". It's "few" or "some" because no managers will get 20-50 IC direct reports of SWEs or PEs. It's flattening some spots of unnecessary middle management. That's it.
• cpurdy 4y ago
  Well, it worked great for Elon
• karaterobot 4y ago
  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 I met two really good ones. This is after working with hundreds of them as a consultant. Actual, natural-born managers are such an incredibly rare species that you can go a long time without seeing any in the wild. It's basically the equivalent of the legendary 10x programmer — you hear about them, but it's rare to actually meet one, and there are sure a lot more people claiming to be one than who actually are. My theory is that there are a set number of great managers in the world, and that number doesn't scale with the number of people who take on the role. They're just out there, being awesome, while a bunch of pretty lousy ones share their job title.
  • dijit 4y ago
    Any traits to identify these people? I am a massive sufferer of imposter syndrome, I do my best to help everyone and smooth over things and set direction in a clear way with as much freedom in execution as possible. but i am always second guessing myself. I know I am almost certainly a middling manager (if not a bad one), but I would like to improve. Not because I love doing it, but because I don't trust that anyone else in my position (or who would take my position) actually wants to improve.
    • solarmist 4y ago
      The distinguishing factor I've seen is servant leadership [1]. They believe that supporting and developing their people is their main job. Execution is just a prerequisite to being able to do the rest. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership
      • pvarangot 4y ago
        > The distinguishing factor I've seen is servant leadership I've never encountered a servant leadership styled EM that is not also a good IC.
• paweladamczuk 4y ago
  Don't managers have enough work on their plate already? Looking at my past and current worplaces (granted, none of them are Meta), I can't imagine juggling individual contributions and managerial responsibilities. Personally, I think a manager's job (in a healthy organization) is important enough to let them of the hook in terms of individual contributions.
• likeabbas 4y ago
  I agree there are good managers, but I've only had one who I can say made my life easier and helped the team be more productive. 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.
• _9omd 4y ago
  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 as much work as the former IC that’s managing them used to do, which means the cost per unit of work has increased tremendously.
  • lxm 4y ago
    Imagine what Michelangelo could’ve accomplished if he was tasked with managing a team of painters.
    • nsajko 4y ago
      Is this ironic, I can't tell? "The Mythical Man-Month" seems relevant in any case.
      • ttoinou 4y ago
        Has to be ironic, since that's what Michelangelo did
        • ramraj07 4y ago
          He hired the painters to complement him, he never stopped painting altogether. I’ve seen the same pattern work. Make star IC a TL, pair them with good product and manager, add many engineers who can take care of all the simpler work and let the star do the main work. For orgs which can’t or won’t hire “A people”, this is the only workable solution I think.
    • kerpotgh 4y ago
      [dead]
  • csense 4y ago
    If the reward for competence is promotion, in the steady-state equilibrium everybody's incompetent at their current job: If they were competent, they would have been promoted into a different job. It's called the Peter Principle [1] and it's pretty well-known. I suppose Facebook's realized it's in a Peter Principle situation, and the remedy for it would, in theory, be to send some of the people back to previous jobs where they were competent. The problem is that, in practice, it seems a lot like a demotion, especially if the original move was touted as a promotion, and the pay and prestige of your new old job is less. It's a real puzzle how this can be done without demoralizing the affected employees into quitting -- especially the best ones, who presumably have lots of good career options elsewhere, and whose value is the entire reason for doing this in the first place. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
• floatinglotus 4y ago
  At this point what is the benefit of working for Meta? High salary. That incentive ends in 6 months. What is it exactly?
  • shostack 4y ago
    Why does that incentive end in 6 months?
• spullara 4y ago
  Too often management is seen as a promotion from IC when really it is a career change.
• travisporter 4y ago
  I think this is similar to why Andrej Karpathy left Tesla in good terms - he missed coding and teaching, according to a recent podcast lex fridman
• ugh123 4y ago
  Can anyone explain the difference between Netflix (only a moderate layoff back in mid '22) vs. the rest of the FAANGs and tech industry? IMO its likely cultural and a demanding environment for high performing self-driven ICs with A LOT less hand holding from management on "career growth". Am I missing something?
  • bhawks 4y ago
    Netflix job at faang is to keep the acronym family friendly. Now that Facebook is Meta it has much less work to do. In all seriousness Netflix has approximately 10k employees. Meta is the smallest of the rest at 90k employees. The scale is radically different. And this is not to say high employee counts are a good thing. To the contrary these behemoths struggle to operate.
• nothrowaways 4y ago
  DIY
• antipaul 4y ago
  Are you not turning kings into emperors, by flattening layers and therefore increasing the number of people who report to a director or VP? I mean in general, not necessarily at Meta.
• d_sem 4y ago
  As a struggling software engineering project manager, are there any reference material I could study up on to better help my team? I want to be a useful as possible to them.
  • ugh123 4y ago
    Start coding?
• deafpolygon 4y ago
  Zuck channeling his inner Musk
• jehb 4y ago
  It's interesting to watch the forces that determine how deep and wide management levels can get. I've fluctuated between first-level manager and IC a few times in my career. The driving force most recently has been that my manager accumulated too many people, and I was moved from a "team lead" or "project lead" to an actual people manager with a small team. When you're only managing 1-3 people, it's very easy to be asked to do this on top of being an IC, so it's a bit like the company getting a "free" level of management without the overhead. Of course, it never works out this way in reality, because your calendar fills continuously until you've gone from a maker's schedule to a manager's schedule. <http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html> Once you've hit peak calendar, it doesn't really matter how many people you manage any more, because your calendar can't get more full and you can't contribute less than zero individual work (ignoring countless Dilbert cartoons here). Does this help the company? Well, maybe. It does mean your managers at least have the context of the work of their teams much better than someone who was hired in. But do it too many times, and pretty soon it's easy to have more people in charge than you actually have doing work. Does it help the contributor who becomes a manager? In my experience, not really. It's a different career path, and it's a bit like starting over. The pay won't necessarily increase significantly, the responsibilities climb, and I think most frustratingly, you're no longer recognized for your technical contributions. I'm also not sure it's all that great for the ICs under a manager with a small team. The best managers I've ever had have been the people who can dedicate 100% of their time to, well, managing. They're the ones who can give me air cover, keep me out of meetings, intercept unnecessary requests before they get to me, make the presentations for the near-constant status update requests, etc.
• lightbendover 4y ago
  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.
• phendrenad2 4y ago
  I think this really shows how much Meta has changed. It's not the tech-first startup company it once was. It's become just another generic big company at this point. The only reason they would be asking managers to become ICs is if they fired too many ICs and didn't fire enough managers, and now the ratio is skewed. Why would they do that? Because they're a typical company and they see managers as "super-employees" who are smarter, faster, better than their underlings, and so can easily do their work.