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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 discour

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.
coolbreezetft22 4y ago
Aren't Product Managers & TPMs considered ICs? They don't have direct reports but aren't writing code either. I imagine this will be a more common option for these Engineering Managers who are managing other managers
- 121789 4y ago
  It’s the same structure for PMs (ICs and managers of PMs). In general I’ve noticed PM managers spend more time in IC type of work than EMs
- neosat 4y ago
  Product Manager can refer to an individual contributor IC or someone who also manages other Product Managers (and sometimes even adjacent functions) e.g. a Group Product Manager. The titles are not very standard though. Many of these roles are hybrid as well. For example, a Product manager who will be responsible for a Product portfolio and some products in that portfolio as an IC, while managing/supporting the work of PMs working on other products in that portfolio. Same for TPMs. They can be ICs or managing other TPMs.
hiddencost 4y ago
My experience is much the opposite: the managers who want to write a lot of code usually are so focused on their contributions they fail their other responsibilities. The ones who are trying to set product direction are usually harmful, too. The managers I've had the best experience with are the ones who focus on helping their ICs navigate the larger organization, dealing with human issues, and helping the ICs understand organizational priorities, and evaluate risks.
- zabzonk 4y ago
  what's an IC? a piece of corporate-speak i haven't come across before.
  - tejtm 4y ago
    objectification of resource... “commoditizing your complement” for management. edit to add "in my experiences" I have also seen good evidence via HN that not all management/admin is as dilbert like as I have seen.
  - xzel 4y ago
    Individual contributor.
  - eftychis 4y ago
    Individual Contributor. Don't ask me why in heavens that term makes any sense outside one that is myopic or only works with extremely fresh out of school junior engineers and unskilled workers. Edit: P.S. Not sure why a couple of people decided to downvote this opinion. Also to other commenters: it sounds to me less as a be a team player title (like the soldier one suggested) and more like an isolated resource that makes interchangeable contributions. Anyways, I think that there is a distinction between "(Team) Lead" and Manager with the Team Lead usually classified as an IC says everything for most organizational approaches. I agree more with the Meta take here.
    - zabzonk 4y ago
      when did this appear? i literally have never seen it before i read this post, and it makes no sense at all to me.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
I have worked with some fantastic "people managers" in my career who don't write code. But they usually faded into the background most of the time, except for when they needed to communicate something or I needed their help with something. The bad managers were always working hard to schedule more meetings, force extra process into every step of our work, make decisions about how we did our work, and to change our priorities to work on their pet projects. The bad managers occupied 10X more of my time than the good managers. It only took one or two bad managers to completely derail productivity of an entire group.
- anyfoo 4y ago
  > I have worked with some fantastic "people managers" in my career who don't write code. But they usually faded into the background most of the time, except for when they needed to communicate something or I needed their help with something. Yep, that's familiar. Good "people managers" have always been the ones that removed obstacles, and didn't become one themselves.
KaiserPro 4y ago
> They instead encourage them to focus fully on process and sprint management. Thats literally the point. Its totally fucking batshit that somewhere like meta still uses spreadsheet to plan. This is why properly trained people should be doing management. Project management at scale is not something you "dip into" its a full time job to project manage and people manage. Its not something most ICs should be doing. A <Edit> consultant[1]</Edit> surgeon leads a team, but they don't manage the timesheets of the juniors, nurses and assistants. Meta very much expects that a consultant surgeon not only does surgery, but fills rostas, recruits nurses, does some marketing and works on the legal policy for negligence. The issue at meta is that with the growth there is no "leadership". What is a lowly IC supposed to work on? "create consensus" and "drive from the bottoms up". That doesn't work when you have 11 layers of management, all pissing about talking about impact, but not actually driving projects. > 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. You should try it. Its pretty clear you've not managed people at any level of scale or formality. Not everything is code, babes. (No. I'm not a manager at meta, thank fuck, it sounds pretty shitty.) [1]https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/careers-in-surgery/surgical-care-team-hub/surgical-care-team-roles/consultant-surgeon/ https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/careers-in-surgery/surgical-care-te... edit I meant uk consultant surgeon, thank you to commentor for pointing out my mistake
- prepend 4y ago
  Chief surgeons do all those things you describe. Check out the job description [0] as they are basically department heads doing recruiting, budgeting, supervising, etc. Chief Surgeon doesn’t mean best surgeon. [0] https://www.betterteam.com/chief-surgeon-job-description https://www.betterteam.com/chief-surgeon-job-description
  - KaiserPro 4y ago
    Sorry you are right, I meant a consultant. But it is a bad analogy, as you've implied. What I was trying to get across is managers should be specialised, they should be someone who might or might not have been a programmer, but is now specifically managing people, or projects. Managers who code, do exist, as to engineers who manage. But its better at large companies to have specialists to manage projects and people. With support, training and performance management, you tend to get a better outcome.
FlyingSnake 4y ago
Pournell's Iron Law¹ in action. The administrators will always hoard the power and control promotions etc in an organisation. Studies have shown time and again that small autonomous teams is the most optimal setup for software development. Having a layer of Director, SVP and VPs on top of EMs is just Pournell's Iron Law manifesting itself. 1: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
SilverBirch 4y ago
You're pretty much just repeating the constant engineer gripe of "What do managers even do". The point of management is co-ordination and direction. They're not there to contribute to the codebase, they're there to ensure people are contributing the right things to the codebase. If you really think these managers/directors/VPs are useless, describe what you think they're meant to be doing, and how it would get done without them.
- roughly 4y ago
  This is the sort of thing that you don't recognize until you become a manager, and then you do and you watch everyone on your team run around like a bunch of kids chasing whatever caught their attention that day and it all becomes a lot clearer. "Why are we doing this" and "how does it align with the business's goals" and more pointedly "what are we not doing so we can do this instead" and "is that the right trade-off" are all questions even very technically gifted engineers seem to have a really hard time answering.
  - likeabbas 4y ago
    The issue is most managers don't tend to think this specific way. They think of how to align the business goals to suit their specific needs (i.e. getting promoted). Every single re-org I've been involved in was bureaucratic mess to give a manager a higher salary. There was no explicit reason why we needed to re-org, and no org change ever made a difference in terms of productivity. Our individual teams still operated the same.
- icedchai 4y ago
  It's not that they are useless, it's that there are often too many of them. At a previous SV org I worked for, they had roughly 1 "dev manager" for every 4 engineers. You could have 1 for every 10 and achieve the same result.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    I’m not sure if that’s true. 1 dev manager for 10 engineers might be tough. The sheer number of 1:1s would be insane, much less keeping track of the career trajectory of 10 different people at 10 different parts of their lives. I guess this would be less difficult if everyone was already at senior or staff level, but you’d still have so much of that managers time sucked into 1:1s, reviews, and team retrospectives. I’m not even a manager and I start to feel neglected as an engineer once my manager juggles more than 6 other people, because I see they start to forget what I’m working on, and those 6 start to compete for attention to get promotions…
29athrowaway 4y ago
If coding is beneath you, working in software is beyond you. If you are a people person and love helping people so much, go work as a social worker, no? Managers are employees same as ICs. An IC can have more impact than a manager. http://programming-motherfucker.com/ http://programming-motherfucker.com/
- KaiserPro 4y ago
  > If coding is beneath you, working in software is beyond you. maybe the problem you are trying to solve isn't code. > ICs do not need managers, managers need ICs. Given the level of infantilisation at meta, and big tech in general, I think this is clearly not the case. "self management" (ie bottoms up management) stopped working at meta many many years ago. > Some managers have negative productivity. So do a lot of ICs "I'm rewriting x in NEW_LANGUAGE because its faster" & "just read the code, that's where all the answers are" & "no you're doing it wrong, just re-write this major system to make it do something completely different because I've not taken the time to listen to your problem" Meta is a massive pile of "not invented here" tech debt, that was half arsed for impacc and then abandoned. Most of that is IC ill disciplined "oh but I'm BORED I'm going to make a new x". Don't get me wrong. I've had some complete bellends of managers, but that's not a function of them being a manager, that's a function of no training and ineffective performance management. Writing code is easy, Writing good code is not so easy Reusing other people's code is hard Making an entire company reuse code is fucking difficult. Getting prima-donnas to document code so that other people can use it quickly, super fucking difficult. Managing programmers so they don't start gnawing at the furniture, rebuild everything every six months, wank over the interns and getting them produce a viable product, one that they can't/don't/wont use is top level hard. It's something I don't want to do.
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    I edited it as you replied, but sure. If you think developers are prima donnas wait until you hear about managers. Compared to developers, many of them fit much more into the prima donna description. Most managers don't document anything and when they do, it is of low quality and goes unmaintained quickly. Most managers out there are redundant and have no idea about what leadership is. They just get an orgasm each time they say no and conflate that with being a true leader. The reason hackathons produce amazing results is because it is what happens when managers get out of the way for 1 day: improvement driven by builders that care about the product, not office politics. https://youtu.be/fj0hpsJvrko https://youtu.be/fj0hpsJvrko
bradleyjg 4y ago
When was Zuck’s last PR?
kerpotgh 4y ago
My experience is the exact opposite. Managers who code are usually talking about minutia bordering on micromanagement, never put or have enough time to develop people skills, ignore career development and growth, have little to no project management skills, do a terrible job with cross team planning etc.
scarface74 4y ago
My experience is just the opposite. Most of the really technical people who were promoted to management that I’ve worked with don’t know how to fight the political fights for their reports or get the raises, recognition or promotions that their reports want.
mancerayder 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 Wow. And these "good" managers coding, how do they meaningfully pursue strategical tasks that benefit the team and organization? Do they have time for these, 1:1s, team meetings, unblocking the blocked, translating the untranslated, and generally, um, managing? Or do they work 80 hours?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

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.

coolbreezetft22 4y ago

Aren't Product Managers & TPMs considered ICs? They don't have direct reports but aren't writing code either. I imagine this will be a more common option for these Engineering Managers who are managing other managers

121789 4y ago
It’s the same structure for PMs (ICs and managers of PMs). In general I’ve noticed PM managers spend more time in IC type of work than EMs
neosat 4y ago
Product Manager can refer to an individual contributor IC or someone who also manages other Product Managers (and sometimes even adjacent functions) e.g. a Group Product Manager. The titles are not very standard though. Many of these roles are hybrid as well. For example, a Product manager who will be responsible for a Product portfolio and some products in that portfolio as an IC, while managing/supporting the work of PMs working on other products in that portfolio. Same for TPMs. They can be ICs or managing other TPMs.

hiddencost 4y ago

My experience is much the opposite: the managers who want to write a lot of code usually are so focused on their contributions they fail their other responsibilities. The ones who are trying to set product direction are usually harmful, too. The managers I've had the best experience with are the ones who focus on helping their ICs navigate the larger organization, dealing with human issues, and helping the ICs understand organizational priorities, and evaluate risks.

zabzonk 4y ago
what's an IC? a piece of corporate-speak i haven't come across before.
- tejtm 4y ago
  objectification of resource... “commoditizing your complement” for management. edit to add "in my experiences" I have also seen good evidence via HN that not all management/admin is as dilbert like as I have seen.
- xzel 4y ago
  Individual contributor.
- eftychis 4y ago
  Individual Contributor. Don't ask me why in heavens that term makes any sense outside one that is myopic or only works with extremely fresh out of school junior engineers and unskilled workers. Edit: P.S. Not sure why a couple of people decided to downvote this opinion. Also to other commenters: it sounds to me less as a be a team player title (like the soldier one suggested) and more like an isolated resource that makes interchangeable contributions. Anyways, I think that there is a distinction between "(Team) Lead" and Manager with the Team Lead usually classified as an IC says everything for most organizational approaches. I agree more with the Meta take here.
  - zabzonk 4y ago
    when did this appear? i literally have never seen it before i read this post, and it makes no sense at all to me.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

I have worked with some fantastic "people managers" in my career who don't write code. But they usually faded into the background most of the time, except for when they needed to communicate something or I needed their help with something. The bad managers were always working hard to schedule more meetings, force extra process into every step of our work, make decisions about how we did our work, and to change our priorities to work on their pet projects. The bad managers occupied 10X more of my time than the good managers. It only took one or two bad managers to completely derail productivity of an entire group.

anyfoo 4y ago
> I have worked with some fantastic "people managers" in my career who don't write code. But they usually faded into the background most of the time, except for when they needed to communicate something or I needed their help with something. Yep, that's familiar. Good "people managers" have always been the ones that removed obstacles, and didn't become one themselves.

KaiserPro 4y ago

> They instead encourage them to focus fully on process and sprint management. Thats literally the point. Its totally fucking batshit that somewhere like meta still uses spreadsheet to plan. This is why properly trained people should be doing management. Project management at scale is not something you "dip into" its a full time job to project manage and people manage. Its not something most ICs should be doing. A <Edit> consultant[1]</Edit> surgeon leads a team, but they don't manage the timesheets of the juniors, nurses and assistants. Meta very much expects that a consultant surgeon not only does surgery, but fills rostas, recruits nurses, does some marketing and works on the legal policy for negligence. The issue at meta is that with the growth there is no "leadership". What is a lowly IC supposed to work on? "create consensus" and "drive from the bottoms up". That doesn't work when you have 11 layers of management, all pissing about talking about impact, but not actually driving projects. > 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. You should try it. Its pretty clear you've not managed people at any level of scale or formality. Not everything is code, babes. (No. I'm not a manager at meta, thank fuck, it sounds pretty shitty.) [1]https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/careers-in-surgery/surgical-care-team-hub/surgical-care-team-roles/consultant-surgeon/ https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/careers-in-surgery/surgical-care-te... edit I meant uk consultant surgeon, thank you to commentor for pointing out my mistake

prepend 4y ago
Chief surgeons do all those things you describe. Check out the job description [0] as they are basically department heads doing recruiting, budgeting, supervising, etc. Chief Surgeon doesn’t mean best surgeon. [0] https://www.betterteam.com/chief-surgeon-job-description https://www.betterteam.com/chief-surgeon-job-description
- KaiserPro 4y ago
  Sorry you are right, I meant a consultant. But it is a bad analogy, as you've implied. What I was trying to get across is managers should be specialised, they should be someone who might or might not have been a programmer, but is now specifically managing people, or projects. Managers who code, do exist, as to engineers who manage. But its better at large companies to have specialists to manage projects and people. With support, training and performance management, you tend to get a better outcome.

FlyingSnake 4y ago

Pournell's Iron Law¹ in action. The administrators will always hoard the power and control promotions etc in an organisation. Studies have shown time and again that small autonomous teams is the most optimal setup for software development. Having a layer of Director, SVP and VPs on top of EMs is just Pournell's Iron Law manifesting itself. 1: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

SilverBirch 4y ago

You're pretty much just repeating the constant engineer gripe of "What do managers even do". The point of management is co-ordination and direction. They're not there to contribute to the codebase, they're there to ensure people are contributing the right things to the codebase. If you really think these managers/directors/VPs are useless, describe what you think they're meant to be doing, and how it would get done without them.

roughly 4y ago
This is the sort of thing that you don't recognize until you become a manager, and then you do and you watch everyone on your team run around like a bunch of kids chasing whatever caught their attention that day and it all becomes a lot clearer. "Why are we doing this" and "how does it align with the business's goals" and more pointedly "what are we not doing so we can do this instead" and "is that the right trade-off" are all questions even very technically gifted engineers seem to have a really hard time answering.
- likeabbas 4y ago
  The issue is most managers don't tend to think this specific way. They think of how to align the business goals to suit their specific needs (i.e. getting promoted). Every single re-org I've been involved in was bureaucratic mess to give a manager a higher salary. There was no explicit reason why we needed to re-org, and no org change ever made a difference in terms of productivity. Our individual teams still operated the same.
icedchai 4y ago
It's not that they are useless, it's that there are often too many of them. At a previous SV org I worked for, they had roughly 1 "dev manager" for every 4 engineers. You could have 1 for every 10 and achieve the same result.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  I’m not sure if that’s true. 1 dev manager for 10 engineers might be tough. The sheer number of 1:1s would be insane, much less keeping track of the career trajectory of 10 different people at 10 different parts of their lives. I guess this would be less difficult if everyone was already at senior or staff level, but you’d still have so much of that managers time sucked into 1:1s, reviews, and team retrospectives. I’m not even a manager and I start to feel neglected as an engineer once my manager juggles more than 6 other people, because I see they start to forget what I’m working on, and those 6 start to compete for attention to get promotions…

29athrowaway 4y ago

If coding is beneath you, working in software is beyond you. If you are a people person and love helping people so much, go work as a social worker, no? Managers are employees same as ICs. An IC can have more impact than a manager. http://programming-motherfucker.com/ http://programming-motherfucker.com/

KaiserPro 4y ago
> If coding is beneath you, working in software is beyond you. maybe the problem you are trying to solve isn't code. > ICs do not need managers, managers need ICs. Given the level of infantilisation at meta, and big tech in general, I think this is clearly not the case. "self management" (ie bottoms up management) stopped working at meta many many years ago. > Some managers have negative productivity. So do a lot of ICs "I'm rewriting x in NEW_LANGUAGE because its faster" & "just read the code, that's where all the answers are" & "no you're doing it wrong, just re-write this major system to make it do something completely different because I've not taken the time to listen to your problem" Meta is a massive pile of "not invented here" tech debt, that was half arsed for impacc and then abandoned. Most of that is IC ill disciplined "oh but I'm BORED I'm going to make a new x". Don't get me wrong. I've had some complete bellends of managers, but that's not a function of them being a manager, that's a function of no training and ineffective performance management. Writing code is easy, Writing good code is not so easy Reusing other people's code is hard Making an entire company reuse code is fucking difficult. Getting prima-donnas to document code so that other people can use it quickly, super fucking difficult. Managing programmers so they don't start gnawing at the furniture, rebuild everything every six months, wank over the interns and getting them produce a viable product, one that they can't/don't/wont use is top level hard. It's something I don't want to do.
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  I edited it as you replied, but sure. If you think developers are prima donnas wait until you hear about managers. Compared to developers, many of them fit much more into the prima donna description. Most managers don't document anything and when they do, it is of low quality and goes unmaintained quickly. Most managers out there are redundant and have no idea about what leadership is. They just get an orgasm each time they say no and conflate that with being a true leader. The reason hackathons produce amazing results is because it is what happens when managers get out of the way for 1 day: improvement driven by builders that care about the product, not office politics. https://youtu.be/fj0hpsJvrko https://youtu.be/fj0hpsJvrko

bradleyjg 4y ago

When was Zuck’s last PR?

kerpotgh 4y ago

My experience is the exact opposite. Managers who code are usually talking about minutia bordering on micromanagement, never put or have enough time to develop people skills, ignore career development and growth, have little to no project management skills, do a terrible job with cross team planning etc.

scarface74 4y ago

My experience is just the opposite. Most of the really technical people who were promoted to management that I’ve worked with don’t know how to fight the political fights for their reports or get the raises, recognition or promotions that their reports want.

mancerayder 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 Wow. And these "good" managers coding, how do they meaningfully pursue strategical tasks that benefit the team and organization? Do they have time for these, 1:1s, team meetings, unblocking the blocked, translating the untranslated, and generally, um, managing? Or do they work 80 hours?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]