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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

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.
- ghostpepper 4y ago
  Not the OP but it’s not uncommon for a manager to need one of their IC reports to replace them (and therefore go into management themselves) before the senior manager can move up.
posharma 4y ago
Meta expects you to have managed at least 40 ppl before considering them for a M2 role. M2s made $800k+. Why wouldn’t a manager not be motivated to grow his empire? How else do you think managers will grow to VPs? We discuss ideals here but the reality on the ground is vastly different.
- mnd999 4y ago
  Directly and at the same time? I’m relatively new to this game, but that seems like far too many.
  - pc86 4y ago
    Depends on your definition of "direct," but it includes skip-levels. This is what some of the other comments were referring to with growing your team large enough you end up with managers reporting to you. I've been an IC reporting to a manager, who himself reported to a manager (as opposed to director or senior manager), and while the second one was technically my skip it was more like I just had two direct supervisors.
  - mulligan 4y ago
    no, he's referring to the total size of the team, not directly
- vrc 4y ago
  Yeah. To become a D1 you need to be an M2 who successfully manages (ideally) more than one other M2, who themselves might manage M2s or M1s or a combo. So you get really large chains of people at the same level in a reporting line, all managing and trying to show that they should be D1s.
  - Ancalagon 4y ago
    No lie that sounds really lame.
  - Wagthesam 4y ago
    It's actually amazing to see empire builders in action. While some EMs are busy trying to keep their teams on track, others are rolling entire teams under them and growing their mandate
rippercushions 4y ago
Building empires is quite standard in management. I work at $BIGCO as a manager and have been told that, in practice, if I want to get a promotion to the next level, I'll need to grow my team large enough to have other managers reporting to me first. So my primary target is to convince the powers that be to give me headcount, and what my team actually does is strictly secondary. Now I'm a mere peon, but this replicates up the chain increasing an order of magnitude each level, meaning up top you get VPs backstabbing each other to take over the victim's headcount and wrangle that sweet SVP promotion.
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  Companies get what they incentivize for.
- indigochill 4y ago
  But if you were CEO and you wanted to, how would you engineer the incentives such that actually productive managers succeeded? Or is there something about corporate structure that makes it impossible?
  - Consultant32452 4y ago
    Step 1: Read every Dilbert comic Step 2: Realize that what you requested is impossible for sufficiently large organizations Step 3: Negotiate a golden parachute for yourself. Don't hate the player, hate the game
  - pc86 4y ago
    I would think an easy way - and coincidentally, the best for business - would be to make it too dangerous to be the stereotypical office politics back-stabbing VP type. Make it known that that behavior will land you out on your ass, with no severance or parachute, and no recommendations for future employment. But, I've never seen that in practice. Maybe the politics of the C suite mean you want those office politics back-stabbing folks around to take those high level positions?
    - 4y ago
fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
I experienced the exact same thing, and have watched the mediocre engineers that went straight for management move up the chain. IC engineering just doesnt have that good of career advancement. The cynical career advice is to just move into management as soon as possible.
- posharma 4y ago
  Exactly. IC career is not as sexy as HN makes it to be. People pursuing IC careers are doing it for personal reasons, definitely not for growth. Compared to management it takes an order of magnitude more time, influence and energy to get promoted in the IC ladder beyond staff.
  - qualudeheart 4y ago
    Intelligence Community?
    - exac 4y ago
      Individual Contributor
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
    I mean, I don’t know. What people like about IC careers is that it’s even an option for an ambitious, hardworking person to not have to spend their time in management. Staff engineers have a ton more responsibility and authority than an IC could ever get in, like, insurance claims adjusting.
TuringNYC 4y ago
The person you're speaking about is obviously not a good steward for the company. That said, what about "Dont hate the player, hate the game" -- that seems to apply here. I've been at companies which offer good IC tracks upward alongside management tracks upwards. On the other hand, the company which you describe above are those which do not offer an acceptable IC track upward. Metrics become about headcount rather than value/revenue delivered. The worst companies are those which will literally have headcount requirements for promotion, because such bright-line requirements drive the behaviour you're writing about.
brundolf 4y ago
To counter-anecdote: I've basically never had a bad manager. Several have been exceptional, shielding me from the whims of higher-ups while making sure I don't burn out by encouraging me to take more time off, etc It probably helps that I've only ever worked at small-ish companies, and it might also help that my managers have pretty much all been technical (either while managing or at some previous time) I would guess, based on limited data, that like most other regressive culture problems this heavily depends on company size
- ThalesX 4y ago
  I'm glad you had this experience! :) Do you think it's a local vs. global maxima situation? I've had a moment in my life where I had to work 16 hours / day for two months, but in the end it was worth it for me. Time out would have been the wrong advice in that situation. I've also had situations where the whims of higher-ups were misunderstood by my direct manager and direct communication unraveled the mistery. Shielding would have been the wrong help in that situation. What does small-ish mean? I find that most small-ish (what I consider small-ish) companies had a rather flat hierarchy. Managers if anything were contributors and their managerial role was aggregating feedback for the executives so they don't get every IC knocking at their door.
  - brundolf 4y ago
    > I've also had situations where the whims of higher-ups were misunderstood by my direct manager and direct communication unraveled the mistery I'd guess this is more likely to happen with non-technical managers. Not sure, but that's a guess > What does small-ish mean? My current company (~300) is by far the largest I've worked at. Next-largest was about 100 > had a rather flat hierarchy Yeah, that tends to be true in my experience and probably contributes to this > Managers if anything were contributors and their managerial role was aggregating feedback for the executives so they don't get every IC knocking at their door Most of my managers have had a tremendous amount of professional humility, which I think is key. The main jobs they've covered (in different portions at different companies, and sometimes with some IC thrown in too) were: - People-manager: make sure people are unblocked, happy, not burning out, working on things that play to their strengths, feeling good about their career and work and not on the verge of leaving. Really a support-role - Shield: go to the stakeholder meetings, field requests made toward the team, manage the jira tickets. Then take all that and digest it, bring it to the team to discuss capacity and direction, and then take the results back to the outside stakeholders and use managerial authority to push back if needed - Product expert: stay in the headspace of the user, features, experiments, overall goals/roadmap, and represent those priorities to the ICs. This one's a fine line- it's easy for them to go off into the clouds and pass things down one-directionally. But when it's collaborative, and we're discussing things as a group with different individual focuses, it works fantastically At my current company we actually have two managers per team- one of the first kind, one of the third kind. This can work really well The most important component for all of these to work well is for the manager to see themselves as a team member, not a boss. These teams (when they worked well) did not operate on a hierarchy unless a tie had to be broken. Normally, we were all just collaborators with different specialties, who brought our different perspectives to the table and advocated for what we saw to be important. I can't emphasize enough how well this works when you can get everybody in that frame of mind
pasquinelli 4y ago
i have a whacky theory--based on very little--that the reason IBM turned away from APL was because fewer APL programmers did more, and that is a potentially bad thing for management, for a number of reasons, one of which your anecdote describes.
qualudeheart 4y ago
What a nice guy. Managers at large companies should hire as many people as possible to improve their station in life.
hourago 4y ago
> 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.' And that is the kind of person that survives purges like the one Meta is doing. The managers that did not grow an empire, the managers that did their jobs and cared for their teams are the ones that will be removed. When an organization incentivizes managers, directors and vice-presidents to grow empires, when the axe comes down it does it on the people that did not play the game. I do not understand why some people gets so happy when management gets the axe. Do you think that good managers that cared for the team instead of their own career are the ones that stay?
- ThalesX 4y ago
  > I do not understand why some people gets so happy when management gets the axe. Do you think that good managers that cared for the team instead of their own career are the ones that stay? I am not happy for any axing. In case this question was directed at me. I am happy for expecting managers to also be able to contribute to the product instead of just managing people.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    The skills I want from a good manager are mostly orthogonal to what I want from a coworker working on a project
    - wonderwonder 4y ago
      I am in a weird spot where I am a manager and expected to be an individual contributor. I am also supposed to play several other roles as well. You are right, the skill sets are vastly different. It is incredibly difficult to have to context switch between manager mind set and developer multiple times a day. Both of my roles likely suffer due to my restrictions on being able to focus on one.
      - scarface74 4y ago
politician 4y ago
"He gave almost 0 fucks about the quality of the people employed" "[He] enables engineers to grow their careers." Just what exactly was accomplished here?
nocsi 4y ago
If you think about it, middle managers are nothing more than recruiters. If the metric really is the number of heads their team grows, then the only thing they'd do is increasing their team size. In some areas, recruiters make 40-80k a referral on senior/specialties. The other thing is team growth is a defensive measure against recession layoffs and probably keeps eyes off a team if they've recently grew. It's either grow or die.
fortituded0002 4y ago
> I've also been in positions where my 'people managers' advised me against my interests. Generally curious here - do you mind adding some examples/details? Looking back at my career I can't think of a time when any 'people manager' advised me against my own interests. I am no longer an IC and since I haven't experienced this, I worry it's a blind spot in how I'm interacting with others.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
  If you are encouraging the people you manage to make personal decisions which benefit your employer more than they benefit those individuals then it's very possible you're running afoul of this. They would likely be things similar to what's described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34699720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34699720 (not my stories, just realized they're relevant to this question).
BhavdeepSethi 4y ago
I've seen engineers who were asked to move to EM role because they weren't strong technically to move up the ladder. They were able to move up multiple ladders in the EM track using the same technique you mentioned above (empire building). With a bigger empire, they're allowed to take credit for high impact engg in their chain, and including the low performers simple for total headcount. It seems like a win-win situation honestly.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
Empire building was a major problem at a local company I worked for. They got around it by setting up multiple reporting chains and co-managers. If you were a manager at a certain level and you worked with certain departments, you got to say that all of the people in that department "reported to" you. It created a laughable situation where there were only a few thousand people in the company, but I knew several dozen managers who had 200-400 people "reporting" to them. Individuals could technically "report to" a dozen managers, though they may never interact with those managers. They all proudly display their number of reports on their LinkedIn profiles.
costcofries 4y ago
There's nothing surprising about this. I work at FANGMA and I see this very very often.
gymbeaux 4y ago
I very much doubt what you’re describing is a statistical anomaly. I think just about everyone here would agree the worst devs either become managers, or move to QA/BA.
- gymbeaux 4y ago
  I'm not surprised this comment is being read as "all managers were former-bad devs". Or maybe it's that some bad devs stay bad'n. Whatevs. Can't come up with empirical data for this one, have to rely on anecdotal stuff and yall dont like speculative stuff.
throwawaylinux 4y ago
This is pretty true for a lot of people and organizations. The best engineers almost without fail are the ones who are passionate about it and don't want to be doing anything else. They'll tend to keep being engineers. And corporations tend to recognize, value, and promote managers based on team size and growth as key metrics. Can't blame someone for doing what their employer tells them it wants. The problem here is not caused by line managers but by executives who set goals in this way. And I don't really know what line managers do either. They seem to sell themselves to their reports as "dealing with all the corporate bullshit" which is kind of true, but if the corporation is generating so much bullshit that it needs to employ bullshit wranglers, it seems like the better solution would be fix it at the source rather than clean it up after the fact. I get there will always be some amount of administration and stuff that you don't want your engineers spending lots of time on, but that could be handled with a personal assistant type of role that should be able to handle dozens of engineers per PA, rather than a higher paid manager.
deevolution 4y ago
I just watched a relevant interview between Dwarkesh Patel and Marc Andreessen[1] where they discussed James Burnham's ideas on how a manager class inevitably arises once a corporation reaches scale in order to maintain the machine. Unfortunately innovation and building suffers once the managerial class takes over. The culling of managers indicates Zuck maybe isn't quite ready to abdicate and there is more growth/innovation ahead? [1] https://youtu.be/kNsi5XVDTTM?t=580 https://youtu.be/kNsi5XVDTTM?t=580
HWR_14 4y ago
> I will call it a statistical anomaly, but the worst engineers are now in 'people management' positions. Is that a bad thing? The person worst at writing code is removed from doing it, and the (same) person managing engineers has at least done it. Unless the managers are pushing technical decisions on the team (does not sound like it), why wouldn't you want the worst engineers to become the people managers? To say nothing of the common idea that engineering skill and people skill don't coexist often in the same people. > , so I took my own advice Always good! I've taken other people's advice over my own to my determent before. Of course I've also taken other people's advice and it worked out way better than my dumb ideas. Blending them is hard. Any commonly given out advice you benefited from flatly ignoring? > and was able to see some of them in the audience from the stage. Sorry, the article implies this is an announcement of the program. It seemed like it was going to be done individually-ish. Was it a massive meeting instead?
jrumbut 4y ago
I like working for people like this, because often they look to increase both quantity and quality of the people they manage (if they can call you a senior engineer, then that must make them a senior manager). So they're often quite a good advocate for your career. They're focused on me and the other engineers, we're focused on the product, and everyone is happy. That contrasts with product focused managers, where I've seen a tendency to burn through engineers and be very stingy with raises and promotions. So the engineers need to take time to be their own advocates and set boundaries and lot of us aren't as good at that so it becomes chaotic.
- ThalesX 4y ago
  I've worked in teams where 'seniors' were given to us by this kind of managers that were more like juniors so my personal experience has not been as good as yours.
kodah 4y ago
The story of Bay Area engineering and management is so fraught that it's hard to know where to begin. First, tech and team leads are regularly pushed out of authority by management types, like the ones you described or worse ones who get promoted by slimming a team down. Then there's the whole fabrication of accomplishments where managers will get promoted for the work of ICs while tech leads and ICs don't. I'm not saying get rid of management, but the Bay really needs to reassess it's incentive and management structure. If anything, let the managers be a tool to the team rather than an authority figure. Then pair them with a competent tech lead to handle things the lead or ICs can't do on their own.
deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

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.
ghostpepper 4y ago
Not the OP but it’s not uncommon for a manager to need one of their IC reports to replace them (and therefore go into management themselves) before the senior manager can move up.

posharma 4y ago

Meta expects you to have managed at least 40 ppl before considering them for a M2 role. M2s made $800k+. Why wouldn’t a manager not be motivated to grow his empire? How else do you think managers will grow to VPs? We discuss ideals here but the reality on the ground is vastly different.

mnd999 4y ago
Directly and at the same time? I’m relatively new to this game, but that seems like far too many.
- pc86 4y ago
  Depends on your definition of "direct," but it includes skip-levels. This is what some of the other comments were referring to with growing your team large enough you end up with managers reporting to you. I've been an IC reporting to a manager, who himself reported to a manager (as opposed to director or senior manager), and while the second one was technically my skip it was more like I just had two direct supervisors.
- mulligan 4y ago
  no, he's referring to the total size of the team, not directly
vrc 4y ago
Yeah. To become a D1 you need to be an M2 who successfully manages (ideally) more than one other M2, who themselves might manage M2s or M1s or a combo. So you get really large chains of people at the same level in a reporting line, all managing and trying to show that they should be D1s.
- Ancalagon 4y ago
  No lie that sounds really lame.
- Wagthesam 4y ago
  It's actually amazing to see empire builders in action. While some EMs are busy trying to keep their teams on track, others are rolling entire teams under them and growing their mandate

rippercushions 4y ago

Building empires is quite standard in management. I work at $BIGCO as a manager and have been told that, in practice, if I want to get a promotion to the next level, I'll need to grow my team large enough to have other managers reporting to me first. So my primary target is to convince the powers that be to give me headcount, and what my team actually does is strictly secondary. Now I'm a mere peon, but this replicates up the chain increasing an order of magnitude each level, meaning up top you get VPs backstabbing each other to take over the victim's headcount and wrangle that sweet SVP promotion.

wonderwonder 4y ago
Companies get what they incentivize for.
indigochill 4y ago
But if you were CEO and you wanted to, how would you engineer the incentives such that actually productive managers succeeded? Or is there something about corporate structure that makes it impossible?
- Consultant32452 4y ago
  Step 1: Read every Dilbert comic Step 2: Realize that what you requested is impossible for sufficiently large organizations Step 3: Negotiate a golden parachute for yourself. Don't hate the player, hate the game
- pc86 4y ago
  I would think an easy way - and coincidentally, the best for business - would be to make it too dangerous to be the stereotypical office politics back-stabbing VP type. Make it known that that behavior will land you out on your ass, with no severance or parachute, and no recommendations for future employment. But, I've never seen that in practice. Maybe the politics of the C suite mean you want those office politics back-stabbing folks around to take those high level positions?
  - 4y ago

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago

I experienced the exact same thing, and have watched the mediocre engineers that went straight for management move up the chain. IC engineering just doesnt have that good of career advancement. The cynical career advice is to just move into management as soon as possible.

posharma 4y ago
Exactly. IC career is not as sexy as HN makes it to be. People pursuing IC careers are doing it for personal reasons, definitely not for growth. Compared to management it takes an order of magnitude more time, influence and energy to get promoted in the IC ladder beyond staff.
- qualudeheart 4y ago
  Intelligence Community?
  - exac 4y ago
    Individual Contributor
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  I mean, I don’t know. What people like about IC careers is that it’s even an option for an ambitious, hardworking person to not have to spend their time in management. Staff engineers have a ton more responsibility and authority than an IC could ever get in, like, insurance claims adjusting.

TuringNYC 4y ago

The person you're speaking about is obviously not a good steward for the company. That said, what about "Dont hate the player, hate the game" -- that seems to apply here. I've been at companies which offer good IC tracks upward alongside management tracks upwards. On the other hand, the company which you describe above are those which do not offer an acceptable IC track upward. Metrics become about headcount rather than value/revenue delivered. The worst companies are those which will literally have headcount requirements for promotion, because such bright-line requirements drive the behaviour you're writing about.

brundolf 4y ago

To counter-anecdote: I've basically never had a bad manager. Several have been exceptional, shielding me from the whims of higher-ups while making sure I don't burn out by encouraging me to take more time off, etc It probably helps that I've only ever worked at small-ish companies, and it might also help that my managers have pretty much all been technical (either while managing or at some previous time) I would guess, based on limited data, that like most other regressive culture problems this heavily depends on company size

ThalesX 4y ago
I'm glad you had this experience! :) Do you think it's a local vs. global maxima situation? I've had a moment in my life where I had to work 16 hours / day for two months, but in the end it was worth it for me. Time out would have been the wrong advice in that situation. I've also had situations where the whims of higher-ups were misunderstood by my direct manager and direct communication unraveled the mistery. Shielding would have been the wrong help in that situation. What does small-ish mean? I find that most small-ish (what I consider small-ish) companies had a rather flat hierarchy. Managers if anything were contributors and their managerial role was aggregating feedback for the executives so they don't get every IC knocking at their door.
- brundolf 4y ago
  > I've also had situations where the whims of higher-ups were misunderstood by my direct manager and direct communication unraveled the mistery I'd guess this is more likely to happen with non-technical managers. Not sure, but that's a guess > What does small-ish mean? My current company (~300) is by far the largest I've worked at. Next-largest was about 100 > had a rather flat hierarchy Yeah, that tends to be true in my experience and probably contributes to this > Managers if anything were contributors and their managerial role was aggregating feedback for the executives so they don't get every IC knocking at their door Most of my managers have had a tremendous amount of professional humility, which I think is key. The main jobs they've covered (in different portions at different companies, and sometimes with some IC thrown in too) were: - People-manager: make sure people are unblocked, happy, not burning out, working on things that play to their strengths, feeling good about their career and work and not on the verge of leaving. Really a support-role - Shield: go to the stakeholder meetings, field requests made toward the team, manage the jira tickets. Then take all that and digest it, bring it to the team to discuss capacity and direction, and then take the results back to the outside stakeholders and use managerial authority to push back if needed - Product expert: stay in the headspace of the user, features, experiments, overall goals/roadmap, and represent those priorities to the ICs. This one's a fine line- it's easy for them to go off into the clouds and pass things down one-directionally. But when it's collaborative, and we're discussing things as a group with different individual focuses, it works fantastically At my current company we actually have two managers per team- one of the first kind, one of the third kind. This can work really well The most important component for all of these to work well is for the manager to see themselves as a team member, not a boss. These teams (when they worked well) did not operate on a hierarchy unless a tie had to be broken. Normally, we were all just collaborators with different specialties, who brought our different perspectives to the table and advocated for what we saw to be important. I can't emphasize enough how well this works when you can get everybody in that frame of mind

pasquinelli 4y ago

i have a whacky theory--based on very little--that the reason IBM turned away from APL was because fewer APL programmers did more, and that is a potentially bad thing for management, for a number of reasons, one of which your anecdote describes.

qualudeheart 4y ago

What a nice guy. Managers at large companies should hire as many people as possible to improve their station in life.

hourago 4y ago

> 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.' And that is the kind of person that survives purges like the one Meta is doing. The managers that did not grow an empire, the managers that did their jobs and cared for their teams are the ones that will be removed. When an organization incentivizes managers, directors and vice-presidents to grow empires, when the axe comes down it does it on the people that did not play the game. I do not understand why some people gets so happy when management gets the axe. Do you think that good managers that cared for the team instead of their own career are the ones that stay?

ThalesX 4y ago
> I do not understand why some people gets so happy when management gets the axe. Do you think that good managers that cared for the team instead of their own career are the ones that stay? I am not happy for any axing. In case this question was directed at me. I am happy for expecting managers to also be able to contribute to the product instead of just managing people.
- scarface74 4y ago
  The skills I want from a good manager are mostly orthogonal to what I want from a coworker working on a project
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    I am in a weird spot where I am a manager and expected to be an individual contributor. I am also supposed to play several other roles as well. You are right, the skill sets are vastly different. It is incredibly difficult to have to context switch between manager mind set and developer multiple times a day. Both of my roles likely suffer due to my restrictions on being able to focus on one.
    - scarface74 4y ago

politician 4y ago

"He gave almost 0 fucks about the quality of the people employed" "[He] enables engineers to grow their careers." Just what exactly was accomplished here?

nocsi 4y ago

If you think about it, middle managers are nothing more than recruiters. If the metric really is the number of heads their team grows, then the only thing they'd do is increasing their team size. In some areas, recruiters make 40-80k a referral on senior/specialties. The other thing is team growth is a defensive measure against recession layoffs and probably keeps eyes off a team if they've recently grew. It's either grow or die.

fortituded0002 4y ago

> I've also been in positions where my 'people managers' advised me against my interests. Generally curious here - do you mind adding some examples/details? Looking back at my career I can't think of a time when any 'people manager' advised me against my own interests. I am no longer an IC and since I haven't experienced this, I worry it's a blind spot in how I'm interacting with others.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
If you are encouraging the people you manage to make personal decisions which benefit your employer more than they benefit those individuals then it's very possible you're running afoul of this. They would likely be things similar to what's described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34699720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34699720 (not my stories, just realized they're relevant to this question).

BhavdeepSethi 4y ago

I've seen engineers who were asked to move to EM role because they weren't strong technically to move up the ladder. They were able to move up multiple ladders in the EM track using the same technique you mentioned above (empire building). With a bigger empire, they're allowed to take credit for high impact engg in their chain, and including the low performers simple for total headcount. It seems like a win-win situation honestly.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

Empire building was a major problem at a local company I worked for. They got around it by setting up multiple reporting chains and co-managers. If you were a manager at a certain level and you worked with certain departments, you got to say that all of the people in that department "reported to" you. It created a laughable situation where there were only a few thousand people in the company, but I knew several dozen managers who had 200-400 people "reporting" to them. Individuals could technically "report to" a dozen managers, though they may never interact with those managers. They all proudly display their number of reports on their LinkedIn profiles.

costcofries 4y ago

There's nothing surprising about this. I work at FANGMA and I see this very very often.

gymbeaux 4y ago

I very much doubt what you’re describing is a statistical anomaly. I think just about everyone here would agree the worst devs either become managers, or move to QA/BA.

gymbeaux 4y ago
I'm not surprised this comment is being read as "all managers were former-bad devs". Or maybe it's that some bad devs stay bad'n. Whatevs. Can't come up with empirical data for this one, have to rely on anecdotal stuff and yall dont like speculative stuff.

throwawaylinux 4y ago

This is pretty true for a lot of people and organizations. The best engineers almost without fail are the ones who are passionate about it and don't want to be doing anything else. They'll tend to keep being engineers. And corporations tend to recognize, value, and promote managers based on team size and growth as key metrics. Can't blame someone for doing what their employer tells them it wants. The problem here is not caused by line managers but by executives who set goals in this way. And I don't really know what line managers do either. They seem to sell themselves to their reports as "dealing with all the corporate bullshit" which is kind of true, but if the corporation is generating so much bullshit that it needs to employ bullshit wranglers, it seems like the better solution would be fix it at the source rather than clean it up after the fact. I get there will always be some amount of administration and stuff that you don't want your engineers spending lots of time on, but that could be handled with a personal assistant type of role that should be able to handle dozens of engineers per PA, rather than a higher paid manager.

deevolution 4y ago

I just watched a relevant interview between Dwarkesh Patel and Marc Andreessen[1] where they discussed James Burnham's ideas on how a manager class inevitably arises once a corporation reaches scale in order to maintain the machine. Unfortunately innovation and building suffers once the managerial class takes over. The culling of managers indicates Zuck maybe isn't quite ready to abdicate and there is more growth/innovation ahead? [1] https://youtu.be/kNsi5XVDTTM?t=580 https://youtu.be/kNsi5XVDTTM?t=580

HWR_14 4y ago

> I will call it a statistical anomaly, but the worst engineers are now in 'people management' positions. Is that a bad thing? The person worst at writing code is removed from doing it, and the (same) person managing engineers has at least done it. Unless the managers are pushing technical decisions on the team (does not sound like it), why wouldn't you want the worst engineers to become the people managers? To say nothing of the common idea that engineering skill and people skill don't coexist often in the same people. > , so I took my own advice Always good! I've taken other people's advice over my own to my determent before. Of course I've also taken other people's advice and it worked out way better than my dumb ideas. Blending them is hard. Any commonly given out advice you benefited from flatly ignoring? > and was able to see some of them in the audience from the stage. Sorry, the article implies this is an announcement of the program. It seemed like it was going to be done individually-ish. Was it a massive meeting instead?

jrumbut 4y ago

I like working for people like this, because often they look to increase both quantity and quality of the people they manage (if they can call you a senior engineer, then that must make them a senior manager). So they're often quite a good advocate for your career. They're focused on me and the other engineers, we're focused on the product, and everyone is happy. That contrasts with product focused managers, where I've seen a tendency to burn through engineers and be very stingy with raises and promotions. So the engineers need to take time to be their own advocates and set boundaries and lot of us aren't as good at that so it becomes chaotic.

ThalesX 4y ago
I've worked in teams where 'seniors' were given to us by this kind of managers that were more like juniors so my personal experience has not been as good as yours.

kodah 4y ago

The story of Bay Area engineering and management is so fraught that it's hard to know where to begin. First, tech and team leads are regularly pushed out of authority by management types, like the ones you described or worse ones who get promoted by slimming a team down. Then there's the whole fabrication of accomplishments where managers will get promoted for the work of ICs while tech leads and ICs don't. I'm not saying get rid of management, but the Bay really needs to reassess it's incentive and management structure. If anything, let the managers be a tool to the team rather than an authority figure. Then pair them with a competent tech lead to handle things the lead or ICs can't do on their own.

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