16 ms·

Meta Layoffs

269 points by jez 4y ago

Firmwarrior 4y ago
I've noticed a similar effect from tall management hierarchies in my career. You end up spending hours every week making presentations to managers, working with managers to make presentations to higher-up managers, etc. Everything is done in terms of "What will Jim (the VP) think of this?"
- gardenhedge 4y ago
  I have the same experience. How can we avoid this?
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    work for small companies
    - 93po 4y ago
      I've exclusively only worked for small companies and my job has mostly always revolved around one person's opinion.
      - quickthrower2 4y ago
        Yep. Usually employe #{1:4}
        gardenhedge 4y ago
        That seems preferable since that person was in the trenches of the company.. presumably doing some necessary work.
        93po 4y ago
        The reality is that it's usually someone who was a founder or cofounder and has the luxury of gambling money on a business. It's less an indicator that they know what they're doing and more that they had money to pay you to execute on their often flawed ideas and perceptions.
  - derwiki 4y ago
    At a large public company— I just don’t do it. Can’t remember the last time I made a slide deck. Has possibly limited my upward trajectory but I guess that’s the trade-off.
ITB 4y ago
There are managers who aren’t competent, either at their functional craft, or managing. And there are organizations which have too many layers. But effective leadership is indispensable to make a company successful. And the best way to distribute leadership through an organization is through a hierarchy, and that usually means managers. Anyone who exclusively sees the negative aspects of having managers has only played the organizational game in easy mode. Large orgs are really freaking hard to coordinate.
- msoad 4y ago
  I believe you might be a manager. One term frequently associated with managers is "leadership." True leadership involves being able to guide someone by saying, "Let me demonstrate the proper way to do this, so you can learn from it." In my current role, although my "leadership professional" may not know how to perform my job for an entire day, they always have "valuable advice" to offer though
  - ITB 4y ago
    I’ve been all over the spectrum, and I believe I can provide pretty strong technical guidance, either directly or by pointing out to the right person or documentation to talk to. As long as the mutual goal is to drive results, then the partnership works. I’m Actually curious about what you think about this: https://www.scopvc.com/thoughts/2023/3/19/to-manage-or-to-be-managed https://www.scopvc.com/thoughts/2023/3/19/to-manage-or-to-be...
dangrover 4y ago
I was a PM at Meta from 2016-2022. I work at a startup now and have to write detailed specs and deal with lots of small details —- something I was discouraged from doing as I rose in rank at Meta and scarcely did after the first year. Looking back, I don’t even remember what it was that I did if not that —- lots of strategy docs, aligning other teams, but no specs. I am having to unlearn a lot of bad attitudes and habits to do new gig effectively. I remember when I left feeling funny that there were as many people working on metaverse stuff as were in company when I joined (like 16k), and it’s mind boggling to me now that the layoffs are affecting around same amount.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Are you excited to be writing lots of detailed specs? Especially in a startup, that seems terrible to me. When I've done startups, one of the best things for me about them was close collaboration with the product/design side of the house. Detailed specs would have slowed that down significantly for us.
  - nojvek 4y ago
    Amazing. Love PMs who can dive into details and clarify edge cases. That’s half the battle of writing code. At our startup, the philosophy is to “first write code without writing code”. This gives clarity of problem and proposed solution to weed out edge cases, before going too deep into implementation phase.
  - adjkant 4y ago
    I've noticed that people can conflate "detailed spec" with "terribly meticulous process". Close collaboration with design/product doesn't mean that writing things down isn't useful, and can come in handy specifically: 1. When capturing complex logic areas, especially if related to any areas that are related to money or legal considerations 2. When onboarding new people on any side who need to learn about or get context on a product (product, design, eng) 3. When you revisit a V2 3 months later and forgotten what decisions you made or why you made them Lots of detailed specs to me sounds like a fast velocity of products and totally compatible with startups. That said, you also added the word "lots" that OP didn't use. It could just mean two or three!
yellowapple 4y ago
> > Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively. This is meaningless without knowing how productivity is being measured. It's very possible that said metric inherently favors in-person collaboration over remote collaboration - which would then skew the results of any further analysis of that metric. This is also meaningless without knowing exactly what's being compared. I wouldn't be surprised if 3 in-person days a week was indeed more productive than 0, but what about 2? 1? 1/2? 1/30? 1/365.24? There's a lot of numbers between 0 and 3, and coming to any conclusions without understanding the actual shape of that graph is folly. This is also meaningless without information on the wide range of in-person cultures or the wide range of remote cultures. These preliminary results could readily come about from having a remote culture that's more dysfunctional than other remote cultures and/or an in-person culture that's less dysfunctional than other in-person cultures. I've personally experienced both ranges more-or-less in full over the course of my career - as well as varying combinations of the two in hybrid environments.
- deleted 4y ago
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- stan_kirdey 4y ago
  their early analysis also showed that "metaverse" is a thing ^_^
- zamadatix 4y ago
  > This is meaningless without knowing how productivity is being measured. It's very possible that said metric inherently favors in-person collaboration over remote collaboration - which would then skew the results of any further analysis of that metric. Why is it supposed to be problematic for the metric to favor or skew towards one over the other? The goal of the metric should be to measure something the company wants to optimize not to try to show all proposals for optimizing the something are equally adept at doing so. It's possible they are measuring productivity incorrectly but whether or not the measure favors a method isn't a signal for that. I agree the other information is needed for the rest of us to consume the findings meaningfully though.
frozenport 4y ago
>> very high-functioning Author seems to be confusing established companies that hold near monopolies as highly functioning. It is difficult to to learn from large US tech companies. At Google not breaking the webpage might be a good day of work, but in my field not shipping a prototype etc will end our company. I would be skeptical of productivity statistics from a company in decline.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Excellent point. I would have a hard time naming anything Google has produced lately that has seemed like a big step forward to me. And with Facebook, a lot of their "productivity" seems to be wasteful (like the metaverse stuff) or actively harmful.
aestetix 4y ago
I just have to point out the irony that a company which believes so much in virtual work that they renamed themselves after the "metaverse" is now thinking to require employees to return to the office.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - twelve40 4y ago
    what hr person? the dude himself said he wants this
- paxys 4y ago
  They built an entire metaverse office with little conference rooms full of avatars. It was comical.
  - alwayslikethis 4y ago
    Who doesn't like bringing everything terrible about the real world into the virtual one? Next thing you see they'll be having virtual commutes with virtual cars waiting 40 minutes just to go to your virtual office. But hey it's all metaverse, which means it's awesome and shiny, right?
    - doctor_eval 4y ago
      This makes me think of Futurama. There are still traffic jams, but now they’re in the sky!
      - bigDinosaur 4y ago
        Futurama had every single problem of the 20th century, just translated forward a millennium.
deleted 4y ago
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gumby 4y ago
A lesson from Valve, which supposedly has no org chart: a company with no hierarchy has politics instead. I'm certain other companies that have tried that model have the same problem.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  well, i think you mean there are always politics
  - djmips 4y ago
    Would you rather have obvious politics or invisible politics.
    - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
      You'll always have both.
      - djmips 4y ago
        I'd prefer not to have a shadow government which is I feel is more likely at a company with no hierarchy.
- danabrams 4y ago
  All companies have politics. What you’re describing is the difference between the messy politics of having to convince others vs the easy politics of telling everyone what to do. But dictatorships don’t have nearly as good a performance record as democracies, despite their “efficient” politics.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> By the end of my tenure at Stripe in 2021 this had done a total 180. I had managers who by design had no function in the R&D org at all – they didn’t do product work, they didn’t do operations or hold a pager, they didn’t help with incoming cross-team asks, they didn’t manage the JIRA board, and a lot of the time they didn’t even run our meetings (deferring that to ICs); and the prevailing wisdom became that this was a good thing. I stumbled into a job like this recently. The startup hired an upper management team from some well-known tech companies. They had several people who claimed that “organization design” was their passion, wrote “thought leader” blogs or substacks, and presented themselves as experts in all things agile. I thought I was joining a lean startup team focused on efficient execution (as they pitched themselves) but they operated in the most bloated, inefficient, and bureaucratic manner I’ve ever seen. Roles and processes were so artificially segmented that I wasn’t allowed to use Jira without waiting for the next scheduled meeting so everyone could tell the project manager what buttons to click in Jira during long shared meetings. If you started to make any comments that sounded like they might be a product-related idea, they’d scold you for daring to think about anything other than code and demand that only product managers be allowed to talk about product things. Several managers seemed to do nothing other than police process among teams, dropping into your team’s meetings unannounced to observe and take notes about who was, and was not, following the extensive process documents they prepared for everyone. Their solution to every problem was always to hire more people. If a new requirement came up, they’d stop teams from working on it and try to find a way to spin the new requirement into more headcount. This created absurd situations where, for example, the design lead had convinced the company to hire a new designer for every new initiative while the designers for past projects sat mostly idle all day. It didn’t matter, though, because the only goal was to increase headcount. People were praised for the amount of hiring they did and the number of people they managed. This company was an extreme version of the dysfunction described in the article. I felt so relieved when I left and rejoined a company that didn’t create elaborate self-serving management structures as their primary goal. So many people at the dysfunctional company just thrived on shuffling from meeting to meeting every day, creating the appearance of doing a lot of work while actively interfering with everyone just trying to execute efficiently.
- naijaboiler 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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dfee 4y ago
Everything is rolling along smoothly, and then, bam: > High caliber, experienced employees probably get just as much done at home at the office, or maybe more… “Probably” is the key word, here. It signals to me that the author is tired of writing at this point and throws in something with little conviction or defense. I care about this point, and am inclined in the opposite direction: I think less work is done in office by these people. Withholding any self reflection to qualify myself as “high caliber”, I can say I’m an experienced employee - and feel that my productivity dwindles in person due to distractions and thus an inability to “zone in”. That means that I’m putting in extra hours outside work to achieve the same level of pre-RTO productivity. I’ve heard the same from others. Together, we’ve expressed concerns about the sustainability of these efforts. For me, toss that sentence from this article and let’s dedicate time to that discussion, independently.
- Plasmoid 4y ago
  I am also vastly more productive at home than I am at an office. Especially the San Francisco lunchroom chic that plagues the city.
  - lmeyerov 4y ago
    Here's an attempt at quantifying Junior staff need constant help, but senior staff need space that's hard to achieve at an office. Studies show people take 30m-1.5hr to dial in for deep work. So, imagine a "light" office day: - 8a drive, coffee, etc - 9a sit down - 10a standup mtg - 11:50a team lunch roundup - 2p random meeting - 5p drive home At best, that leaves 3 hours of deep work: 11a-12, 3p-5p. Heaven forbid someone swings by your desk during that period! WFH gets the 2 commute hours back, gives scheduling control to bookend breakfast & lunch with whatever distracting meetings, an async standup removes the sync one's disruptions, and a lot of the desk traffic is gone. So, WFH done right, ~doubles the amount of deep work by the more effective staff
    - forgotusername6 4y ago
      WFH gives me all those hours back. Because no matter which meeting I'm in, I'm working on something else.
darth_avocado 4y ago
Middle management bloat is real. At one point there were 16 layers of management between me and the ceo when I was at a staff engineer. However the other extreme (like in places like Twitter, since the author mentioned it), you have 20 people reporting to a single manager. That is not a great place to work in. The managers are just stretched thin and the ICs are left to deal with the chaos. This becomes really hard for newer or junior engineers.
- geokon 4y ago
  out of curiosity, what issues did you see? 20 to one seems kinda low in my experience. At my last deskjob it about 30-50 to 1 and it felt like a good balance. My team and I (~5 people) met with the manager once a week for a couple of hours. Id estimate they had 2-3 meetings a day with other teams. Project direction and blockers were dicussed and adjusted. It felt optimal, enough to get guidance, but they were too busy to micromanage and get in the way. Non-high-level nitty gritty day to day issues were just resolved within the team throughout the week
  - flashgordon 4y ago
    How is a team that is meeting their manager consisting only of 5 people if the manager has 30-50 people reporting into them? I wasn't sure if it was a typo or where you actually advocating for a manager to have 30-50 direct reports?
    - manmal 4y ago
      5 people in one meeting, done 2-3 times per day, for 4 days per week => 40-60 people
    - geokon 4y ago
      Yes. The manager managed 6+ teams. They had decades of industry experience and were very good at.. Management? dealing with project scope, knowing what clients would find useful, when to change direction etc. Managing a team is realistically not a full time job. He did not write any code or independently make technical decisions nor act as a mentor or senior dev or anything like that. He used to write code, so could follow technical discussions but he wasnt some topdog 10xer. He just managed and he was good at it. Since he was involved in many concurrent projects he also knew the organization and talent very well
paxys 4y ago
The management part rings so true. 15 years ago every manager I had would be closely involved in system architecture, reviewing specs, setting engineering standards for the team, approving code and lots more. Today all of this is delegated down to ICs and even team leads and L1 managers do...meetings and other important stuff. Sooner rather than later a large chunk of line managers and middle managers industry-wide are going to face a "what would you say you do here?" moment, and it already seems to have started at Meta.
KerrAvon 4y ago
TFA sez: But as we see, companies like Meta have been making an effort to quantify the effect of remote work on productivity, and concluded not only that there is some, but that it’s significant enough to warrant encouraging an unpopular return. [End TFA.] But they have failed to do this. When they actually provide such data (a rarity), it’s cherry-picked to justify getting asses back in seats for egocentric reasons. They just want to feel the busyness of the business when they walk in the door. It makes the executives feel like they’re in charge of something. No, the future is simple: eventually, you will be glad to hire competent people no matter where they want to work. COVID and the generally suppressed immune systems that it’s leaving behind will continue to thin the employee pool. The fascists will shut down H1-B and close the borders. You’ll hire us WFH, or hybrid, or full time in-office, by employee choice, and you’ll like it. Because otherwise you won’t have anyone to hire at all.
- mjr00 4y ago
  This is good fanfiction, but doesn't really reflect reality. Employees have mostly gone along with RTO/hybrid strategies and there hasn't been a mass exodus where it's happened, especially in this job market. Most people are probably assuming RTO is a matter of when, not if, for most companies anyhow. And remember that 40,000+ tech workers have been laid off in the past 6 months, and the specter of ChatGPT is lurking over the future of knowledge work for many. There are certainly "single issue workers" who will quit over non-remote, and more power to them, but it seems silly to think that Google, Meta, or Amazon would have trouble hiring workers with a 3-day-a-week office policy, especially at their top-of-market salaries.
  - mejutoco 4y ago
    IBM is still getting by well, but it is not what it used to be. Companies can avoid critical thinking and end up the same, slowly but surely.
elguyosupremo 4y ago
This piece goes from talking about meta layoffs to an indictment of remote work surprisingly quick. I love remote work, because I grew up in a small city with no companies operating in my industry and when covid hit I was able to go full remote, move back home, and be around my friends and family while contributing to my company and to my local economy. The biggest thing that has helped my dev team thrive and be able to onboard new members is mob programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_programming). We have our own take on exactly how we do it, but the gist is that all our software engineers are in a video conference with each other as much as possible and focus on a single task. We're starting to add new members in timezones that are 5+ hours offset from the rest of the team and that integration is proving to be hard. If anyone has advice on building TZ-distributed teams I would love to hear advice!
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > If anyone has advice on building TZ-distributed teams I would love to hear advice! You won't love to hear it, because the general way to handle large TZ offsets it to make work async, and it sounds like "mob programing" as you do it is quite sync. What I've seen work is strong document culture - write docs, leave comments, etc. Have clear expectations on deliverables from the start ("this doc will design service X, impl can start when 3/3 senior engineers approve design by leaving an "I approve" comment). Everyone does their thing, and you don't need to be talking to someone to do it.
- 0xB31B1B 4y ago
  The problem w mob programming is that measured purely on a man-hour cost it sounds extremely stupid and expensive for a company. It has always sounded to me like a hare brained idea that a dev shop came up with to sell more man hours per feature delivered.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Depends - I have seen enough throw a mythical manmonth worth of developers at embarrassingly unparallelizable work and watch the tech debt pile up like it’s a 2007 mortgage bubble. And that code then trips people up day after day as more features are added.
djha-skin 4y ago
His poignant take on weekly remote work is being wrestled to the ground stick me the most: > To me, although I’d certainly concede that WFH pares down meeting culture and certainly has benefits in logistics, it’s always been fairly obvious that in-person collaboration is more effective, produces a much stronger culture, and I suspect is important especially to larger orgs because it helps to even out performance. High caliber, experienced employees probably get just as much done at home at the office, or maybe more, but junior employees with less direction struggle more, and WFH provides the ultimate cover for less motivated people (which in a larger company will always be a percentage of the total) that might otherwise be held more accountable in-person. It's not just about the heavy hitters, it's about the team as a whole. In person work, though a logistical headache and social annoyance, drives team cohesion.
- bink 4y ago
  I'd argue that that doesn't have to be the case. The companies that are failing their junior employees and new hires are doing so not because they are remote/WFH, but because those companies did not invest the energy and resources necessary to be good at remote/WFH. There are plenty of companies that focus on remote work and have no issues with onboarding or failing performance.
  - RestlessMind 4y ago
    > There are plenty of companies that focus on remote work and have no issues with onboarding or failing performance. Can you please name a few of those? Mine has gone all in and sincerely trying to make it work. And it still sucks. So curious to know some successful examples.
    - doktorhladnjak 4y ago
      A couple of well-known ones are Automattic (WordPress.com) and Gitlab. Gitlab even has its employee handbook publicly available https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/
starkparker 4y ago
> it’s always been fairly obvious that in-person collaboration is more effective, produces a much stronger culture Can someone who agrees explain how these points are obvious, to me, a person who's worked part- or full-time remotely for more than 10 years and has no concept of either of these things?
rationalfaith 4y ago
[dead]
fnordpiglet 4y ago
In office culture will die once the emotions abate and the CFO presents to the board a .02 EPS boost by closing all offices. Given the boards fiduciary duty it won’t even be a debate. The “culture” hand wave is ludicrous - a for profit public company isn’t about building culture, it’s about increasing earnings per share. The whole “we need to be in office for the kids” strikes me as absurd as well - we’ve got a 16 year queue of kids that went to school online for two years and grow up with FaceTime, zoom, slack, discord, and all the tools to get it done as common in their life as the pay phone was in ours. On the middle management purge, I am glad to see it. I went into management at the time that was the only way to increase your leverage as an engineer. Over time it’s become a simpering pile of drivel and I am actively looking to switch back to IC roles. I’m sick to death of the professional manager culture in tech these days - it’s literally filled with people that just don’t like computers that much - likely got into it because their parents thought it was a good career and they realized after a few years they weren’t into it and switched to management. It’s been steered towards managers holding the nominal power but none of the ability to understand their decisions, so they a) don’t make them, b) when cornered make bad decisions. It’s sickening and I literally can’t stand my career as it stands. I’m not even allowed to commit code any more, and even if I were, I’m too busy going to bs offsites to talk about decisioning shift left strategies and how to make inhuman hotel seating open floor plan offices fun enough that people want ti come into their chicken coops to be milked.
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure that "culture" means "we, the management, like having people around who won't disagree with us to our faces".
Karrot_Kream 4y ago
> To me, although I’d certainly concede that WFH pares down meeting culture I feel the opposite though I'm an n=1 and don't have any data beyond myself. My company went full WFH during the pandemic and committed to it. Ever since we've become much more meeting heavy (I also have pretty senior IC title sadly.) Why? Along with going WFH we began hiring from other timezones in earnest. Low cost of living areas are cheaper to hire from. Previously we were really careful about hiring teams in a given timezone together, everyone on the team used to be within +- 1 hour of each other. Now lunch times, day start, and day end times weren't in sync anymore. Before standup was at 1100, now meetings started appearing at 1000, 0900, eventually 0800. After all 0800 in UTC-8 was actually 1100 in UTC-5. My 1200 lunch is overwritten all the time by folks in UTC-6 for whom it's actually 1400. Before you'd see people run to the bathroom or express annoyance finding meeting rooms, but now going from meeting to meeting is just a click of a button. What used to be a hallway conversation or an extra 10 minutes of hanging outside a conference room to hash out a few details becomes another 30 min time slot they book on my calendar along with everyone else.
- realworldperson 4y ago
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- ilikerashers 4y ago
  A side effect too is it becomes much harder to manage focus. 30 mins at 1, 2, and 3 turn 1hr 30 of meetings into at least 3 hours wasted on conference calls. I've taken to hiding my calendar and not turning up if someone does some inefficient meeting booking.
  - adjkant 4y ago
    Slogan an old company of mine tried to socialize while trying to wrangle overbooked meeting issues: "No agenda, no attenda"
- krisoft 4y ago
  > My 1200 lunch is overwritten all the time by folks in UTC-6 for whom it's actually 1400. Book out your lunch break in your calendar. If anyone manages to put in a conflicting event just simply don’t appear for it (or bow out early, or arrive late if the overlap is only partial) If anyone is asking tell them directly that this is your lunch break. It is up to you to setup healthy boundaries and maintain them.
raverbashing 4y ago
> although I’d certainly concede that WFH pares down meeting culture and certainly has benefits in logistics, it’s always been fairly obvious that in-person collaboration is more effective, produces a much stronger culture When I read this, I translate it to: "We don't know how to collaborate remotely efficiently, so we don't try anything different and say 'office work is better' " Yes there's a value to meeting in-person. But don't say the process doesn't work when you don't know how to use the available tools to collaborate
RomanPushkin 4y ago
The most important point is missing. The reason for Meta layoffs is that metaverse is not getting enough traction. They wasted billions and they blame engineers for WFH? It's nonsense. Moreover, with multiple rounds of layoffs nobody's gonna join Meta. Why joining? Getting 500k "salary" with a risk of being laid off in the next 6 months and spending the next 6 months looking for a job? It's not 500k, folks. It's a fake 500k carrot for naive bunnies. I had offer from Meta, and I am so happy that I didn't go there. The company is just unstable, going downwards spiral. They have to pay me a really good sign up bonus with a good vesting schedule so I consider them, maybe, one day.
- clintonb 4y ago
  Okay…but you can feed a lot of bunnies with the $250K carrot.
- 93po 4y ago
  > The company is just unstable Minimum net income of $10 billion a year for the past 7 years is now apparently unstable
  - rchaud 4y ago
    $10 billion annually sounds pretty good until you consider that they've spent close to $40b on a Second Life clone. Blackberry profits were looking good in 2009 as well, it wasn't until 2012 that the wheels came off.
    - 93po 4y ago
      IBM has spent billions on Watson with very little return. I don't think anyone is calling IBM unstable.
      - sizzle 4y ago
        Watson was a let down, it was supposed to be what Chat-GPT accomplished today.
colmvp 4y ago
> > Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively. I don't doubt that people earlier in their career work better with more senior people at arms length to help them. Hell, I experienced a bit of that my first few months at a new job where I struggled to understand processes. But after a period of time, I got it. Sure it took longer, but I got there. Now, I get less work done in the office because people spend time socializing, and more importantly, the workstation is not customized to my liking because of this whole satellite desk situation. I'll say this: If these companies tanked during the height of Covid, they'd blame it on WFH. Of course, the financial performance for these companies was quite good, so now that there's a bit of correction, they search for reasons to bring employees back to the office.
- 8note 4y ago
  > I'll say this: If these companies tanked during the height of Covid, they'd blame it on WFH. Of course, the financial performance for these companies was quite good, so now that there's a bit of correction, they search for reasons to bring employees back to the office. What's entertaining is that the various faang companies performance is likely unrelated to employee performance, and Elon musk's twitter will show a path forward for near-term tech employment
  - IntelMiner 4y ago
    I don't think anyone could replicate the utter disaster that Elon is every single day
- dclowd9901 4y ago
  A pessimistic person might say that companies don’t trust their employees to work unless they have absolute control over their employees and how they work. It’s a power play. Companies need to know they’re in charge.
AHOHA 4y ago
I just never understood how come “tech” companies never used the same concept used within their products, async communications!! Sync communication is a blocking one, you need to block all involved parties to discuss X that most of the times is useless, just use async ones, I email/text/or even video record when I have the time, and you respond when you do, not really that hard!
- RestlessMind 4y ago
  Because a lot of work needs sync and is inefficient to do in an async manner. Even for software engineers, let alone other people centric roles. Most obvious example would be designing nuances of a complex system. That discussion is needed at least once every 4-6 weeks and I wish we are around a whiteboard at that time.
  - mejutoco 4y ago
    Async work is more difficult, but not more inefficient. It is the difference between putting a lot of work into an email that perfectly explains something, vs shooting a quick email and offload the effort to the recipient. In this case communication ability is crucial, since it requires written documents. Many people (managers and developers) lack the discipline, patience, and incentives to adopt this style of work.
    - RestlessMind 4y ago
      > Many people (managers and developers) lack the discipline, patience, and incentives to adopt this style of work. Correct. So what do we do then? Changing people is hard. And communication styles are ingrained after a certain age. Also, even the best communicators are finding it hard to do some tasks async, like designing a complex system.
      - mejutoco 4y ago
        > like designing a complex system If kernel devs can do it so can 90% of companies, if there is a will. This seems to me like a culture matter that needs to come from the top, though.
deleted 4y ago
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havkom 4y ago
My experience as a manager before and after WFH is that WFH: 1) makes it actually clearer what is delivered and by whom 2) requires more from the manager to make sure the right stake holders are communicating efficiently and employees are satisfied - doable but more work load for managers and requires more experience from them I think #2 is that companies are actually struggling with. It is not about the workers productivity (which generally increases by WFH), it is about the managers comfort, skills and experience.
emodendroket 4y ago
I don't know that three days are necessary but it's hard to deny that sometimes an in-person conversation just gets things resolved much faster. Though considering how many teams are now geographically distributed I find the argument less compelling.
einhverfr 4y ago
I think the problem of engineering management is that componentization is a hard problem. One needs to recognize that Conway's Law is an inevitability, but it can be a positive as well as a negative thing. If you design your organization around needs for components, then you end up with limited contracts. Even the organizations that I have worked for that have been better at this than others have still struggled. Perhaps there is room to just point out that high-level architects need to be involved in people and organization decisions. In the end, flatter organizations are better, but structure of both organizations and software are hard problems and things that we struggle with throughout our careers on either track. I have usually fought to have ICs report at every level so that part makes sense. But the question becomes what you replace middle management with? The answer shouldn't be "chaos."
UberFly 4y ago
Regarding the comments in the author's post about companies requiring more and more that employees work at least 3 days in-office - I think it really boils down to the fact that most people work harder when there's someone looking over their shoulder and expectations are literally staring you in the face. It was like that in 1000 BCE and it's like that in 2023.
zmmmmm 4y ago
> in-person collaboration is more effective, produces a much stronger culture I believe the second part but not the first. The most productive collaborations I've had by far have been virtual. People rapid fire exchanging ideas, testing things out on slack, quickly sharing screens to solve a problem and then jumping out again to focus on the next bit, etc. When it works well it's exhilirating. Everyone will have encountered situations when it worked badly. But nothing is as unproductive 12 people spending hours in a room where it inevitably gets dominated by 1 or 2 extroverts and the rest sit back passively. Doing it well either way is hard.
supernova87a 4y ago
I think many big tech companies are in a "we don't know what our next big goal is" kind of phase. And this would be ok for a small company. But when you have tens of thousands of people who now need new clear marching orders, this is a very dangerous thing. And doubly so if you keep on changing those people's goals because you think you need to launch something big and new that requires thousands of people to build it (but you don't know exactly how it's going to be built). Why is it dangerous (and I mean org-productivity-wise)? Because everyone has a natural need to feel useful and that they're productive and deserving of their pay. So when clear instructions are lacking about what we're supposed to do, we make up things to work on. We hire people who say they can help us figure out what to work on. We create managers to manage people who seem to not know what they're working on, so that some direction can seem like it's clear. Because you can't have 10 people not knowing what they're working on, without a manager to manage their not knowing what they're working on. We schedule meetings to find out what other people are working on, and how we should get involved to be useful, distracting the few who are actually being productive. So you find, after a few years, that you've accumulated a massive apparatus of people who have created a behomth of their own, simply from the desire to believe they're working on something useful. Sometimes they're very convincing, looking like they're working on something useful. And unpleasant as it is (and surprising, as Elon Musk showed), many of them could stand to be fired without much detriment to the original purpose of the company. Figure out what you want to build before you hire tens of thousands of people to do it. (and whether it will work). Or, at least as a caution, when your goal changes but you already have tens of thousands of people, be prepared to act unless you want to find yourself unwittingly in this position.
c54 4y ago
> The overwhelming opinion amongst developer types is that remote is better in every way It doesn’t check out to me that this is an overwhelming opinion. People definitely like remote and hybrid work but the tradeoffs vs being in person at least some of the time are well known to the point of being obvious. Partially-remote teams inherently have higher communication bandwidth between the in-office cadre versus the remote teammates, and all-remote teams specifically plan for team retreats and hangouts to build camaraderie, emotional connection, and understanding. The Meta studies are one of those “you have to find numbers for the thing that is obviously true” situations. It’d be really surprising to me to hear any kind of experienced developer contest this, even if their personal preference is to knowingly make that trade in favor of the flexibility being remote gives. I’m curious if others agree or disagree here, given the author presented the exact opposite of my stance so frankly.
- modfreq 4y ago
  For what it's worth: I'm a 'developer type' who agrees with you.
- tomduncalf 4y ago
  I’ve got 15+ years experience and prefer being in the office. This is definitely somewhat because I live in an apartment in London so a) don’t have a great dedicated workspace (I do have a desk in the spare room but it’s not hugely exciting), b) my commute is actually quite quick and pleasant and c) companies usually will have a nice office here… I did try full remote with my last role and it just didn’t work out for me, I found it harder to be productive at home long term and I like the change of scene of the office, so actively was looking for somewhere with an office and people in there at least some of the time in a new role - though I also appreciate being somewhere flexible so I can work remote if I need to. I can see the arguments for both sides but to claim full remote is pure positive seems disingenuous to me, there are clear negatives. FWIW my team are at least 50% fully remote but I still prefer to be in the office even if a lot of my communications are via Zoom/Slack.
glass3 4y ago
>Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. If their performance data is reliable, why does Meta need several rounds of layoffs? The foundation of their analysis is weak.
throwawaysvb 4y ago
Work from home so good for me. I don't see any valid reason to throw it away. Companies can not force me do what's clearly not in my best interest as long as they need me more than i need them.
deleted 4y ago
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rmk 4y ago
I have seen the 'manager does nothing' situation, and it is a bad idea. The notion that line managers just do people management and literally nothing else is just egregiously harmful to the industry. This is how you end up with three layers of people who do nothing, as explained in the article. A line manager ought to be in the trenches, handling oncall, writing some code now and then, automating the bits of drudgery away, project managing, product managing, code reviewing and generally being an engineer. None of these things have to be done all the time and to the highest level of performance, but the idea that managers delegate all of these responsibilities leads to yes-men being promoted. If, as a manager, you do none of these activities, how on earth do you evaluate your people? You become the Vladimir Putin of your team, fed horseshit by people who have agendas or loudmouths while completely missing out on the concerns of people who do the actual work, with absolutely no idea of the actual performance and problems of the team.
hintymad 4y ago
> A manager writing code would have been an absolutely jaw-dropping ludicrous idea – their function was to engage in high-level planning, manage people by doing 1:1s and participating in the stack ranking process, and they had four layers above them doing the same thing. My theory is that the companies grew bigger, their management became risk-averse for good or for bad. The logical thing for the management to do, is to insert a layer under them to insulate themselves from unknown risks. As a result, managers were busy planning and aligning and challenging any bottom-up plans but in reality they were just actively avoiding personal risks.
- muskmusk 4y ago
  This is almost always the prevailing idea. "Management are doing this on purpose". Dont think that is the case. Its more like we hired a somewhat poor manager, that manager hired yet more poor managers who in turn hired even more poor managers. All of these poor managers finds ways to make themselves appear useful using what they know how to do: endlessly discuss things. The above is a caricature, but I think it has more than one grain of truth to it.
TurkishPoptart 4y ago
How come layoffs are typically only of FTEs and not contractors? Is it because FTEs and contractors are different types of costs like "personnel" as opposed to "project-based resources"?
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  I've heard from HR people that, as a rule of thumb, an FTE costs the company 150% of their salary, e.g. if a company pays an FTE $150k in salary a year, they expect to also spend about $75k on that FTE's benefits (health insurance, retirement, etc.) and administrative overhead.
muskmusk 4y ago
I don't think the problem is one type of management vs another type of management. But about a completely disproportional application of one type of management. Heavy coding and no management have a place in the world. But no coding and heavy management also has a place in the world. Coding "heats up" the environment and management "cools it down". Sometimes you need heat, sometimes you need to temper the heat. Companies start out with all coding and no management because they need to just produce. Then when they have something valuable, they must reign in the cowboy culture with management. Unfortunately, this often ends up overdone and there are very few leaders who have the guts to prune the overmanaged companies. Let's see how it turns out for the Zuck.
swiftcoder 4y ago
> WFH provides the ultimate cover for less motivated people (which in a larger company will always be a percentage of the total) that might otherwise be held more accountable in-person. Bullshit. Everyone who worked in-office knows folks who spend half their day in pointless meetings, and the other half chatting by the coffee machine. Obscuring lack of productivity in an office setting is not particularly hard - it's a lot easier to "look busy" in person
- sideshowb 4y ago
  Agreed. I have been mostly remote since 2015 and if anything I feel more pressure to achieve things as I can't justify my existence merely by being there.
- surgical_fire 4y ago
  TBF, it was always easier to look busy in an office, with everyone around you. Plenty of ways to procrastinate work with "work". When you work remote the only thing you have to show is your output.
bvrmn 4y ago
> When I came to the valley in 2012, I had a manager who wrote as much code and shipped as much as I did, and prevailing wisdom was that this was a good thing. My team lost manager almost 8 month ago. And I took additional management role alongside with a TL role by necessity. Burned out completely by now. It's so much more work and information you must operate I don't understand who can ever say managers aren't needed. It's ridiculous.
roomey 4y ago
The point about remote workers been less efficient.... I really do hope they accounted that they were probably not shown the ways to game the "efficiency" system.. most people won't tell a new worker who they never met how to do something like game the efficiency metric. Although and manager worth their salt would know to pass this info along. And anyway, in a "creative" area, like writing code, inventing new stuff, since when is "efficiency" a good thing, all that does is make the same shot, just more of it. "Year of efficiency" is year of cost cutting. The blog post has an interesting take on it tho.
- wg0 4y ago
  Efficiency is meaningful in manufacturing where you exactly know what goes into a shoe, how many steps, processes and how much energy and material goes into each. You're making the same thing over and over. Then there, it's justified to say that 100 shoes per minute is better than 96 shoes per minute and additional 4 shoes can be considered as additional revenue or bringing average cost down etc. In software, the same thing with the same software stack with the same code base is not happening. If it's happening, either the activity is meaningless or can be a step in the build pipeline as requires no thought. Efficiency can be measured either on number of bux fixes, features added or lines of code. Great. Lines of code are meaningless they even vary by software stack, language, framewok, domain, Feature scope or bug's severity. Bug fixes have exactly the same problem. Could be two weeks to find out that the issue isn't even in the code but in an external that had an incorrect value. Features? Don't know. How much against the existing features the new features goes? The more that slope is, more necessary refactoring would be required.
danjac 4y ago
Meta's problems are due to a lack of direction and very poor decision making from the very top. The Metaverse was a huge expensive failure, their core demographics are old people and their Instagram demographic is being eaten up by TikTok. Zuckerberg is not an "ideas" guy. He had that one great idea back in the early 2000s (whether you believe it was his idea or not, he did execute on it) and everything since then has been acquisitions. Sure maybe they can wring out more "productivity" by return to office or firing their middle managers or whatever but so what? It doesn't matter how fast you can run if you are running in the wrong direction.
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  If the "one great idea" you refer to is a social network, Friendster and Myspace beat Zuckerberg to it by years.
  - danjac 4y ago
    Sure, the concept of a social network wasn't novel, but Zuckerberg had some insights that led to FB becoming the dominant network within a few years - for example incubating inside US colleges to gain traction among younger demographics through word of mouth, building an ecosystem around games and apps, creating a social graph based on real identities and relationships that yielded lucrative marketing data, and so on.
Dave3of5 4y ago
Reading through the OP and comments it seems like a lot of people have never actually experienced a decent manager. If the only manager(s) you've ever had have only caused problems and micromanaged you with no help whatsoever then yes I guess you want to remove all management layers completely. The downside to removing all management layers is: * You'll have to interact with the directors of a company directly. I have experience with this and from this I can tell you that you'll find they don't share the viewpoints of most devs. They will expect things done yesterday and all possible corners to be cut. They don't care about Tech debt. Your estimates will always be too high and they will demand they be cut down to the unreasonable. They leave 0 time for testing as far as they know the dev work is done once the dev says so. They don't care about the complexity of implementation, they only see complexity in what they are asking you. SO if They ask "build me the next facebook" that is quite a simple statement but the implementation is very complex they see that because the statement is simple so should be the implementation * Good luck ever getting a pay raise or a promotion. A decent manager will track you through those things as you work for a company and push for them on your behalf. A director only sees development as a cost to be reduced * Much easier to directly blame developers when things go wrong. You bet your ass that if prod goes down there will be hell to pay. Fire the dev that brought it down. A good manager shields the team from this as they spread the blame of many departments making it hard to fire anyone * You won't get any time for personal development. Kiss all those pluralsight courses goodbye that costs money. A yearly conference ? who's paying for that. Remember that the directors of a company will see money being spent as their own money because every dollar spent reduces EBITDA which will reduce their mega bonus * Any problems you have with other devs are now yours to fix. Remember HR aren't their to help you they are there to help the company * Projects will be dumped on you that are way outside your field of expertise. Directors often lump all devs into the same bucket. So for example if there is a new project that involves AI and no-one on the teams got any real experience then tough luck get her done * You'll have to deal with strange requests. For example given chatgpt has been in the news a lot you'll suddenly be told to add chatgpt to the product regardless if it makes any sense. Normally a good manager would bat these types of things off to protect the dev team * Time management is your problem. You'll be given an end date and told everything has to be done for that date Note I get that having too many managers is bad but you ideally want small IC to manager ratio so that you are getting the benefit.
nunez 4y ago
> WFH provides the ultimate cover for less motivated people (which in a larger company will always be a percentage of the total) that might otherwise be held more accountable in-person. Quiet part out loud. tbf, it can definitely be true.

269 points by jez 4y ago

I've noticed a similar effect from tall management hierarchies in my career. You end up spending hours every week making presentations to managers, working with managers to make presentations to higher-up managers, etc. Everything is done in terms of "What will Jim (the VP) think of this?"

gardenhedge 4y ago
I have the same experience. How can we avoid this?
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  work for small companies
  - 93po 4y ago
    I've exclusively only worked for small companies and my job has mostly always revolved around one person's opinion.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      Yep. Usually employe #{1:4}
      - gardenhedge 4y ago
        That seems preferable since that person was in the trenches of the company.. presumably doing some necessary work.
        93po 4y ago
        The reality is that it's usually someone who was a founder or cofounder and has the luxury of gambling money on a business. It's less an indicator that they know what they're doing and more that they had money to pay you to execute on their often flawed ideas and perceptions.
- derwiki 4y ago
  At a large public company— I just don’t do it. Can’t remember the last time I made a slide deck. Has possibly limited my upward trajectory but I guess that’s the trade-off.

ITB 4y ago

There are managers who aren’t competent, either at their functional craft, or managing. And there are organizations which have too many layers. But effective leadership is indispensable to make a company successful. And the best way to distribute leadership through an organization is through a hierarchy, and that usually means managers. Anyone who exclusively sees the negative aspects of having managers has only played the organizational game in easy mode. Large orgs are really freaking hard to coordinate.

msoad 4y ago
I believe you might be a manager. One term frequently associated with managers is "leadership." True leadership involves being able to guide someone by saying, "Let me demonstrate the proper way to do this, so you can learn from it." In my current role, although my "leadership professional" may not know how to perform my job for an entire day, they always have "valuable advice" to offer though
- ITB 4y ago
  I’ve been all over the spectrum, and I believe I can provide pretty strong technical guidance, either directly or by pointing out to the right person or documentation to talk to. As long as the mutual goal is to drive results, then the partnership works. I’m Actually curious about what you think about this: https://www.scopvc.com/thoughts/2023/3/19/to-manage-or-to-be-managed https://www.scopvc.com/thoughts/2023/3/19/to-manage-or-to-be...

dangrover 4y ago

I was a PM at Meta from 2016-2022. I work at a startup now and have to write detailed specs and deal with lots of small details —- something I was discouraged from doing as I rose in rank at Meta and scarcely did after the first year. Looking back, I don’t even remember what it was that I did if not that —- lots of strategy docs, aligning other teams, but no specs. I am having to unlearn a lot of bad attitudes and habits to do new gig effectively. I remember when I left feeling funny that there were as many people working on metaverse stuff as were in company when I joined (like 16k), and it’s mind boggling to me now that the layoffs are affecting around same amount.

wpietri 4y ago
Are you excited to be writing lots of detailed specs? Especially in a startup, that seems terrible to me. When I've done startups, one of the best things for me about them was close collaboration with the product/design side of the house. Detailed specs would have slowed that down significantly for us.
- nojvek 4y ago
  Amazing. Love PMs who can dive into details and clarify edge cases. That’s half the battle of writing code. At our startup, the philosophy is to “first write code without writing code”. This gives clarity of problem and proposed solution to weed out edge cases, before going too deep into implementation phase.
- adjkant 4y ago
  I've noticed that people can conflate "detailed spec" with "terribly meticulous process". Close collaboration with design/product doesn't mean that writing things down isn't useful, and can come in handy specifically: 1. When capturing complex logic areas, especially if related to any areas that are related to money or legal considerations 2. When onboarding new people on any side who need to learn about or get context on a product (product, design, eng) 3. When you revisit a V2 3 months later and forgotten what decisions you made or why you made them Lots of detailed specs to me sounds like a fast velocity of products and totally compatible with startups. That said, you also added the word "lots" that OP didn't use. It could just mean two or three!

yellowapple 4y ago

> > Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively. This is meaningless without knowing how productivity is being measured. It's very possible that said metric inherently favors in-person collaboration over remote collaboration - which would then skew the results of any further analysis of that metric. This is also meaningless without knowing exactly what's being compared. I wouldn't be surprised if 3 in-person days a week was indeed more productive than 0, but what about 2? 1? 1/2? 1/30? 1/365.24? There's a lot of numbers between 0 and 3, and coming to any conclusions without understanding the actual shape of that graph is folly. This is also meaningless without information on the wide range of in-person cultures or the wide range of remote cultures. These preliminary results could readily come about from having a remote culture that's more dysfunctional than other remote cultures and/or an in-person culture that's less dysfunctional than other in-person cultures. I've personally experienced both ranges more-or-less in full over the course of my career - as well as varying combinations of the two in hybrid environments.

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stan_kirdey 4y ago
their early analysis also showed that "metaverse" is a thing ^_^
zamadatix 4y ago
> This is meaningless without knowing how productivity is being measured. It's very possible that said metric inherently favors in-person collaboration over remote collaboration - which would then skew the results of any further analysis of that metric. Why is it supposed to be problematic for the metric to favor or skew towards one over the other? The goal of the metric should be to measure something the company wants to optimize not to try to show all proposals for optimizing the something are equally adept at doing so. It's possible they are measuring productivity incorrectly but whether or not the measure favors a method isn't a signal for that. I agree the other information is needed for the rest of us to consume the findings meaningfully though.

frozenport 4y ago

>> very high-functioning Author seems to be confusing established companies that hold near monopolies as highly functioning. It is difficult to to learn from large US tech companies. At Google not breaking the webpage might be a good day of work, but in my field not shipping a prototype etc will end our company. I would be skeptical of productivity statistics from a company in decline.

wpietri 4y ago
Excellent point. I would have a hard time naming anything Google has produced lately that has seemed like a big step forward to me. And with Facebook, a lot of their "productivity" seems to be wasteful (like the metaverse stuff) or actively harmful.

aestetix 4y ago

I just have to point out the irony that a company which believes so much in virtual work that they renamed themselves after the "metaverse" is now thinking to require employees to return to the office.

gonzo41 4y ago
[flagged]
- twelve40 4y ago
  what hr person? the dude himself said he wants this
paxys 4y ago
They built an entire metaverse office with little conference rooms full of avatars. It was comical.
- alwayslikethis 4y ago
  Who doesn't like bringing everything terrible about the real world into the virtual one? Next thing you see they'll be having virtual commutes with virtual cars waiting 40 minutes just to go to your virtual office. But hey it's all metaverse, which means it's awesome and shiny, right?
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    This makes me think of Futurama. There are still traffic jams, but now they’re in the sky!
    - bigDinosaur 4y ago
      Futurama had every single problem of the 20th century, just translated forward a millennium.

deleted 4y ago

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gumby 4y ago

A lesson from Valve, which supposedly has no org chart: a company with no hierarchy has politics instead. I'm certain other companies that have tried that model have the same problem.

readthenotes1 4y ago
well, i think you mean there are always politics
- djmips 4y ago
  Would you rather have obvious politics or invisible politics.
  - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    You'll always have both.
    - djmips 4y ago
      I'd prefer not to have a shadow government which is I feel is more likely at a company with no hierarchy.
danabrams 4y ago
All companies have politics. What you’re describing is the difference between the messy politics of having to convince others vs the easy politics of telling everyone what to do. But dictatorships don’t have nearly as good a performance record as democracies, despite their “efficient” politics.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> By the end of my tenure at Stripe in 2021 this had done a total 180. I had managers who by design had no function in the R&D org at all – they didn’t do product work, they didn’t do operations or hold a pager, they didn’t help with incoming cross-team asks, they didn’t manage the JIRA board, and a lot of the time they didn’t even run our meetings (deferring that to ICs); and the prevailing wisdom became that this was a good thing. I stumbled into a job like this recently. The startup hired an upper management team from some well-known tech companies. They had several people who claimed that “organization design” was their passion, wrote “thought leader” blogs or substacks, and presented themselves as experts in all things agile. I thought I was joining a lean startup team focused on efficient execution (as they pitched themselves) but they operated in the most bloated, inefficient, and bureaucratic manner I’ve ever seen. Roles and processes were so artificially segmented that I wasn’t allowed to use Jira without waiting for the next scheduled meeting so everyone could tell the project manager what buttons to click in Jira during long shared meetings. If you started to make any comments that sounded like they might be a product-related idea, they’d scold you for daring to think about anything other than code and demand that only product managers be allowed to talk about product things. Several managers seemed to do nothing other than police process among teams, dropping into your team’s meetings unannounced to observe and take notes about who was, and was not, following the extensive process documents they prepared for everyone. Their solution to every problem was always to hire more people. If a new requirement came up, they’d stop teams from working on it and try to find a way to spin the new requirement into more headcount. This created absurd situations where, for example, the design lead had convinced the company to hire a new designer for every new initiative while the designers for past projects sat mostly idle all day. It didn’t matter, though, because the only goal was to increase headcount. People were praised for the amount of hiring they did and the number of people they managed. This company was an extreme version of the dysfunction described in the article. I felt so relieved when I left and rejoined a company that didn’t create elaborate self-serving management structures as their primary goal. So many people at the dysfunctional company just thrived on shuffling from meeting to meeting every day, creating the appearance of doing a lot of work while actively interfering with everyone just trying to execute efficiently.

naijaboiler 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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dfee 4y ago

Everything is rolling along smoothly, and then, bam: > High caliber, experienced employees probably get just as much done at home at the office, or maybe more… “Probably” is the key word, here. It signals to me that the author is tired of writing at this point and throws in something with little conviction or defense. I care about this point, and am inclined in the opposite direction: I think less work is done in office by these people. Withholding any self reflection to qualify myself as “high caliber”, I can say I’m an experienced employee - and feel that my productivity dwindles in person due to distractions and thus an inability to “zone in”. That means that I’m putting in extra hours outside work to achieve the same level of pre-RTO productivity. I’ve heard the same from others. Together, we’ve expressed concerns about the sustainability of these efforts. For me, toss that sentence from this article and let’s dedicate time to that discussion, independently.

Plasmoid 4y ago
I am also vastly more productive at home than I am at an office. Especially the San Francisco lunchroom chic that plagues the city.
- lmeyerov 4y ago
  Here's an attempt at quantifying Junior staff need constant help, but senior staff need space that's hard to achieve at an office. Studies show people take 30m-1.5hr to dial in for deep work. So, imagine a "light" office day: - 8a drive, coffee, etc - 9a sit down - 10a standup mtg - 11:50a team lunch roundup - 2p random meeting - 5p drive home At best, that leaves 3 hours of deep work: 11a-12, 3p-5p. Heaven forbid someone swings by your desk during that period! WFH gets the 2 commute hours back, gives scheduling control to bookend breakfast & lunch with whatever distracting meetings, an async standup removes the sync one's disruptions, and a lot of the desk traffic is gone. So, WFH done right, ~doubles the amount of deep work by the more effective staff
  - forgotusername6 4y ago
    WFH gives me all those hours back. Because no matter which meeting I'm in, I'm working on something else.

darth_avocado 4y ago

Middle management bloat is real. At one point there were 16 layers of management between me and the ceo when I was at a staff engineer. However the other extreme (like in places like Twitter, since the author mentioned it), you have 20 people reporting to a single manager. That is not a great place to work in. The managers are just stretched thin and the ICs are left to deal with the chaos. This becomes really hard for newer or junior engineers.

geokon 4y ago
out of curiosity, what issues did you see? 20 to one seems kinda low in my experience. At my last deskjob it about 30-50 to 1 and it felt like a good balance. My team and I (~5 people) met with the manager once a week for a couple of hours. Id estimate they had 2-3 meetings a day with other teams. Project direction and blockers were dicussed and adjusted. It felt optimal, enough to get guidance, but they were too busy to micromanage and get in the way. Non-high-level nitty gritty day to day issues were just resolved within the team throughout the week
- flashgordon 4y ago
  How is a team that is meeting their manager consisting only of 5 people if the manager has 30-50 people reporting into them? I wasn't sure if it was a typo or where you actually advocating for a manager to have 30-50 direct reports?
  - manmal 4y ago
    5 people in one meeting, done 2-3 times per day, for 4 days per week => 40-60 people
  - geokon 4y ago
    Yes. The manager managed 6+ teams. They had decades of industry experience and were very good at.. Management? dealing with project scope, knowing what clients would find useful, when to change direction etc. Managing a team is realistically not a full time job. He did not write any code or independently make technical decisions nor act as a mentor or senior dev or anything like that. He used to write code, so could follow technical discussions but he wasnt some topdog 10xer. He just managed and he was good at it. Since he was involved in many concurrent projects he also knew the organization and talent very well

paxys 4y ago

The management part rings so true. 15 years ago every manager I had would be closely involved in system architecture, reviewing specs, setting engineering standards for the team, approving code and lots more. Today all of this is delegated down to ICs and even team leads and L1 managers do...meetings and other important stuff. Sooner rather than later a large chunk of line managers and middle managers industry-wide are going to face a "what would you say you do here?" moment, and it already seems to have started at Meta.

KerrAvon 4y ago

TFA sez: But as we see, companies like Meta have been making an effort to quantify the effect of remote work on productivity, and concluded not only that there is some, but that it’s significant enough to warrant encouraging an unpopular return. [End TFA.] But they have failed to do this. When they actually provide such data (a rarity), it’s cherry-picked to justify getting asses back in seats for egocentric reasons. They just want to feel the busyness of the business when they walk in the door. It makes the executives feel like they’re in charge of something. No, the future is simple: eventually, you will be glad to hire competent people no matter where they want to work. COVID and the generally suppressed immune systems that it’s leaving behind will continue to thin the employee pool. The fascists will shut down H1-B and close the borders. You’ll hire us WFH, or hybrid, or full time in-office, by employee choice, and you’ll like it. Because otherwise you won’t have anyone to hire at all.

mjr00 4y ago
This is good fanfiction, but doesn't really reflect reality. Employees have mostly gone along with RTO/hybrid strategies and there hasn't been a mass exodus where it's happened, especially in this job market. Most people are probably assuming RTO is a matter of when, not if, for most companies anyhow. And remember that 40,000+ tech workers have been laid off in the past 6 months, and the specter of ChatGPT is lurking over the future of knowledge work for many. There are certainly "single issue workers" who will quit over non-remote, and more power to them, but it seems silly to think that Google, Meta, or Amazon would have trouble hiring workers with a 3-day-a-week office policy, especially at their top-of-market salaries.
- mejutoco 4y ago
  IBM is still getting by well, but it is not what it used to be. Companies can avoid critical thinking and end up the same, slowly but surely.

elguyosupremo 4y ago

This piece goes from talking about meta layoffs to an indictment of remote work surprisingly quick. I love remote work, because I grew up in a small city with no companies operating in my industry and when covid hit I was able to go full remote, move back home, and be around my friends and family while contributing to my company and to my local economy. The biggest thing that has helped my dev team thrive and be able to onboard new members is mob programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_programming). We have our own take on exactly how we do it, but the gist is that all our software engineers are in a video conference with each other as much as possible and focus on a single task. We're starting to add new members in timezones that are 5+ hours offset from the rest of the team and that integration is proving to be hard. If anyone has advice on building TZ-distributed teams I would love to hear advice!

vineyardmike 4y ago
> If anyone has advice on building TZ-distributed teams I would love to hear advice! You won't love to hear it, because the general way to handle large TZ offsets it to make work async, and it sounds like "mob programing" as you do it is quite sync. What I've seen work is strong document culture - write docs, leave comments, etc. Have clear expectations on deliverables from the start ("this doc will design service X, impl can start when 3/3 senior engineers approve design by leaving an "I approve" comment). Everyone does their thing, and you don't need to be talking to someone to do it.
0xB31B1B 4y ago
The problem w mob programming is that measured purely on a man-hour cost it sounds extremely stupid and expensive for a company. It has always sounded to me like a hare brained idea that a dev shop came up with to sell more man hours per feature delivered.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Depends - I have seen enough throw a mythical manmonth worth of developers at embarrassingly unparallelizable work and watch the tech debt pile up like it’s a 2007 mortgage bubble. And that code then trips people up day after day as more features are added.

djha-skin 4y ago

His poignant take on weekly remote work is being wrestled to the ground stick me the most: > To me, although I’d certainly concede that WFH pares down meeting culture and certainly has benefits in logistics, it’s always been fairly obvious that in-person collaboration is more effective, produces a much stronger culture, and I suspect is important especially to larger orgs because it helps to even out performance. High caliber, experienced employees probably get just as much done at home at the office, or maybe more, but junior employees with less direction struggle more, and WFH provides the ultimate cover for less motivated people (which in a larger company will always be a percentage of the total) that might otherwise be held more accountable in-person. It's not just about the heavy hitters, it's about the team as a whole. In person work, though a logistical headache and social annoyance, drives team cohesion.

bink 4y ago
I'd argue that that doesn't have to be the case. The companies that are failing their junior employees and new hires are doing so not because they are remote/WFH, but because those companies did not invest the energy and resources necessary to be good at remote/WFH. There are plenty of companies that focus on remote work and have no issues with onboarding or failing performance.
- RestlessMind 4y ago
  > There are plenty of companies that focus on remote work and have no issues with onboarding or failing performance. Can you please name a few of those? Mine has gone all in and sincerely trying to make it work. And it still sucks. So curious to know some successful examples.
  - doktorhladnjak 4y ago
    A couple of well-known ones are Automattic (WordPress.com) and Gitlab. Gitlab even has its employee handbook publicly available https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/

starkparker 4y ago

> it’s always been fairly obvious that in-person collaboration is more effective, produces a much stronger culture Can someone who agrees explain how these points are obvious, to me, a person who's worked part- or full-time remotely for more than 10 years and has no concept of either of these things?

rationalfaith 4y ago

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fnordpiglet 4y ago

In office culture will die once the emotions abate and the CFO presents to the board a .02 EPS boost by closing all offices. Given the boards fiduciary duty it won’t even be a debate. The “culture” hand wave is ludicrous - a for profit public company isn’t about building culture, it’s about increasing earnings per share. The whole “we need to be in office for the kids” strikes me as absurd as well - we’ve got a 16 year queue of kids that went to school online for two years and grow up with FaceTime, zoom, slack, discord, and all the tools to get it done as common in their life as the pay phone was in ours. On the middle management purge, I am glad to see it. I went into management at the time that was the only way to increase your leverage as an engineer. Over time it’s become a simpering pile of drivel and I am actively looking to switch back to IC roles. I’m sick to death of the professional manager culture in tech these days - it’s literally filled with people that just don’t like computers that much - likely got into it because their parents thought it was a good career and they realized after a few years they weren’t into it and switched to management. It’s been steered towards managers holding the nominal power but none of the ability to understand their decisions, so they a) don’t make them, b) when cornered make bad decisions. It’s sickening and I literally can’t stand my career as it stands. I’m not even allowed to commit code any more, and even if I were, I’m too busy going to bs offsites to talk about decisioning shift left strategies and how to make inhuman hotel seating open floor plan offices fun enough that people want ti come into their chicken coops to be milked.

ElfinTrousers 4y ago
I'm pretty sure that "culture" means "we, the management, like having people around who won't disagree with us to our faces".

Karrot_Kream 4y ago

> To me, although I’d certainly concede that WFH pares down meeting culture I feel the opposite though I'm an n=1 and don't have any data beyond myself. My company went full WFH during the pandemic and committed to it. Ever since we've become much more meeting heavy (I also have pretty senior IC title sadly.) Why? Along with going WFH we began hiring from other timezones in earnest. Low cost of living areas are cheaper to hire from. Previously we were really careful about hiring teams in a given timezone together, everyone on the team used to be within +- 1 hour of each other. Now lunch times, day start, and day end times weren't in sync anymore. Before standup was at 1100, now meetings started appearing at 1000, 0900, eventually 0800. After all 0800 in UTC-8 was actually 1100 in UTC-5. My 1200 lunch is overwritten all the time by folks in UTC-6 for whom it's actually 1400. Before you'd see people run to the bathroom or express annoyance finding meeting rooms, but now going from meeting to meeting is just a click of a button. What used to be a hallway conversation or an extra 10 minutes of hanging outside a conference room to hash out a few details becomes another 30 min time slot they book on my calendar along with everyone else.

realworldperson 4y ago
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ilikerashers 4y ago
A side effect too is it becomes much harder to manage focus. 30 mins at 1, 2, and 3 turn 1hr 30 of meetings into at least 3 hours wasted on conference calls. I've taken to hiding my calendar and not turning up if someone does some inefficient meeting booking.
- adjkant 4y ago
  Slogan an old company of mine tried to socialize while trying to wrangle overbooked meeting issues: "No agenda, no attenda"
krisoft 4y ago
> My 1200 lunch is overwritten all the time by folks in UTC-6 for whom it's actually 1400. Book out your lunch break in your calendar. If anyone manages to put in a conflicting event just simply don’t appear for it (or bow out early, or arrive late if the overlap is only partial) If anyone is asking tell them directly that this is your lunch break. It is up to you to setup healthy boundaries and maintain them.

raverbashing 4y ago

> although I’d certainly concede that WFH pares down meeting culture and certainly has benefits in logistics, it’s always been fairly obvious that in-person collaboration is more effective, produces a much stronger culture When I read this, I translate it to: "We don't know how to collaborate remotely efficiently, so we don't try anything different and say 'office work is better' " Yes there's a value to meeting in-person. But don't say the process doesn't work when you don't know how to use the available tools to collaborate

RomanPushkin 4y ago

The most important point is missing. The reason for Meta layoffs is that metaverse is not getting enough traction. They wasted billions and they blame engineers for WFH? It's nonsense. Moreover, with multiple rounds of layoffs nobody's gonna join Meta. Why joining? Getting 500k "salary" with a risk of being laid off in the next 6 months and spending the next 6 months looking for a job? It's not 500k, folks. It's a fake 500k carrot for naive bunnies. I had offer from Meta, and I am so happy that I didn't go there. The company is just unstable, going downwards spiral. They have to pay me a really good sign up bonus with a good vesting schedule so I consider them, maybe, one day.

clintonb 4y ago
Okay…but you can feed a lot of bunnies with the $250K carrot.
93po 4y ago
> The company is just unstable Minimum net income of $10 billion a year for the past 7 years is now apparently unstable
- rchaud 4y ago
  $10 billion annually sounds pretty good until you consider that they've spent close to $40b on a Second Life clone. Blackberry profits were looking good in 2009 as well, it wasn't until 2012 that the wheels came off.
  - 93po 4y ago
    IBM has spent billions on Watson with very little return. I don't think anyone is calling IBM unstable.
    - sizzle 4y ago
      Watson was a let down, it was supposed to be what Chat-GPT accomplished today.

colmvp 4y ago

> > Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively. I don't doubt that people earlier in their career work better with more senior people at arms length to help them. Hell, I experienced a bit of that my first few months at a new job where I struggled to understand processes. But after a period of time, I got it. Sure it took longer, but I got there. Now, I get less work done in the office because people spend time socializing, and more importantly, the workstation is not customized to my liking because of this whole satellite desk situation. I'll say this: If these companies tanked during the height of Covid, they'd blame it on WFH. Of course, the financial performance for these companies was quite good, so now that there's a bit of correction, they search for reasons to bring employees back to the office.

8note 4y ago
> I'll say this: If these companies tanked during the height of Covid, they'd blame it on WFH. Of course, the financial performance for these companies was quite good, so now that there's a bit of correction, they search for reasons to bring employees back to the office. What's entertaining is that the various faang companies performance is likely unrelated to employee performance, and Elon musk's twitter will show a path forward for near-term tech employment
- IntelMiner 4y ago
  I don't think anyone could replicate the utter disaster that Elon is every single day
dclowd9901 4y ago
A pessimistic person might say that companies don’t trust their employees to work unless they have absolute control over their employees and how they work. It’s a power play. Companies need to know they’re in charge.

AHOHA 4y ago

I just never understood how come “tech” companies never used the same concept used within their products, async communications!! Sync communication is a blocking one, you need to block all involved parties to discuss X that most of the times is useless, just use async ones, I email/text/or even video record when I have the time, and you respond when you do, not really that hard!

RestlessMind 4y ago
Because a lot of work needs sync and is inefficient to do in an async manner. Even for software engineers, let alone other people centric roles. Most obvious example would be designing nuances of a complex system. That discussion is needed at least once every 4-6 weeks and I wish we are around a whiteboard at that time.
- mejutoco 4y ago
  Async work is more difficult, but not more inefficient. It is the difference between putting a lot of work into an email that perfectly explains something, vs shooting a quick email and offload the effort to the recipient. In this case communication ability is crucial, since it requires written documents. Many people (managers and developers) lack the discipline, patience, and incentives to adopt this style of work.
  - RestlessMind 4y ago
    > Many people (managers and developers) lack the discipline, patience, and incentives to adopt this style of work. Correct. So what do we do then? Changing people is hard. And communication styles are ingrained after a certain age. Also, even the best communicators are finding it hard to do some tasks async, like designing a complex system.
    - mejutoco 4y ago
      > like designing a complex system If kernel devs can do it so can 90% of companies, if there is a will. This seems to me like a culture matter that needs to come from the top, though.

deleted 4y ago

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havkom 4y ago

My experience as a manager before and after WFH is that WFH: 1) makes it actually clearer what is delivered and by whom 2) requires more from the manager to make sure the right stake holders are communicating efficiently and employees are satisfied - doable but more work load for managers and requires more experience from them I think #2 is that companies are actually struggling with. It is not about the workers productivity (which generally increases by WFH), it is about the managers comfort, skills and experience.

emodendroket 4y ago

I don't know that three days are necessary but it's hard to deny that sometimes an in-person conversation just gets things resolved much faster. Though considering how many teams are now geographically distributed I find the argument less compelling.

einhverfr 4y ago

I think the problem of engineering management is that componentization is a hard problem. One needs to recognize that Conway's Law is an inevitability, but it can be a positive as well as a negative thing. If you design your organization around needs for components, then you end up with limited contracts. Even the organizations that I have worked for that have been better at this than others have still struggled. Perhaps there is room to just point out that high-level architects need to be involved in people and organization decisions. In the end, flatter organizations are better, but structure of both organizations and software are hard problems and things that we struggle with throughout our careers on either track. I have usually fought to have ICs report at every level so that part makes sense. But the question becomes what you replace middle management with? The answer shouldn't be "chaos."

UberFly 4y ago

Regarding the comments in the author's post about companies requiring more and more that employees work at least 3 days in-office - I think it really boils down to the fact that most people work harder when there's someone looking over their shoulder and expectations are literally staring you in the face. It was like that in 1000 BCE and it's like that in 2023.

zmmmmm 4y ago

> in-person collaboration is more effective, produces a much stronger culture I believe the second part but not the first. The most productive collaborations I've had by far have been virtual. People rapid fire exchanging ideas, testing things out on slack, quickly sharing screens to solve a problem and then jumping out again to focus on the next bit, etc. When it works well it's exhilirating. Everyone will have encountered situations when it worked badly. But nothing is as unproductive 12 people spending hours in a room where it inevitably gets dominated by 1 or 2 extroverts and the rest sit back passively. Doing it well either way is hard.

supernova87a 4y ago

I think many big tech companies are in a "we don't know what our next big goal is" kind of phase. And this would be ok for a small company. But when you have tens of thousands of people who now need new clear marching orders, this is a very dangerous thing. And doubly so if you keep on changing those people's goals because you think you need to launch something big and new that requires thousands of people to build it (but you don't know exactly how it's going to be built). Why is it dangerous (and I mean org-productivity-wise)? Because everyone has a natural need to feel useful and that they're productive and deserving of their pay. So when clear instructions are lacking about what we're supposed to do, we make up things to work on. We hire people who say they can help us figure out what to work on. We create managers to manage people who seem to not know what they're working on, so that some direction can seem like it's clear. Because you can't have 10 people not knowing what they're working on, without a manager to manage their not knowing what they're working on. We schedule meetings to find out what other people are working on, and how we should get involved to be useful, distracting the few who are actually being productive. So you find, after a few years, that you've accumulated a massive apparatus of people who have created a behomth of their own, simply from the desire to believe they're working on something useful. Sometimes they're very convincing, looking like they're working on something useful. And unpleasant as it is (and surprising, as Elon Musk showed), many of them could stand to be fired without much detriment to the original purpose of the company. Figure out what you want to build before you hire tens of thousands of people to do it. (and whether it will work). Or, at least as a caution, when your goal changes but you already have tens of thousands of people, be prepared to act unless you want to find yourself unwittingly in this position.

c54 4y ago

> The overwhelming opinion amongst developer types is that remote is better in every way It doesn’t check out to me that this is an overwhelming opinion. People definitely like remote and hybrid work but the tradeoffs vs being in person at least some of the time are well known to the point of being obvious. Partially-remote teams inherently have higher communication bandwidth between the in-office cadre versus the remote teammates, and all-remote teams specifically plan for team retreats and hangouts to build camaraderie, emotional connection, and understanding. The Meta studies are one of those “you have to find numbers for the thing that is obviously true” situations. It’d be really surprising to me to hear any kind of experienced developer contest this, even if their personal preference is to knowingly make that trade in favor of the flexibility being remote gives. I’m curious if others agree or disagree here, given the author presented the exact opposite of my stance so frankly.

modfreq 4y ago
For what it's worth: I'm a 'developer type' who agrees with you.
tomduncalf 4y ago
I’ve got 15+ years experience and prefer being in the office. This is definitely somewhat because I live in an apartment in London so a) don’t have a great dedicated workspace (I do have a desk in the spare room but it’s not hugely exciting), b) my commute is actually quite quick and pleasant and c) companies usually will have a nice office here… I did try full remote with my last role and it just didn’t work out for me, I found it harder to be productive at home long term and I like the change of scene of the office, so actively was looking for somewhere with an office and people in there at least some of the time in a new role - though I also appreciate being somewhere flexible so I can work remote if I need to. I can see the arguments for both sides but to claim full remote is pure positive seems disingenuous to me, there are clear negatives. FWIW my team are at least 50% fully remote but I still prefer to be in the office even if a lot of my communications are via Zoom/Slack.

glass3 4y ago

>Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. If their performance data is reliable, why does Meta need several rounds of layoffs? The foundation of their analysis is weak.

throwawaysvb 4y ago

Work from home so good for me. I don't see any valid reason to throw it away. Companies can not force me do what's clearly not in my best interest as long as they need me more than i need them.

deleted 4y ago

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rmk 4y ago

I have seen the 'manager does nothing' situation, and it is a bad idea. The notion that line managers just do people management and literally nothing else is just egregiously harmful to the industry. This is how you end up with three layers of people who do nothing, as explained in the article. A line manager ought to be in the trenches, handling oncall, writing some code now and then, automating the bits of drudgery away, project managing, product managing, code reviewing and generally being an engineer. None of these things have to be done all the time and to the highest level of performance, but the idea that managers delegate all of these responsibilities leads to yes-men being promoted. If, as a manager, you do none of these activities, how on earth do you evaluate your people? You become the Vladimir Putin of your team, fed horseshit by people who have agendas or loudmouths while completely missing out on the concerns of people who do the actual work, with absolutely no idea of the actual performance and problems of the team.

hintymad 4y ago

> A manager writing code would have been an absolutely jaw-dropping ludicrous idea – their function was to engage in high-level planning, manage people by doing 1:1s and participating in the stack ranking process, and they had four layers above them doing the same thing. My theory is that the companies grew bigger, their management became risk-averse for good or for bad. The logical thing for the management to do, is to insert a layer under them to insulate themselves from unknown risks. As a result, managers were busy planning and aligning and challenging any bottom-up plans but in reality they were just actively avoiding personal risks.

muskmusk 4y ago
This is almost always the prevailing idea. "Management are doing this on purpose". Dont think that is the case. Its more like we hired a somewhat poor manager, that manager hired yet more poor managers who in turn hired even more poor managers. All of these poor managers finds ways to make themselves appear useful using what they know how to do: endlessly discuss things. The above is a caricature, but I think it has more than one grain of truth to it.

TurkishPoptart 4y ago

How come layoffs are typically only of FTEs and not contractors? Is it because FTEs and contractors are different types of costs like "personnel" as opposed to "project-based resources"?

ElfinTrousers 4y ago
I've heard from HR people that, as a rule of thumb, an FTE costs the company 150% of their salary, e.g. if a company pays an FTE $150k in salary a year, they expect to also spend about $75k on that FTE's benefits (health insurance, retirement, etc.) and administrative overhead.

muskmusk 4y ago

I don't think the problem is one type of management vs another type of management. But about a completely disproportional application of one type of management. Heavy coding and no management have a place in the world. But no coding and heavy management also has a place in the world. Coding "heats up" the environment and management "cools it down". Sometimes you need heat, sometimes you need to temper the heat. Companies start out with all coding and no management because they need to just produce. Then when they have something valuable, they must reign in the cowboy culture with management. Unfortunately, this often ends up overdone and there are very few leaders who have the guts to prune the overmanaged companies. Let's see how it turns out for the Zuck.

swiftcoder 4y ago

> WFH provides the ultimate cover for less motivated people (which in a larger company will always be a percentage of the total) that might otherwise be held more accountable in-person. Bullshit. Everyone who worked in-office knows folks who spend half their day in pointless meetings, and the other half chatting by the coffee machine. Obscuring lack of productivity in an office setting is not particularly hard - it's a lot easier to "look busy" in person

sideshowb 4y ago
Agreed. I have been mostly remote since 2015 and if anything I feel more pressure to achieve things as I can't justify my existence merely by being there.
surgical_fire 4y ago
TBF, it was always easier to look busy in an office, with everyone around you. Plenty of ways to procrastinate work with "work". When you work remote the only thing you have to show is your output.

bvrmn 4y ago

> When I came to the valley in 2012, I had a manager who wrote as much code and shipped as much as I did, and prevailing wisdom was that this was a good thing. My team lost manager almost 8 month ago. And I took additional management role alongside with a TL role by necessity. Burned out completely by now. It's so much more work and information you must operate I don't understand who can ever say managers aren't needed. It's ridiculous.

roomey 4y ago

The point about remote workers been less efficient.... I really do hope they accounted that they were probably not shown the ways to game the "efficiency" system.. most people won't tell a new worker who they never met how to do something like game the efficiency metric. Although and manager worth their salt would know to pass this info along. And anyway, in a "creative" area, like writing code, inventing new stuff, since when is "efficiency" a good thing, all that does is make the same shot, just more of it. "Year of efficiency" is year of cost cutting. The blog post has an interesting take on it tho.

wg0 4y ago
Efficiency is meaningful in manufacturing where you exactly know what goes into a shoe, how many steps, processes and how much energy and material goes into each. You're making the same thing over and over. Then there, it's justified to say that 100 shoes per minute is better than 96 shoes per minute and additional 4 shoes can be considered as additional revenue or bringing average cost down etc. In software, the same thing with the same software stack with the same code base is not happening. If it's happening, either the activity is meaningless or can be a step in the build pipeline as requires no thought. Efficiency can be measured either on number of bux fixes, features added or lines of code. Great. Lines of code are meaningless they even vary by software stack, language, framewok, domain, Feature scope or bug's severity. Bug fixes have exactly the same problem. Could be two weeks to find out that the issue isn't even in the code but in an external that had an incorrect value. Features? Don't know. How much against the existing features the new features goes? The more that slope is, more necessary refactoring would be required.

danjac 4y ago

Meta's problems are due to a lack of direction and very poor decision making from the very top. The Metaverse was a huge expensive failure, their core demographics are old people and their Instagram demographic is being eaten up by TikTok. Zuckerberg is not an "ideas" guy. He had that one great idea back in the early 2000s (whether you believe it was his idea or not, he did execute on it) and everything since then has been acquisitions. Sure maybe they can wring out more "productivity" by return to office or firing their middle managers or whatever but so what? It doesn't matter how fast you can run if you are running in the wrong direction.

ElfinTrousers 4y ago
If the "one great idea" you refer to is a social network, Friendster and Myspace beat Zuckerberg to it by years.
- danjac 4y ago
  Sure, the concept of a social network wasn't novel, but Zuckerberg had some insights that led to FB becoming the dominant network within a few years - for example incubating inside US colleges to gain traction among younger demographics through word of mouth, building an ecosystem around games and apps, creating a social graph based on real identities and relationships that yielded lucrative marketing data, and so on.

Dave3of5 4y ago

Reading through the OP and comments it seems like a lot of people have never actually experienced a decent manager. If the only manager(s) you've ever had have only caused problems and micromanaged you with no help whatsoever then yes I guess you want to remove all management layers completely. The downside to removing all management layers is: * You'll have to interact with the directors of a company directly. I have experience with this and from this I can tell you that you'll find they don't share the viewpoints of most devs. They will expect things done yesterday and all possible corners to be cut. They don't care about Tech debt. Your estimates will always be too high and they will demand they be cut down to the unreasonable. They leave 0 time for testing as far as they know the dev work is done once the dev says so. They don't care about the complexity of implementation, they only see complexity in what they are asking you. SO if They ask "build me the next facebook" that is quite a simple statement but the implementation is very complex they see that because the statement is simple so should be the implementation * Good luck ever getting a pay raise or a promotion. A decent manager will track you through those things as you work for a company and push for them on your behalf. A director only sees development as a cost to be reduced * Much easier to directly blame developers when things go wrong. You bet your ass that if prod goes down there will be hell to pay. Fire the dev that brought it down. A good manager shields the team from this as they spread the blame of many departments making it hard to fire anyone * You won't get any time for personal development. Kiss all those pluralsight courses goodbye that costs money. A yearly conference ? who's paying for that. Remember that the directors of a company will see money being spent as their own money because every dollar spent reduces EBITDA which will reduce their mega bonus * Any problems you have with other devs are now yours to fix. Remember HR aren't their to help you they are there to help the company * Projects will be dumped on you that are way outside your field of expertise. Directors often lump all devs into the same bucket. So for example if there is a new project that involves AI and no-one on the teams got any real experience then tough luck get her done * You'll have to deal with strange requests. For example given chatgpt has been in the news a lot you'll suddenly be told to add chatgpt to the product regardless if it makes any sense. Normally a good manager would bat these types of things off to protect the dev team * Time management is your problem. You'll be given an end date and told everything has to be done for that date Note I get that having too many managers is bad but you ideally want small IC to manager ratio so that you are getting the benefit.

nunez 4y ago