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Meta Tells Managers Promotions Will Be Few and Far Between
- romusha 3y ago[dead]
- jraby3 3y agohttps://archive.is/xTpHY https://archive.is/xTpHY
- hcnews 3y agoThis has to also apply to PMs/ICs as well at some level right? You can just have one core role in your organization have no personal growth for 2-3 years and other core roles keep progressing. Most of the time you have a cross functional team for a lot of launches and only have few members get promoted for them seems like a non-starter.
- henry2023 3y agoI think it's all about incentives. If you want fewer managers in your organization you disincentivize the manager position. Even more, if you're a manager and see all of the PMs/ICs get promoted.
- reverius42 3y agoIf you want fewer managers in your organization (as a fraction of total employees), have each manager manage more direct reports. Incentives on their own don't create or reduce headcount, it has to be policy.
- Hasz 3y agoShow me the incentives, and I’ll show you the results. Policy is set by the same people you want to govern. The incentive from the top needs to be on ICs or on manager efficiency if you want less managers.
- Hermitian909 3y agoNah, different supply and demand for the two groups. After the layoffs a glut of senior management, with more directors than you can shake a stick at. Many have had to take jobs as line managers. Director is a pretty similar level to a Senior Staff engineer, the latter is still in relatively short supply.
- jnwatson 3y ago“To move from a manager title to a director role, a person had to have hired managers under them from outside the company. To move up the director ranks, a person needed to have managed their own team of directors.” That is absolutely crazy town. That’s like multi-level marketing, where your primary value is recruiting folks (that recruit folks).
- crimsonpowder 3y agoIt works well while there's good growth and cheap debt. But when the revenue to support this type of headcount inflation isn't there, suddenly the entire promotion treadmill seizes up.
- stephc_int13 3y agoYes, and this is unfortunately how middle-management works, even in small to mid size companies. I’ve also seen this effect with video games producers.
- harles 3y agoYes, it’s unfair but I think it’s also necessary. Every big tech company I’m aware of has lagging rather than leading promotions. You need to already be doing the job at the next level and have demonstrated it through your work. For directors, that includes being able to build an org from scratch. Can’t demonstrate it? No promo, no exceptions. The flip side of this is that most companies really don’t need so many directors and senior managers. ICs have had to deal with slim pickings at senior level promos for a long time, and I’m honestly glad to see some parity coming - even though would’ve preferred more promos on the IC track rather than few on the EM. One final thing worth noting is that comp bands are extremely wide at these levels and have significant overlap. I’d be much happier in a world where good work is rewarded with better comp rather than pressure to take on a bigger role.
- randoglando 3y agoThis is a scam. It's a way to extract more value out of you than what they are paying you for (i.e. paying you for an E5 level, while making you do E6 work).
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y agoAbstractly, it seems quite reasonable — whatever gets measured gets optimized, and for years Big Tech has measured headcount as a metric of manager skill. Eliminating that metric directly tackles the problem of empire-building. On the other hand, it's already difficult to retain talent, and a single good manager can be transformational for a team. Between this and the RTO shenanigans — both of which seem to be widespread across the tech industry these days — it's tough to see why talented managers would stay, let alone put in hard work. Overall, it feels like an incomplete solution. If we as an industry are going to move away from headcount as a professional growth metric, we need to have some other, more direct way of measuring the business impact a manager delivers so we can reward that. Standing up and telling a roomful of high-leverage hires that their career trajectories are frozen for 2-3 years is probably not a winning strategy by itself. If I were a hungry startup founder, I'd read this as an invitation to ramp up recruiting.
- kd5bjo 3y ago> If we as an industry are going to move away from headcount as a professional growth metric, we need to have some other, more direct way of measuring the business impact a manager delivers so we can reward that. A manager’s job, fundamentally, is to ensure that their reports are delivering appropriate value to the company, so the most direct measure of a manager’s performance is the performance of the ICs that report to them (possibly indirectly). If you’re going actually to use this, however, you need a way to fairly evaluate the performance of ICs that doesn’t rely on input from their management chain which is itself a hard problem.
- lrem 3y ago> If you’re going actually to use this, however, you need a way to fairly evaluate the performance of ICs that doesn’t rely on input from their management chain which is itself a hard problem. Why would you need to decouple that to evaluate managers? TBF at manager level this can be a rather simple and robust “how did the org subtree rooted at this person fare at contributing to the stated business objectives?” Along team performance, this depends on staffing matching the expectations. Negotiating which are core responsibilities of a manager. Seems much easier than evaluating ICs.
- Simon_O_Rourke 3y agoNow promotions will be based on what aristocratic pedigree you claim, as well as how wealthy and well connected your family are at the court of Zuck.
- thepostman0 3y agoFeceboom is over it is a shit website and nobody cared about your friend count. Their bubble has burst (and rightly so after CA scandal). The rest of the industry will use fecebook's news as advice, sadly.
- spacecadet 3y agoI love this comment! its poetry in a long thread of hypocrites- I guess the most obvious one being hacker news itself with this subtle attempt at sensor.
- eclectic29 3y agoI'm really happy this is happening. Meta had strict rules for hiring sr. managers (M2) wherein you'd to have a minimum of 30 reports in your previous job to even get called for an interview. Based on feedback from many of my friends at Meta, managers did _only_ paper work and hardly added any value other than filling PSC (their name for performance cycle). Meta might be going back to its roots - more doers than managers. This is one of the best moves Meta has made as a company in the past several years.
- namdnay 3y agoThe amount of engineering manager hours spent on the "performance cycle" at Google and Meta is just insane. I honestly think it's a huge waste, they could get near-identical results with 10x less time spent on this whole bloated, process-heavy, over-"scientific" game . That would free up managers to work on the real problems, such as the complete disorganisation and inability to deliver cross-team projects
- kevinventullo 3y agoTo Google’s credit, they do seem to be trying to get performance process bloat under control in recent years.
- mrweasel 3y agoWhile this apparently wasn't how it previously worked at Meta, isn't promotions for managers always going to be few and far between in a functional business? Some number of managers are requires right above the senior engineering level, but from there each layer should have fewer and fewer people, leaving you with slimmer changes of promotion. In a stable organization you'll have fewer top level managers leaving each years, leaving even less room for promotion. For some roles it might be better to pull in external people, reducing the number even further. Having managers who's only goal is to be promoted doesn't seem healthy.
- jedberg 3y agoThe idea is that in an ever growing organization there is an ever growing need for more managers at every level. So internal promotions come when the company grows.
- rawanking 3y agoHiu
- a-dub 3y agobig organizations are dysfunctional as many lose sight of any real goals due to the pressure to jockey for position. film at 11.
- silisili 3y agoMaybe it's a good thing. The one thing I've learned in my 20 year IC career is that I'd chosen the wrong path, generally. Every company is different, but it felt wild watching people move fast up the rank from supe to mgr to director to vp of some useless thing, while us engineers move like molasses. And I don't mean this as sour grapes jealousy. I've literally had people come in, beg for help with their inflated title, then treat us like trash a year later. More engineers, less managers, please.
- jedberg 3y agoI've worked at a couple places that had the "dual track", where they claimed that engineers can get promoted just like managers. The problem is, to be a VP manager, you need to be a really good manager. To be a VP level IC, you need to be the best in the entire industry in your field. So sure, you can accelerate just like the managers, but in reality it's far harder on the IC track.
- eclectic29 3y agoYes, thank you! this needs to be said many more times. Everyone calls out parallel tracks but doesn't mention how much harder it is to move up in the IC track than in the mgr track. I wrote a similar response here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36697404#36700085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36697404#36700085
- mmmmmbop 3y agoIn my opinion, that is still fair. IC is a much more rewarding and enjoyable job for many, so it seems reasonable that there would be a lot more competition for the high-level IC positions. If you're willing to put up with the organizational bullshit and politics, there's usually nothing stopping you from becoming a manager at those tech companies. The "dual track" concept is already a significant improvement over "traditional" companies where the IC ladder usually stops short of the first level of management.
- dougmwne 3y ago
- villgax 3y agoPMs/middle management will find better roles at ethical companies that are actually building good stuff rather than maintaining a dead social networking platform now masquerading as an Ad joint
- francisofascii 3y ago> ethical companies that are actually building good stuff Now those are certainly "few and far between"
- phendrenad2 3y agoUnicorns grow so fast and wildly, the company structure is all out of wack, but everyone is afraid to touch it because it's a machine that prints money. Now that the money-printing machine has broken down anyway, it's time to fix the annoying pinging sound it makes in third gear.
- dahwolf 3y agoI think the money printing machine is fine. Stagnating a bit, but that's it. Rather this seems a time where companies check who is in fact not contributing in any way at all to the functioning of the money printing machine.
- 2-718-281-828 3y agoSeems like gold rush in the valley is over and techies are soon flocking to Europe for health insurance and a not-as-fucked-up medical infrastructure ...
- weberer 3y agoThe medical infrastructure in the USA is among the best in the world. It is just the insurance industry that's messed up. And tech workers mostly avoid that by having employer-subsidized insurance plans.
- treprinum 3y agoThe gold rush is super strong in AI.
- boredumb 3y agoI've heard the eggs are all double yolked as well
- NavinF 3y agoLol. How much do you wanna bet?
- cscurmudgeon 3y agoZero data to back this (techies are soon flocking to Europe). Leave it to folks to turn any random stuff into a pro-Europe moment, lol. Any techie worth their salt would know Europe is mostly not-fucked-up due to US security spending and that can change with a presidential election. In fact, if you have money or insurance, US medical infrastructure is the best. Even anti-US communists fly to the US on taxpayer money for medical reasons. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/cm-leaves-for-treatment-in-the-us/article65350503.ece https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/cm-leaves-for-...
- eclectic29 3y agoIt’s a bit unfortunate how the article says “Meta eliminated many manager roles, moved down many existing managers to individual contributor roles” as if moving from management to IC is a demotion. This attitude is killing our industry.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- darshings 3y agoYea at my company, we consider moving from senior eng to level 1 mgr a parallel move, and many senior engineers have tried management, decided it wasn’t right for them, and made arrangements to move back to IC. It has worked out really well for us. I made the move from IC to manager at this company, ended up liking management a lot more than I thought I would, and am staying in management for the foreseeable future. I probably never would have made the move if there wasn’t an escape hatch to go back to IC. Would be great to see more companies using a similar model.
- meindnoch 3y agoI don't really care about promotions. I care about my comp steadily increasing. In fact, I prefer getting a raise without being promoted.
- Xenoamorphous 3y agoI guess it varies from person to person. But in general, comp is a "secret", but a job title is very public. I'm a 20 year long career IC in some southern European country with salaries for that kind of worker are not that great. But I work for a London-based company and my salary is great even by London standards (but still low for US standards, or at least SF standards). To my contacts in LinkedIn I'm a failure, I'm sure. They all have fancy titles by now. It kind of bothers me even if I know I make more than most of them.
- gardenhedge 3y agoTitles mean nothing. On LinkedIn everyone is a director of some sort. It's all nonsense.
- refurb 3y agoMy former employer (not tech) was notorious for “under titling” roles compared to other companies. What they called a senior manager would be a Director in another company. I checked LinkedIn and they retitled everyone. Now Directors are Senior Executive Directors and so on. But otherwise the org chart was the same. Ridiculous.
- throwawaymeta01 3y agosame. m1 here, previously on track to m2, but I'm not bothered by this. With ae + stock appreciation I'm getting m2+ pay so can't really complain.
- SergeAx 3y agoHiring managers outside the company is a last resort measure. Company should nurture new leaders from the inside since day one.
- buffonsneedle 3y ago[flagged]
- dahwolf 3y agoAn excessive amount of promotions is really bad. They disrupt teams. They create an incentive to build things that you never have to look after. They turn away attention from your team and the product you're working on. They undervalue meaningful iterative work, process optimization, customer support. They stimulate competition instead of collaboration.
- archo 3y agohttps://archive.is/zAPc0 https://archive.is/zAPc0