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Abstractly, it seems quite reasonable — whatever gets measured gets optimized, and for years Big Tech has measured headcount as a metric of manager skill. Elimi

Abstractly, 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.
  - kd5bjo 3y ago
    > Why would you need to decouple that to evaluate managers? If a manager’s performance evaluation is based primarily on their reports’ evaluations, then there’s a conflict of interest: The manager is incentivized to inflate their reports’ evaluations because doing so directly improves their own evaluation.
    - takenpilot 3y ago
      Perfect. Then maybe the managers would be working with their teams instead of just setting up goalposts.
    - lrem 3y ago
      You're approaching your stated problem wrong. See: > 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). Now, you're arguing that `sum(evaluate(impact) for each IC)` is absurdly bad. Which it is, because you're compounding errors in individual evaluations. These are hard to do, because you're trying to distribute team's achievements between contributions from particular people. I say that `evaluate(sum(impact for each IC))` is easy and robust. In fact simpler than an evaluation for a single IC, because you don't have to distribute anything and a lot of things that are external distractions for ICs fall into responsibility of managers.
      - rat9988 3y ago
        Using functions in text just makes it hard to read.
        dopidopHN 3y ago
        And shows a poor command of English.
        konschubert 3y ago
        It was the only thing that made me understand his point.
shuckles 3y ago
One thing I've learned in my career: no policies apply to anyone the company views as a valuable asset.
- FreshStart 3y ago
  This. If you write the server code alone and chill in the lounge in the afternoon alone, the hierarchy spiders leave you alone after one public tear down..
- blitzar 3y ago
  One thing I've learned in my career: eventually they will hire a new shiny management who has no idea who or what is a valuable asset and in their infinite wisdom fire all the most valuable assets.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    The person who was viewed as a most valuable asset, and got exceptions is of course still safe then!
  - blackoil 3y ago
    Another learning: Understand and calculate probability*impact and invest accordingly.
  - shuckles 3y ago
    That is not relevant to this conversation which is about retaining managers the company views as talented in light of a no promotions policy. It’s almost guaranteed Meta will give managers they think are important to retain secret comp increases (bonuses, RSUs out of band) to make up for the lack of an on-paper promotion.
dagmx 3y ago
Really depends on the tech company too. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and NVIDIA have been huge on personnel growth. Apple has quite famously been very stingy in growth that way. On the flip side it meant they had fewer layoffs, if any, when everyone else was recalibrating with mass layoffs.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  > Apple has quite famously been very stingy in growth that way. It's not that Apple was shrewder than others - it's just that since it is primarily a hardware business, Apples "Covid boom" was far smaller than the rest (online services). Meta, Amazon and Microsoft had massive growth due everyone being at home all the time (Nvidia took advantage of from supply-chain restrictions to increase margins, and non-covid-related crypto boom)
tippytippytango 3y ago
Using headcount seems like the wrong thing to measure. But, it seems like maybe there’s a method to the madness? If you reward growing the pie then you avoid nastier politics like Wall Street firms might have. It’s a luxury that big tech has been able to afford. Now that they can’t afford this anymore I wonder if we see the relatively friendly tech cultures turn into a more brutal survival of the fittest. Seems like the good times are really coming to an end.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  > relatively friendly tech cultures turn into a more brutal survival of the fittest The problem is that often you have to collaborate a lot in these companies - you need to use services or libraries written by another team, for example. "Fittest" really makes no sense, because almost no one has a PnL sheet broken out by team like wall street. That said, not all companies (Apple, Amazon) had super friendly cultures. If you maintain a core service at amazon, for example, you can expect to constantly have every dependents' roadmap shoved at you all year as it is.
matwood 3y ago
> Big Tech has measured headcount as a metric of manager skill This is pretty much any company over a certain size.
ryandrake 3y ago
> 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. This is how I read the article. This move is basically: the people already at the top removing the ladder behind them so fewer people can climb it. I wonder if the new criteria will be re-applied to those senior execs who already got through before the door closed.
jofiawjf 3y ago
> 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. It's too hard to actually measure performance, so most managers are just horribly incompetent parasites

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.
- kd5bjo 3y ago
  > Why would you need to decouple that to evaluate managers? If a manager’s performance evaluation is based primarily on their reports’ evaluations, then there’s a conflict of interest: The manager is incentivized to inflate their reports’ evaluations because doing so directly improves their own evaluation.
  - takenpilot 3y ago
    Perfect. Then maybe the managers would be working with their teams instead of just setting up goalposts.
  - lrem 3y ago
    You're approaching your stated problem wrong. See: > 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). Now, you're arguing that `sum(evaluate(impact) for each IC)` is absurdly bad. Which it is, because you're compounding errors in individual evaluations. These are hard to do, because you're trying to distribute team's achievements between contributions from particular people. I say that `evaluate(sum(impact for each IC))` is easy and robust. In fact simpler than an evaluation for a single IC, because you don't have to distribute anything and a lot of things that are external distractions for ICs fall into responsibility of managers.
    - rat9988 3y ago
      Using functions in text just makes it hard to read.
      - dopidopHN 3y ago
        And shows a poor command of English.
      - konschubert 3y ago
        It was the only thing that made me understand his point.

shuckles 3y ago

One thing I've learned in my career: no policies apply to anyone the company views as a valuable asset.

FreshStart 3y ago
This. If you write the server code alone and chill in the lounge in the afternoon alone, the hierarchy spiders leave you alone after one public tear down..
blitzar 3y ago
One thing I've learned in my career: eventually they will hire a new shiny management who has no idea who or what is a valuable asset and in their infinite wisdom fire all the most valuable assets.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  The person who was viewed as a most valuable asset, and got exceptions is of course still safe then!
- blackoil 3y ago
  Another learning: Understand and calculate probability*impact and invest accordingly.
- shuckles 3y ago
  That is not relevant to this conversation which is about retaining managers the company views as talented in light of a no promotions policy. It’s almost guaranteed Meta will give managers they think are important to retain secret comp increases (bonuses, RSUs out of band) to make up for the lack of an on-paper promotion.

dagmx 3y ago

Really depends on the tech company too. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and NVIDIA have been huge on personnel growth. Apple has quite famously been very stingy in growth that way. On the flip side it meant they had fewer layoffs, if any, when everyone else was recalibrating with mass layoffs.

sangnoir 3y ago
> Apple has quite famously been very stingy in growth that way. It's not that Apple was shrewder than others - it's just that since it is primarily a hardware business, Apples "Covid boom" was far smaller than the rest (online services). Meta, Amazon and Microsoft had massive growth due everyone being at home all the time (Nvidia took advantage of from supply-chain restrictions to increase margins, and non-covid-related crypto boom)

tippytippytango 3y ago

Using headcount seems like the wrong thing to measure. But, it seems like maybe there’s a method to the madness? If you reward growing the pie then you avoid nastier politics like Wall Street firms might have. It’s a luxury that big tech has been able to afford. Now that they can’t afford this anymore I wonder if we see the relatively friendly tech cultures turn into a more brutal survival of the fittest. Seems like the good times are really coming to an end.

vineyardmike 3y ago
> relatively friendly tech cultures turn into a more brutal survival of the fittest The problem is that often you have to collaborate a lot in these companies - you need to use services or libraries written by another team, for example. "Fittest" really makes no sense, because almost no one has a PnL sheet broken out by team like wall street. That said, not all companies (Apple, Amazon) had super friendly cultures. If you maintain a core service at amazon, for example, you can expect to constantly have every dependents' roadmap shoved at you all year as it is.

matwood 3y ago

> Big Tech has measured headcount as a metric of manager skill This is pretty much any company over a certain size.

ryandrake 3y ago

> 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. This is how I read the article. This move is basically: the people already at the top removing the ladder behind them so fewer people can climb it. I wonder if the new criteria will be re-applied to those senior execs who already got through before the door closed.

jofiawjf 3y ago

> 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. It's too hard to actually measure performance, so most managers are just horribly incompetent parasites