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This is, and the article points it out, the direct result of an excess number of managers and the explosion of management after the pandemic. Silicon Valley wa

This is, and the article points it out, the direct result of an excess number of managers and the explosion of management after the pandemic. Silicon Valley was amazing because you could actually DO things and make an impact, but too much hiring added useless layers to the system. American management theory always tries to do this every tech cycle. That doesn’t work well with technical craft.

davidivadavid 3y ago
Hacker News really is like clockwork. Random "tech" industry problem? Gotta be "managers" or "designers." Engineers can do no wrong.
- stuff4ben 3y ago
  Engineers do the work to make the magic happen. Too much middle management adds fat and gets in the way of work getting done. I say this as a GenXer who has been on both sides and is currently an engineer again. I have no beef with designers.
- robertakarobin 3y ago
  They're not mutually exclusive. Plenty of managers have engineering backgrounds. What is generally mutually exclusive is managers and individual contributors. It may be that if individual contributors did all the decision-making then the outcome would be different; it may be that it would be exactly the same. We can't really know, for the same reason we can't know how society would be different if we elected "normal people" to Congress instead of "politicians."
- happytiger 3y ago
  Engineers do plenty wrong. But they typically don’t lead the effort, they implement the ideas and plans of designers and managers. So tradition in society is to put the burden of success or failure at the feet of those who do the planning. If you have someone buying the wrong seeds or not ordering fertilizer on time, it makes all the work on the farm a failure.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
From my experience that started long before the pandemic.
gargs 3y ago
I have to wonder how much of this middle management heavy organizational structure was introduced by cultures that place undue significance to 'becoming a manager' in computing success in profession.
- Zetobal 3y ago
  My team is full of it. People that needed to be catered with useless titles just to retain them. We have like 40 Head of XYZ for 10 Senior Devs, it's insanity. The thing is they don't even care about the money if they get a fancy title they would do it for the same money.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - jasonlotito 3y ago
    People are optimizing for what the businesses value. If you make these titles attractive, why wouldn't you expect people to optimize for them? It's not the people's fault; it's the company leadership. Couple that with companies that don't care about the employees, of course, titles will matter. Say what you want, but someone with only a history of Junior Engineer on their CV will get looked at differently when they have to find a new job.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > If you make these titles attractive, why wouldn't you expect people to optimize for them? There is a cultural component to it, and it travels. People coming from a corporate culture attach value to these titles in a way we traditionally did not in Silicon Valley. The interesting thing is seeing how they then breathe power into those words; I remember one senior-ish person who proceeded to attempt pulling rank on her peers on the back of the new title. In most cases, it didn't work. But in some cases, it did, including with people who were otherwise insensitive to titles. My broad takeaway is trading titles for money is a deal with the devil. Eventually, the thing you're giving away gains animation.
ot1138 3y ago
Not only an excess number of managers, but an excess number of poorly performing and poorly trained engineers. 2018-2022 was peak shit eating time for managers. I had to put up with no end of candidates who couldn't pass even the easiest technical exams (and we intentionally made them easy to weed out only the pretenders). Candidates would ghost interviews and after receiving an offer, would lean on it for a higher salary for anyone else. They wanted $250-300k with just five years experience. It was the frothiest and least professional recruiting environment I had seen in 35 years.
- eddtries 3y ago
  This, I swear I had people interviewing for senior roles who couldn't FizzBuzz. I don't give LeetCode challenges to people but I do give them the first Project Euler problem which is summing ints that are divisible by 3 or 5 with the incredibly complex edge case of only adding numbers divisible by both values, aka 15, once. There was someone who applied who was really struggling so I hinted at modulo, then they mentioned they didn't really like to use if/else branches to avoid complex code.
  - geodel 3y ago
    > with the incredibly complex edge case of only adding numbers divisible by both values, aka 15 Ah I love it, you are pushing them to reach peak human potential.
  - corimaith 3y ago
    As a new grad who's currrently in the job market I have to say my experience is contrary to this. Pretty much every OA I've received from companies including non-tech companies like big banks are all asking pretty complex stuff such as writing a LRU Cache, Dynamic Progamming, etc. Most of these questions I would have had no idea how to do in the time allocated if I hadn't studied their specific patterns beforehand. Expectations are sky high, and it's only getting worse as time passes on.
    - eddtries 3y ago
bionhoward 3y ago
I’m honestly shocked by the number of non technical people “managing” software projects. If you can’t run the system on your machine, then how the heck do you even know if it’s done or not? Honestly, TDD ought to be a fundamental everyday skill requirement for managers. If you want to clean house at your company to improve profitability and productivity, then just go around to every manager in charge of a software project and ask them to show you the code for the e2e test and run it. Anyone who can’t do that doesn’t belong in a leadership position. Manager implies leader implies knowing the fundamentals.
- op00to 3y ago
  I'm confused. I would call my QA manager and ask them to show me, if I was in the situation you state and needed that information. Why would someone who's managing a large project be specifically skilled in the specialized actions of a Quality Engineer?
  - wildrhythms 3y ago
    I believe the manager should at least know how to do the job of the people whose work they oversee... how else would you possibly check the quality of the work? Lol
    - davzie 3y ago
      Well, as a thought experiment; should the CEO of the company know how to do every function he or she hires for within their business?
      - bionhoward 3y ago
        No, the CEO needs to know how to clone the repo, read and write E2E test code (basically usage examples), and run the “make test” or whatever to check their (the managers’) E2E tests are running and which properties pass or fail. Otherwise, the “non technical” manager is unwilling (not incapable…just too lazy) to understand the definition of “done” so they’ll be clueless about if the thing is working or not, they’ll be forced to play telephone to add a simple test expectation and then they need to have a meeting to beg someone else to write a function. That’s a leech, not a leader!
mc32 3y ago
It could also just be part of an industry maturing. Competition has picked all the low hanging fruit and it’s all more or less become another commodity industry. There was also the switch from people who were naturally attracted to SW dev., CS and EE, to now people who specifically pursue the industry for the perks and not because they’re into it -I think that’s maturation. I think this started about 2005 or so as things became inflated. The dotcom boom certainly perked the ears of many new college freshmen back then and they eventually entered the workforce.
- adra 3y ago
  Nah, as someone who popped into the industry around 2k, a bunch of people bounced out of IT never to return either during or shortly after 2000. To me, its felt a little frothy since ~2010 but this is clearly a subjective approximation. I'm sure a historical compensation chart will show when salaries started to grow precipitous and with them those keen for big wages followed.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Around 2010 is about the right date. Things had picked back up in tech by 2005/6 approximately but, by then, as you say a fair number of people had just left the industry or never entered it. And, of course, the great recession was not that far in the future. I was laid off right after 9/11 and I was very lucky that someone I knew who owned a very small company was still doing OK and they hired me; certainly I wasn't getting so much as a nibble anywhere else. (They did end up struggling but I was still there for a decently long time, albeit at an unexceptional salary.)
Eumenes 3y ago
I've noticed this big time post pandemic. I'm seeing EMs with < 4-5 years of experience who are managing engineers with 10-15+ years of experience. These are quite frankly, kids, and it really shows. They could really use more time behind a keyboard.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  This is the result of telling everybody that they will be screwed and unemployable if they get a humanities degree: a bunch of people who aren’t technical at all have struggled through STEM degrees out of fear. Oops, there goes that signal. They don’t need more time behind the keyboard, we as a society need to figure out how to provide middle class lifestyles to people who aren’t good behind the keyboard. I mean we’re talking about careers that will start building generational wealth, it is not surprising that people will do whatever they need to get in.
  - Eumenes 3y ago
    Idk if this trend of ICs being rapidly promoted into management has to do with humanity degrees or generational wealth. If anything, I find these individuals to be well off and from respectable schools. It reminds me more of the hustle and career driven attitude of the finance and MBA world, where the prestige is centered in having high # of direct reports, or lofty titles.
  - jmopp 3y ago
    People underestimate the value of a humanities degree. The point of studying literature or art history is not to study literature or art history, it's to study how people operate from an emotional point of view, and see how the way people acted on their feelings in the past influenced the present. That's a pretty good background to have if you're going to be a people manager. Despite what we like to believe, we are not rational creatures.
    - Eumenes 3y ago
      Yeah having art history majors manage engineering projects is how you get Boeing 737 MAX disasters. Perhaps okay if you're developing a mobile app or dating website but mission critical and real world scenarios, we should be striving for excellence.
icedchai 3y ago
So true. I love going on calls and discovering there are more "managers" than actual ICs. Does anyone around here do any work? The pandemic created a layer of professional meeting attenders that talk a bunch and do very little.

davidivadavid 3y ago

Hacker News really is like clockwork. Random "tech" industry problem? Gotta be "managers" or "designers." Engineers can do no wrong.

stuff4ben 3y ago
Engineers do the work to make the magic happen. Too much middle management adds fat and gets in the way of work getting done. I say this as a GenXer who has been on both sides and is currently an engineer again. I have no beef with designers.
robertakarobin 3y ago
They're not mutually exclusive. Plenty of managers have engineering backgrounds. What is generally mutually exclusive is managers and individual contributors. It may be that if individual contributors did all the decision-making then the outcome would be different; it may be that it would be exactly the same. We can't really know, for the same reason we can't know how society would be different if we elected "normal people" to Congress instead of "politicians."
happytiger 3y ago
Engineers do plenty wrong. But they typically don’t lead the effort, they implement the ideas and plans of designers and managers. So tradition in society is to put the burden of success or failure at the feet of those who do the planning. If you have someone buying the wrong seeds or not ordering fertilizer on time, it makes all the work on the farm a failure.

JKCalhoun 3y ago

From my experience that started long before the pandemic.

gargs 3y ago

I have to wonder how much of this middle management heavy organizational structure was introduced by cultures that place undue significance to 'becoming a manager' in computing success in profession.

Zetobal 3y ago
My team is full of it. People that needed to be catered with useless titles just to retain them. We have like 40 Head of XYZ for 10 Senior Devs, it's insanity. The thing is they don't even care about the money if they get a fancy title they would do it for the same money.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jasonlotito 3y ago
  People are optimizing for what the businesses value. If you make these titles attractive, why wouldn't you expect people to optimize for them? It's not the people's fault; it's the company leadership. Couple that with companies that don't care about the employees, of course, titles will matter. Say what you want, but someone with only a history of Junior Engineer on their CV will get looked at differently when they have to find a new job.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > If you make these titles attractive, why wouldn't you expect people to optimize for them? There is a cultural component to it, and it travels. People coming from a corporate culture attach value to these titles in a way we traditionally did not in Silicon Valley. The interesting thing is seeing how they then breathe power into those words; I remember one senior-ish person who proceeded to attempt pulling rank on her peers on the back of the new title. In most cases, it didn't work. But in some cases, it did, including with people who were otherwise insensitive to titles. My broad takeaway is trading titles for money is a deal with the devil. Eventually, the thing you're giving away gains animation.

ot1138 3y ago

Not only an excess number of managers, but an excess number of poorly performing and poorly trained engineers. 2018-2022 was peak shit eating time for managers. I had to put up with no end of candidates who couldn't pass even the easiest technical exams (and we intentionally made them easy to weed out only the pretenders). Candidates would ghost interviews and after receiving an offer, would lean on it for a higher salary for anyone else. They wanted $250-300k with just five years experience. It was the frothiest and least professional recruiting environment I had seen in 35 years.

eddtries 3y ago
This, I swear I had people interviewing for senior roles who couldn't FizzBuzz. I don't give LeetCode challenges to people but I do give them the first Project Euler problem which is summing ints that are divisible by 3 or 5 with the incredibly complex edge case of only adding numbers divisible by both values, aka 15, once. There was someone who applied who was really struggling so I hinted at modulo, then they mentioned they didn't really like to use if/else branches to avoid complex code.
- geodel 3y ago
  > with the incredibly complex edge case of only adding numbers divisible by both values, aka 15 Ah I love it, you are pushing them to reach peak human potential.
- corimaith 3y ago
  As a new grad who's currrently in the job market I have to say my experience is contrary to this. Pretty much every OA I've received from companies including non-tech companies like big banks are all asking pretty complex stuff such as writing a LRU Cache, Dynamic Progamming, etc. Most of these questions I would have had no idea how to do in the time allocated if I hadn't studied their specific patterns beforehand. Expectations are sky high, and it's only getting worse as time passes on.
  - eddtries 3y ago

bionhoward 3y ago

I’m honestly shocked by the number of non technical people “managing” software projects. If you can’t run the system on your machine, then how the heck do you even know if it’s done or not? Honestly, TDD ought to be a fundamental everyday skill requirement for managers. If you want to clean house at your company to improve profitability and productivity, then just go around to every manager in charge of a software project and ask them to show you the code for the e2e test and run it. Anyone who can’t do that doesn’t belong in a leadership position. Manager implies leader implies knowing the fundamentals.

op00to 3y ago
I'm confused. I would call my QA manager and ask them to show me, if I was in the situation you state and needed that information. Why would someone who's managing a large project be specifically skilled in the specialized actions of a Quality Engineer?
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  I believe the manager should at least know how to do the job of the people whose work they oversee... how else would you possibly check the quality of the work? Lol
  - davzie 3y ago
    Well, as a thought experiment; should the CEO of the company know how to do every function he or she hires for within their business?
    - bionhoward 3y ago
      No, the CEO needs to know how to clone the repo, read and write E2E test code (basically usage examples), and run the “make test” or whatever to check their (the managers’) E2E tests are running and which properties pass or fail. Otherwise, the “non technical” manager is unwilling (not incapable…just too lazy) to understand the definition of “done” so they’ll be clueless about if the thing is working or not, they’ll be forced to play telephone to add a simple test expectation and then they need to have a meeting to beg someone else to write a function. That’s a leech, not a leader!

mc32 3y ago

It could also just be part of an industry maturing. Competition has picked all the low hanging fruit and it’s all more or less become another commodity industry. There was also the switch from people who were naturally attracted to SW dev., CS and EE, to now people who specifically pursue the industry for the perks and not because they’re into it -I think that’s maturation. I think this started about 2005 or so as things became inflated. The dotcom boom certainly perked the ears of many new college freshmen back then and they eventually entered the workforce.

adra 3y ago
Nah, as someone who popped into the industry around 2k, a bunch of people bounced out of IT never to return either during or shortly after 2000. To me, its felt a little frothy since ~2010 but this is clearly a subjective approximation. I'm sure a historical compensation chart will show when salaries started to grow precipitous and with them those keen for big wages followed.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Around 2010 is about the right date. Things had picked back up in tech by 2005/6 approximately but, by then, as you say a fair number of people had just left the industry or never entered it. And, of course, the great recession was not that far in the future. I was laid off right after 9/11 and I was very lucky that someone I knew who owned a very small company was still doing OK and they hired me; certainly I wasn't getting so much as a nibble anywhere else. (They did end up struggling but I was still there for a decently long time, albeit at an unexceptional salary.)

Eumenes 3y ago

I've noticed this big time post pandemic. I'm seeing EMs with < 4-5 years of experience who are managing engineers with 10-15+ years of experience. These are quite frankly, kids, and it really shows. They could really use more time behind a keyboard.

bee_rider 3y ago
This is the result of telling everybody that they will be screwed and unemployable if they get a humanities degree: a bunch of people who aren’t technical at all have struggled through STEM degrees out of fear. Oops, there goes that signal. They don’t need more time behind the keyboard, we as a society need to figure out how to provide middle class lifestyles to people who aren’t good behind the keyboard. I mean we’re talking about careers that will start building generational wealth, it is not surprising that people will do whatever they need to get in.
- Eumenes 3y ago
  Idk if this trend of ICs being rapidly promoted into management has to do with humanity degrees or generational wealth. If anything, I find these individuals to be well off and from respectable schools. It reminds me more of the hustle and career driven attitude of the finance and MBA world, where the prestige is centered in having high # of direct reports, or lofty titles.
- jmopp 3y ago
  People underestimate the value of a humanities degree. The point of studying literature or art history is not to study literature or art history, it's to study how people operate from an emotional point of view, and see how the way people acted on their feelings in the past influenced the present. That's a pretty good background to have if you're going to be a people manager. Despite what we like to believe, we are not rational creatures.
  - Eumenes 3y ago
    Yeah having art history majors manage engineering projects is how you get Boeing 737 MAX disasters. Perhaps okay if you're developing a mobile app or dating website but mission critical and real world scenarios, we should be striving for excellence.

icedchai 3y ago

So true. I love going on calls and discovering there are more "managers" than actual ICs. Does anyone around here do any work? The pandemic created a layer of professional meeting attenders that talk a bunch and do very little.