[HN Gopher] Meta to ask many managers to become individual contr...
___________________________________________________________________
Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or
leave
Author : marban
Score : 358 points
Date : 2023-02-07 18:27 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| [deleted]
| chitowneats wrote:
| If this headline doesn't get the HN commentariat excited I don't
| know what would.
| behnamoh wrote:
| Probably the announcement that all managers should start using
| NixOS and convert all their code base to a combination of Rust
| and Lisp.
| [deleted]
| cletus wrote:
| This is long overdue.
|
| Years ago playing Civ 4 I distinctly remember hearing Leonard
| Nimoy's voice say "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs
| of the expanding bureaucracy". That's what management in these
| companies is like. It became a meme that every 6 months you'd get
| an email saying "your manager's manager's manager's manager now
| reports to a new manager". You'd never seen, heard of or let
| alone met any of these people.
|
| A large company like this should ahve a structure that's really
| no deper than:
|
| 1. CEO
|
| 2. SVP
|
| 3. VP
|
| 4. Director and really high level ICs
|
| 5. Manager and high-level ICs
|
| 6. ICs
|
| Any deeper than that is organizational bloat. The above will
| allow ~5000 ICs per SVP without any layer having two many
| branches (eg a manager should really have no more than 10-15
| reports).
|
| This is better than layoffs because mid-level management is more
| responsible for bad company strategy than any IC is. Even though
| this is a step in the right direction, Zuck still faces two way
| bigger problems:
|
| 1. There is no vision for the company's key assets (ie FB, IG,
| WA). All of these seem to be relatively stagnant (if not in
| outright decline) and facing pressure from new platforms, most
| notably Tiktok as well as the behemoth that Youtube remains; and
|
| 2. There is absolutely no product market fit for the metaverse,
| certainly none that justifies sinking tens of billions of dollars
| into it.
|
| Disclaimer: ex-Facebooker.
|
| Disclaimer:
| bagels wrote:
| Most of the reporting chains for ICs were ~8 steps away from
| Zuck, from what I recall.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Really agree of the emtsverse. Out of my dunbars number friend
| group I only know one VR enthusiast.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| FB is attempting to burn the ships by renaming to Meta and
| focusing heavily on that. Unfortunately, metaverse is a loser.
| redtriumph wrote:
| Shoutout to fellow Civ player!
|
| Just curious: Is Civ something very popular at FB or something?
| I know Zuck himself plays Civ [0].
|
| [0] https://www.facebook.com/civ/posts/thanks-mark-zuckerberg-
| fo...
| amethyst wrote:
| I would say it's about as popular among the gamers at Meta as
| it is among gamers outside the company. I play it myself
| periodically, but I wasn't even aware that Mark was a fan of
| the game, and I've been here a long time.
| xtracto wrote:
| By that structure, the maximum number of people that such a
| company should have is 7x7x7x7x7 = 16807 Given the best
| practices of number of direct reports [1].
|
| How would you deal with the rest 30,000+ Full time employees
| that Facebook has?
|
| [1] https://www.inc.com/jim-schleckser/how-many-direct-
| reports-s...
| ikrenji wrote:
| add one more layer and now you can accommodate 100k +
| thefaux wrote:
| > By that structure, the maximum number of people that such a
| company should have is 7x7x7x7x7 = 16807
|
| That actually sounds like pretty reasonable limit. There are
| very, very few organizations that should exceed this size in
| my view. In fact, even 16807 sounds far larger than ideal in
| most cases.
| tpolm wrote:
| simple: more layoffs
| dekhn wrote:
| I've been a manager once- only because of necessity while working
| at a rapidly growing startup- and it's not a role for me. I loved
| being an IC at Google and other employers, and no matter how much
| I tried, I couldn't convince myself that by being a manager I'd
| have more impact, or achieve more of my goals, or be happier.
|
| I'd like to see more people-managers who aren't also product-
| managers and tech-leads: people whose job is to manage people,
| not work on the technical side of what the managed people work
| on. Some people are really good at this and should focus on it,
| to the exclusion of coding.
| perfecthjrjth wrote:
| What a 'brilliant move' to purge the middle management! At many
| places, all but the super smart love to climb the management
| ladder. This strategy will force them out.
| User23 wrote:
| Then in six months promote the ones that stayed back and you've
| effectively purged your middle management of deadweight.
| tschellenbach wrote:
| The market is healing, amazing
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| C'mon fire all the contributors and the middle managers! Elon did
| it and he is the smartest man in the universe. Hardcore!
| Patrol8394 wrote:
| This, I can agree with. I know first hand failed software
| engineer that turned into engineer management at FB just because
| they didn't know how to do anything. So management was their
| escape route to success. Shuffling things around, rarely adding
| value.
|
| They should either prove themselves valuable or just leave.
| ugh123 wrote:
| This is good.
|
| We're finally pulling back on the "HRBP-sponsored" people-
| management hype train thats rolled through much of SV startups
| and FAANG over the last 5-10 years:
|
| "Focus on your people, give them the support and mentorship they
| need to grow. Also 1-on-1s every week." - and all that bullshit.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > "Focus on your people, give them the support and mentorship
| they need to grow. Also 1-on-1s every week." - and all that
| bullshit.
|
| Taking the cynical view, that BS is there for a reason. It
| makes it easier to performance manage people out _very very
| quickly_.
|
| The optimistic view is that that BS enables people to never let
| their productivity drop below a certain level.
|
| The extreme cynical view is to wonder why you are being
| performance-reviewed every 3 months but salary-reviewed every
| 12.
| Baader-Meinhof wrote:
| http://archive.today/ddhH9
| dado3212 wrote:
| @dang can we pin this?
| behnamoh wrote:
| It'd be nice to have @<user_name> work on HN.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| You can somewhat find it https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=
| last24h&page=0&prefix=true... but it ignores the @
| yodsanklai wrote:
| I suspect this type of blackmail isn't legal in many countries
| where Meta operate.
| gautamdivgi wrote:
| That's curious. I mean why lay off ICs and ask managers to be
| ICs? Wouldn't it be better to lay off managers and keep the ICs?
| jdlyga wrote:
| Every company should set a 6 month trial period on engineers
| turned managers. I only know one or two engineers who ended up
| enjoying it. It's far, far more likely to dip your toes into it
| with enthusiasm and realize you hate it. It's not about not
| trying hard enough, about social skills, or it being "a totally
| new job with a new skill set and you're not used to it yet". It's
| about your personality type.
|
| Ask yourself:
|
| Do you like being in charge of people, or do you like being in
| charge of the codebase?
|
| Do you like solving your problems by asking people to do specific
| tasks for you, or would you rather solve a problem yourself?
|
| Would you rather take a breadth first depth first approach to you
| work?
|
| Are you good at planning, logistics, and deadlines, or are you
| more comfortable with going with the flow?
| flashgordon wrote:
| I had cautiously gotten into management because I wanted to learn
| the skills of delegatin and really building through others and
| growing/coaching others. I thoroughly enjoyed this. But over time
| what I had realized was the role had been changing (not sure if
| it was just for pandering) towards being a mouth piece for
| leadership and hr - having to relay decisions I didn't believe in
| (perf seasons, promo rationales, layoffs anybody?) As if they
| were on purely my own. Given Ive always enjoyed building this may
| actually be a good forcing function to go back to IC and just ...
| Build!
| mr_gibbins wrote:
| I've recently held a senior management position then left and
| obtained a technical position at a different organisation.
|
| Not kidding, I nearly cried with happiness moving away from SM
| and into a tech position again. I was GIVEN work to do. I had
| NO responsibilities for others. Moreover, I was DISCOURAGED
| from attending unnecessary meetings. I arranged no meetings!
| Not one!
|
| Went from 7 direct reports to zero. No more approving holiday
| requests. No more performance reviews. No more management town-
| halls. No more arguing strategy with anyone. It was brilliant.
| 'Please write a procedure that does X. Return it by Thursday.'
| 'Please optimise this statement that hangs during the overnight
| run'. Yes, absolutely, more of that please.
|
| More money too, oddly.
| nerdponx wrote:
| > As if they were on purely my own
|
| Is this actually the expectation at the places you work?
| superjan wrote:
| In general, if you want your reports to accept company
| decisions, it is in your interest as a manager to align your
| stated opinions with company policy. Openly disagreeing, or
| just trying to take a neutral position will only reduce faith
| in the company and sow unrest for which you will be held
| accountable.
| joxel wrote:
| If it's in your interest to lie you should probably get a
| job that doesn't make you a shithead.
| saberience wrote:
| Imagine this from a military perspective. The general/field
| marshal etc makes the call that you're going over the top and
| as a smart Major or whatever you know this means most of your
| men are going to die. Are you going to say to your men:
|
| "Hello gents, we have our new orders, we're going to go over
| the top tomorrow at 8am and try and take the village one mile
| down the road, however, I think this is a horrible idea and
| you're all probably going to die."
|
| Even if you really believe this is the case, it's a bad idea
| to tell your men as it means the plan (which is going to
| happen anyway) is even LESS likely to succeed. That is, if
| you can make your men believe the plan is genius and they're
| going to destroy the enemy easily, it may give them more
| confidence and leave more of them alive at the end of it.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| > Is this actually the expectation at the places you work?
|
| Can you imagine a manager saying, "I don't agree with these
| decisions, but you need to do A, B, C." This might be being
| frank and open with your reports, but at the same time you
| reduce their motivation. And if top management learns about
| this, they won't be happy.
|
| So yes, there is such unspoken pressure to at least not to
| distance oneself from the things you ask others to do,
| whether they come from you or from your boss.
| joxel wrote:
| Yes, it happens all the time. Each time we get a new form
| we have to fill out to do something or some extra hoop to
| jump through. If the manager I worked for didn't act like a
| normal person that thought that shit was stupid I would
| absolutely hate working with/for that liar/crazy person.
| rodgerd wrote:
| > Can you imagine a manager saying, "I don't agree with
| these decisions, but you need to do A, B, C."
|
| Some of my best managers, on well-regarded teams, have done
| exactly that. Those managers are doing me a favour by
| flagging that it's a waste of my time, emotional energy,
| and political capital to argue with decisions that neither
| they nor I can affect, and that it will be better if we
| just get on with it.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| I've been a manager for decades and this is the way to
| handle it sometimes. Life is full of things that suck but
| you have to do them anyway, like paying taxes or cleaning
| your bathroom. Why should we try to pretend that work, of
| all places, is exempt from that?
|
| Wrapping it in pink wrapping paper fools no one but kills
| personal credibility, which is the most important asset a
| manager has.
|
| Top management often does not give a shit if people are
| happy about the thing (who is happy about layoffs?), just
| that it gets done satisfactorily. So yeah, sometimes I tell
| my team "this sucks but just get it done and then we can
| get back to the interesting work."
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I'm not a manager, but at the very least it seems like an
| implicit expectation associated with the role. I wouldn't be
| surprised if it was explicit at some companies.
| hello_moto wrote:
| > towards being a mouth piece for leadership and hr - having to
| relay decisions I didn't believe in (perf seasons, promo
| rationales, layoffs anybody?) As if they were on purely my own.
|
| The role doesn't change though. It has been like that forever.
|
| This is another part of Management (whether you like it or
| not). Management should be seen as a cohesive "Leadership" unit
| because if the leaders aren't on the same page, what good are
| them?
|
| The other thing about Management/Leadership is that they should
| be able to relay the message in the right format and at the
| right level for their direct reports. C-level typically have
| OKR/Objective in 3-5 bullet points (the bigger the company, the
| more bullet points) and it's the VP and Dir jobs to break these
| individual points to high-level goals for their Organizations.
| It is the Manager's job to distill it even further to their
| level + their direct reports.
|
| It's one way to keep ICs on the same frequency with leadership
| and to execute for a common goal.
|
| Most ICs don't want to attend meetings, don't want to hear
| "high-level goals", and more importantly, don't have the skill
| to consume those high-level goals at their level. They need
| help from various layers of leaderships. Sure, there are those
| exceptional ICs that wouldn't mind to be involved at that level
| and understood the social/human aspect part of the work but
| let's be frank here: majority of ICs just want to bang
| keyboard, produce clean code, and marvel at the end results
| (ignoring everything in between).
| buffet_overflow wrote:
| Oh how I don't miss those days of management.
|
| It because a theory of mine that a large part of my job
| function was to simultaneously water down accountability from
| above, while adding enough complexity to the layers below me to
| discourage them from changing the status quo.
|
| The double edged sword being, without that authority, that same
| power structure is forced on me, and now I'm more aware of it.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| I have a feeling being in middle management leads to that
| squeeze.
|
| If you're closer to the doing, you are more isolated from the
| companyspeak nonsense. If you are in the upper part of the
| food chain, you get to enjoy more influence, freedom, a
| better risk/reward tradeoff, with costs you mention.
|
| In the middle you're kind of screwed from both ends.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| [dead]
| conductr wrote:
| The best thing you can do in these roles is protect your team.
| It's your primary job to ensure they can build and with minimal
| wasted efforts. If you view it as building for the company,
| your team is a victim to all the dysfunctions of the
| organization and nobody wants to be on that team. The
| mouthpiece part is tricky, I always try to give the official
| message with a dose of my personal candid opinion on it even if
| it's in opposition. You just can't lay it on too thick and try
| to find a way to spin it to a positive as to not be
| demotivating for the team, "it might be challenging, but at
| least we'll learn X and they're aware of the risks that are at
| top of your minds."
| curiousllama wrote:
| God help them if there's a few dozen Director-turned-IC folks
| running around trying to "redefine industry practice" or
| something because they got overpromoted as a manager
| jujube3 wrote:
| https://dilbert.com/strip/2002-05-21
|
| https://dilbert.com/strip/2002-05-22
| smeagull wrote:
| Should've just kept more of the ICs and asked the managers to
| leave. I'd take a less experienced person who has been doing
| something for the past two years over a more experienced person
| who hasn't.
| xivzgrev wrote:
| Maybe this works with managers overseeing 1 or 2 people. But any
| broader than that is likely to be counter productive.
|
| Managers don't just have 1:1s. They set direction, clear
| obstacles (both upcoming and here now), ensure quality work, etc.
| that scales somewhat linearly with team size, plus or minus
| depending on the individuals.
|
| If you remove a bunch of managers making them ICs, now the
| remaining managers have that much more to wrangle, and stuff will
| get dropped.
| arnvald wrote:
| I mostly agree with you and I think it highly depends on the
| organizational complexity.
|
| In a smaller company (100 people) I was able to manage 10
| people and still had time to write some non-critical code.
| That's because there was little overhead - just 2 PMs to work
| with, not many meetings.
|
| Then in a large org (5,000+) it became much harder. Even though
| I had only 5 reports, I had to attend plenty of cross-dept
| meetings, had multiple stakeholders, and in order to get
| anything done I had to talk to 5 different people.
|
| In order to "flatten" the organization, first this complexity
| must be tackled. If there's s lot of overhead to get things
| done, removing managers won't help, because now ICs will have
| to do the job that previously was done by managers
| firstfewshells wrote:
| Management is just a way to coast. I don't understand why we need
| to "manage" grown up adults. What we need are team leads who code
| and architect. Then give them the autonomy to run teams.
| jchw wrote:
| Running teams _is_ management. Not everyone wants to be doing
| the roles involved in managing teams, so it 's a designated job
| title. If you get rid of the hierarchy entirely, then what
| happens is that they form implicitly and everyone is completely
| confused as to who leads what, and that only gets worse as
| teams grow and the number of projects grow.
|
| Some management is bullshit, but literally "run teams" is the
| important part. But if you get big enough, you do wind up with
| departments. It grows like a fractal.
| pkd wrote:
| Managers are an organisational necessity past a certain scale.
| If you have not felt the need for them I can only guess you've
| not been in a company big enough.
|
| Think of it as trying to run a big country with direct
| democracy. Can it be done? Maybe. But there are good reasons
| why democracies become indirect after a certain scale.
| revskill wrote:
| Not quite. If i'm a CEO, my manager is required to know
| coding first. It's nonsensical and ineffecient to hire a non-
| coder to manage real coders ?
| pkd wrote:
| I don't think I was claiming that. Managers should
| definitely be able to code. That does not mean that we
| don't need managers.
| ReflectedImage wrote:
| "Managers are an organisational necessity past a certain
| scale." That sounds like a dubious claim, I'm sure there are
| exotic ways to run an organisation that doesn't need
| managers.
|
| For example, Pirate ships ran with a Battle Commander,
| Accountant and Crew.
| pkd wrote:
| Pirate ships frequently had crews of about 50, and the
| biggest ones never exceed a couple of hundred. Do you have
| real world examples of large organisations (in the
| thousands of employees) being managed in a flat hierarchy?
| Because I don't.
|
| Please note I'm not saying you can't be overprovisioned in
| managers. I'm replying to the parent comment that sees no
| need for managers.
| cauthon wrote:
| > Then give them the autonomy to run teams.
|
| "running teams" is literally management
| firstfewshells wrote:
| Run teams by being hands on. Just don't sit in endless
| meetings and help "manage" people's careers. It's all a bunch
| of bs.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Resolving interpersonal disputes and guessing how much you have
| to pay someone to get them to stay, and software architecture,
| are two (three?) totally unrelated skillsets.
| firstfewshells wrote:
| You don't need to "guess" how much to pay someone. The market
| dictates that. HR has pay bands. Raises are always in a
| narrow band. I don't know what kind of disputes you're
| talking about. If you ask any manager - describe your
| responsibilities succinctly, they will most inevitably fail
| to do so.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I can imagine a company that had pay bands so narrow and
| bonuses so small that managers had no tools to reward high
| performers, and although I agree that it would take away a
| lot of what allows managers to do their jobs, I don't think
| that is the usual situation.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Those are the same things.
| bsg75 wrote:
| Interesting opinion contrast to this posted 2 days ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34531284
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| This actually sounds like a meaningful change, unlike proposals
| from the peanut gallery "to fire the CEO for layoffs," instead
| demand more output from those you keep in exchange for a job.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| And to be fair, until about 2015 or so, all managers at FB were
| expected to be able to do their reports job.
|
| This is definitely a good move, as I've heard some horror
| stories of management bloat at FB since I left in 2018.
| pbalau wrote:
| My then manager, that become a director after he grew the
| team large enough, was writing code after 12 hours of
| meetings.
| cheeze wrote:
| That's just sad.
| blsapologist42 wrote:
| Why? He probably loved it
| irrational wrote:
| That is interesting. I've been working in the field
| professionally for 22+ years and I've never had a manager
| that had any technical skills. None of them could even begin
| to do my job.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| The managers I enjoyed working for the most came up through
| the ranks and were better at my job than I was. But that
| was only maybe 25% of the time in the 20ish years I spent
| as an IC. The worst for me were the ones with no
| understanding of how I did what I did.
| Hovertruck wrote:
| Wow, in my 15 or so years I've never _not_ had a manager
| who had engineering chops. Admittedly, I prefer working for
| smaller companies so this has often been a hands-on CTO,
| and I was filtering these job opportunities for technical
| leaders that I respected.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Pretty much all my Google managers were ex-ICs who would
| have been fully capable of jumping into the codebase if
| they had to. Some of them still did, if they could squeeze
| it in.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| That must suck (unless you're really senior in which case
| it's normal). Hilariously enough, I learned so much more
| from my one non technical manager at FB but having leaders
| that understand what you do is incredibly helpful.
| jedberg wrote:
| At Netflix I can't think of a single manager at any level
| managing engineers that didn't start as one, all the way up
| to the CEO. In some cases they couldn't necessarily do
| their employee's job, but they at least understand the
| technical aspects well enough to make useful contributions
| to technical discussions.
| dekhn wrote:
| That is interesting. I've been working in the field
| professionally 20 years (I'm not including grad school or
| postdocs) and every manager I've had had technical skills
| (deep ones) although most of them couldn't have done my job
| exactly the same way I did. Some would have done it better.
| Others, worse. Even others- would have cancelled the
| project, or morphed it into something else entirely.
| cheeze wrote:
| Most FAANG companies grow managers from within, with many
| managers starting as ICs.
|
| Anecdotally, I've never had a manager that wasn't super
| technical. They wouldn't last.
| irrational wrote:
| Yeah, I've never worked for a FAANG company. I do work
| for a Fortune 100 company, but it is not a tech company
| (When I was hired, I was once in a meeting where I heard
| the founder of the company say that we would never have
| an IT department because we were not a tech company. We
| do have an IT department now, but that happened after the
| founder gave up the reigns.)
| xxpor wrote:
| OTOH, if I tried to be a manager, even if I _could_ do it,
| I 'd be incredibly bad at it.
| pjmorris wrote:
| > I've been working in the field professionally for 22+
| years and I've never had a manager that had any technical
| skills. None of them could even begin to do my job
|
| Technical skills may or may not be required, but
| understanding is...
|
| "Each of my managers explained carefully his own theory of
| what had gone wrong and all the theories were different. At
| last, there breezed into my office the most senior manager
| of all, a general manager of our parent company, Andrew St.
| Johnston. I was surprised that he had even heard of me.
| "You know what went wrong?" he shouted--he always shouted--
| "You let your programmers do things which you yourself do
| not understand." I stared in astonishment. He was obviously
| out of touch with present day realities. How could one
| person ever understand the whole of a modem software
| product like the Elliott 503 Mark II software system? I
| realized later that he was absolutely right; he had
| diagnosed the true cause of the problem and he had planted
| the seed of its later solution. "
|
| - C.A.R Hoare, 1980 Turing Award speech
| John23832 wrote:
| Good understanding is a management trait. It's great that
| managers have that, when managing.
|
| Technical skills are DEFINITELY required to be an IC.
| Understanding without the ability to implement makes for
| a lousy IC.
| smeej wrote:
| I don't need my manager to know how to do my job.
|
| I just need my manager to _know_ they don 't know how to do
| my job and stop telling _me_ how to do it.
|
| Tell me what needs to be done. Trust me to figure out how.
| dieselgate wrote:
| Kind of my thoughts as well - it's "cool" there are
| technical managers out there and engineering managers
| should be technical "enough" but I'd never expect them to
| be competent with all the ICs' jobs
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Sure, neither do I (now). At that point in my career
| though, it was incredibly helpful and levelled me up
| significantly in a relatively short space of time.
|
| But agreed that your manager should set goals rather than
| plans. Fun fact, at FB at the same time all ICs came up
| with their own goals rather than these being passed down
| from management.
| gabythenerd wrote:
| Where I work we just had a round of layoffs and it was almost all
| middle level managers. I guess now it's the time where individual
| contributors that directly create value are more important than
| people who mostly organize and communicate.
|
| Wonder what this will do to what is left of middle management.
| costcofries wrote:
| Happening at Microsoft too!
| fatnoah wrote:
| I love management and, after over 17 years in an IC capacity,
| find that it fulfills me in a way that writing code stopped
| doing. I was also a manager at Meta in a past life, and really
| didn't love the experience due to the nature of the company and
| roles of manager. I do think I'd really like being an IC there,
| due to the high level of autonomy and focus on doing impactful
| work.
| RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm wrote:
| > doing impactful work.
|
| Would you mind elaborating what the "impactful work" available
| at Meta is?
|
| Because to be absolutely honest, when I hear "impactful work"
| along with Meta, the first thing which comes to my mind is
| millions of teenagers with body dysmorphic disorder thanks to
| Instagram.
|
| There must be something else which you are thinking about when
| wording it with this positive connotation?
| fortituded0002 wrote:
| Meta's has a corporate value for "Focus on long-term impact"
| which is trying to counter short-term gains that don't
| produce over time. They also talk about how you can make a
| "big impact" as an IC there, which from what I know is true
| since you can work on big projects, but they aren't
| necessarily the projects you'd want to work on if you have
| some form of value system that includes empathy.
|
| Years ago, I met someone that boasted about doing auto-play
| for videos in your feed so that get sucked into related video
| after related video. He was particularly proud of
| implementing a feature (he worked it out with the PM) where
| you could only delete one video at a time from your history
| instead of in batch. The goal was to make it harder to purge
| your data and frustrate the customer so they give up.
| Ultimately they wanted more data on you so that they could
| further "optimize" the app to better suit/manipulate you.
| Pretty sure this is what they mean by their company core
| value of "focus on long-term impact."
| ianlevesque wrote:
| Okay I'll feed the troll. There are only a few places where
| if you implemented, for example, an effort to reduce "body
| dysmorphic disorder", it could instantly improve the lives of
| 3 billion users worldwide. Meta is one of those places.
| RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm wrote:
| > Okay I'll feed the troll.
|
| I'm not trying to troll.
|
| I just genuinely don't understand why someone would
| consider working there as a positive thing.
|
| So I would like to know!
|
| But I have no way to figure it out as I know zero people
| who work there, and talking to a human who works at these
| companies is impossible because their websites are geared
| towards not allowing you to talk to them.
|
| So now that I just saw someone in the wild to ask, I
| figured I should use the opportunity to figure something
| out which I absolutely do not understand.
|
| > There are only a few places where if you implemented, for
| example, an effort to reduce "body dysmorphic disorder", it
| could instantly improve the lives of 3 billion users
| worldwide. Meta is one of those places.
|
| It surely is a zero-sum to fix the problem which your
| company has created in the first place???
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| It's hard to believe you're not trolling when you present
| "millions of teenagers with body dysmorphic disorder
| thanks to Instagram" as the only kind of 'impactful'
| work.
|
| What about people working on WhatsApp, or infra, or
| people working at FAIR or people building React, etc? The
| list goes on.
|
| Meta creates a shit ton of positive impact which is not
| at all related to "millions of teenagers with body
| dysmorphic disorder thanks to Instagram".
| istjohn wrote:
| They said that was the first thing that came to mind. The
| first thing that comes to my mind is fueling a genocide
| in Myanmar[1], but as a parent of a girl, I couldn't care
| less about Meta's development of React when their own
| research showed that they "make body-image issues worse
| for one in three teenage girls." Then there was the
| Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal. It's been
| clear for years that to work for Zuckerberg is to do
| anything that he thinks will make him rich, the
| consequences for our children, our democracy, and the
| rest of the world be damned.
|
| 1.
| https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-
| faceb...
| artifaxx wrote:
| I don't see their comment as trolling. Reducing the
| negative impact Meta already has is a more accurate
| description. Given their track record so far, you'd be a
| tiny minority to even get to work on that instead of
| ad/user engagement optimization for example.
| omeze wrote:
| For every teen with poor body image issues there are
| likely 5 people served by Facebook in some way that they
| deeply appreciate. I talk to family members in Algeria
| who I'd never be able to reliably keep in touch with
| otherwise, and friends in Europe love FB marketplace.
| Yes, a service for 2-3 billion people has drawbacks. It's
| disingenuous to say that it doesn't improve the lives of
| hundreds of millions of people, though.
| istjohn wrote:
| Facebook's algorithms fueled the genocide in Myanmar. How
| many muslim lives is FB marketplace worth?
|
| Do you talk to family members in Algeria through FB or
| WhatsApp? WhatsApp would have been just fine if
| Zuckerberg didn't buy it before US regulators rolled out
| of bed.
|
| I think it's hard to argue that anyone's life is improved
| by a company that shows such a lack of respect for its
| users. We could have social networks that respect us, but
| Zuckerberg systematically purchased them or squashed them
| in the cradle.
| bityard wrote:
| Somebody at Meta worked really hard to make sure that when
| I'm using Facebook on my phone to read someone's post or
| comment thread, it punishes me for taking a call or answering
| a text message by reloading my feed with a set of completely
| different posts when I re-enter the app, and then making it
| impossible to find the previous post or thread again.
|
| No other app has gone to such extraordinary lengths to make
| sure you can only view a piece of content once, and then hide
| it from you forever after.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I use FB via browser and have not experienced this behavior
| there. But I do see it in the LinkedIn app all the time.
| Even if you click into a posted article, when you exit from
| the article you won't be able to find the post so you can
| comment on it!
| gryn wrote:
| have you met the desktop version of tiktok ? they went out
| of their way to make it not possible to click multiple
| suggested videos in new tabs and all others kind of anti
| desktop measures.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Even if you don't think that some people find value in Meta
| apps, Meta engineers work on all types of project, lots of
| them are open source (see https://opensource.fb.com) and are
| impactful beyond just supporting Instagram.
| dqpb wrote:
| Meta created pyTorch
| ketzo wrote:
| To be slightly less cynical, I think they just mean that
| individual engineers at Meta are responsible for large
| chunks/vertical slices of work, so your work has a lot of
| individual impact on getting things out into the world.
| [deleted]
| throwaway4837 wrote:
| Zuck has it right. All the worst managers/directors/VPs in
| engineering I've seen are people who don't contribute anything to
| the codebase. They actively discourage managers who want to write
| code from writing code. They instead encourage them to focus
| fully on process and sprint management. Lots of backwards
| ideologies in tech perpetuated by B-players who got a little too
| comfortable with "people management". I would think that the role
| of an "Engineering Manager" or "Tech Lead" or "Team Lead" etc.
| should all be pretty interchangeable, or at least have very high
| overlap.
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| Anyone without intimate knowledge of the product they are
| working on is useless IMO. I was in the code daily when leading
| a team and don't respect any development team leader who isn't.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| When was Zuck's last PR?
| coolbreezetft22 wrote:
| Aren't Product Managers & TPMs considered ICs? They don't have
| direct reports but aren't writing code either. I imagine this
| will be a more common option for these Engineering Managers who
| are managing other managers
| 121789 wrote:
| It's the same structure for PMs (ICs and managers of PMs). In
| general I've noticed PM managers spend more time in IC type
| of work than EMs
| neosat wrote:
| Product Manager can refer to an individual contributor IC or
| someone who also manages other Product Managers (and
| sometimes even adjacent functions) e.g. a Group Product
| Manager. The titles are not very standard though. Many of
| these roles are hybrid as well. For example, a Product
| manager who will be responsible for a Product portfolio and
| some products in that portfolio as an IC, while
| managing/supporting the work of PMs working on other products
| in that portfolio.
|
| Same for TPMs. They can be ICs or managing other TPMs.
| hiddencost wrote:
| My experience is much the opposite:
|
| the managers who want to write a lot of code usually are so
| focused on their contributions they fail their other
| responsibilities.
|
| The ones who are trying to set product direction are usually
| harmful, too.
|
| The managers I've had the best experience with are the ones who
| focus on helping their ICs navigate the larger organization,
| dealing with human issues, and helping the ICs understand
| organizational priorities, and evaluate risks.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Writing code as a manager is my number 1 stressor.
|
| As a manager, I have to deal with so much random bullshit. I
| don't mind it, but it's extremely difficult to manage that
| bullshit alongside code and sprint commitments. "I couldn't
| deliver" is remembered far more clearly than "I couldn't
| deliver because I was helping the team with X other thing
| that was far more important.".
| zabzonk wrote:
| what's an IC? a piece of corporate-speak i haven't come
| across before.
| tejtm wrote:
| objectification of resource... "commoditizing your
| complement" for management.
|
| edit to add "in my experiences" I have also seen good
| evidence via HN that not all management/admin is as dilbert
| like as I have seen.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Individual contributor
| [deleted]
| jdeibele wrote:
| I'm guessing Individual Contributor. Someone who is not
| management but also not support (administrator, sales, HR,
| etc.)
| xzel wrote:
| Individual contributor.
| eftychis wrote:
| Individual Contributor.
|
| Don't ask me why in heavens that term makes any sense
| outside one that is myopic or only works with extremely
| fresh out of school junior engineers and unskilled workers.
|
| Edit: P.S. Not sure why a couple of people decided to
| downvote this opinion.
|
| Also to other commenters: it sounds to me less as a be a
| team player title (like the soldier one suggested) and more
| like an isolated resource that makes interchangeable
| contributions.
|
| Anyways, I think that there is a distinction between
| "(Team) Lead" and Manager with the Team Lead usually
| classified as an IC says everything for most organizational
| approaches.
|
| I agree more with the Meta take here.
| zabzonk wrote:
| when did this appear? i literally have never seen it
| before i read this post, and it makes no sense at all to
| me.
| com2kid wrote:
| It has been in common use for at least 15, if not 20
| years.
|
| Very common phrase in the tech industry.
| zabzonk wrote:
| i have worked in tech for over 40 years at all levels
| and, as i said, i have never come across the term before
| today.
| com2kid wrote:
| Just in the past week "IC" has appeared in 2 front page
| stories on HN.
|
| Are you US based? Beginning my career in the mid 00s I
| was exposed to "IC" pretty much day 1 starting at
| Microsoft.
|
| Other people around me in adjacent sectors also use the
| phrase to refer to non-managers, it is pretty common
| daily parlance, I am 99% sure I can ask any of my
| knowledge worker friends and they'll know what I am
| talking about.
|
| Google trends show "individual contributor" has been a
| pretty popular phrase since at least 2011.
| zabzonk wrote:
| no, i am not us based, though i have worked there. but so
| what?
|
| is "knowledge workers" still a thing? it was meaningless
| when it was introduced in the 60s, even more so now.
|
| another bubble creature, i guess.
| com2kid wrote:
| > no, i am not us based, though i have worked there. but
| so what?
|
| Every country, and even different regions of a country,
| has linguistic differences. This is true even if all the
| countries being talked about have the same national
| language.
|
| For example, nobody in the US tech sector is going to
| know what a Boffin is unless they read The Register.
|
| Even on the west coast of the US, vocabulary is different
| between California and the Pacific Northwest, although
| things started to merge together when the Silicon Valley
| based tech companies began opening offices up in Seattle.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > It has been in common use for at least 15, if not 20
| years.
|
| I've been in the industry since 1998. The first time I
| saw it was on HN a few years ago (maybe 3 or 4).
| coliveira wrote:
| This is FAANG speak. They created this role for people
| who are not (directly) involved in management.
| zabzonk wrote:
| so i guess that managers are not individuals and don't
| contribute? might be true. but i've been a manager and an
| individual and contributed code. well, who knows?
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Lots of people who aren't part of the "working class" do
| plenty of work but that's the nomenclature society uses
| for some reason so if you want to communicate with
| everyone else, you have to go along with it.
| icedchai wrote:
| As usual, "it depends." Many individual contributors
| don't actually contribute, either. Some actually have
| negative net contribution.
| capitalsigma wrote:
| The point is that ICs are judged based on their
| _individual contribution_ s, i.e. their own code, design
| docs, etc, whereas managers are judged based on their
| team's contributions
| zabzonk wrote:
| i have never, ever come across a programmer working on a
| system of any complexity that did not depend on
| contributions from other programmers.
| [deleted]
| svachalek wrote:
| A->B != !A->!B
| eftychis wrote:
| I am not sure. It has been around for at least 5 years I
| would say. I guess at some point they needed a nice
| sounding alternative category to people not becoming
| managers.
| prepend wrote:
| I actually like the term as it seems pretty accurate to
| me and I don't know if a more accurate term.
|
| There's many types of "managers" who are actually
| individual contributors (eg, sysadmin, project admin).
|
| When you get into principal engineer and architect
| titles, sometimes those positions manage people and
| sometimes they don't.
|
| I think it also highlights how one version of contributor
| isn't better than the others. Some people only produce
| value by being part of a team, some produce value by
| managing, and some produce value direct from themselves.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I've always like the term soldier. It's what organized
| crime syndicates, armies, and ant colonies all use. The
| worst is when someone gets called a "resource", but I
| can't get too exercised about IC.
| Moissanite wrote:
| As a consultant, I've become accustomed to being referred
| to as "the resource" by operations people. However, the
| day an engagement manager refers to me directly as
| "resource" is the day I openly start referring to them as
| my secretary.
| zabzonk wrote:
| i keep envisaging what some of these uber stupid job
| names would look like on a business card i might have to
| give to a client:
|
| zab zonk
|
| the resource
|
| zab zonk
|
| individual contributor
|
| jesus wept
| tuckerman wrote:
| Nobody has IC as a title, it's a whole class of job
| families that don't require/revolve around managing other
| employees. Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Data Center
| Technician are all ICs. It's just a more positive way of
| saying "not people manager", especially when you are
| trying to build a culture that going into people
| management shouldn't be the only career path.
| [deleted]
| ssss11 wrote:
| Individual contributor
| [deleted]
| LVB wrote:
| Individual Contributor
| ryanianian wrote:
| Individual Contributor. Line engineer. Has a manager and
| likely doesn't have direct-reports of their own.
| the_af wrote:
| Others have answered what the words "IC" mean, but let me
| add that this is the usual name for the technical career
| track, i.e. the not-management track, meant for people who
| do not want to manage teams of people.
|
| Strictly speaking, the roles of Engineer Manager and IC are
| incompatible; you cannot want to manage people and _at the
| same time_ want to stay out of it. So in this particular
| context, "EM+IC" is a misnomer for "EMs who also need to
| be able handle tech/coding tasks themselves".
| Izkata wrote:
| > this is the usual name
|
| I dunno if it's just me, but it seems like the term came
| out of nowhere just a couple years ago.
| the_af wrote:
| True! I meant the usual name _now_. For me it 's the same
| as Engineer Manager: it seems to have come out of nowhere
| but it's the standard now. Before we called them simply
| "managers" (or sometimes "team leaders" of the non-
| technical variety).
|
| PS: are you by any chance the same Izkata as the one in
| scifi.se?
| georgemcbay wrote:
| I also never saw this until pretty recently. At first I
| assumed people were talking about independent contractors
| because it was the first thing that came to mind, it
| possibly fit the context I saw the term used in and
| nobody explained the acronym they just dropped it there
| like I was supposed to know what it meant.
|
| Took a bit longer to realize they meant individual
| contributor.
| sbrother wrote:
| TLM is the term I've heard for that more often.
| zabzonk wrote:
| what does TLM mean? i wish that all you folks out there
| would understand that nobody outside your bubble knows
| what these daft abbreviations stands for, much less mean.
| tchalla wrote:
| It's honestly getting out of hand. It's almost as if one
| requires a dictionary to communicate these days. Even
| though I know these abbreviations it's just off putting.
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| Tech Lead Manager is my guess. I'm familiar with the term
| "tech lead," at least.
| fferen wrote:
| Transfer length method :)
| wrigby wrote:
| TLM (at Facebook) stands for Tech-Lead Manager - it's a
| hybrid role, with engineering duties and people
| management duties.
|
| From what I remember, it wasn't intended as a long-term
| position, but was used in stop-gap circumstances (manager
| quits, tech lead temporarily takes on some people
| management duties) or for when an engineer was
| considering transitioning to the management track.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Yeah, it's an "M0" role. Generally folks who transition
| from senior engineer into management become TLMs. Staff
| engineers transition to "M1" or a full-fledged manager.
|
| TLMs still have individual contributor responsibilities.
| M1s don't. The reason for that is generally that
| (especially junior) ICs aren't likely to push back
| against poor technical decisions knowing that the person
| they're pushing back against is also in charge of their
| rating. This feels quite fair based on my experience and
| as such I'm quite skeptical about TLMs in general.
| rocketbop wrote:
| Too little motivation?
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| To clarify, EM stands for Engineering Manager not
| Engineer Manager. EMs are generally expected to be
| technical, but not be engineers writing code on top of
| being a manager.
| the_af wrote:
| Yes, agreed: Engineering Manager.
|
| I often make this mistake because English is not my first
| language, and I confuse "engineer" with "engineering": in
| both cases it sounds to me "a manager who manages
| engineers", not "a manager who is an engineer
| him/herself". Kind of like a "Product Manager" is a
| manager who manages the product, not a manager who is a
| product!
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| No worries, just wanted to make sure people didn't get
| confused and think it was a dual Engineer/Manager role
| :).
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > They instead encourage them to focus fully on process and
| sprint management.
|
| Thats literally the point. Its totally fucking batshit that
| somewhere like meta still uses spreadsheet to plan. This is why
| properly trained people should be doing management.
|
| Project management at scale is not something you "dip into" its
| a full time job to project manage and people manage. Its not
| something most ICs should be doing.
|
| A <Edit> consultant[1]</Edit> surgeon leads a team, but they
| don't manage the timesheets of the juniors, nurses and
| assistants. Meta very much expects that a consultant surgeon
| not only does surgery, but fills rostas, recruits nurses, does
| some marketing and works on the legal policy for negligence.
|
| The issue at meta is that with the growth there is no
| "leadership". What is a lowly IC supposed to work on? "create
| consensus" and "drive from the bottoms up". That doesn't work
| when you have 11 layers of management, all pissing about
| talking about impact, but not actually driving projects.
|
| > I would think that the role of an "Engineering Manager" or
| "Tech Lead" or "Team Lead" etc. should all be pretty
| interchangeable, or at least have very high overlap.
|
| You should try it. Its pretty clear you've not managed people
| at any level of scale or formality. Not everything is code,
| babes.
|
| (No. I'm not a manager at meta, thank fuck, it sounds pretty
| shitty.)
|
| [1]https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/careers-in-surgery/surgical-care-
| te...
|
| _edit_ I meant uk consultant surgeon, thank you to commentor
| for pointing out my mistake
| Xeronate wrote:
| My team at Amazon still uses spreadsheets and I much prefer
| it to Jira.
| prepend wrote:
| Chief surgeons do all those things you describe. Check out
| the job description [0] as they are basically department
| heads doing recruiting, budgeting, supervising, etc. Chief
| Surgeon doesn't mean best surgeon.
|
| [0] https://www.betterteam.com/chief-surgeon-job-description
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Sorry you are right, I meant a consultant.
|
| But it is a bad analogy, as you've implied. What I was
| trying to get across is managers should be specialised,
| they should be someone who might or might not have been a
| programmer, but is now specifically managing people, or
| projects.
|
| Managers who code, do exist, as to engineers who manage.
| But its better at large companies to have specialists to
| manage projects and people. With support, training and
| performance management, you tend to get a better outcome.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Pournell's Iron Law1 in action. The administrators will always
| hoard the power and control promotions etc in an organisation.
|
| Studies have shown time and again that small autonomous teams
| is the most optimal setup for software development. Having a
| layer of Director, SVP and VPs on top of EMs is just Pournell's
| Iron Law manifesting itself.
|
| 1: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
| SilverBirch wrote:
| You're pretty much just repeating the constant engineer gripe
| of "What do managers even do". The point of management is co-
| ordination and direction. They're not there to contribute to
| the codebase, they're there to ensure people are contributing
| the right things to the codebase. If you really think these
| managers/directors/VPs are useless, describe what you think
| they're meant to be doing, and how it would get done without
| them.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > What do managers even do
|
| I understood the role of managers after I joined a chaotic
| startup which hired a bunch of people but didn't think of
| management. It was a complete mess. Senior engineers didn't
| want to manage, or didn't know how to do it. And good
| managers are very hard to find.
| roughly wrote:
| This is the sort of thing that you don't recognize until you
| become a manager, and then you do and you watch everyone on
| your team run around like a bunch of kids chasing whatever
| caught their attention that day and it all becomes a lot
| clearer.
|
| "Why are we doing this" and "how does it align with the
| business's goals" and more pointedly "what are we not doing
| so we can do this instead" and "is that the right trade-off"
| are all questions even very technically gifted engineers seem
| to have a really hard time answering.
| icedchai wrote:
| It's not that they are useless, it's that there are often too
| many of them. At a previous SV org I worked for, they had
| roughly 1 "dev manager" for every 4 engineers. You could have
| 1 for every 10 and achieve the same result.
| rwalle wrote:
| I guess you have never been a manager.
|
| There is no way you can manage 10 engineers and still have
| good technical knowledge of what they do and provide
| directions.
| icedchai wrote:
| I have, though the team size was 7 (company ran out of
| cash.) 10 may be too many. But 4 is way too small.
|
| Also, I want to add that the team with the manager of 4
| engineers, he provided _no_ technical direction. That was
| my job as the "tech lead."
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I'm not sure if that's true. 1 dev manager for 10 engineers
| might be tough. The sheer number of 1:1s would be insane,
| much less keeping track of the career trajectory of 10
| different people at 10 different parts of their lives. I
| guess this would be less difficult if everyone was already
| at senior or staff level, but you'd still have so much of
| that managers time sucked into 1:1s, reviews, and team
| retrospectives. I'm not even a manager and I start to feel
| neglected as an engineer once my manager juggles more than
| 6 other people, because I see they start to forget what I'm
| working on, and those 6 start to compete for attention to
| get promotions...
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| If coding is beneath you, working in software is beyond you.
|
| If you are a people person and love helping people so much, go
| work as a social worker, no?
|
| Managers are employees same as ICs. An IC can have more impact
| than a manager.
|
| http://programming-motherfucker.com/
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > If coding is beneath you, working in software is beyond
| you.
|
| maybe the problem you are trying to solve isn't code.
|
| > ICs do not need managers, managers need ICs.
|
| Given the level of infantilisation at meta, and big tech in
| general, I think this is clearly not the case. "self
| management" (ie bottoms up management) stopped working at
| meta many many years ago.
|
| > Some managers have negative productivity.
|
| So do a lot of ICs "I'm rewriting x in NEW_LANGUAGE because
| its faster" & "just read the code, that's where all the
| answers are" & "no you're doing it wrong, just re-write this
| major system to make it do something completely different
| because I've not taken the time to listen to your problem"
| Meta is a massive pile of "not invented here" tech debt, that
| was half arsed for impacc and then abandoned. Most of that is
| IC ill disciplined "oh but I'm BORED I'm going to make a new
| x".
|
| Don't get me wrong. I've had some complete bellends of
| managers, but that's not a function of them being a manager,
| that's a function of no training and ineffective performance
| management.
|
| Writing code is easy,
|
| Writing good code is not so easy
|
| Reusing other people's code is hard
|
| Making an entire company reuse code is fucking difficult.
|
| Getting prima-donnas to document code so that other people
| can use it quickly, super fucking difficult.
|
| Managing programmers so they don't start gnawing at the
| furniture, rebuild everything every six months, wank over the
| interns _and_ getting them produce a viable product, one that
| they can 't/don't/wont use is top level hard. It's something
| I don't want to do.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| I edited it as you replied, but sure.
|
| If you think developers are prima donnas wait until you
| hear about managers. Compared to developers, many of them
| fit much more into the prima donna description.
|
| Most managers don't document anything and when they do, it
| is of low quality and goes unmaintained quickly.
|
| Most managers out there are redundant and have no idea
| about what leadership is.
|
| The reason hackathons produce amazing results is because it
| is what happens when managers get out of the fucking way
| for 1 motherfucking day: improvement driven by builders
| that care about the product, not office politics.
| kerpotgh wrote:
| My experience is the exact opposite. Managers who code are
| usually talking about minutia bordering on micromanagement,
| never put or have enough time to develop people skills, ignore
| career development and growth, have little to no project
| management skills, do a terrible job with cross team planning
| etc.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I have worked with some fantastic "people managers" in my
| career who don't write code. But they usually faded into the
| background most of the time, except for when they needed to
| communicate something or I needed their help with something.
|
| The bad managers were always working hard to schedule more
| meetings, force extra process into every step of our work, make
| decisions about how we did our work, and to change our
| priorities to work on their pet projects.
|
| The bad managers occupied 10X more of my time than the good
| managers. It only took one or two bad managers to completely
| derail productivity of an entire group.
| anyfoo wrote:
| > I have worked with some fantastic "people managers" in my
| career who don't write code. But they usually faded into the
| background most of the time, except for when they needed to
| communicate something or I needed their help with something.
|
| Yep, that's familiar. Good "people managers" have always been
| the ones that removed obstacles, and didn't become one
| themselves.
| scarface74 wrote:
| My experience is just the opposite. Most of the really
| technical people who were promoted to management that I've
| worked with don't know how to fight the political fights for
| their reports or get the raises, recognition or promotions that
| their reports want.
| IncRnd wrote:
| https://archive.is/20230207181413/https://www.bloomberg.com/...
| bennysonething wrote:
| I want my career path as a developer to never be anything but
| individual contributor. I like teaching newer Devs but I don't
| want to manage them. Maybe I'm being naive?
| giantg2 wrote:
| I just wish I had a career path at all.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >I want my career path as a developer to never be anything but
| individual contributor. I like teaching newer Devs but I don't
| want to manage them. Maybe I'm being naive?
|
| You can do this, but you will have to accept the plateau.
| There's really nowhere to go beyond Staff/L6, unless you're
| some super genius full of brilliant ideas or luck into being
| involved in a game changing product launch. Everything beyond
| that becomes politics.
| rconti wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with that because you might not even
| want to go up that high.
| the_af wrote:
| Every role has a plateau at any given company.
|
| More importantly, why would one always want to "go beyond"
| any specific role, assuming the pay is good?
| eklitzke wrote:
| The same applies to being a manager though. You're not going
| to get promoted forever in any role, at some point you'll hit
| a terminal level, whether that's in an IC track or a
| management track. And it's not a problem as long as you find
| your work fulfilling.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| aka the Peter principle
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >The same applies to being a manager though.
|
| It depends. If you're able to side-step the middle manager
| doldrums to Director/VP, and you know how to play the game,
| the sky's the limit. But IC's are pretty hard capped at L6
| short of being involved in the creation of a new business.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| Well I guess the difference is that the top of the
| technical leadership track is ostensibly CTO, which is a
| "higher" role than you'd typically see on the IC side.
|
| That said I totally agree with you overall and think the
| argument you are responding to is a little silly. You can
| have an absolutely fantastic career staying IC forever. The
| fact that you might cap out at "staff/principal/whatever
| engineer," a hugely influential and generally very well
| paid role, should not be viewed as a downside to that
| track.
| ratorx wrote:
| Well, in terms of the org chart, you'll always be higher
| at an equivalent point in the management track compared
| to the IC track (starting from team lead, who will report
| to the team manager), but that's not necessarily mean
| there's not that as room for growth.
|
| Even the CTO can have incredibly senior engineers
| reporting to them as a consultant of sorts. Sure, the
| probability of arriving at that role is low, but then so
| is the probability of becoming CTO.
| WkndTriathlete wrote:
| Not all companies have that plateau.
| flatline wrote:
| Some people spend their whole careers like this, there is
| nothing wrong with it. I personally avoided management for
| years, until I was offered a lead role over a team of roughly 4
| people in Feb 2020. I had been working on the product for years
| and knew all the ins and outs and had a vision for its future.
| Cue the pandemic and everyone going remote - and the project
| ballooning to 25 people across three organizations. I
| absolutely thrived. I realized I'd done everything coding wise
| that I was really interested in, and that job had grown stale.
| I have matured, and found I have more social skills than in my
| 20s and early 30s. I found that not everyone could or would be
| interested in driving things where they needed to go to
| successfully ship a product. You may someday surprise yourself
| at how your interests and capabilities evolve.
| sfpotter wrote:
| Hell yeah. This is a great response. Lots of positivity and
| challenging the usual HN tropes! More of this please.
| serpix wrote:
| my advice is to keep doors open. You will age and your needs
| and expectations may change. You can always start a transition
| to take on more managerial duties while doing individual
| contribution.
| irrational wrote:
| I've been working professionally for 22 years and am still an
| individual contributor. I've refused all attempts to move me
| into any kind of lead/manager position.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| You're only naive in thinking that you will never want to be
| anything else.
| eklitzke wrote:
| This is easy to do and not looked down upon at FAANGs, but
| harder to do at smaller companies.
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| Amazon has a whole tree of long tenured engineers that are
| strictly ICs. Principle engineers are still ICs
| turdprincess wrote:
| The principal engineer role usually comes with expected
| impact on a big organization or even the whole company.
| Having that kind of impact is impossible as an "IC" in the
| traditional sense. Unless you are in some very cutting edge
| area, or get very lucky, your principal role will involve a
| big dose of the same leadership and management tasks that a
| manager or director would have.
| r00fus wrote:
| So what is your vision of IC "in the traditional sense"?
|
| Most senior engineers at organizations require a
| significant amount of coordination and people-skills. If
| you're not managing a team, you're definitely managing the
| relationship with your manager and coworkers/project
| teammates.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > The principal engineer role usually comes with expected
| impact on a big organization or even the whole company.
|
| Yes, but you're not managing _people_. It 's a lot of
| collaboration and leadership, certainly, but not doing any
| of the HR-adjacent bureaucracy that comes with being
| management.
| lifeinthevoid wrote:
| It's kind of satisfying to take care of people and help them
| develop.
| stcroixx wrote:
| I've been in a role like this for many years in a small
| company. I doubt it would really work in a rigid FAANG
| environment with formalities like levels and performance
| reviews and all that - it would get too political and
| competitive.
|
| Other managers will always try to change your mind on this.
| When layoffs come around, they usually are more likely to get
| laid off and their tech skills are now stale and they have to
| rely on their 'network' to get another management job if
| they're lucky. Not a position I want to put myself in.
| ratorx wrote:
| This is a pretty well-defined role in FAANG. Usually the
| promotion criteria to become more senior as an IC will
| require demonstrating mentorship.
|
| Separately, there is also the Tech Lead track, where you
| don't get reports, but rather final say over an increasingly
| larger area of influence and drive cross-team/org projects.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| That's called "technical track"
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Staff Engineer1 is the path for you my friend. If you don't
| want to manage people, focus on creating maximum impact on your
| project.
|
| I think the term IC is a misnomer and is detrimental to our
| field. Afterall the code you write, the designs you make etc
| are part of the larger puzzle which completes the project. No
| work you do is in isolation.
|
| https://staffeng.com/
| penjelly wrote:
| same, im not interested in managing people for at least next
| 5-10 years.
| posharma wrote:
| Things are not as black and white as they seem. It's a spectrum -
| from people who detest mgmt to people who realize the value of
| it. You fall somewhere in the spectrum depending on your
| experience in the industry and depending on your experience with
| past/current managers. Unfortunately, at some point managers (M1,
| M2, VPs, etc) take undue advantage of things in an organization
| and dilute the true picture to an extent that all management
| seems worthless. Having been on both the IC and management side I
| can relate to and appreciate the importance of both roles. What
| Meta is doing is right, but be careful when speaking about
| management in general.
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| I think this is a great move. My understanding is that some
| reporting chains in facebook have 12 links between IC and
| Zuckerberg, which is crazy inefficient. Enormous organizations
| are able to run effectively with 5-6 links from IC to CEO.
| Managers managing managers managing turtles all the way down is a
| horrible form of "administrative bloat". You see bloat like this
| in enormous organizations like colleges, governments, and now
| monopolistic tech companies. This is besides the point that I
| don't think that big tech has successfully groomed many managers
| into people are capable of actually managing businesses; they
| don't drive value, they preside over decisions and make a case
| for higher headcount in the next planning cycle.
| warner25 wrote:
| Wow. I'll say that even in the Army, famous for its bloat,
| there are arguably fewer than 12 links (following the legal
| chain of command) between the lowest ranking private and the
| President of the United States...
|
| Private -> Team Leader -> Squad Leader -> Platoon Leader ->
| Company Commander -> Battalion Commander -> Division Commander
| -> Corps Commander -> Combatant Commander -> SECDEF -> POTUS
|
| Of course we also pad that with a lot of senior enlisted
| advisors, executive officers, chiefs-of-staff, deputy
| commanders, etc. who can effectively be additional buffers
| between each echelon.
| yowzadave wrote:
| If you want a flatter org structure, it seems like it would be
| easier to achieve this if manager/IC roles were distinct. If a
| manager is also writing code, then they won't have the time to
| manage as many other employees, and the total number of
| managers/layers would need to increase.
| AndyNemmity wrote:
| I've avoided every attempt to make me management. I've changed
| roles, intentionally shutdown workstreams when they were done
| instead of creating a new silo. I just want to work on things. I
| would be happy about this, but I'm sure others aren't.
| drewcoo wrote:
| That almost makes sense to me.
|
| Are they re-interviewing to be ICs? (paywall)
| la64710 wrote:
| Frankly most of what managers and middle managers do can be
| codified to a large extent like scheduling , tasking , following
| up , projections and planning. Yet instead of sticking to only
| these things often managers end up being the most insecure person
| in the team .. always looking over their shoulders to who is
| gaining more traction than them and continuously inventing BS
| projects to keep the minions busy or to boost their credibility
| for the next position.
| Bahamut wrote:
| This is a kind of interesting change to see FB make to me (I had
| heard about this a couple of weeks ago from my brother, who was
| one of the ICs affected by the layoffs), as recently while I've
| been promoted into management at a different one of the FAANGs,
| I'm still doing a fairly heavy amount of coding out of necessity,
| maybe even moreso in some ways since my team isn't able to handle
| the amount of projects/work given to us without covering some of
| the most undesirable work.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| My company does yearly 360s. But you only can rate peers and
| maybe one level up. I think they could flush out incompetent
| managers (there are many) quickly if people could rank managers
| several layers up. I can think of several directors who basically
| destroyed the culture of their department. They were good at
| talking to their uppers but made horrible decisions in hiring and
| management. But there was no way to raise this issue in a safe
| manner.
| bfrog wrote:
| Didn't google try this? What was the result?
| philip1209 wrote:
| At a previous company, I reported to a director who had no other
| reports. That director reported to a GM who had zero other
| reports. That GM reported to a VP who had one other report.
|
| The overhead of stakeholder management is out of control. With
| this structure, the leadership wanted all roadmaps and planning
| to be bottoms-up, which just meant a lot of thrash as every layer
| tried to figure out what the layer above wanted.
|
| I admire how Airbnb has switched to a top-down structure, which
| eliminates a lot of the unnecessary administrative bloat at
| companies. It means that the most experienced people are steering
| the ship. https://fourweekmba.com/airbnb-organizational-struture/
| yalogin wrote:
| I know the general view is middle management sucks and I can see
| asking first level managers to become ICs may make sense in some
| cases, but that also means someone else is managing x times the
| number of employees. How is that supposed to scale?
| ketzo wrote:
| It's a good question.
|
| I mean, if there are lots of managers at Meta who only have 4-5
| direct reports, you could see this scaling decently well --
| turn two teams into one, and that's not so bad.
|
| But I don't think one person can constructively manage more
| than about 20 engineers at the absolute maximum.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Good managers are few and far between and there are many ways to
| fail in the role. If you have low level ICs then you've got to be
| contributing as well, leading from the front. If you have high
| performing ICs then you need to instead be a coach, protecting
| and representing your talent to the next level up.
|
| The best engineering teams need the latter but a lot of managers
| come up through the ranks looking for a role like the former. I
| know Meta played that game for a long time and I can completely
| see why they want to walk it back. They need their high
| performing ICs to actually do stuff again and start shipping
| diffs. The luxury of being there to level up the noobs is over,
| for now.
| cdnsteve wrote:
| Right, I'm sure that will work. Maybe don't lose $1B a month on a
| product nobody wants with Bobblehead graphics that make the Wii
| look good.
| saos wrote:
| Yeah I always thought manager should also be able to do the job.
| But that seems to have changed these last few years.
| s1mon wrote:
| This is interesting. During my last job search I talked to
| colleagues who had positions at Oculus and Tesla. Both of them
| talked about things being set up for either management or IC, but
| not both. I prefer to do some of both. Just management would lead
| to my IC skills getting rusty, which would mean that some of the
| management that I do would become more and more disconnected from
| current practices. Just being a high level IC can divorce you
| from determining the direction of your work. High level ICs
| who've never dealt with the realities of managing projects or
| programs can be frustrating to deal with since they may not
| understand why things can't always be done in the perfect way.
| bitL wrote:
| Hmm, it might be a good time to join Meta without the management
| dumpster fire going on. There are plenty of tech companies with
| little to no management like Valve or JetBrains doing well, so it
| might help Meta as well.
| sbarre wrote:
| I've said it before on here: being a lower-level manager in a
| large company is worse than an entry-level job.
|
| No one cares about your job experience (all those painful
| internal tools you now have to use to manage and report on your
| team) so you're just expected to grit through all the broken
| processes and inefficiencies (kiss your evenings and Sunday
| afternoons goodbye), and you are mostly powerless, particularly
| in orgs with centrally managed budgets.
| sytelus wrote:
| For this work, there should be equal rewards for ICs and
| managers. That is, ICs should get equal probability to get to
| level X in the company as managers. This actually used to be the
| case in old big tech, in early days. ICs can get to all the way
| to Director and Distinguished level with equal probability of
| their managers. But during last couple of decades everything
| changed. Big tech career ladder now states that merely making
| impact is not good enough but one needs to "scale" the impact.
| This is sheepish way of saying that one must be manager in order
| to claim "scaling". Consequently, there no higher level promos in
| big tech if you are mere IC. Unless this is solved, everything
| else is just talk and wishful thinking.
| ThalesX wrote:
| Potentially inflammatory story, but I think about it
| occasionally, and this is a good context.
|
| I was out having a meal with old college buddies; most of us are
| developers, but some have become team leaders and managers. I
| will call it a statistical anomaly, but the worst engineers are
| now in 'people management' positions.
|
| The discussion ended with a guy boasting about how his team has X
| people, and he's looking to grow it to Y this year. Naturally, we
| asked if he needed that much headcount. Turns out, no. It's their
| way of assessing value and getting promoted. He gave almost 0
| fucks about the quality of the people employed and how adding
| them to the team would impact quality. The only thing on his mind
| was getting that number up to pump up his CV for the following
| position of managing people.
|
| I'm gladly reporting that he managed to do that and has indeed
| been promoted, and I still can't say what he does for a living
| apart from 'enable engineers to grow their careers.'
|
| I've also been in positions where my 'people managers' advised me
| against my interests. Unfortunately, I am my own people manager,
| so I took my own advice, which worked out wonderfully. I wake up
| from time to time thankful that I didn't follow the advice of my
| managers and was able to see some of them in the audience from
| the stage.
| hourago wrote:
| > I'm gladly reporting that he managed to do that and has
| indeed been promoted, and I still can't say what he does for a
| living apart from 'enable engineers to grow their careers.'
|
| And that is the kind of person that survives purges like the
| one Meta is doing. The managers that did not grow an empire,
| the managers that did their jobs and cared for their teams are
| the ones that will be removed.
|
| When an organization incentivizes managers, directors and vice-
| presidents to grow empires, when the axe comes down it does it
| on the people that did not play the game.
|
| I do not understand why some people gets so happy when
| management gets the axe. Do you think that good managers that
| cared for the team instead of their own career are the ones
| that stay?
| ThalesX wrote:
| > I do not understand why some people gets so happy when
| management gets the axe. Do you think that good managers that
| cared for the team instead of their own career are the ones
| that stay?
|
| I am not happy for any axing. In case this question was
| directed at me. I am happy for expecting managers to also be
| able to contribute to the product instead of just managing
| people.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The skills I want from a good manager are mostly orthogonal
| to what I want from a coworker working on a project
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I am in a weird spot where I am a manager and expected to
| be an individual contributor. I am also supposed to play
| several other roles as well. You are right, the skill
| sets are vastly different. It is incredibly difficult to
| have to context switch between manager mind set and
| developer multiple times a day. Both of my roles likely
| suffer due to my restrictions on being able to focus on
| one.
| posharma wrote:
| Meta expects you to have managed at least 40 ppl before
| considering them for a M2 role. M2s made $800k+. Why wouldn't a
| manager not be motivated to grow his empire? How else do you
| think managers will grow to VPs? We discuss ideals here but the
| reality on the ground is vastly different.
| vrc wrote:
| Yeah. To become a D1 you need to be an M2 who successfully
| manages (ideally) more than one other M2, who themselves
| might manage M2s or M1s or a combo. So you get really large
| chains of people at the same level in a reporting line, all
| managing and trying to show that they should be D1s.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| No lie that sounds really lame.
| Wagthesam wrote:
| It's actually amazing to see empire builders in action.
| While some EMs are busy trying to keep their teams on
| track, others are rolling entire teams under them and
| growing their mandate
| gruffin wrote:
| > Meta expects you to have managed at least 40 ppl before
| considering them for a M2 role
|
| Not true. At least not as of late. M2 promos can lean on
| different things, e.g. delivered impact, over established
| people scope. But the person trying to promote you need to be
| able to do that well. Source: Have done M2 promotions at
| Meta.
| posharma wrote:
| I'm not talking about promotions particularly.
| mnd999 wrote:
| Directly and at the same time? I'm relatively new to this
| game, but that seems like far too many.
| pc86 wrote:
| Depends on your definition of "direct," but it includes
| skip-levels. This is what some of the other comments were
| referring to with growing your team large enough you end up
| with managers reporting to you.
|
| I've been an IC reporting to a manager, who himself
| reported to a manager (as opposed to director or senior
| manager), and while the second one was technically my skip
| it was more like I just had two direct supervisors.
| mulligan wrote:
| no, he's referring to the total size of the team, not
| directly
| rippercushions wrote:
| Building empires is quite standard in management. I work at
| $BIGCO as a manager and have been told that, in practice, if I
| want to get a promotion to the next level, I'll need to grow my
| team large enough to have other managers reporting to me first.
| So my primary target is to convince the powers that be to give
| me headcount, and what my team actually _does_ is strictly
| secondary.
|
| Now I'm a mere peon, but this replicates up the chain
| increasing an order of magnitude each level, meaning up top you
| get VPs backstabbing each other to take over the victim's
| headcount and wrangle that sweet SVP promotion.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Companies get what they incentivize for.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > I work at $BIGCO as a manager and have been told that, in
| practice, if I want to get a promotion to the next level,
| I'll need to grow my team large enough to have other managers
| reporting to me first.
|
| Imagine if at $BIGCO they told you that in practice, you need
| to reduce headcount and run as lean as possible so that your
| team brings as much monetary value for the company with the
| least amount of expense instead...
| indigochill wrote:
| But if you were CEO and you wanted to, how would you engineer
| the incentives such that actually productive managers
| succeeded? Or is there something about corporate structure
| that makes it impossible?
| version_five wrote:
| Give them a budget and agree on a set of accountabilities.
| The same model as buying a managed software consulting
| project.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Paying for consultants often isn't a good use of money
| though, right? Like often the problem is that the right
| metrics are hard to know in advance and they are
| typically games in a way that makes it easy for the
| consultant to meet them without actually delivering what
| is desired. I think they also make it hard to take
| (calculated) risks which isn't necessarily what you'd
| want.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Step 1: Read every Dilbert comic
|
| Step 2: Realize that what you requested is impossible for
| sufficiently large organizations
|
| Step 3: Negotiate a golden parachute for yourself. Don't
| hate the player, hate the game
| pc86 wrote:
| I would think an easy way - and coincidentally, the best
| for business - would be to make it too dangerous to be the
| stereotypical office politics back-stabbing VP type. Make
| it known that that behavior will land you out on your ass,
| with no severance or parachute, and no recommendations for
| future employment.
|
| But, I've never seen that in practice. Maybe the politics
| of the C suite mean you _want_ those office politics back-
| stabbing folks around to take those high level positions?
| Tyr42 wrote:
| I mean, then the backstabbers just need to frame someone
| for backstabbing and get their path cleared up.
|
| You also need a good way to tell apart the backstabbers
| from the good guys.
| deltree7 wrote:
| I know HN hates him, but Elon Musk has figured this out and
| that's why he will always deliver outstanding returns
| compared to others.
| scarface74 wrote:
| His company hasn't delivered outstanding returns as far
| profits. Tesla's stock is mostly hype.
| chris11 wrote:
| Twitter is private, but Elon definitely destroyed value
| when he took it over.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| How exactly has he figured this out? I see an egomaniac
| that drives his employees as if they're just cogs in a
| machine.
| dasil003 wrote:
| I think both you and the GP are missing the essence of
| what Elon is. He is neither an amazing operator and
| businessman, nor is he a slave driving demon. He _does_
| have a huge ego and need for attention, I 'll give you
| that, but fundamentally he is someone who cares more
| about solving big problems than he does about money or
| people. The push to deify or villify him is all about
| satisfying ones own judgement, but personally I find
| those reductive opinions to be far less interesting than
| actually looking at the various things he's done and
| evaluating them on their own merits.
| rippercushions wrote:
| Per this thread, this seems preferable to letting
| managers spend all their time building empires.
|
| Also, if you're working for any large company, you _are_
| a cog in the machine.
| [deleted]
| adventured wrote:
| First, you have to hire exceptional people, if you can.
|
| If you can't get good enough people, you're going to fail
| hard inevitably no matter what you do (if you've got a
| quasi monopoly moat it may take a long rot to get there).
| ninjagoo wrote:
| There might be fundamental incompatibilities here because
| of orthogonal goals - if you're an ambitious person in a
| corporate hierarchy won't one (or maybe even primary) goal
| be to climb the ladder? And if you're a founder won't your
| goal be to 'grow the product or service'?
|
| Now one way to climb the ladder may be to grow the product
| or service, but in a larger org the ability to influence a
| product or service in a major way might be a bit limited,
| with decision-making at the business level being controlled
| by upper echelons. So the ladder-climbing process would
| select for different skills and temperament than
| founding/running a company.
|
| Essentially, in a corporate hierarchy, we're asking people
| with ladder-climbing skills to become business people as
| they reach the top, and not everyone can make that
| transition successfully. In fact, I'd go so far as to say
| that very few can actually make that transition
| successfully.
|
| Human brains learn through feedback [1]. To become a good
| business person, you need to run a business and get
| feedback just like a real founder/CEO, including business
| failures. Your question essentially becomes - how can a CEO
| structure incentives so that managers at all levels become
| good business people?
|
| It's a great question, to which there is no simple answer
| that I know of. Would appreciate any pointers to potential
| solutions.
|
| One way could be to treat each team at a certain level (say
| no more than 50 people) as a business of its own. It might
| not be the most efficient way for the corporation to
| deliver on its objectives, but it would likely create a lot
| of business-savvy managers. But now you have a pool of
| business-savvy folks that want to get paid like founders,
| and that might not be possible in a corporation. In terms
| of (in)efficiency, you could have duplicate teams that
| provide similar services, wasting resources, and adding
| costs to spin up new teams as existing ones fail or move
| on.
|
| Something like this might be more feasible at a societal
| level - a capitalistic structure that encourages the growth
| of smaller size businesses while inhibiting the growth of
| mid- to large corporates.
|
| Open source organizations actually seem to be the closest
| that I've seen that seem to operate this way.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA
| mooreds wrote:
| Hire people with the right kind of ambition, says Ben
| Horowitz: https://www.fastcompany.com/1685869/right-kind-
| ambition
| scarface74 wrote:
| You act as if this behavior is unique to management. Every
| leveling guideline I've seen for any big tech company
| (including the one I work for) requires you to demonstrate
| "scope" and "impact".
| rippercushions wrote:
| For ICs those are usually measured with product metrics,
| not butts in seats.
| scarface74 wrote:
| How many Google engineers got promoted by launching a
| product that was cancelled soon after?
| mooreds wrote:
| I remember in my first job, one of the older guys telling me
| that at a certain size of company, it's all about the turf
| battles between the upper level managers. And as a line level
| employee, you just want to be on the right side of the
| battle.
|
| Sounds pretty miserable to me; I suppose that's why I've
| stayed at smallcos/startups my entire career.
| andix wrote:
| I think once a company hits around 2-5k office workers, the
| whole company can be occupied with internal processes,
| without delivering any value at all.
| rot13xor wrote:
| Communication overhead, like edges in a graph, scales
| quadratically. The computing analogy is going from 1 core
| to 8 core CPU gives far less than 8x performance if your
| task is not parallelizable. The solution is
| compartmentalization and clear interface boundaries,
| which is why microservices are so popular. Instead of 5k
| people working on 1 project, have 100 projects each with
| 50 people plus a few architects who define the
| interfaces.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| Oh, so that's why the linux kernel uses microservices so
| much.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| It's easy to say that but there's lots of large, old,
| dysfunctional dinosaurs shipping oil, cars, or life
| insurance policies day in and day out.
|
| Meanwhile there's plenty of small, nimble, managed-by-
| best-practices would be disruptors not shipping much of
| anything.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Isn't this exactly what the book Bullshit Jobs is about?
| People build mini empires as a proxy for value.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| I experienced the exact same thing, and have watched the
| mediocre engineers that went straight for management move up
| the chain. IC engineering just doesnt have that good of career
| advancement. The cynical career advice is to just move into
| management as soon as possible.
| posharma wrote:
| Exactly. IC career is not as sexy as HN makes it to be.
| People pursuing IC careers are doing it for personal reasons,
| definitely not for growth. Compared to management it takes an
| order of magnitude more time, influence and energy to get
| promoted in the IC ladder beyond staff.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Intelligence Community?
| exac wrote:
| Individual Contributor
| [deleted]
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I mean, I don't know. What people like about IC careers is
| that it's even an option for an ambitious, hardworking
| person to not have to spend their time in management. Staff
| engineers have a ton more responsibility and authority than
| an IC could ever get in, like, insurance claims adjusting.
| nocsi wrote:
| If you think about it, middle managers are nothing more than
| recruiters. If the metric really is the number of heads their
| team grows, then the only thing they'd do is increasing their
| team size. In some areas, recruiters make 40-80k a referral on
| senior/specialties.
|
| The other thing is team growth is a defensive measure against
| recession layoffs and probably keeps eyes off a team if they've
| recently grew. It's either grow or die.
| BhavdeepSethi wrote:
| I've seen engineers who were asked to move to EM role because
| they weren't strong technically to move up the ladder. They
| were able to move up multiple ladders in the EM track using the
| same technique you mentioned above (empire building).
|
| With a bigger empire, they're allowed to take credit for high
| impact engg in their chain, and including the low performers
| simple for total headcount. It seems like a win-win situation
| honestly.
| fortituded0002 wrote:
| > I've also been in positions where my 'people managers'
| advised me against my interests.
|
| Generally curious here - do you mind adding some
| examples/details? Looking back at my career I can't think of a
| time when any 'people manager' advised me against my own
| interests. I am no longer an IC and since I haven't experienced
| this, I worry it's a blind spot in how I'm interacting with
| others.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| If you are encouraging the people you manage to make personal
| decisions which benefit your employer more than they benefit
| those individuals then it's very possible you're running
| afoul of this. They would likely be things similar to what's
| described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34699720
| (not my stories, just realized they're relevant to this
| question).
| costcofries wrote:
| There's nothing surprising about this. I work at FANGMA and I
| see this very very often.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| The person you're speaking about is obviously not a good
| steward for the company. That said, what about "Dont hate the
| player, hate the game" -- that seems to apply here.
|
| I've been at companies which offer good IC tracks upward
| alongside management tracks upwards.
|
| On the other hand, the company which you describe above are
| those which do not offer an acceptable IC track upward.
|
| Metrics become about headcount rather than value/revenue
| delivered. The worst companies are those which will literally
| have headcount requirements for promotion, because such bright-
| line requirements drive the behaviour you're writing about.
| brundolf wrote:
| To counter-anecdote: I've basically never had a bad manager.
| Several have been exceptional, shielding me from the whims of
| higher-ups while making sure I don't burn out by encouraging me
| to take more time off, etc
|
| It probably helps that I've only ever worked at small-ish
| companies, and it might also help that my managers have pretty
| much all been technical (either while managing or at some
| previous time)
|
| I would _guess_ , based on limited data, that like most other
| regressive culture problems this heavily depends on company
| size
| ThalesX wrote:
| I'm glad you had this experience! :)
|
| Do you think it's a local vs. global maxima situation? I've
| had a moment in my life where I had to work 16 hours / day
| for two months, but in the end it was worth it for me. Time
| out would have been the wrong advice in that situation. I've
| also had situations where the whims of higher-ups were
| misunderstood by my direct manager and direct communication
| unraveled the mistery. Shielding would have been the wrong
| help in that situation.
|
| What does small-ish mean? I find that most small-ish (what I
| consider small-ish) companies had a rather flat hierarchy.
| Managers if anything were contributors and their managerial
| role was aggregating feedback for the executives so they
| don't get every IC knocking at their door.
| brundolf wrote:
| > I've also had situations where the whims of higher-ups
| were misunderstood by my direct manager and direct
| communication unraveled the mistery
|
| I'd guess this is more likely to happen with non-technical
| managers. Not sure, but that's a guess
|
| > What does small-ish mean?
|
| My current company (~300) is by far the largest I've worked
| at. Next-largest was about 100
|
| > had a rather flat hierarchy
|
| Yeah, that tends to be true in my experience and probably
| contributes to this
|
| > Managers if anything were contributors and their
| managerial role was aggregating feedback for the executives
| so they don't get every IC knocking at their door
|
| Most of my managers have had a tremendous amount of
| professional humility, which I think is key. The main jobs
| they've covered (in different portions at different
| companies, and sometimes with some IC thrown in too) were:
|
| - People-manager: make sure people are unblocked, happy,
| not burning out, working on things that play to their
| strengths, feeling good about their career and work and not
| on the verge of leaving. Really a support-role
|
| - Shield: go to the stakeholder meetings, field requests
| made toward the team, manage the jira tickets. Then take
| all that and digest it, bring it to the team to discuss
| capacity and direction, and then take the results back to
| the outside stakeholders and use managerial authority to
| push back if needed
|
| - Product expert: stay in the headspace of the user,
| features, experiments, overall goals/roadmap, and represent
| those priorities to the ICs. This one's a fine line- it's
| easy for them to go off into the clouds and pass things
| down one-directionally. But when it's collaborative, and
| we're discussing things as a group with different
| individual focuses, it works fantastically
|
| At my current company we actually have two managers per
| team- one of the first kind, one of the third kind. This
| can work really well
|
| The most important component for all of these to work well
| is for the manager to see themselves as a team member, not
| a boss. These teams (when they worked well) did not operate
| on a hierarchy unless a tie had to be broken. Normally, we
| were all just collaborators with different specialties, who
| brought our different perspectives to the table and
| advocated for what we saw to be important. I can't
| emphasize enough how well this works when you can get
| everybody in that frame of mind
| ghaff wrote:
| Not that everyone was perfect, but I've only once had a
| manager that made me go to my skip-level manager and tell him
| that they needed to put me somewhere/anywhere else or I was
| out. Didn't hurt that I had a good relationship with skip-
| level and and he wasn't wowed by my manager either.
|
| Did a bunch of legacy stuff for a while but ended up fine.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| i have a whacky theory--based on very little--that the reason
| IBM turned away from APL was because fewer APL programmers did
| more, and that is a potentially bad thing for management, for a
| number of reasons, one of which your anecdote describes.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Empire building was a major problem at a local company I worked
| for.
|
| They got around it by setting up multiple reporting chains and
| co-managers. If you were a manager at a certain level and you
| worked with certain departments, you got to say that all of the
| people in that department "reported to" you.
|
| It created a laughable situation where there were only a few
| thousand people in the company, but I knew several dozen
| managers who had 200-400 people "reporting" to them.
| Individuals could technically "report to" a dozen managers,
| though they may never interact with those managers.
|
| They all proudly display their number of reports on their
| LinkedIn profiles.
| politician wrote:
| "He gave almost 0 fucks about the quality of the people
| employed"
|
| "[He] enables engineers to grow their careers."
|
| Just what exactly was accomplished here?
| alas44 wrote:
| Out of curiosity what were your own advice vs your manager's (I
| guess career related)?
| ThalesX wrote:
| Career-related. Most of it is low-level stuff, like what I'd
| be expected to do for my yearly reviews vs. what I wanted to
| do. I'll mention two stories that just sprang to mind, though
| there are more.
|
| 1 - I was working in a rich .NET environment; JavaScript was
| beginning to show its teeth and wasn't taken seriously by
| 'serious' programmers. I was going with my manager through
| the SMART objectives I needed to do for the year, and I
| mentioned wanting to learn about this new thing NodeJS and
| JavaScript on the server side. He kept pushing that I should
| do a presentation on our use of Entity Framework to get some
| clout against the Java department. I insisted that I was more
| interested in learning something new than just doing some
| presentation that has been done by almost every engineer on
| our team. He accused me of being an ego-driven engineer and
| wouldn't accept it. I learned NodeJS that year, did a
| presentation on it (it was fun, not a single senior thought
| this was worthwhile), and ultimately ended up using it a lot,
| and that headstart helped me.
|
| 2 - I was talking to the head architect in a large
| multinational, expressing my interest in joining the
| 'architect guild.' My manager informed me that I was too
| young (about 28 then) to consider this career move and that
| architecture is for older people. I found that to be rather
| stupid, and when I got offered a CTO role and the possibility
| to architect a system, I talked to my manager about it,
| telling him that I was very interested in being in that kind
| of role and asked if there's any way I could find it inside
| the company. He told me that 99% of startups failed and that
| my choice was between employment and ending up on the
| streets. I took the chance and couldn't help but smile,
| getting our first million dollars with him in the audience,
| front row seats paid by the corporation.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| Not the OP but it's not uncommon for a manager to need one of
| their IC reports to replace them (and therefore go into
| management themselves) before the senior manager can move up.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| What a nice guy. Managers at large companies should hire as
| many people as possible to improve their station in life.
| neosat wrote:
| FB and Zuck have always prioritized a culture of building, and
| created a place (at least in the early days) where builders could
| thrive. Over time with massive hiring this obviously changed. If
| they need to further 'trim the fat' Part of this move could also
| be as a mechanism for selecting out people who are not
| comfortable with IC responsibilities as a way to identify people
| who would not have been a fit for FB in the early days, and thus
| an attempt to revise at least some of the early culture.
| lucasgonze wrote:
| I was an engineer, then a manager, and now I'm transitioning back
| to about 80% IC work. There were a couple big obstacles.
|
| - Getting your skills back means getting hired to do engineering
| in the absence of sharp skills. I had to fake-it-to-make-it for a
| little while.
|
| - Moving from manager to IC is a risky story on your resume,
| where you want to show continuous growth. You can't take just any
| IC role. In some way it has to show a positive career trajectory.
|
| Now that I'm over the hump things are great. I love engineering
| and am glad to do it all day.
| Animats wrote:
| It was once a rule at Microsoft that if you supervised less than
| 100 people you had to write code. Is that still the case?
| switchbak wrote:
| The vast majority of the managers I've worked with wouldn't be
| particularly good ICs, not so sure of the wisdom of this move.
| Maybe it's a way to slow roll a bunch of layoffs.
| andrestc wrote:
| The technical bar for EMs at Meta is quite high.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| As a former EM at Meta, I beg to differ.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| It's definitely a way to reset the culture and get rid of
| people who don't fit what Mark is trying to achieve.
| justizin wrote:
| It can't be that difficult to contribute to the achievement
| of absolutely tanking the company's value by investing in a
| dead-end VR-for-work platform that was always just a
| distraction to avoid responding in any way to Congress
| pressing him about election interference.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Look man, Apple tanked Facebooks valuation, not the
| Metaverse.
|
| And that's presumably why he wants the Metaverse, so he's
| not just a sharecropper on someone else's digital platform.
| r00fus wrote:
| I absolutely don't know why Facebook balked at making
| their own phone back in the day. Facebook's entire value
| prop about 10-15 years ago was the fact that you could
| find anyone on there who you even remotely knew.
|
| Imagine (10 years ago) being able to use an FB version of
| Siri/Alexa to "connect me to that girl Megan from my 5th
| grade classroom". Sure sounds compelling.
|
| Instead FB released a half-assed "dailer app/widget" and
| forgot about it. Today that window of opportunity closed.
| krschultz wrote:
| I don't think they balked, they failed.
| blsapologist42 wrote:
| They tried to make their own phone but it just didn't
| work out. So they ended up releasing something just so
| they could show something after all that investment. Of
| course teh company was much smalelr then.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> I absolutely don 't know why Facebook balked at making
| their own phone back in the day._
|
| Why would that have gone any better for them than it went
| for Amazon and Microsoft?
| klodolph wrote:
| I think Facebook didn't have the kind of capital to do it
| at the time they would have needed the captial to make a
| phone. Keep in mind that the Windows phone was reportedly
| _pretty good_ but came out in 2010 and it turned out the
| smart phone space didn't give out prizes for third place.
| People always underestimate the cost of developing a
| smartphone, even when working with modern OEMs, never
| mind working in the 2008-2010 time frame.
| swatcoder wrote:
| > I absolutely don't know why Facebook balked at making
| their own phone back in the day.
|
| Because it's really hard to make good hardware cost-
| effectively. The only companies that have succeeded in
| the phone market are practiced hardware companies, except
| for one software company that focused on making a
| adaptable OS for hardware companies to use.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| > connect me to that girl Megan from my 5th grade
| classroom
|
| if you only look at the tech then yeah it's compelling.
| but in reality it's creepy and people don't want it.
| hello_moto wrote:
| > I absolutely don't know why Facebook balked at making
| their own phone back in the day
|
| Microsoft and its phone story is enough to explain why.
|
| Facebook needs a new platform that they control
| themselves and Phone is D.o.A because they have to
| compete with other companies (Apple, Google). Nobody
| wants to have 2 phones and nobody wants yet-another-
| Android phone "just for Facebook".
| fullshark wrote:
| He's not spending the same amount as the Apollo Space
| Program on VR to distract Congress.
| drstewart wrote:
| Can you describe in detail how a strategic internal VR
| initiative "distracts" Congress about election
| interference?
| vkou wrote:
| I somehow doubt Mark has great visibility into the culture of
| his _line_ managers.
|
| If he were making SVPs become ICs, I'd credit this move to
| him. Otherwise, it's just the big-business org doing big-
| business things.
| zabzonk wrote:
| but what the heck is he "trying to achieve" - write a third-
| rate web video game?
| friedman23 wrote:
| > The vast majority of the managers I've worked with wouldn't
| be particularly good ICs, not so sure of the wisdom of this
| move.
|
| The point is that the company doesn't need the managers.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Depends on the company, of course (and I've no idea how it
| works at Facebook), but some companies make their EMs out of
| ICs (much like Pokemon, I assume touching a special rock is
| required to effect the evolution) and it's somewhat common for
| EMs to re-IC-ify on their own anyway.
| the_af wrote:
| When the EM becomes an IC, how does this help the team grow
| their own skills and not get distracted by problems the EM
| should be moving out of their way?
|
| When the EM is an IC, what stops them from either interfering
| with small stuff (I had an EM -- back then we called them
| "managers" -- stop us for a week trying to determine whether
| we should use List or Vector in Scala. Nobody was happy) or
| taking the big interesting problems for themselves?
| ratorx wrote:
| I don't really understand the first question, but do you
| mean that the capacity of an EM to spend time on growing
| team skills is reduced? There is a limited amount of time a
| manager can spend on that. If it's a small team, then they
| could do a good job at it whilst doing small bits on the
| side.
|
| For the 2nd, I imagine that if you are a manager and an IC
| on the side, then you don't have the time to spend on big
| projects. It's more likely you'll be filling in gaps or
| doing the uninteresting but necessary work. There's nothing
| stopping you from attempting to hoard the interesting
| projects, but then your performance on either role or both
| will likely suffer. That's not really a new failure mode -
| any manager can be bad.
|
| As a manager + IC, you shouldn't be leading projects, since
| that's a useful skill for your reports to develop. I guess
| there may be exceptions if your team is particularly
| junior. Ideally, if you are not micromanaging, you only
| participate on a big project if required or asked, not
| because you want to. Your main role is the people
| management side and to help with planning, prioritisation
| and communication.
| the_af wrote:
| > _do you mean that the capacity of an EM to spend time
| on growing team skills is reduced? There is a limited
| amount of time a manager can spend on that. If it's a
| small team, then they could do a good job at it whilst
| doing small bits on the side._
|
| Yes, that's part of what I mean (but also: dealing with
| red tape, bureaucracy, and removing impediments) and no,
| the amount of time that can be used for this is basically
| unlimited: it's a full time job. "Small bits on the side"
| is not a good use of a senior IC, that's for the more
| junior members of the team.
|
| Also, playing both roles is less than ideal, see:
| http://blogs.newardassociates.com/blog/2023/player-coach-
| fal...
|
| > _That's not really a new failure mode - any manager can
| be bad._
|
| Agreed that any manager can be bad, but I contend that
| this _is_ a new failure mode driven by two conflicting
| goals.
| ratorx wrote:
| I don't think you treat the team manager as a senior IC.
| You treat them as a mid-level IC with a part-time job. If
| you are a manager you can't also be considered a full-
| time senior IC (except in very specific cases, which
| should be transitionary) for the purposes of work
| allocation, because you can't dedicate your full time to
| the job.
|
| I don't think management is unlimited work, at least not
| always. There are a fixed set of people on the team doing
| a fixed number of things who can only grow at a fixed
| rate. I agree that it could be a full time job or more,
| but I think that depends on the specifics. Obviously
| managers shouldn't be forced to be ICs in all situations.
| If management is taking up all your time, you can retract
| from the IC pool. However, I think it's valuable to
| consider and push for organisational changes to allow
| yourself to enter the IC pool again (maybe handing off
| some responsibilities to a new team etc.).
|
| > failure mode driven by two conflicting goals
|
| Again, I think this strongly depends on how you allocate
| yourself. There is room for a pre-emptible IC, that is
| not always available. However, it's situation dependent
| whether this is useful or not. The conflicting goals
| theory only applies if you try and optimise for both.
| Your IC performance can suffer, whilst still being a net
| positive, again depending on the specific situation.
| That's kinda upto you as a manager to quantify though.
| The article is more good advice on how not to approach
| this dual situation. If you know how to prioritise being
| a manager though, the points don't apply.
|
| On the flip side, sometimes your management performance
| HAS to suffer to meet critical deadlines because the
| entirety of the normal IC pool has other critical
| deadlines. It's also upto you to avoid these situations,
| and if they happen then strongly push back on your
| leadership to prevent them happening again.
|
| Your primary goal as a manager is to ensure team
| productivity and deadlines. If you can't recognise that
| you are a detriment and step back (or at the very least
| step back when you get feedback from others who do), then
| that suggests that other aspects of your management are
| lacking as well, so it seems like the same failure mode.
|
| The benefit to keeping yourself in the IC pool is that
| you can keep your skills at least slightly fresh. Even if
| you are no longer a full senior IC, not having any
| technical skills means an inability to make technical
| judgements if required.
| the_af wrote:
| Thank you for your reply.
|
| All I can say is that in my experience I've only
| witnessed (and on occasions been, sadly) the
| dysfunctional kind of EM+IC. I've never witnessed it
| working well, which is what I'm basing my objections on.
|
| The best managers I had were full-time managers (with an
| engineering background, which meant they understood the
| technical constraints); the worst managers I've had were
| either 100% non-technical, or EM+IC roles which just
| couldn't keep their paws away from coding.
|
| My 2 cents, anyway.
| ratorx wrote:
| Yeah, there's definitely room for error. I just don't
| think the idea should be discounted in all situations :)
| rsynnott wrote:
| > When the EM becomes an IC, how does this help the team
| grow their own skills and not get distracted by problems
| the EM should be moving out of their way?
|
| Well, generally the team would still have an EM, just not
| that EM.
|
| > When the EM is an IC, what stops them from either
| interfering with small stuff
|
| What stops any IC doing that?
| the_af wrote:
| > _Well, generally the team would still have an EM, just
| not that EM_
|
| If there is an EM role, I don't see the problem. I took
| TFA to mean "become an EM who also codes".
|
| > _What stops any IC doing that?_
|
| Nothing, but an IC has by definition time to tackle big
| problems. Also, other ICs are their peers. An EM+IC has
| no time to tackle big problems -- or if they do, then
| they are neglecting their management role -- and so by
| default will tend to focus on nitpicking or small tasks.
| Tasks that are best done by junior level ICs.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > I took TFA to mean "become an EM who also codes".
|
| I don't _think_ that's what they're saying. I read it as
| "we have too many EMs; would some EMs like to un-EM,
| please?
| the_af wrote:
| Oh. In that case I misunderstood TFA. Wouldn't be the
| first time! In that case, I agree with you: no problem
| with an EM going back to an IC role.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Their manager should be keeping an eye on them. That's why
| you have "middle management."
| the_af wrote:
| I thought we wanted to get rid of layers of management?
| hello_moto wrote:
| This is effectively demoting and laying off middle
| management.
|
| These SDMs won't be an IC _and_ manager. These SDMs are
| demoted.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Eh, not necessarily demoted; many companies, and I'd
| assume Facebook, would have IC levels parallel to their
| EM levels. They might be looking at... sidemotion?
| hello_moto wrote:
| > would have IC levels parallel to their EM levels. They
| might be looking at... sidemotion
|
| Sure. Many companies do this too. Like Senior Engineer at
| the level of Engineering Manager and Staff at the level
| of Senior Engineer Manager.
|
| They don't have direct report and they still write code.
|
| Same payband and leveling but different job function.
|
| But at the end of the day, the ICs still have to "report"
| to Management: Senior Engineer even if they have same
| payband and leveling still have to report to an actual
| Manager.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Well, sure, but in a company of any size managers also
| have to report to managers; it's managers all the way up.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| "Here's an option you'll hate--take it, or leave" is a tried-
| and-true way of making people quit. "You've been re-assigned"
| is a common form for it to take.
| henriquez wrote:
| Isn't that basically constructive termination?
| Alupis wrote:
| No, because these positions are genuinely being offered as
| an alternative to being laid off. If you choose not to take
| the new position, then you have terminated yourself.
| benj111 wrote:
| What are individual contributors in English? I took it to
| mean they were becoming contractors?
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Anyone non-tech I know would just call it "labor", as
| opposed to management. The people who mostly do the
| things that make the stuff, rather than mostly telling
| others to do the things to make the stuff.
|
| Again, people'd just say "labor" in other contexts. Or
| maybe "workers". I'm not sure where "IC" came from but
| I've never seen it outside of tech, and that, mostly
| online.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Individual contributors is just a fancy name for a
| software engineer without direct reports. Aka you'd stop
| being a manager and just write code (for the most part).
| Falell wrote:
| Non-managers, they aren't responsible for anyone but
| themselves. I know nothing of Meta's specific titles but
| I'd expect that e.g. the first level of full time
| engineering manager would convert to a full time senior
| or staff engineer.
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| Well the details are important here - are they being laid
| off, or is Meta suggesting they quit and then forcing
| them into a new role? The beginning of the article just
| says they're "asking" them to leave the company, not
| firing them, and I can't read the rest so it's a bit
| unclear what they're doing.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| If an actual layoff is the alternative, rather than being
| fired for-cause (after failing at being an IC, perhaps)
| or quitting, then yeah, it's not really constructive
| termination. I can't read the article to see if that's
| the case, though.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Yep. Used pretty often. Attempting to fight things like
| that without a union backing you is scary and risky enough
| (plus lots of people just have no clue what the law says--
| which, who can blame them when it hardly matters?) that it
| usually works just fine. Probably a little more dangerous
| with employees as well-paid as at FAANG, but then again, if
| they ever want to work at that level anywhere else, they're
| not gonna want to rock the boat that way.
| krschultz wrote:
| At Meta many engineers tried management and then went back to
| being an individual contributor. I'm not sure of the exact
| numbers but it was a very common career path. It did build up
| empathy for management on the senior IC side and meant that teams
| didn't get stuck with managers that didn't actually want to be a
| manager. If the company is not growing headcount this move makes
| perfect sense.
| bink wrote:
| That's a pretty common thing once ICs reach a certain age. I've
| seen it everywhere I've worked. Sometimes it's because they
| fear age discrimination but more commonly I've found it caused
| by the organization not providing a great career path beyond a
| certain level. With wisdom comes the ability to accept that
| it's OK to stick at an engineering career level for years at a
| time.
| dqpb wrote:
| Good choice! Middle management is like that bad fat that
| accumulates around your vital organs.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| What exactly is an "individual contributor"? I'm confused. This
| term has come out of nowhere in the past 5 years, and it sounds
| like you're referring to someone who backed a kickstarter
| campaign. If this is the new term for "employee", I'm out. I
| can't stand that companies refer to their customers as
| "consumers".
| time_to_smile wrote:
| It all came from the industry wide shift to make sure that
| software engineers were even more just cogs in a machine that
| could be hot swappable.
|
| The growing concept of "IC" goes hand in hand with the
| increased focus on "leveling" for engineers, as well as the
| rise of delegating all product related decisions to the rising
| class of PMs. All of these create a structure in which every
| team, even across companies, starts to look more and more the
| same and any individual can be trivially swapped out for
| another with the same role and level.
|
| In the early days of the startup boom, ~2008, engineers at
| startups had a lot more control over the product process.
| Typical startups where a CEO with some general vision of the
| product and a knowledge of fundraising and a technical
| cofounder who would handle the real implementation of the
| product. CEO would make sure the company was health, CTO/tech
| cofounder would make sure the product was built.
|
| But this lead to a class of labor that was a bit too powerful.
| As you likely remember engineers used to contribute a lot more
| than purely churning through tickets.
|
| Today you can think of IC as a prefix to a more complicated
| part number: IC-SRE-4, IC-DEVOPS-2, IC-DS-6. Then you just have
| to find someone claiming to be the part and send them through a
| leetcode grinder to verify the build quality, then plug them in
| and go!
| fmajid wrote:
| Someone who does not manage others.
| moosedev wrote:
| (Not directly answering the question asked, because sibling
| comments already did.)
|
| FWIW, I've heard and used it in FAANG for well over a decade.
|
| Usually I see HN comments using "IC" followed by someone asking
| what "IC" stands for. Makes a change to see someone asking for
| an expansion of the expansion :)
| jldugger wrote:
| > If this is the new term for "employee", I'm out
|
| AFIACT, it's intended to distinguish between employees who
| manage people and those who don't. I.e. "the set of employees
| is the set of managers plus the set of individual
| contributors."
| logicalmonster wrote:
| > If this is the new term for "employee", I'm out.
|
| Can you please explain what's that offensive about calling
| somebody an Individual Contributor?
|
| It's a little bit of weird jargon, but it acknowledges 2
| important things (they're a person, and they're actually
| working) which is infinitely more respectful to the people that
| actually do the work than "Resource" that also gets used.
|
| To me, using the word "Resource" to refer to people is by far
| the most dehumanizing term I've seen seriously used in an
| office.
| benjiweber wrote:
| Individual Contributor is problematic in that it implies that
| contributions are primarily made by individuals rather than
| team efforts. It also implies that manager roles are not
| contributing which is also often not the case.
|
| It's quite individualistic. Much like "talent" which is the
| latest attempt to imply people are resources without using
| the word resources.
| logicalmonster wrote:
| > it implies that contributions are primarily made by
| individuals rather than team efforts
|
| > It's quite individualistic.
|
| A team always exists, but humans are not exactly the Borg.
|
| I think it's ok to recognize that individuals with
| differences exist.
|
| Feel free to dislike the term individual contributor if you
| want to though. That's your right as an individual
| contributor to HackerNews.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| It's recognition over the last few years that the standard eng
| -> sr eng -> manager isn't actually a path that all engineers
| want, does not always suit the employee, and does not always
| benefit the company.
| blacksmithgu wrote:
| Individual contributor means people who directly write code
| (individuals who contribute), as opposed to people who manage
| (managers and project managers).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| I've held a number of roles in tech from IC to sales to
| engineering management to product management and now back to IC.
| The problem with engineering management is that its difficult to
| quantify the things that make someone a good technical manager.
| I'm not even sure its always the same set of things in every
| organization. So its very easy for there to be many really bad
| EMs hiding in plain sight at places like Google and Meta. Its
| just really difficult to tease apart what an EM's contributions
| to team success actually are, and whether a team's failures and
| successes are even properly laid at their feet when there are so
| many confounding factors.
|
| I went back to being an IC because its so much easier to take the
| blame and praise for my work when I'm just coding. I wouldn't
| mind doing sales again either. But I don't ever want to manage a
| large team again. There's just too much bullshit ... and I'm also
| old now (nearly 50) and I feel like a lot of new engineers don't
| understand what having a job means within an org. Yes, I know you
| want to work on interesting things all the time, but sometimes
| all you get to work on is unexciting stuff. Its a job.
| dboreham wrote:
| Follow the Jay Lenno doctrine.
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