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.
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.
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.
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.
By definition, you want some of those companies to be old and stable. You, by definition, want life insurance companies outlive your policy. You want big car companies to build tanks in an emergency. You want big companies with lots of employees doing whatever to just exist and keep the economy stable. All the “disruption” at the edges are just for show to find the next giants
It's cost-prohibitive to start a new business in those fields due to large-scale regulatory capture and capital barriers. How many new car companies have been successful in the past decade without the personal fortune of a multi-billionaire?
The existentence of one or two enormous hidebound sequoias in a forest is not a good indication of its overall health.
I work in the insurance biz and we generally don't want to be nimble and follow best practices. That sounds crazy right? Well, best practices change over time, and fads (at least in IT if not all types of mgmt.) are far too common.
Our team has a motto of "avoiding the cutting edge" because we don't want to bleed. We still have mainframes, because the cost of migration is prohibitive. We largely host on-prem though we have some initiatives to see how the various clouds might work for us. But these initiatives have been going on for 5-6 years. Mostly because our CTO doesn't want to miss out on the cool things.
We generally don't do layoffs, 2008 was the first time in the company's history, and that was like .005% of our company staff. We're very conservative, and when you have ten figures under management, you need to be.
I think upon examination, the folks actually shipping things at those old dinosaurs are by and large unaffected by the constantly changing upper reaches of their org chart, which just becomes a drain on profits.
The real lightbulb moment is when you realize this observation applies to almost all social structures: your school's PTA, government, militaries, large families, etc.
These bigger companies have moats e.g. life insurance is difficult business to get into and disrupt. They also have strategies to acquire smaller companies and to expand in different markets. This essentially allows them to run for a long, long time once their brand is good.
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.
I have been at both and frankly I think this can be even worse at a very small company because there are no guardrails to keep it from being entirely personality-driven without even a pretense of serving some larger goal.
> Building empires is quite standard in management.
The same impulse exists in individual contributors too, which is why you see people architecting giant sprawling armies of microservices for something that could be a simple program running on a single machine.
Some people like to just show off their ability to make big things without caring enough about what it's for.
I once built a series of microservices doing the same thing but with different external vendors. Originally I thought it would be best to add a dispatcher/orchestration microservice that other services would have to go through, because I thought the externally connected services would all end up with differet APIs. In the end, I managed to give all those services the same API, making the dispatcher service obsolete and overengineered. Ultimately I just shipped it because changing the architecture would have meant endless discussions with that one lead architect who actually gave nor shit about anything but pointless discussion and I was out of time. So I shipped all the services.
In the last performance review, my boss complimented the amount of new services I put into production.
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?
A few thoughts having worked at a bunch of large companies before, with varying degrees of rewarding empire-building.
- The orgs most susceptible to rampant empire-building are ones where execs seem disconnected from the product. IMO the best way to discourage rampant headcount growth is for upper-level execs to scrutinize hiring needs. Some orgs (especially pre-2022) have been apt to approve headcount growth without sufficient oversight as to what the new people are actually supposed to be doing, and whether or not they're necessary. Loose hiring policies result not only in corp bloat and high expenditures, but reward empire-builder managers more than product-oriented managers.
- To double down on that point, part of the problem is that in too many companies execs and managers don't speak product. The point of hiring is ostensibly to ship more/different/better product, but when execs themselves do not speak product hiring becomes divorced from this underlying goal. You hire so your seniors have juniors to mentor. You hire so a manager can get promoted. You hire to "expand your scope". But at the end of the day there is only one valid reason to actually hire: so the company can produce more/different/better products that it otherwise cannot do without hiring. This is especially true at companies like Google and Meta where the PM track and Engineering tracks are fully decoupled.
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?
C-suite people from different companies end up working together on company boards later in their career. To fire with cause and no severance and no parachute some back-stabbing VPs would make it more difficult to work with said back-stabbing VP later on a company board.
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.
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.
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).
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.
He seems like a ‘slave driving demon’. Best example how he treated the folks at Twitter or his other companies… demanding ‘hardcore’ hours and exactly like you said… he doesn’t care about people… doesn’t care whether they burn out or creating a culture where bullying is accepted.
I don’t think he really cares about solving big problems, it’s just a front to feed his big ego… he wants be seen as real life Tony Stark.
If he really cared about solving big problems like the climate crisis etc he wouldn’t have wasted his time with Twitter.
He wouldn’t have come with a stupid idea like the hyperloop and trying to derail a high speed rail project.
What he has achieved is he inspired more people to become engineers and problem solvers and have a positive vision of the future. But his big ego and narcissistic traits have ruined it and more and more folks see what he really is.
No argument with what you said, but I give him credit for Tesla and SpaceX. Those are more ambitious than the vast majority of SV companies funded over the past couple decades.
Yes true, that’s what I meant by he inspired others.. to join him to solve humanity’s problems.
At the beginning his ambitions were probably more aligned to this vision, but he probably got more jaded over the years, realised it’s effin hard and his narcissism got the better of him.
It’s a shame the way he treated the Tesla founders. Also I never saw him credit his various teams, it’s always about him.
Tesla and SpaceX are successful despite his involvement, because ppl care about creating more sustainable solutions for humanity… it’s a great mission.
One thing he figured out was that he could cut 75% of the dead weight employees and still have a product that 95% of the users are just as, if not more, satisfied with (despite all the predictions of imminent destruction).
I would argue that administrative and organizations bloat is a very real problem across virtually every large business. The bigger the business, the worse the bloat problem.
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”.
> 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...
I imagine a lot of IT folks or those in compliance would be promoted very fast and then quickly leave the company before the hidden costs caught up with them.
That's simply counter to how $BIGCOs work. Just look at infosec for a big corporation. There's no incentive on their part to minimize cost or disruption with strict security policies and audits. The people who feel the pain are the workers, not the CISSPs pushing STIG hardening rules. And if the C-Suite starts to wonder if all the time and money is worth it? Just show them some news reports of breaches. In many industries (especially highly regulated ones), the entire audit world of Deloitte et al is designed to make things unproductive.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
I can tell you from experience that you are going to suck at both.
As a code contributor, you’re not going to be able to keep your commitments because of management responsibility and as a manager you’re not going to have time to do either career development for your team or be in the room to play politics for your team.
The only time that I’ve seen that work is when my former CTO would do non production code as a research product or a proof of concept that he would give to someone else to make production ready.
Also, the people you report to aren’t going to be as willing to give you honest feedback.
As an IC, I can give a suggestion to my team and I have to convince them based on my ideas. They will free to push back. As a manager, many won’t.
I work with a lot of people who for whatever reason won’t say anything openly when they feel something is wrong. Even when it’s not their manager - ie a project manager.
I’ve never been afraid to voice my opinion and “disagree and commit” (how do you say where you work without saying where you work). But then again I’m older (49), more financially secure and not here on H1B [1].
[1] That last statement is not meant to rail against H1B visa holders. I think the entire H1B visa system sucks and is inhumane for the people who have to deal with it precisely because they have to deal with shit that they shouldn’t have to.
You are 100% correct. I manage a team now that I don't really have time to guide and am probably stricter with them than I need to be because of it. Additionally I am constantly behind on my deliverables to Sr. leadership because I don't have time to focus on the constant flow of busy work they keep giving me because they need data for some report to their leaders. I have no one that I can delegate this work too. I'm also working in an agile environment and have no scrum master. In addition I don't have time to think, I am just constantly pinged and in meetings. My blocked time on the calendar is not respected. Yesterday I had 9 meetings. Its impossible to do any type of deep work. Honestly its really not great. Salary is helpful though.
If anyone ever asks me "I want to burn out as fast as possible, what should I do?" I will send them the link to your comment.
Jokes aside, I think that I had very similar experience, and it does lead to burnout
If you care about total compensation, “grind LeetCode and work for a FAANG” (haha only serious)
I went from the Dev lead in 2016 in a medium size health care company, to a senior dev/de facto “cloud architect” at a startup to mid level “cloud consultant” at $BigTech. Each job came with more money - and the current one a step change in compensation - and less responsibility and less headaches.
You are not wrong. I used to think I wanted to work in leadership and now that I'm there it kind of sucks. At least the middle manager level I am at. I have really started considering doing exactly as you suggest, just grinding for a year and then going for a FAANG position. I currently make more money than I ever imagined (I grew up on food stamps) and its far less than what FAANG SR's make. The thought of being able to make more than this with half of the responsibility sounds incredible and I am leaning in that direction.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
> 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
You are unlikely to find empire builders in that size of company because they are too easily exposed and ousted by competent leadership. The real problems start once there is way too much going on for any one person to track the major initiatives, which I'd say is more in the 500+ realm.
> To counter-anecdote: I've basically never had a bad manager.
I've never had a bad manager, but I've never had a good one. Or rather I've never had one where I've really noticed what they actually did aside from doing a basic personal assistant / secretary job dealing with administrative paperwork, scheduling meetings, taking notes, conveying status reports between people and teams and tools.
I've never had personal issues with my managers and I've always got along well with them and I don't suggest its their fault that their positions exist. I just don't see the value in having organizations structured in a way that necessitates these roles.
> 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
See this is how they sell themselves, but what it really means is that your engineering firm has whimsical higher-ups who don't understand engineering or even basic people management such that they would kill your productivity and burn you out, forcing the firm to hire another layer of people to protect staff from incompetent upper management.
There could be a grain of truth to it, but it just makes the situation even more ridiculous.
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.
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.
The story of Bay Area engineering and management is so fraught that it's hard to know where to begin.
First, tech and team leads are regularly pushed out of authority by management types, like the ones you described or worse ones who get promoted by slimming a team down.
Then there's the whole fabrication of accomplishments where managers will get promoted for the work of ICs while tech leads and ICs don't.
I'm not saying get rid of management, but the Bay really needs to reassess it's incentive and management structure. If anything, let the managers be a tool to the team rather than an authority figure. Then pair them with a competent tech lead to handle things the lead or ICs can't do on their own.
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.
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.
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.
This is pretty true for a lot of people and organizations.
The best engineers almost without fail are the ones who are passionate about it and don't want to be doing anything else. They'll tend to keep being engineers.
And corporations tend to recognize, value, and promote managers based on team size and growth as key metrics. Can't blame someone for doing what their employer tells them it wants. The problem here is not caused by line managers but by executives who set goals in this way.
And I don't really know what line managers do either. They seem to sell themselves to their reports as "dealing with all the corporate bullshit" which is kind of true, but if the corporation is generating so much bullshit that it needs to employ bullshit wranglers, it seems like the better solution would be fix it at the source rather than clean it up after the fact. I get there will always be some amount of administration and stuff that you don't want your engineers spending lots of time on, but that could be handled with a personal assistant type of role that should be able to handle dozens of engineers per PA, rather than a higher paid manager.
I like working for people like this, because often they look to increase both quantity and quality of the people they manage (if they can call you a senior engineer, then that must make them a senior manager). So they're often quite a good advocate for your career.
They're focused on me and the other engineers, we're focused on the product, and everyone is happy.
That contrasts with product focused managers, where I've seen a tendency to burn through engineers and be very stingy with raises and promotions. So the engineers need to take time to be their own advocates and set boundaries and lot of us aren't as good at that so it becomes chaotic.
I've worked in teams where 'seniors' were given to us by this kind of managers that were more like juniors so my personal experience has not been as good as yours.
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.
I just watched a relevant interview between Dwarkesh Patel and Marc Andreessen[1] where they discussed James Burnham's ideas on how a manager class inevitably arises once a corporation reaches scale in order to maintain the machine. Unfortunately innovation and building suffers once the managerial class takes over. The culling of managers indicates Zuck maybe isn't quite ready to abdicate and there is more growth/innovation ahead?
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.
> I will call it a statistical anomaly, but the worst engineers are now in 'people management' positions.
Is that a bad thing? The person worst at writing code is removed from doing it, and the (same) person managing engineers has at least done it. Unless the managers are pushing technical decisions on the team (does not sound like it), why wouldn't you want the worst engineers to become the people managers?
To say nothing of the common idea that engineering skill and people skill don't coexist often in the same people.
> , so I took my own advice
Always good! I've taken other people's advice over my own to my determent before. Of course I've also taken other people's advice and it worked out way better than my dumb ideas. Blending them is hard.
Any commonly given out advice you benefited from flatly ignoring?
> and was able to see some of them in the audience from the stage.
Sorry, the article implies this is an announcement of the program. It seemed like it was going to be done individually-ish. Was it a massive meeting instead?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
I very much doubt what you’re describing is a statistical anomaly. I think just about everyone here would agree the worst devs either become managers, or move to QA/BA.
I'm not surprised this comment is being read as "all managers were former-bad devs". Or maybe it's that some bad devs stay bad'n. Whatevs. Can't come up with empirical data for this one, have to rely on anecdotal stuff and yall dont like speculative stuff.
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.