Meta To Ask Many Managers To Become Individual Contributors or Leave (bloomberg.com) 86
Meta is asking many of its managers and directors to transition to individual contributor jobs or leave the company as part of a process to become a more efficient organization, known internally as a "flattening," Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Higher-level managers are sharing the directive with their reports in the coming weeks, separate from the company's regular performance review process, which is also occurring, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing a matter that wasn't public.
Dilberts or Peters? (Score:3)
Dilberts or Peters?
Re:Dilberts or Peters? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Dilberts or Peters? (Score:4, Informative)
It's biz speak for people who actually do work. As opposed to people who tell other people to do work.
Re:Dilberts or Peters? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm amazed people haven't grown out of this nonsense, I've worked on both sides of the fence (and am back as an IC now). Managers can be good and bad, just like ICs can be good and bad. I wouldn't want to work somewhere with no managerial support because they can really take the shit off your plate in terms of dealing with difficult stakeholders, pushing back against unrealistic asks, arguing for the resources you need.
I've met just as many ICs that don't contribute (or are in fact negative contributors for causing more problems than they solve) as I have bad managers. Both do work, both have their share of incompetents, both are important.
I think where it goes wrong is in orgs that have too many layers of management in an effort to give people career progression, and you just get a manager managing 2 managers managing 2 managers managing 2 managers and they just invent paper and drama to justify their existence. I've seen the same with ICs though, I've worked places where the business hasn't been able to figure out what it wants so you have ICs inventing shit that results in problems, or fighting with other teams over how to do something causing each other stress and being really detrimental to the company. I don't think these issues are ICs vs. managers, I think these issues are a result of abysmal organisational culture. I think Facebook is going to suffer this going forwards, on one hand if they have too many managers and it's causing unnecessary bureaucracy they need to do something, on the other if it's turning thousands of managers into half-assed ICs they're going to end up with more ICs than they probably need, half of which never really wanted to be ICs in the first place creating a toxic culture of backstabbing and such.
As much as I'm against more tech redundancies, the reality is if Facebook genuinely means what it says when it has too many managers that are just causing problems rather than contributing, the actual solution is to simply lay them off. In fact, it makes you wonder why they recently laid off a bunch of ICs if they're now saying they're manager heavy - they should've just kept all the ICs and binned off more managers. It's a fine example of incompetence at the very top.
Re:Dilberts or Peters? (Score:4, Interesting)
They're the linemen, the sweepers, the shortstops. The teams can play without them if they have to, but they're darned nice to have. But with the exception of the linemen, you only really need one shortstop or sweeper style player on the field.
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This right there.
I have a perfect manager. He has the clout needed to get shit done, he cuts the red tape, he keeps the idiots out of my hair and he makes sure we have all the resources we need.
And no, you can't have him, that one's mine.
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You seem to be trying to read some kind of moral judgement into single sentence post. Interesting.
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As if you didn't imply managers did no work.
We're onto you, buddy ;)
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Uh huh. I didn't say anything about managers not working.
The worker/management dichotomy is older than my great grandparents. Workers do *the* work: the primary work of the company. Managers do work (or not), but they don't do *the* work. Many workers realize this when they get "promoted" to management. Many are very unhappy to learn that they're doing a completely different job.
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when it has too many managers that are just causing problems rather than contributing, the actual solution is to simply lay them off
Telling them to move to an individual contributor role is essentially laying them off, with a "courtesy" from one noble to a lesser noble... as an IC they no doubt wouldn't be paid the extra consideration in the future, be treated as the rest of the lower ranks in the company, and lose any increase in salary + bonuses that managers get over corporate peons, And most likely
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The sorriest title I ever heard was "assistant facility manager".
Yes, it was the janitor's helper.
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Facility manager can mean many things, including Janitor, but also not Janitor. I've seen facility managers who's roles encompass HVAC, Plumbing, Power and low voltage data.
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Depends very much on the company. I once reported to an "Infrastructure manager" who was effectively the one responsible for, as he put it, "if it's in here and you can touch it, I'm in charge of it". And he was. From real estate to plumbing to electricity to desks to lighting to ... I think pretty much everything but finance was "his".
And then I've seen "infrastructure managers" who were essentially the janitor of the place.
In general, you'll find that the companies that work that first way run better. The
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Dilbert!
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It's big tech's terminology for "Doesn't have any reports".
I'm not a fan of it because it misses the nuances of the real world; I've seen good development team leads that are both amazing technically (the best technical contributor in their team) and excel at raising people in their team up with them too as leaders. When you go binary like this you miss out on people like that who are truly great; you end up with people managers who know nothing about tech, and you end up with technical staff who know nothi
Re:Dilberts or Peters or Dogbert (Score:4, Funny)
Can you imagine all these managers that haven't done real work in years trying to code in Typescript or Python or whatever ?? Seems like a bad idea. What do you mean unit tests?? why do we need to test units ? Where's my coffee? Why can't we just test on prod ?
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Can you imagine all these managers that haven't done real work in years trying to code in Typescript or Python or whatever ?? Seems like a bad idea. What do you mean unit tests?? why do we need to test units ? Where's my coffee? Why can't we just test on prod ?
So you mean the usual level of Facebook quality, then? I mean seriously, when you have bugs where simple things like typing and selecting text don't work in Safari not once, but twice, a year apart or so, and lasting for a couple of weeks each time, only stopping after I explicitly send feedback saying "everything is broken, what the heck are you doing?", I have no faith in anything coming out of your company ever again, along with no faith in your metrics' ability to detect problems, no faith in your engi
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This whole thing reminds me of the statistician who famously said, "All models are false, some models are useful." The important point is *models aren't reality*. Somebody looked at the org chart and said, "This is too hierarchical; it would be better if the org chart were smaller and flatter." Then they laid off a ton of people and shifted people around so the org chart looked like they thought it should.
So they improved their org chart, but is the *company* better? Maybe that development manager you tu
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Surely, if there's a manager who does some techie work, and would do more if only they got the time, then it's okay for them to shed their direct reports to their boss and get back to the techie work?
Of course, their manager, now far too far away from techie work can't do that. They're probably for the chop, because there's no way they're going to lay off the directors and VPs.
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It means no one reports to you. You don't actually have to contribute...
Odd thing is, when I became a manager for a few years it was the opposite - the new incoming director felt things were too flat, and too many people reported to the manager. So instead of just having team leads he made 2 of us managers and hired a manager.
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It means no one reports to you. You don't actually have to contribute...
Odd thing is, when I became a manager for a few years it was the opposite - the new incoming director felt things were too flat, and too many people reported to the manager. So instead of just having team leads he made 2 of us managers and hired a manager.
Not saying this is the case, but a negative spin on adding middle managers is that it makes the workload of the top manager easier. Instead of dealing with lots of individual workers, the top manager gets to communicate only with a few middle managers.
An even more negative spin is viewing middle management from the viewpoint of historical British imperialism. Instead of being the bad guy who mistreated the local population into doing the dirty work, the British imported middle managers from other countrie
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That's not a negative spin, that's the main reason middle managers are needed in the first place - to cut down on the number of lines of communication.
If you have 100 people in a department, e.g., there's no way a single manager can deal directly with that m
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I guess they mean everybody has do be in the virtual Meta, that way Zuck doesn't have to smell them.
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Re: Dilberts or Peters? (Score:2)
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WTF is an "individual contributor job" ?
One in which you have no underlings from which to steal credit
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Easy fix for the managers (Score:2)
1) Manager takes copy of most productive subordinate's work product(s)
2) Manager makes minor tweak to said product(s), then presents as "own contribution".
3) If subordinate complains about (2), manager gives said worker bad performance rating as not being a "team player" and puts them on a PIP.
4) Profit!
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I feel like that's difficult to get away with given modern source control logs.
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Re: Easy fix for the managers (Score:2)
Big noisy ambitious guy spreads around that he can do my job in a week. About 4 times faster. He is a lead on a new project and sure enough. In one week he does my jo
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I feel like that's difficult to get away with given modern source control logs.
It's not difficult at all when management simply doesn't care. About 20 years ago I got raked over the coals when someone used some code that I'd checked in for a project that was cancelled. In the header and an associated readme file, I put in all caps that the code was NOT production-ready, had not been tested, was almost certainly buggy, and that it was saved only so someone else might possibly find a use for it as a jumpin
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I was looking at it more as a "cannot show evidence of authorship". If management doesn't care, there's nothing to be done regardless.
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This seems to be an Elon inspired managers of managers shouldn't exist type idea. Of course shit roles down hill and the actually useless manager of managers won't get fired, but they will have to now pretend to understand and know what their reports know and force their reports that do manage to pretend to be lead engineers, etc. End result will be at best they fire the actual managers to preserve the useless managers of managers.
Re:Easy fix for the managers (Score:4, Informative)
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Hmmm. I got the feeling that they would still have subordinates but wouldn't be called (or paid like) managers. It's a fancy way of saying "you're doing the same job but taking a pay cut (and you won't be able to put 'manager' on your resume if try to leave)."
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Re:Easy fix for the managers (Score:5, Insightful)
Not being a manager anymore does not necessarily mean being a pleb. That was the old model. Now individual contributors have their own tiers and there may be explicit advancement tracks with titles for those who don't want to go into management. They can be a "principal" engineer for example. And one doesn't necessarily get a pay raise to become a manager or lose pay when they go back to being individual contributor. Likely most of these ex-managers become the team leads.
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Isn't a "team lead" also called a manager?
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I guess the manager could also be the team lead, but in that case this person is called the manager normally. I don't think I've ever seen "team lead" as an official title from HR before. But let's say the software group has a manager, and three of the reports are in security and three are in applications. Then one of the security guys could be the team lead and one of the applications guys would be team lead there. The leads aren't "official" but are the group's expert, mentor, etc.
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and you won't be able to put 'manager' on your resume if try to leave
They can put it on their resume anyways, and I'd assume they will. Not like a company's going to disclose that a former employee was an individual contributor not a manager.
They don't have to "try" to leave: they can just leave by declining the new job offer and accepting their dismissal effective as soon as they receive it, or on whatever date is stated on it -- they do not even need to put in a resignation, since it is the employer that
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If they're doing it right it does mean they don't have subordinates, but it doesn't mean they're demoted.
PIP (Score:1)
My PIP says in summary: "Shuddup and don't rock the boat. Dump that 'logic' shit, nobody wants it."
How many managers do they have? (Score:2)
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Good (Score:5, Insightful)
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In a big org, a manager's job is to protect underlings from dealing with (too much) BS by feeding BS to their own managers. While often not bright from a technical perspective, they know how to deal with BS because they themselves are skillful at it. It's why Kirk was better at dealing with difficult aliens: he understood the thought process of blowhard morons better than Spock.
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There is a limit to how flat an organization can realistically be.
The standard rule of thumb for optimal development team size is a "two pizza team" - if the team is large enough that two pizzas can not feed it, it is probably too large to be optimal. That number is routinely quoted at about 8 people.
Now, maybe you say that 8 people is small enough that they don't need their own manager. Let's say the real number is more like, two teams per manager, or ~ 15 people. Which makes sense since anyone who has ma
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Why do you need 1:1 weekly checkins, full team standups (daily? Two or three times a week?), or all the other usual rubbish that wastes time? You don’t need any of that. If I need to talk to my manager I talk to him, otherwise I leave him alone. If I’m struggling with something or someone needs help they ask for it or it’s offered. Junior staff get paired with senior staff to help them but it’s not an organised hierarchy, it’s a team effort. If you have 20 senior staff and 2
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I agree almost no one needs one-on-one weekly check-ins, but regular full team stand-ups are necessary, if not for you, at least for your manager. (This assumes those meetings are short and to the point, which is only true at my place if the manager's boss does not get involved.)
Most of them already were (Score:2)
That said Facebook must have done some analysis and found that the pay cuts are better for them than the labor law dodging.
Managers Becoming Working Managers (Score:2, Insightful)
This is a trend that is happening in many corporations right now. It's hard to hire people, so managers are being given contributor work on top of their management responsibilities.
It's a cheap way to get more productivity... just give managers a second full-time job and expect them to do both.
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> It's a cheap way to get more productivity... just give managers a second full-time job and expect them to do both.
Ding ding ding! You got it! And being semi-management, they are exempt from many overtime laws.
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Can't be that hard to hire people when they just fired a bunch of people.
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I'm sorry, but I am a working manager, I code and I also have a set of direct reports, and I honestly feel that I'm not doing my best at both jobs...
If I focus on my coding, my direct reports suffer (I'm not there to mentor them, help them grow, help them work towards the next promotion, properly evaluate their performance, or deal with personnel conflicts before they become big deals).
If I focus on my direct reports, my coding suffers (delays in completion, more defect-prone, often times only satisfactory
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You sound stressed. Sounds like you need a vacation and a secretary.
--
There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship. - Thomas Aquinas
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What managers? (Score:2)
Also... (Score:2)
Private contributor (Score:2)
Start at the top! (Score:3)
You'll save the most money by firing all the highest level managers!
Probably at least partially positive. (Score:5, Interesting)
Think of it as a reversal of the Peter Principle. Some genuinely talented individual contributors who were promoted out of their best role are being pushed back into that space.
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From another perspective, the move might be perceived by some as cause for a lawsuit for constructive dismissal.
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In my experience involving "constructive dismissal" in the case of demotion and shrinking sphere's of control, people threaten it, but rarely actually win it. Usually this is becausewhat has happened is that the employee is told their existing employment contract is going to be terminated, and they're offered a new one, or an exit package. This avoids the problem by effectively making "demotion" not at issue.
If they were simply told their contract is changed, that is not legal, and much more likely to be a
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Transition to individual contributor jobs.... (Score:2)
Don't count on seeing any real "leadership" (Score:3)
While the top bosses may all espouse Libertarian ideals, those are strictly for those above them, for regulators. For those below them, they actually run all their businesses in a completely top-down feudal-pyramid fashion. Bad things flow downhill.
So, don't expect any senior managers to show leadership ("by example - there is no other kind") by demoting themselves to the bottom, and give somebody below them a chance to rise. It will all be the most-junior managers that have to step down one.
Since there won't be any leadership, showing that every level of contribution has status, it'll be an ugly status competition to not be demoted. The senior managers who make the decisions will be sucked up to, and the feudal system will be reinforced. As usual.
Sure! (Score:3)
As long as I don't have my compensation cut....
Overdue.... (Score:2)
I'm tired of having managers that a.) have never done my job b.) couldn't do it if they tried telling me how to do my job more efficiently.
When I hear BS from my never-done-it manager, I politely respond, "Show me how YOU would have done it." Their stumbling, half-hearted response is usually, "Oh, it was just a suggestion. Never mind."
I'm sorry, but... (Score:2)
IMHO any manager who cannot do productive work of the type the people he manages do, is not capable of managing those people. In all likelihood, the people working under him are actually wasting significant amounts of time/energy/money dealing with his ignorance and any success "the team" has is in spite of him, rather than because of him.
I've been in the tech universe for decades, and as I look back on my career I can honestly say I have never met a middle manager who was a net positive force in ANY compan
Well done, Zuckerberg! (Score:2)
The elephant in the room (Score:2)
If Facebook really wants to cut costs, they should get rid of most of the managers. The best approach is: Lay off anybody who thought Zuckerberg's vision of the future in VR was a good idea.