“To move from a manager title to a director role, a person had to have hired managers under them from outside the company. To move up the director ranks, a person needed to have managed their own team of directors.”
That is absolutely crazy town. That’s like multi-level marketing, where your primary value is recruiting folks (that recruit folks).
Yes, it’s unfair but I think it’s also necessary. Every big tech company I’m aware of has lagging rather than leading promotions. You need to already be doing the job at the next level and have demonstrated it through your work. For directors, that includes being able to build an org from scratch. Can’t demonstrate it? No promo, no exceptions.
The flip side of this is that most companies really don’t need so many directors and senior managers. ICs have had to deal with slim pickings at senior level promos for a long time, and I’m honestly glad to see some parity coming - even though would’ve preferred more promos on the IC track rather than few on the EM.
One final thing worth noting is that comp bands are extremely wide at these levels and have significant overlap. I’d be much happier in a world where good work is rewarded with better comp rather than pressure to take on a bigger role.
This is a scam. It's a way to extract more value out of you than what they are paying you for (i.e. paying you for an E5 level, while making you do E6 work).
Scams usually don’t make their victims millionaires. I think that’s much too strong of a reaction.
The FAANGs I’ve been at, and especially where I’ve managed, high impact work is rarely passed over when it comes to both comp and promo. The problem is the opposite of that: there simply isn’t enough high impact work to go around. It’s a common problem in pure engineering, and one that’s becoming more obvious in management as the article alludes to.
The problem is that it doesn't foster a culture of collaboration, it becomes a competition around who is leading the high impact projects; to the point where people start to not communicate, and entrench themselves when working on high impact work just to avoid others getting jealous (and/or greedy) and stealing their projects to pad their promotion package.
As far as I know this is common in most of FAANG and other big tech corps. A friend just left Meta last week due to this bickering, everyone is protective of their work, everyone is paranoid their high impact work will be taken by someone else looking for a promotion.
It's perverse incentives all around, over my career I found I prefer to work in a collaborative environment than in one where I need to be distrustful of my peers due to systemically bad incentives. I'm lucky my current employer is a large-ish corp that fosters collaboration over competition, makes me much happier.
Yeah I'm leaving a Big Tech company for exactly this reason. Ultimately, staff needs to be thinned. If too many folks are competing for too little work then you either have too much staff or too little work. In this economy, probably the former.
On the up side, if managers get desperate and turn to in-fighting ICs can play them off against each other ... as opposed to being treated like cattle.
Give me an example of a large (10k+) company that uses a better approach and has better business metrics than FAANG. Otherwise you're talking hypotheticals while FAANG has continuing growth and 20+% profit margins.
Amazon has had very strong competition that they mostly beat. Meta has faced strong competition which they beat through scaling out acquisitions. Apple has gone from nothing to the world's richest company. Microsoft was a joke and now it's not. Google I agree with you on.
I want to flip this: give me an example of large companies in other engineering-adjacent industries who fostered an atmosphere of hyper-competition, breeding into a lack of internal collaboration and extreme distrust and which have been extremely successful due to that practice.
I ask that because you are conflating that there's a causality between internal politics vs business metrics success, which is definitely not that directly correlated, even less in tech which is an outlier in almost every aspect: compensation, growth, scale, etc. There are many more parameters to consider than simply a direct relationship between internal politics for promotions to business success, the whole environment of tech is conducive to create profitable behemoths after a market is captured through hypergrowth. I think the only outlier to this in FAANG is Apple.
In tech if we take the example of Google you can't say that it's because they apply this approach that they're successful. After decades the Google branding is extremely damaged for adoption of their new products, we all expect the new shiny product to die in 1-3 years. The new shiny product was definitely someone's (or multiple someones) promotion package capstone, it doesn't help the company long-term, Google's profits don't come from whatever new product someone created for a promotion, it comes from ads while relying on search to support the ads business, both are some of the earliest products Google ever released.
> Otherwise you're talking hypotheticals while FAANG has continuing growth and 20+% profit margins.
This is not directly related to management incentives to internal competition, show me how it can be directly attributed to it.
My point is that without examples we cannot have a conversation except in meaningless hypotheticals. As you said there's a ton of factors that influence company success. Having positive and negative examples of companies with different cultures would allow for a nuanced discussion. You'd expect that in most situations unless there was a strong selection bias against a certain culture.
>I want to flip this: give me an example of large companies in other engineering-adjacent industries who fostered an atmosphere of hyper-competition, breeding into a lack of internal collaboration and extreme distrust and which have been extremely successful due to that practice.
Off the top of my head, hedge funds and banks. Not familiar enough with other industries to say so personally.
It is easy: look to other industries. Koch Industries, KKR, bp, Walmart, JPMC, Saudi Aramco, Volkswagen, etc.
Now why can't you find others inside the same industry who compete with these and behave dramatically differently? First of all, management practices across the FAANGs are not uniform and yet they're all up there with one another, so clearly it isn't because there's one incredible management style.
Perhaps instead their trajectory is primarily defined by their industry, as I stated.
That only means that Amazon had money enough in the bank for acquiring a potential future competitor, just like most of FAANG has been doing since they became behemoths.
When you have enough money to stamp out any potential competition by simply buying them out I think we can't really rely on comparing management approaches anymore, it's just a finance game: I got more money than you, I will make you go away.
That's not my point. My point is that Zappos is not a company anymore and hasn't been for almost 15 years. If it had survived during that time and grown to 5k+ employees then it would be a good example. People keep bringing up hypotheticals but not a single large company with a good culture and good business metrics.
> not a single large company with a good culture and good business metrics
There are plenty of mega-companies that are very, very different and very, very successful. Koch Industries is a good example. Do they manage with a Silicon Valley ethos?
There's a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why there are not other companies in tech who rival these ones, and that's mentioned in my very first post: the consumer software industry naturally lends itself to monopolization, which we also know observationally has been happening.
>In reality it is probably almost 100% due to fundamentals
Can you explain what inherent "fundamentals" are associated with these companies that destined them to be successful despite themselves? I mean, Microsoft was founded almost 50 years ago. Their success was a given? Management practices have had no effect there? We can argue about the ratio, but it sounds like silly post-hoc reasoning to claim that these companies didn't work to get to where they are, one way or another.
The fundamentals being that they had the most significant bull run in history on top of the lowest interest rates in history on top of the two largest communication-technology transformations in history (Internet then mobile) which happened to produce a near-zero cost distribution channel for a product format (internet-connected software) which has near-zero opex and which has natural network effects.
A very small set of companies were going to win this regardless of anyone's management practices. I think 99.999% of reasonable-sounding conclusions you can draw from their success will be wrong, including "the management style is really really good" or "logos should have blue in them."
> it sounds like silly post-hoc reasoning to claim that these companies didn't work to get to where they are
Some of the conclusions seem far fetched. But some seem inherently reasonable.
For example, all of the successful tech monopolists paid a premium for engineering and management talent and had processes designed to hire the best (clearly not perfect but effective enough to make lots of good hires). I’m not sure how far we want to stretch the implications of that but at a minimum there is something substantially different between the top 10% of engineers and the bottom 50% of engineers and that difference seems to matter some.
Which is exactly another dynamic produced by the natural agglomeration effects: once someone starts winning they can simply outspend the almost-winners for talent, resources, marketing, etc.
Over time this starves the almost-winners into “losers because they didn’t do the right management style.” Which, to find this theory even remotely plausible, we have to ignore the fact that many of the almost-winners-turned-losers did and continue to mimic the management styles of the big kids.
This is a horrible well actually. FANG (notice the missing A) was a term coined by Kramer and means absolutely nothing. Apple originally “wasn’t a FAANG” when the term was first coined and it already had a market cap higher than the other four companies.
As far as market cap and impact on the industry, Netflix is a nothingburger. Microsoft has been one of the top five most valuable companies since 2000.
Ah, I was not trying to use the finance term of art but I see why that's a confusing word choice here. Can't edit but take fundamentals here as "the base dynamics of the industry."
FAANG has money printing machines based on ad monopolies, with the exception of Apple.
All their engineers could do nothing for a year and nobody could tell as it comes to metrics. There's no evidence I know of that suggests that promotion culture is the factor responsible for FAANG success.
Facebook has money because it's Facebook. That doesn't mean how the company is run is good, efficient or worthy of emulating. Everyone I know who's worked there says it's not well run. There are constant articles like this proving it is not, and has not been, well run.
> Scams usually don’t make their victims millionaires.
A “victim” of a pyramid scheme can become a millionaire, if they entered early enough. Those people play a very important role for the scammers. They will be used as examples of how well the scheme works to those entering the bottom of the pyramid.
A scam and a pyramid scheme are not synonyms. Toxic promotion culture is neither a scam nor a pyramid scheme.
A scam is where you pay for something yet do not receive the promised item. Nobody promised you a promotion at Google so it's not a scam.
A pyramid scheme is where an ever growing amount of low level newcomers pay for the returns of those on the top. When you're a low level newcomer at Google, you don't pay for the higher level employees. Google does. Nor does it require an exponentially growing amount of newcomers for the system to not collapse.
Before the Internet, and before Amway in the US, many average folk did not know what a pyramid scheme was. So some of the earlies, in a pyramid, might not even understand.
If this promotion method is a scam (I'd say no, but...), and those trapped inside benefit, they may not think it is, too.
So maybe not a victim, but also not a conspirator?
Even an E5 can become a millionaire pretty quickly. You can definitely save around 100k/yr at that income and with a 6% return (very reasonable) that ends up giving you $4m after 20 years or $8m after 30 years. So you will end up quite well off in retirement.
You don't need to make 1M a year to become a millionaire. Becoming millionaire doesn't mean having a 1M paycheck a year. You can get there in a couple of years with 0.X * 1M paychecks. For example can be E5 for 5 years at 350K/year, and that gets you there too.
And there's not several hundreds E5s or equivalent, there's thousands+ of them.
$350k paycheck takes a fair amount of time to make a millionaire. You could be paying $72k/year in rent and $130k/year in taxes. If transit food and other expenses are $25k/year you pretty much need an 8 year run to save $1Mil.
I’m also not sure $1M should be the standard for making people rich when the typical house where they live is $1.8M-$2.5M
Sure but most of tech companies have regional income adjustments and generally speaking your income adjusts in proportion to cost of living. Usually that means its worth living in a high cost of living area because your savings also scale. If you get $220k in rural montana instead of $350k in SF I don't think you come out ahead.
The adjustment at the FAANG I work at is 15% less for base salary for the lowest cost of living areas. Stock grants are the same, if the stock price were to be perfectly stable this would be bit less than half of my total comp. This means at my level I make ~9% less because I live in the Midwest instead of the Bay Area. You definitely come out ahead.
Right. When I worked for Facebook in Boston my partner and I each paid $1500/month for a 2/1 in Cambridge. In-unit dishwasher but coin-op laundry in the basement. I also drove a 10-year-old Nissan.
Maintaining a (grad_student)++ standard of living while working at big tech means your savings go up fast.
Alas, my current monthly mortgage is certainly not $1500.
I think it is better to just justify if a task has a high impact to one's self, particularly in well-established companies. If I can get paid decently and learn new stuff to keep my knowledge fresh, that's good enough for me. However, that's something I had to train myself, because high-impact work doesn't come along well but there is a strong social component to it; it's great to talk about, at least.
I left my last company because there was simply nothing to gain from, unless I wanted to spend the next few years trying to maybe become a manager, which felt like a distant possibility there anyway.
Isn’t the entire concept of employment meant to scam you out of more value for your labor than what you put in? I don’t see anything special about this specific scam
The individual value of an IC outside of Meta is most certainly lower than what they get paid there. The company provides so much value that it raises the ICs value inside Meta. It's win-win.
Very true. But we have to also consider the intrinsic value of working for Meta. The employees getting paid that excess compensation also have to live with the fact that they took more money to work for Meta. And other people now view them as a person who took more money to work for Meta. So for some people it’s a win win, I’m sure, especially if you don’t really care about how you’re perceived in the world
I think the risk is more feeling trapped. e.g. buying into a housing market you probably couldn't afford if you were taking more risk or bootstrapping. It catches up to you fast, especially if you're in the midlife crisis age band.
Getting "paid more than you'd be worth anywhere else" has its price.
Yeah I'm leaving a Big Tech feeling this pain now and it's exactly this. I stayed careful over the years to stay clearly within my means and have the freedom to walk away but still hold onto previous saved earnings. But I have coworkers who bought huge houses in high COL neighborhoods and nice luxury cars who feel too trapped to leave Big Tech.
No because I've lived very frugally over the years and my partner also works in tech. For years we had no car and only recently bought one for the family. We stay well within our means and save most of what we earn. We have a small mortgage on a cozy townhome. Nothing we can't comfortably pay off on a non Big Tech TC.
I worked at a big tech company and saw a good portion of my team buying houses at the same time, a lot of which were a lot more junior than me. I know what they bought, where and roughly how much it cost. A lot of the time, they're only making it work by having (2) two big tech salaries or 1 big tech salary and a second senior-level tech salary. My thought at the time is that it was very high risk.
This whole meme needs to die. I'm so sick of reading "Piotr the factory worker spends an hour making a chair. Piotr is paid 5 roubles, but chair sells for 10! Piotr has been robbed of 5 roubles!" No, Piotr supplied one hour's labour, but not the training, raw materials, design, packaging, tools, workshop, electricity, financing, liability, insurance, accounting, management, marketing, shipping, or after-sales support. If the company is being run competently then the total cost will be less than the sale price, and the company will make a profit, but that doesn't mean the workers could produce the same value independent of the company. If they could, they wouldn't be working there.
Marxists are insane. GDP per capita in my country is $71,000. Wages are $59,500 which means all other capital gains make up $11,500. A good chunk of that is non-business capital gains (like housing) which means capital is taking under 10%. But Marxists always act like you could double your wage if not for the greedy capitalists. That’s not true, do the math.
GDP doesn’t include capital gains. Actually income and GDP should be equal if they are calculated correctly, so the 10% gap is probably just an accounting error.
Correct that it doesn't include capital gains, but it does include business profits... and in the long term those average out to be the same.
Similar to how it doesn't include housing appreciation, but does include imputed rent... in the long term rents and the cost of a house will track each other as well, just sometimes for even maybe a decade one surges ahead of the other.
As the other comment mentioned GDP per capita includes non-wage things like imputed rents and business profits so wages are not supposed to be equal to GDP per capita. You absolutely can use the difference between them to measure how much money goes to capital instead of labour.
It's less about the self-serving approach which I've seen on rare occasion. It's more the complete inability to estimate magnitude effects. If you found a way to replace capital entirely but keep all the efficiency of price mechanisms you could maybe give people a 10% raise (but I bet whatever mechanism replaces price loses the entirety of that 10% due to inefficiency) but the average marxist will confidently tell people they could double their paycheque if the greedy capitalists weren't taking half.
Did you try to get involved in creating one or work for one ?
If this is fundamentally a model you think if more fair and should be more popular, the logical step would be to get involved in this. Either it will be successful for you and you will be (slightly) closer to demonstrating that it's a viable alternative to the corporate/capitalistic model that dominates the economy; if you end up being able to quit your day to job to replace it with a coop job instead and reach/maintain a lifestyle that you are comfortable with.
Or it won't be successful for you and you will learn why it's not gaining in popularity despite this being a well known model.
Not sure if it qualifies as a scam. The grocery store does the same when I'm looking for fruit, exploiting the margins (and hoping I don't know the real value)
The real value is what they managed to pay for the product plus the cost of their own work. You could know it down to the cent and still not benefit from cutting out the middleman.
I think more important than you not knowing the “real” value is that they’re relying on you not being able to access that value. You can’t talk to the producers directly, and even if you can, you can’t purchase in sufficient bulk to see the same price they do.
The margins don’t simply exist because of hidden information, but because the grocery store is actually adding something to the equation (else if capitalism does its thing, someone else would start drinking their milkshakes).
In the same fashion, you might be able to add X value to Meta by adding some feature to Facebook, and they’re relying on X to exceed your pay, but that doesn’t mean you can produce X value without Meta/Facebook and capture it for yourself — if you could, then you’d be an idiot not to. And I don’t think Meta is relying on their high value ICs being smart enough to provide value, but so dumb that they wouldn’t take money just lying in front of them.
What’s “fair” is generally what is accepted by the parties involved. Even if you complain about the compensation, if you’re working at a particular rate, you have implicitly agreed to that rate rather than seeking a higher compensating position.
Slaves don’t get a choice in the matter. Mobsters and kidnappers are criminals.
Living is a choice, and in order to do so it is expected that you gather your own food and find your own shelter and we’ve structured society in a way that makes that easy. You can even form a relationship with someone where you merge your resources and time to make it easier and raise other people to eventually replace you.
But if you would prefer to hunt and gather and compete with other humans through a more violent means, that option is probably available to you somewhere and you can go seek that out on your own but it’ll probably be a shorter life.
I won’t tell you how to live, but however you do it, it won’t be without cost to you as it isn’t for any of us even if the cost is much more marginal for some than for others.
>What’s “fair” is generally what is accepted by the parties involved. Even if you complain about the compensation, if you’re working at a particular rate, you have implicitly agreed to that rate rather than seeking a higher compensating position.
Both implicit and explicit agreement can be problematic, depending on the conditions under which you give them.
Your argument depends entirely on scarcity of life-sustaining resource. We’ve objectively not had that situation for quite a while. What we have had, and still have, is a situation where scarcity of resources is artificially generated or maintained.
Whilst we are being pushed to accept artificial stratification on economic and class levels, there are only two political / economic classes. The ultra rich hoarders of resources, and everyone else. The “everyone else” group represents 99% of the global population, making the hoarders a statistical anomaly. Those folk, however, have amassed $26 _trillion_ dollars of resources, just during the pandemic.
The asinine suggestion of “you are free to go out and hunt” only has meaning when you remain oblivious to the fact we are _all_ enslaved and we only get the illusion of choice about which set of bastards get to pretend to represent our interests.
There is enough to cover the basic needs of everyone on this planet. We just need to get rid of a few powerstructures before we can get to it.
> Your argument depends entirely on scarcity of life-sustaining resource. We’ve objectively not had that situation for quite a while. What we have had, and still have, is a situation where scarcity of resources is artificially generated or maintained.
If you’ve solved the free-rider problem and have solved logistics, then you have a point, but I’m doubtful to both of those things.
Just so we’re not losing context here, what I originally replied to was this:
> Isn’t the entire concept of employment meant to scam you out of more value for your labor than what you put in?
If employment is a scam, who is doing the work of maintaining farms and fields and transporting food to well, I guess not to market, but to people? And who is doling it out?
What’s the reward for growing more food than you need?
> The asinine suggestion of “you are free to go out and hunt”
The real reason it’s asinine is that it isn’t scalable. We can sustain some of the people hunting some of the time, but we can’t sustain all of the people hunting all of the time. This is an actual lifestyle that people still practice and the primary source of their food is hunting and gathering. It’s not a lot of people, but it’s some, and the issue is if everyone did it, yes we would have literal violent disputes over hunting grounds and lose most of the world’s population to starvation and war, not to mention all the quality of life improvements we would be giving up.
So we specialize, and in order to specialize we need trade, we need an economy, and we need incentives to do the things we do. Feeding my neighbors is honestly not an incentive for me to work, as crass as that may seem to actually say. Giving them shelter means someone has to construct it, and they probably need land (that’s probably parceled to someone else) and materials (that places like Home Depot sell) and laborers who want something in return, usually this is money because it’s fungible and can represent anything. Then you need the guy to organize it all and pay people and provide the equipment. Usually this guy is the capitalist, quite literally the provider and owner of capital for the business whatever the business may be (building shelter in this example) and since he’s not working for free either, he’s probably looking to sell the shelter to you for a sum denominated in the local currency or retain ownership and rent it out to you. In either scenario, the shelter isn’t entitled to you for free, so yeah, you work for it. Or one of your ancestors did and left you enough money to pay for it. Or left you their own shelter when they died (and y’know, it still needs to be maintained, so maybe you work to do that and keep the fridge stocked and operational).
That’s what living means in this world, and dealing with that low level stuff on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs kind of comes first. So you do it basically because nobody will do it for you, and to be honest, doesn’t really want to do it for you except maybe your parents. Humanity isn’t some big family, or part of a single organizational structure with a chain of command, or all marching to the same drum beat in the same direction forward.
I think that depends on their circumstances. Slavery is already illegal, and there isn’t really a market for slaves to go around negotiating the terms under which they are being kept alive at the pleasure of someone else so they may not be able to physically execute a suicide even if they can mentally get past the fact that they don’t actually want to die.
Also being kept alive in bondage isn’t actually compensation. I mean there are many reasons slavery is an abominable practice, this is one of them, definitely one of the big ones.
Alternate view: the lady behind the counter is obscenely underpaid, and the ICs are merely underpaid.
This meme that tech workers are obscenely overpaid is just an example of how the propaganda of the truly wealthy elite works. Instead of standing in solidarity with the counter lady and doing things to lift her up, you’d rather tear the IC down. It’s sad.
> This meme that tech workers are obscenely overpaid is just an example of how the propaganda of the truly wealthy elite works.
Or it's a realistic view from outside your bubble.
Check out the income distribution of the U.S. public and realize that the typical software engineer is within the top 1% when considering total compensation. And put that in relation to what the typical programmer contributes to society which is rarely within the top 1%.
> Instead of standing in solidarity with the counter lady and doing things to lift her up, you’d rather tear the IC down. It’s sad.
I stand in full solidarity with the Walmart lady. Lifting her up doesn't mean gettinf her into programming bootcamp though. Her rent is so sky high because all the insane tech worker compensation around her inflated housing costs.
The comments in this thread makes all this entitlement pretty obvious.
> Or it's a realistic view from outside your bubble.
This doesn't negate my point about propaganda. There is a long and deep history of the wealthy classes pitting the lower classes against each other in this very way, primarily by directing anger at the middle tiers from the lower, and a fomenting a sense of fear of the lower tiers in the middle.
I have checked out the income distribution in the US: you're way off. The typical software engineer has a total compensation less than $150k (pick any source: salary.com, indeed.com, etc.). The top 1% of salary is more than $350k in the lowest income states (https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/financial-advisor/a...).
> I stand in full solidarity with the Walmart lady. Lifting her up doesn't mean gettinf her into programming bootcamp though. Her rent is so sky high because all the insane tech worker compensation around her inflated housing costs.
You stand in solidarity with the top 5%, because you're contributing to their propaganda efforts. Housing costs are inflated primarily because collectively housing is in shortage--a condition the wealthy love to see because they're relatively insensitive to it (they don't live where we do) and it also serves their propaganda interests (see above), which you seem to have taken up with glee.
> There is a long and deep history of the wealthy classes pitting the lower classes against each other in this very way,
Considering yourself part of low class if you are a software engineer is the root issue here.
> primarily by directing anger at the middle tiers from the lower, and a fomenting a sense of fear of the lower tiers in the middle.
I'm not arguing that the effect you are describing doesn't exist. The point is that you are applying to the wrong part of society.
> I have checked out the income distribution in the US: you're way off.
"Way off" is not accurate. The income distribution is extremely steep at the top end. If 1% is at 350k the 150k is not far away. 2%? 3%? The page you linked doesn't load from where I am located. It's surely within the top 5% which you still ascribe to be the elite that's manipulating everybody. I'm doing the exact opposite of expressing support.
I'm sure your salary, stocks and bonuses compensate you royaly for your heroic effort from your armchair in an office with nice AC, unlimited snacks and coffee and no requirement to show up before 10am.
Those millions that were wasted and later "saved" were likely because somebody misunderstood AWS billing and hacked away without bothering. Likely also being compensated royaly.
This bubble and the consequence of feeling entitled left and right is pretty disturbing.
Actually, since you made so many terrible assumptions about me, the millions I saved the company were directly measurable in CC fees from less fraud, up to and including having numbers other people in the industry were extremely jealous of. This was done with about three people, compared to our competitors many tens of people, using kinda antiquated techniques.
I also get zero stocks, and zero bonuses. After 6 years working for the same company including many roles where I was basically team lead and engineering lead as a "Base level software developer", including being the sole holder of important legacy knowledge. I make $70k before taxes in a high cost of living area. Maybe we could build a system that rewards doing good work instead of rewarding job hopping and bullshitting. I once had a manager that did zero work for an entire month before he was asked to leave. He was made my manager because he sucked at doing basic coding. He made more than me from day one. This is very common for the normies like me who don't live in SV and basically do all the work that makes things happen not on google.com or facebook.com
I am also currently required to be working at 9am, AND attend meetings at midnight in my timezone because we have a big office in India and most of my team are there. I am also perpetually "oncall", though only for "serious" issues, neither of which I receive compensation for because tech workers are exempt and my employment contract was a single paragraph saying "You will do what we need you to do" and when I signed that I was fresh out of college with one year experience, $300 to my name and $1200 rent due in two weeks. I could leave but I am permanantly on medication just to live a normal life so here in the States I get to be shackled to my job unless I spend valuable personal time planning out a way to keep my medication going after I lose insurance.
So how about realize there are plenty of us not working in FAANG. Meanwhile, when a google engineer builds a system to improve ad targeting, how much of that money goes to the engineer, vs how much goes to the VP who made the vague suggestion of "lets make ad targeting better", as if vague, completely obvious ideas like that have value.
If you are so brilliant and terribly productive but still work in such a toxic environment for such low pay, then either you need to switch to a more reasonable employer or you are not really honest with us here.
Slavery, extortion and kidnapping are not scams though. And you'll notice that in all these cases the victims would have been better off if their tormentor simply did not exist. Would employees be better off if their employer didn't exist?
> This system is definitely rigged.
How would a hypothetical non-rigged system look like?
It's hard to see into alternative worlds. I can tell you what my belief is, but I can't really prove it: if Meta did not exist (and no other similar company filled the same niche), the world would be better by most measurements. People would, on average, be happier.
People in general are better off living in a better world.
And most Meta Employees would have found other jobs. I mean, sure, in this alternate world some specific people would be worse off. I would wager they would be the minority by far.
Let me know if you get a timeline-scope and we can verify.
I think you misread my comment. What I meant is that I'm not only assuming Meta does not exist, but also assuming that no other company that fills the same niche exists. If there's another company which is essentially the same, just with another name and minor differences, it doesn't change much.
I'd say I've seen this at most companies in many industries. You have to be doing the work of the next level in order to prove you can do it, so you are always being 'extracted' from. Or always behind a level. So in you head, just slide the whole scale up one notch.
The claim is that a high performing E5 will get good ratings, and there is enough comp overlap between levels that their pay will be in the same range has a meets E6. (At least, this was the official stance at Google.)
So what happens when you get promoted and are not qualified for the job? What happens to their reports that have to deal with an unqualified manager? What happens with the organization?
I work in a half technical (hands on development)/half customer facing role in BigTech - cloud consulting.
I was a software developer mostly working at small companies until 2020. There were never any promotion guidelines and I knew to make more money I needed to job hop.
For context: a “work stream” is a series of task meant to achieve an outcome. Depending on the complexity of a project, it can have multiple work streams.
The expectations are for the first 3 levels are:
An L4: you’re expected to be able to gather requirements from a customer and understand their business needs for one work stream. Help implementing a solution and present the solution to the customer. If you can’t demonstrate that you can do that as an intern, you won’t get a return offer.
The problem is well defined. You are not expected to design the solution without help.
L5: You should be able to do what the L4 does and lead a work stream, design the solution, implement it, and manage your own work and customer delivery.
The problem is mostly defined (ie low ambiguity). You are expected to be able to define the solution.
L6: All of the requirements of an L5. But you should be able to manage multiple work streams in a project and here the problem is not well defined (high ambiguity).
At each level it is about increasing “scope” and “impact”. Do you suggest someone be promoted without proving they work at the next level? How will that affect the customer?
Just because you’re good at taking orders when everything is spoon fed to you (L4) doesn’t mean you can design and manage an implementation. Are you going to let an L4 with no demonstrated skill loose on your AWS account? Be responsible for your HIPAA compliant implementation?
An L5 that can handle their work well, show a deep technical understanding and can manage their workstream is not necessarily good at managing multiple related work streams (more scope), nor does it mean they can handle pre-sales work unassisted (high ambiguity).
> You learn it as you go. Like some of the most succesful managers and CEOs to ever be.
And how many successful CEOs of large companies were successful without demonstrating they could manage a large org before getting promoted.
And who are they going to “learn” from and what happens to the company as they are learning? What do you think happens to a department consisting of in demand developers when they get an incompetent manager?
Even though I mostly worked at small companies before working at BigTech, I did work at one at the time F10 non tech company from 2012-2014. An incompetent manager who was good technically got promoted. Within 6 months his entire team of 14 left.
>And how many successful CEOs of large companies were successful without demonstrating they could manage a large org before getting promoted.
There's something fishy about how developers continue to demonstrate the ability to write/ship software but they don't get regular raises, but it works differently for managers/execs for some reason. This and the poaching agreements are why we have job hopping as the primary lifting force of compensation.
It's also like your above post about L6s doing multiple L5s worth of work: that L6 pay doesn't scale with output/revenue impact.
It should actually be the opposite because managerial badness might happen in big bangs (whole team leaving) or very obvious red flags (abusive shitbags), but developers have access to a lot more objective information that could be used to drive promotion decisions, but that still doesn't happen.
> There's something fishy about how developers continue to demonstrate the ability to write/ship software but they don't get regular raises
They do, there is an L4 to at least L7 track as an IC in BigTech and even on the corporate dev side, you can job hop your way from $80K to $170K in most major cities in the US within 8 years of starting your career.
> It's also like your above post about L6s doing multiple L5s worth of work
I didn’t mean to imply that an L6 is doing the same type of work, as a purposeful L5 I likes being able to deep dive on one “work stream” from requirements, to implementation to handover.
An L6 wouldn’t be putting in more hours they would be coordinating the work of multiple L5s. They aren’t doing more work, they are doing different work. Their contribution is valuable. But someone has to be in the trenches doing the work.
>And how many successful CEOs of large companies were successful without demonstrating they could manage a large org before getting promoted.
I don't know, most of them? Most companies have their founders as their CEOs until they become very successful, and these are their first gigs as CEOs of a big company, right?
No, I didn't, I'll reiterate what I said - that most of the CEOs start as founders and remain with their companies until they're successful (without being replaced to get there) - and beyond, so most successful companies actually have "inexperienced" CEOs.
Not "adults", just corporate drones, usually stiffling what made the company great.
In a real capitalist society where success wasn't tied to optics and stock performance but actual products, the "adults" would have burned the company to the ground.
>You do remember the shit show that Steve Jobs was as CEO the first time
I remember him making the product that saved the company and had their future 15 years without him based on. And I remember him being ousted without be given a chance by pencil pushers.
The company would have been dead without the Apple //e that kept it afloat for 3-5 years. The Mac didn’t become the revenue generator until 1989. It takes more than a “good product” to be a viable business.
Weren’t you talking about promoting people without them proving themselves? At what level should they need to prove themselves before getting a promotion.
Doesn't mean they have to "prove ourselves" at the next level they'll be promoted into, before they're promoted, which was the whole focus of the discussion...
No, it's not. Higher performance is rewarded with higher equity, salary, and bonus. You can argue that someone's worth more less than they're paid, but there are paid less because they're performing at a recognized higher level but not promoted. Also, higher level is imaginary anyway. Directors aren't better than ICs just because they sit at choke points in the org chart.
My current company has no concept of “levels” within software engineering. Coming from a big company, where criteria for promotions and a whole process and ceremony around them existed, this was a huge shock to me. I’ve now been there about a year and the culture is not at all competitive. Nobody is competing for an (artificially limited) pool of promotions. Nobody is competing for status. We are all trying to do our best work to the furtherance of our company’s objectives.
It is a much more relaxing way to work. I don’t have to worry about if I am checking all the boxes to get a promotion. I don’t have to fight with my manager about why I didn’t get one but <other person> did. I don’t have to worry about if I’m on the most high-profile project. I can breathe, and I can focus on my work.
> It is a much more relaxing way to work. I don’t have to worry about if I am checking all the boxes to get a promotion
I work at BigTech and I am just as relaxed. But I took another route.
I fell into a BigTech role (cloud consulting department) late into my career (46) without really even trying.
I had no previous consulting experience and had only opened the AWS console two years prior for the first time when I also fell into a role as the de facto “cloud architect” responsible for leading “application modernization” at a startup.
I had made a good life for myself and had the big house in the burbs in the good school system as a journeyman enterprise C# developer.
I got the job, started down the road of working toward getting a promotion to an L6 from an L5 (mid level) and then a year in realized that I didn’t care about a promotion, I didn’t want the headache of worrying about “increasing scope and impact” and hated the entire politics and self promotion of trying to get there. I could see that my expenses not only weren’t going up, they would go down in the next couple of years. I work remotely.
I told my manager my goal was to “improve at my current level”.
By the end of my four year initial offer, I will probably be looking to go back to small to midsize companies and most likely will take a cut in compensation to do it.
Interesting trajectory and this approach should be normalized.
I too am intentionally moderately ambitious only in the sense that I work at a lower level compared to what would be my maximum potential. But still at a high enough level for work to be interesting and the pay enough for my needs.
I do not desire more responsibility or complexity.
Honestly, I believe most of your work force should be like this. Competent stability. Promotions should be an exception.
Like you, I intend to ultimately scale down further as I age. I can't afford to retire early but I definitely can afford to lower my income.
And you’re free to make different choices. If I was meeting all of my goals making $150K a year at 46 (the amount an intern I mentored got as a return offer), do you really think I am struggling meeting my financial goals making BigTech money working remotely ?
This isn't what I was talking about. You're talking about slinking into a quick 6 figure job. That's not how a lot people get there. A lot had to go right for you for that to happen, not the least of which was the state of funding in the tech industry.
the nice thing about levels on the flip side is that you can communicate with your peers about your progression without necessarily having to give your salary.
When I talk to somebody a level above, they're very open about when and how they got that promotion. I don't expect that they would communicate as openly with me about their salary, unless we had a particularly close relationship.
I mentioned in a previous post that I worked in the consulting department at BigTech. When I need some advice or a sanity check about something I am implementing, I reach out to the team responsible for the service (ie S3, Lambda, etc) if I’m doing something novel or if I find a reproducible bug.
I could care less about titles. Especially knowing that the levels have nothing to do with technical capabilities passed an L4 to L5.
> ICs have had to deal with slim pickings at senior level promos for a long time
A lot of people don't have what it takes to reach higher levels as SWE. Technical skills alone can be a blocker. On the other hand, it seems easier for managers to assume new responsibilities. I could definitely see my direct manager assume the role of his manager for instance.
Personally, I know I can't be an E7 at that stage of my career. My teammates at that level are fast thinkers, extremely well organized, technically exceptional and so on. In comparison, my skip manager is just a guy with good communication skills, enough technical knowledge to understand what the teams do, and smart enough to understand the rules of the game.
I don't think it requires bad management to accidentally promote someone who wasn't ready for promotion. A lot of promotions, even on the IC track, require qualitatively different skill sets. Someone can be performing well in their current role, and the manager could assume they would do well one level up, but if they've never been given the tasks of that level it's really impossible to know for sure.
Understanding who should be promoted to where is a cornerstone of good management. Getting that wrong is literally one of the markers of bad management.
There are a variety of mechanisms that can be deployed to ensure the person is right for the position. Throwing up your hands and going “well figuring this out is just too hard” is another marker of bad management, lol
an alternative would be to promote the best available person when a space opens up. the structure in a company should be relatively stable, as long as the teams and the number of employees are stable. say for 1000 employees you need 100 managers and 10 directors, then if one director leaves you promote the best suitable candidate from among the 100 managers. if none are suitable maybe hire an external, or find a way to train a manager to become suitable.
achievements can be rewarded with a bonus or a higher salary but i think the latter is tricky if equal work should be rewarded with equal salary. i believe that's why there are more promotions than needed. they are used as a tool to reward people while making it look like they doing different work from those not promoted.
Anyone that agrees to doing the work of the level above you before getting promoted is agreeing to be exploited. They want you to do this because they know there’s enough suckers. Don’t be a sucker.
This seems to be a very naive view of the way people and organizations work.
It is quite typical for managers to delegate projects/efforts/initiatives to a subordinate for the express purpose of giving them an opportunity to develop and demonstrate the skills they will need in a future position/promotion.
If I assigned a stretch opportunity to one of my direct reports and their response was that they needed a promotion before they would do that work, that would be strong evidence that they were not going to be progressing anytime soon.
Rather than assume malicious intent, I think there's a very reasonable explanation for this policy: it avoids the Peter Principle. If someone is content to stay at their current level, that's fine, they can stay there. But if they want a promotion, they need to show that they have the skills that are expected at that level.
The company has to decide if they want some people to permanently hold positions beyond their capabilities (Peter Principle), some people to temporarily hold positions below their capabilities (while working towards a promotion), or if they want to regularly demote people who aren't able to do their job.
Demotions absolutely kill morale, as does having a bunch of unqualified people in high-level positions. The least bad option is to require people to do the work of the position they want to hold.
During 2010s, many ppl would just job hop to different company to get promoted instead. Further, they would boomerang after 2-3 years and get promoted once more (I’ve seen several EMs join Uber from Google and go back 2 years later with +1/2 level bump)
Maybe harder now since hiring market way tighter, but feel like incentives are still messed up overall for senior+ career track across most FANG companies. This policy Meta announced just incentivizes this job hopping as way of getting promo strategy even more.
I see why they or others do this. But it’s a prime example of Goodhart‘s law. The incentives misalign with the overarching goals.
It reminds me of the (very fun) book Bullshit Jobs by the late David Graeber. He categorized one of the types of jobs as „flunkies“. Their purpose is to make upper management appear more powerful and professional.
Hierarchical power structures often have a political minigame that can easily overshadow their organizational and meritocratic purpose.
On one hand this is hilarious. But on the other hand it's a way better system than the one above, because the side effect has a positive portion to it.
I think we need to account for "bullshit products" too. Facebook and Instagram for example are such bullshit products, no real value, detrimental to society and mental health, and proped up by the worst attributes of human nature (narcissism, jealoushy, exhibitionism, and so on).
With that mentality, If you think hard, almost everything we do apart from food and shelter can be considered 'superflous'.
-- Watching movies? Waste of time
-- Playing Video Games - Rotting your brain
-- Watching sports for fun - wasting your money / promoting violence
-- Traveling for fun - you are destroying the environment
-- Any entertainment shows - promoting bad habits
etc.. etc..
You can extrapolate 'what I don't like, must be bad for humanity' to almost every product of leisure activity out there.
At some point, for some, unless you are living like an Amish or in some kind of 'Puritan' way, everything else you are doing is bad and you are a bad person, and that platform that enables it (Radio, TV, Online Apps, Arbnb, Uber) must be bad and needs to be abolished.
In any case, a lot of those can indeed be considered bad. Like professional sports. Participatory sports on the other hand, foster community, improve health, and entertain, all in one.
Watching movies, or the general category, art, nourishes the soul, allows us to live vicariously other people's perspectives, and builds culture. Watching crap movies, made for profit, who turn their audience stupid (or pressupose their stupidity), on the other hand, can be considered bad. The same can be said of spending hours every day watching TV.
These activities are examples of self gratification, they don't give anything to others and are bad for this reason. Imagine a group of cells in your body engaging in this behavior: they grab energy from others, spend it on rattling their mitochondrias, and give nothing back. Imagine if most cells in your body were like that.
I agree with the criticism except that I believe that these products provide some core utility to us. One of our dogs was posted for adoption on FB for example. Although plain old websites + RSS are my preferred method.
English is not my first language, when I wrote this I was suspicious too.
What I wanted so say is that, these structures want to promote people upwards based on expertise, effort, popularity etc. So the structure is in part based on meritocracy - in theory.
My personal belief is that any hierarchical social structure is arbitrary and exploitable to a degree. We seem to be very good at creating personal and financial incentives without coupling them with the appropriate level of accountability.
Was meant to be a cynical comment on the number people one sees simply failing upwards. Success has many parents, failure is an orphan.
Merit at playing political games, backstabbing, lying, appearing plausible and convincing, looking like the kind of person expected at that time.
Talent, ability, hard work, placing the common goal first? Vastly less important.
Aligning self-interest with a common goal is very much an unsolved problem. Being slightly less bad is amazing. One of the most powerful facets of the visionary founder ceo owner despite most being such epic idiots is they aren't professional managers looking to cut themselves into inter-generational levels of wealth from their employer, whether they have MBAs from Harvard like G.W.Bush or not.
Structure based on on meritocracy is indeed, as you say, theory. Or justification. Or rationalisation.
Facebook is shooting itself in the foot. There is no point in promoting anyone internally as a manager. It is best if an IC leaves for another FAANG so that you can rehire them as a manager in two years' time.
This approach also encourages a heavily bloated hierarchy. If I want to progress, I best promote a cleaning staff member to Director Of Sh*t and have them report to me. In return, they can have several managers reporting to them, who then manage smaller groups of cleaning staff.
This approach favours empire builders, who are constantly scheming how to build their empires but are not necessarily adding any value to the company. The staff that are contributing will end up leaving for another FAANG as there are too few opportunities for internal growth.
It works well while there's good growth and cheap debt. But when the revenue to support this type of headcount inflation isn't there, suddenly the entire promotion treadmill seizes up.
The problem is the value placed with a director versus an IC. It should be considered another job of the same importance with equal pay and then there wouldn't be this over hiring nonsense. People could actually stay as experts in their field instead of chasing these promotions.
No pun intended but I think there is a meta-game when it comes to being successful at a company.
The surface level is to see companies as an entity that serves customers and by doing so generates profits and so you work hard to try and help the company achieve this.
The deeper level is to see companies as a method of personal enrichment, and you optimise your behaviours for this. Some of this may overlap with the surface level, but things like EG building a bigger team than you need to justify your promotion to the next level obviously do not.
NFL Players are in a union with various rules around contracts, pay, benefits, etc. A corporation exploiting employees and those employees wanting protections against that doesn't need to be limited by what those employees earn.
I said nothing about unions but merely that Meta employees are not plebs. You don't need to insult your own socioeconomic standing to fight for a better deal from your employer.
I can point at $12M/yr professional footballers who have been lied to and screwed over by the billionaires that they work for. They certainly won't be going hungry at night, but their careers have been affected negatively. Power imbalances can still exist between multimillionaire employees and their multibillionaire owners.
Watched 1978, Blue Collar [1] recently, given also the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike, and was thinking on the forced master-slave dialectic [2] between the union representative and the worker, the proliferation of middle-management, the micro-dictatorship of the foreperson, and how to solve this vicious cycle. As for the democratic societies at large, the only long-term viable solution seems to be sortition [3]: don't elect leaders, union reps, forepersons based on perceived or real qualities, instead randomly select and also, perhaps more important, randomly cull; both random moment in time and random individual.
If I have one sociological curiosity is this: how much better (in pure KPIs) an organization/society would be if its leaders would be randomly cut from power, sine ira, studio, vel ratio [4]. Given a wide and deep enough structure of power, the individual good (in an extra-moral sense) has a diminishing impact, while the individual bad gets only amplified as power increases. The meta-principles of the structure ought to control this asymmetry and random selection/culling seems, weirdly enough, the most fair, perhaps even the most efficient.
[1] "Three workers try to steal from the local union, they instead discover corruption and decide to use this information for blackmail", https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077248
As I see it random selection means every leader will pillage as much money for themselves as possible as quickly as possible. More so than right now since there's some risk of them losing power (current or future) over it right now.
Not quite. Corruption is the side-effect of interpersonal relationships. Once the cluster of the organization's/society's leaders are random, and with a sufficiently aggressive random culling function, there is no ground anymore for fostering interpersonal relationships. Take it one step further and replace judges, prosecutors, lawyers in the same manner with a random retribution function. Now you have a third level of metastable phase control just through randomness.
The current bar is so low, so artificially kept low (just on one dimension, around 800 millions of people are starving [1] while around 1 billion are obese [2]), almost anything would be an improvement, especially dispersing power through randomness.
Unions are an idea to counter the power imbalance against the company. It turns it from many->1 to many->many. Now all of a sudden lots of things are negotiable, like different contract terms, which were off the table before.
Altruism is about giving things away. If you want to donate to charity, fine, if you're at the union for charity you're misunderstanding things.
Altruism makes unions work. From a purely utilitarian perspective, being a freeloader is almost always a better choice. You get most of the benefits of the union without having to pay for it.
Altruism is about the concern for the welfare and happiness of others. It's particularly important in organizations that fight, both figuratively and literally. An army that runs out of altruism collapses, because people generally don't want to die for no reason.
Solidarity is important. Charity isn't. We're all working, it's not charity to be treated right.
Look at that dumbass alphabet worker's union for example. They offered nothing to workers for joining, all their goals were social justice culture war stuff.
How are they doing? If they called for a strike, would anyone notice?
How many lives have been made significantly worse by 24/7 on-call being made the norm for engineers by these companies? These companies deserve plenty of retaliation even if they pay good salaries.
Indeed and so basically, a good manager or director will be someone who can self promote himself and his company. Basically, a great marketer... Which seems fine for managers and directors working in Marketing but what about those working in Tech for example? It seems that a brilliant tech manager will have less chance than an average tech manager who is brilliant in marketing ...
No opinion either way, but a quote I have always thought was useful from maybe Steve Jobs "A level people hire level A people, B level people hire C level people" ... and C people tank your company. Point is mining for the best talent out there seems reasonable. Retention, though, is possibly similarly important.
> One of the most important things that made Microsoft successful was Bill Gates’ devotion to hiring the best people. If you hire all A people, he said, they’ll also hire A people. But if you hire B people, they’ll hire the C people and then it’s all over.
Crazy town? Or simply where FB / Meta is now? Wall Street doesn't like surprises. These type of rules create - at least the illusion of? - consistency.
Put another way, Meta has jumped the shark. It's startup days and the associated mind set are now long behind them. Expect to see them all wearing Meta blue suits - a la IBM - soon :)
Note: This isn't necessarily a bad thing per se. It's ultimately a matter of perspective. Sure, HN won't like it. But HN isn't Meta's market and/or concern, eh.
Suggest you listen to a Meta quarterly analyst call. This is not on their radar. Only possible way this would even appear is via quarterly earnings line item for YoY R&D spend growth that states Meta was able to reduce it by N%.
Regarding IBM comparison, no clue where you’re coming from.
IBM has historically been sales driven and for past few decades derived most sales from services.
FB is product driven and gets most of their sales from their ad products.
FYI I don’t work and never worked at Meta, this is just based on info I got online + personal accounts of folks I know who have worked at Meta in the past.
People keep talking about Google and Meta and Tech in general but what everyone is describing is how very large groups of humans organize and operate and all the dysfunctions that come with that. Pick any company over 10k people and you will have all the same issues, doesn't matter if they are walking around in blue suits in cube farms with fluorescent lights or sitting in bean bags next to lava lamps with a hoodie on.
People don't want to admit it but Tech companies at that size operate more like IBM than a startup (I'm not comparing products/services just how humans are organized and dysfunction).
Thank you! I knew the pseudo-tech advancement ladder we have, with seniors being expected to spend most of their time teaching new hires, so that they can learn on their own and eventually become competent at their job, at which point they stop doing the job, and start teaching the new batch of hires - I knew this looked familiar.
Obviously is super valuable, but overreliance on internal promotion can lead to not built here syndrome and rather close minded growth, esp if the co has a strong enough recruiting pipeline + brand to keep people hired fresh out of uni eventually claiming most senior/leadership positions.
Abstractly, it seems quite reasonable — whatever gets measured gets optimized, and for years Big Tech has measured headcount as a metric of manager skill. Eliminating that metric directly tackles the problem of empire-building.
On the other hand, it's already difficult to retain talent, and a single good manager can be transformational for a team. Between this and the RTO shenanigans — both of which seem to be widespread across the tech industry these days — it's tough to see why talented managers would stay, let alone put in hard work.
Overall, it feels like an incomplete solution. If we as an industry are going to move away from headcount as a professional growth metric, we need to have some other, more direct way of measuring the business impact a manager delivers so we can reward that.
Standing up and telling a roomful of high-leverage hires that their career trajectories are frozen for 2-3 years is probably not a winning strategy by itself. If I were a hungry startup founder, I'd read this as an invitation to ramp up recruiting.
> If we as an industry are going to move away from headcount as a professional growth metric, we need to have some other, more direct way of measuring the business impact a manager delivers so we can reward that.
A manager’s job, fundamentally, is to ensure that their reports are delivering appropriate value to the company, so the most direct measure of a manager’s performance is the performance of the ICs that report to them (possibly indirectly). If you’re going actually to use this, however, you need a way to fairly evaluate the performance of ICs that doesn’t rely on input from their management chain which is itself a hard problem.
> If you’re going actually to use this, however, you need a way to fairly evaluate the performance of ICs that doesn’t rely on input from their management chain which is itself a hard problem.
Why would you need to decouple that to evaluate managers? TBF at manager level this can be a rather simple and robust “how did the org subtree rooted at this person fare at contributing to the stated business objectives?” Along team performance, this depends on staffing matching the expectations. Negotiating which are core responsibilities of a manager.
> Why would you need to decouple that to evaluate managers?
If a manager’s performance evaluation is based primarily on their reports’ evaluations, then there’s a conflict of interest: The manager is incentivized to inflate their reports’ evaluations because doing so directly improves their own evaluation.
You're approaching your stated problem wrong. See:
> A manager’s job, fundamentally, is to ensure that their reports are delivering appropriate value to the company, so the most direct measure of a manager’s performance is the performance of the ICs that report to them (possibly indirectly).
Now, you're arguing that `sum(evaluate(impact) for each IC)` is absurdly bad. Which it is, because you're compounding errors in individual evaluations. These are hard to do, because you're trying to distribute team's achievements between contributions from particular people. I say that `evaluate(sum(impact for each IC))` is easy and robust. In fact simpler than an evaluation for a single IC, because you don't have to distribute anything and a lot of things that are external distractions for ICs fall into responsibility of managers.
> Now, you're arguing that `sum(evaluate(impact) for each IC)` is absurdly bad.
No, I’m not. I’m arguing that it’s unwise to trust someone to do an evaluation who has a personal stake in the result of that evaluation.
Looking at how well a team works together to advance company goals is an important factor in any evaluation system, but using that as the only factor in a manager’s evaluation is as shortsighted as evaluating a software engineer solely on how many LOC they produced.
In practice, overall team performance should be a factor in IC evaluations as it’s reflective of various hard-to-quantify contributions of the team members. It should also be a somewhat larger factor in a manager’s evaluation, with the weight between IC and team performance shifting from mostly-IC at the bottom of the hierarchy to mostly-team at the C-suite level.
You don't need to use the individual evaluation of ICs, you use the overall success of the team in delivering whatever it's their job to deliver. If nobody but the manager is capable of evaluating that, somebody has really messed up.
One thing I've learned in my career: eventually they will hire a new shiny management who has no idea who or what is a valuable asset and in their infinite wisdom fire all the most valuable assets.
That is not relevant to this conversation which is about retaining managers the company views as talented in light of a no promotions policy. It’s almost guaranteed Meta will give managers they think are important to retain secret comp increases (bonuses, RSUs out of band) to make up for the lack of an on-paper promotion.
This. If you write the server code alone and chill in the lounge in the afternoon alone, the hierarchy spiders leave you alone after one public tear down..
> Apple has quite famously been very stingy in growth that way.
It's not that Apple was shrewder than others - it's just that since it is primarily a hardware business, Apples "Covid boom" was far smaller than the rest (online services). Meta, Amazon and Microsoft had massive growth due everyone being at home all the time (Nvidia took advantage of from supply-chain restrictions to increase margins, and non-covid-related crypto boom)
> Standing up and telling a roomful of high-leverage hires that their career trajectories are frozen for 2-3 years is probably not a winning strategy by itself. If I were a hungry startup founder, I'd read this as an invitation to ramp up recruiting.
This is how I read the article. This move is basically: the people already at the top removing the ladder behind them so fewer people can climb it. I wonder if the new criteria will be re-applied to those senior execs who already got through before the door closed.
> On the other hand, it's already difficult to retain talent, and a single good manager can be transformational for a team. Between this and the RTO shenanigans — both of which seem to be widespread across the tech industry these days — it's tough to see why talented managers would stay, let alone put in hard work.
It's too hard to actually measure performance, so most managers are just horribly incompetent parasites
Using headcount seems like the wrong thing to measure. But, it seems like maybe there’s a method to the madness? If you reward growing the pie then you avoid nastier politics like Wall Street firms might have. It’s a luxury that big tech has been able to afford. Now that they can’t afford this anymore I wonder if we see the relatively friendly tech cultures turn into a more brutal survival of the fittest. Seems like the good times are really coming to an end.
> relatively friendly tech cultures turn into a more brutal survival of the fittest
The problem is that often you have to collaborate a lot in these companies - you need to use services or libraries written by another team, for example. "Fittest" really makes no sense, because almost no one has a PnL sheet broken out by team like wall street.
That said, not all companies (Apple, Amazon) had super friendly cultures. If you maintain a core service at amazon, for example, you can expect to constantly have every dependents' roadmap shoved at you all year as it is.
The one thing I've learned in my 20 year IC career is that I'd chosen the wrong path, generally. Every company is different, but it felt wild watching people move fast up the rank from supe to mgr to director to vp of some useless thing, while us engineers move like molasses.
And I don't mean this as sour grapes jealousy. I've literally had people come in, beg for help with their inflated title, then treat us like trash a year later.
I've worked at a couple places that had the "dual track", where they claimed that engineers can get promoted just like managers. The problem is, to be a VP manager, you need to be a really good manager. To be a VP level IC, you need to be the best in the entire industry in your field.
So sure, you can accelerate just like the managers, but in reality it's far harder on the IC track.
Yes, thank you! this needs to be said many more times. Everyone calls out parallel tracks but doesn't mention how much harder it is to move up in the IC track than in the mgr track. I wrote a similar response here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36697404#36700085
In my opinion, that is still fair. IC is a much more rewarding and enjoyable job for many, so it seems reasonable that there would be a lot more competition for the high-level IC positions.
If you're willing to put up with the organizational bullshit and politics, there's usually nothing stopping you from becoming a manager at those tech companies.
The "dual track" concept is already a significant improvement over "traditional" companies where the IC ladder usually stops short of the first level of management.
I would suggest that lots of people don’t think like you or share your values. Lots of people would rather spend the day talking and basking in the attention and respect that comes with their position.
That may be true. My impression was that people switch over to the management chain because it's easier to climb the ladder there, not because they inherently enjoy it more. FWIW, in FAANG, I've seen high-level ICs to be much more respected than equal-level managers.
Yes, because job A is more enjoyable than job B, we should expect people to toil more for less reward, and have higher expectations of those who do job A.
I would argue the average VP has negative to zero marginal impact. You could replace them with another random person and achieve similar results. Of course there are exceptional cases but my experience has been that most essentially just meddle with things they don’t understand or cause excessive churn by wanting to seem to be doing something.
The problem I think with IC lies in the "I". You can be an absolute rockstar but no matter how good you are the impact of a single person at the technical level in most cases can never reach the impact of a manager with dozens, if not hundreds, of people under them.
This is just a problem with how we measure a manager's performance. If you measure an IC's performance as "what that IC accomplished" and then measure a manager's performance as "the sum of what every IC under him accomplished" then of course, even a mediocre manager is going to look like he's had more impact than the world's foremost expert IC.
Yes. That's essentially the principle behind scaling. Using more people.
As an IC you are always limited, even if you are some sort of genius, sickness etc.
Been doing this for 13 years, professionally and I see the same thing in the UK. I want to work for a company that doesn't think engineers are "lesser".
We have PhD's in computer science, I have worked with people who have made significant contributions to the tooling of modern languages, and yet a manager who spends most of their time on eBay, Twitter or giving the same talk on "psychological safety" for the 15th time gets lauded? I don't get it.
I'm not a bucket crab, I don't want to drag people down, I just want the same opportunities people in other disciplines get (in the same industry!!)
Give up on UK/EU companies, they won't change. Work remotely for US companies. In many US companies managers are more like peers to engineers, with the same salary. In UK it's a two class system, managers are usually at least 2:1 against engineers comp-wise, including at Meta London.
In Sweden I often had a higher salary than my immediate manager. Only the "strategic" level management were really above engineers, mostly because they decided how resources get allocated and which projects need to be prioritised.
I've always felt it was a trade-off. I feel that as an IC it's way easier to change companies than as an EM, so that's why I've never been interested in the EM path.
In my experience the key difference is that managers often accept they are part of an inherently soulless capitalistic exchange of their time for money. Many ICs prefer the illusion that they're not. Everything else tends to flow from that. A manager with that illusion will not rise up as quickly and an IC without that illusion will rise up more quickly. Of course living life without that illusion is not inherently better (except for the money) since it can feel very soul destroying.
I'm really happy this is happening. Meta had strict rules for hiring sr. managers (M2) wherein you'd to have a minimum of 30 reports in your previous job to even get called for an interview. Based on feedback from many of my friends at Meta, managers did _only_ paper work and hardly added any value other than filling PSC (their name for performance cycle). Meta might be going back to its roots - more doers than managers. This is one of the best moves Meta has made as a company in the past several years.
The amount of engineering manager hours spent on the "performance cycle" at Google and Meta is just insane.
I honestly think it's a huge waste, they could get near-identical results with 10x less time spent on this whole bloated, process-heavy, over-"scientific" game . That would free up managers to work on the real problems, such as the complete disorganisation and inability to deliver cross-team projects
Unicorns grow so fast and wildly, the company structure is all out of wack, but everyone is afraid to touch it because it's a machine that prints money. Now that the money-printing machine has broken down anyway, it's time to fix the annoying pinging sound it makes in third gear.
While this apparently wasn't how it previously worked at Meta, isn't promotions for managers always going to be few and far between in a functional business?
Some number of managers are requires right above the senior engineering level, but from there each layer should have fewer and fewer people, leaving you with slimmer changes of promotion. In a stable organization you'll have fewer top level managers leaving each years, leaving even less room for promotion. For some roles it might be better to pull in external people, reducing the number even further.
Having managers who's only goal is to be promoted doesn't seem healthy.
The idea is that in an ever growing organization there is an ever growing need for more managers at every level. So internal promotions come when the company grows.
It’s a bit unfortunate how the article says “Meta eliminated many manager roles, moved down many existing managers to individual contributor roles” as if moving from management to IC is a demotion. This attitude is killing our industry.
Yea at my company, we consider moving from senior eng to level 1 mgr a parallel move, and many senior engineers have tried management, decided it wasn’t right for them, and made arrangements to move back to IC. It has worked out really well for us. I made the move from IC to manager at this company, ended up liking management a lot more than I thought I would, and am staying in management for the foreseeable future. I probably never would have made the move if there wasn’t an escape hatch to go back to IC.
Would be great to see more companies using a similar model.
I guess it varies from person to person. But in general, comp is a "secret", but a job title is very public.
I'm a 20 year long career IC in some southern European country with salaries for that kind of worker are not that great. But I work for a London-based company and my salary is great even by London standards (but still low for US standards, or at least SF standards). To my contacts in LinkedIn I'm a failure, I'm sure. They all have fancy titles by now. It kind of bothers me even if I know I make more than most of them.
They disrupt teams. They create an incentive to build things that you never have to look after. They turn away attention from your team and the product you're working on. They undervalue meaningful iterative work, process optimization, customer support. They stimulate competition instead of collaboration.
Seems like gold rush in the valley is over and techies are soon flocking to Europe for health insurance and a not-as-fucked-up medical infrastructure ...
The medical infrastructure in the USA is among the best in the world. It is just the insurance industry that's messed up. And tech workers mostly avoid that by having employer-subsidized insurance plans.
Zero data to back this (techies are soon flocking to Europe). Leave it to folks to turn any random stuff into a pro-Europe moment, lol.
Any techie worth their salt would know Europe is mostly not-fucked-up due to US security spending and that can change with a presidential election.
In fact, if you have money or insurance, US medical infrastructure is the best. Even anti-US communists fly to the US on taxpayer money for medical reasons.
This has to also apply to PMs/ICs as well at some level right? You can just have one core role in your organization have no personal growth for 2-3 years and other core roles keep progressing. Most of the time you have a cross functional team for a lot of launches and only have few members get promoted for them seems like a non-starter.
Nah, different supply and demand for the two groups.
After the layoffs a glut of senior management, with more directors than you can shake a stick at. Many have had to take jobs as line managers. Director is a pretty similar level to a Senior Staff engineer, the latter is still in relatively short supply.
I think it's all about incentives. If you want fewer managers in your organization you disincentivize the manager position. Even more, if you're a manager and see all of the PMs/ICs get promoted.
If you want fewer managers in your organization (as a fraction of total employees), have each manager manage more direct reports. Incentives on their own don't create or reduce headcount, it has to be policy.
PMs/middle management will find better roles at ethical companies that are actually building good stuff rather than maintaining a dead social networking platform now masquerading as an Ad joint
I love this comment! its poetry in a long thread of hypocrites- I guess the most obvious one being hacker news itself with this subtle attempt at sensor.
That is absolutely crazy town. That’s like multi-level marketing, where your primary value is recruiting folks (that recruit folks).