"At Facebook, moving into management is not a promotion. It’s a lateral move, a parallel track. "
This is nice in theory. But when your "peers" with Manager in their title have access to more information and more decision-making power, it is not in fact a parallel track. Just saying people are equal doesn't make it so, and it doesn't change the underlying organizational structures.
I think you're absolutely right, in general, but I've been at Facebook for 5 years now, and the one thing I'll say about it is that once you establish a track record of 1) doing good work and 2) making good long-term decisions, that trumps any considerations around level. The culture is definitely such that the very senior folks (Director++) will value trust over level, so it's very much "influence over authority."
Personally, this has lead to me getting messed with my managers ~never, which is a very high-order bit in my work happiness.
While this system does work well for very meritocratic groups, it is a mostly anecdotal/self-constructed replacement for defined/quantified hierarchy. The "influence over authority" framework is the adhoc social group hierarchy that is replacing a defined hierarchy, and is very susceptible to silos, clicks, and favoritism; regardless of the accuracy of the merit calculations by the members, of the members.
I am not knocking the system, as I agree that a meritocratic structure can work in small social systems, but there are some risk. The primary ones would be new member exclusion which can be hidden behind the meritocratic mantle of "it's the best choice", and fiefdom building that can result from the finite number of members that can function in a social group or that can reliably be recalled/indexed by members with in a group.
It may be possible to have numerous self contained and self structured groups operating within a larger organization, assuming the time tables allow for them to establish, and that new member barriers are not so obvious that they decrease retention. Facebook may be knowingly or unknowingly leveraging their Employer Brand to mitigate the risk of attrition within hierarchy-lite system.
I really wouldn't be that cynical about it in that sense. I don't work at Facebook. I never have. But I've seen this work. It really can happen.
The problem isn't traditional office politics, as far as I've seen. The problem is that sometimes the influential engineers can be shortsighted about other teams' needs and it can actually be hard for management to step in and say hey look.
Isn't this the definition of politics? Trust is a personal feeling based on other opinion and your own experience while level should be based on documented achievements in the company.
Same with influence over authority. Influence is just another word for politics.
Office politics becomes toxic because it's about using political structures for personal gain.
Political status becomes the primary product at work. Actual work performance of individuals and teams becomes secondary.
Decisions become increasingly irrational because the interests of low-status individuals - including customers, suppliers, and other employees - start being seen as an annoying distractions from personal profit/status.
If that's reversed and performance becomes more important than status, you're already in a healthier place.
Empires can be very profitable. But they're also miserable places to work, and they rarely have much customer good will.
Doesn't that still mean more informal, people in my sphere than formal merit recognition which is the whole point of levels? Maybe I'm just not getting it.
Then that means there are people whose work merits higher levels/pay/promotions/fancier desks who aren't getting them, but instead get to be advisors to people with fancy desks?
The last time i was at a place where trust went above everything, literally all the code was the worst horrible shit, because they sold tyres and that being a solid business had run into zero trouble, ever, and thought that the developer who'd been with them for over a decade was the best, since "he has never made a wrong decision" (i.e. the company hadn't gone bankrupt yet), despite his code managing to create, just on its own, an amazing turn-over rate in developers.
The place I'm currently about to leave had a similar situation in times past, due to the fact they weren't a software organisation. Facebook is a software organisation, so the same situation would rarely apply. However, I think you should trust but verify. If you're unable to accomplish the verify part (for whatever reason), you'll have problems.
Yeah, a lot of people make the mistake on what type of company it is.
For instance, a lot of non-software companies may pay more and provide a director or executive level title to a developer and give them a team just to get them in the door.
What these people don't immediately realize is they are giving up being a "tier-1" employee at the organization. First and foremost if you are at say, a tire company, software is most likely a cost center and not central to the strategy. This means they wont attract good developers, and have to do things like above to get them in the door.
If you want to work with really passionate and talented software developers, you'll want to be at a primarily software organization, or one that sees the logistics of software central to the business strategy.
If, say, a Software Architect and a Senior Director have the same pay and the same perks and the same bonus structure, and it really does take a talented person the same amount of time to climb that high from (say) Software Engineer and Manager, then they're parallel.
If any of that favors one side over the other then they're not.
I doubt any company is going to give access to enough data to prove or disprove the claim; but the default believability isn't very high.
>>If, say, a Software Architect and a Senior Director have the same pay and the same perks and the same bonus structure, and it really does take a talented person the same amount of time to climb that high from (say) Software Engineer and Manager, then they're parallel.
I have a doubt: "the same pay and the same perks" things seem okay but "the same bonus structure" seems difficult to understand.
A manager has more visibility, more access to business info then he/she will have more chance to be eligible to "bonus" than an engineer has.
So, it'd great if you elaborate on how a Software Engineer and a supposedly equal Manager can have "the same bonus structure".
In my company (pharma, not tech), the bonus structure is based on salary and some multiplier. The multiplier is the same across the entire company and is based on key performance factors from several departments. For 2 employees with the same base salary, their bonuses will be the same regardless of job title.
To be fair, he was talking about a Software Architect, who tend to work cross team and have a broader view than an engineer coding away in a given team.
Many large software companies have very similar structure.
Since I had personal experience working in these companies here what I found as problem:
- Management has decision making power.
- Management has ability to control $$ (bonus allocation, etc.)
- Management has access to more information than employees on "individual contributor" track
It is important to note that system work up to mid-level managers. I.e., it is works well when there is "team lead" and "manager". Manager ensures that the team is not bothered by politics and get all necessary resources while team lead ensures that things are done.
But when you come to mid-level and up even if the pay is comparable, the life is much better for managers. For example, if you are in 40s it is important to have job security. Senior managers and VPs will know when are layoffs are coming or certain groups will be sacked (since they have access to more informations). They can prepare for it. If you are "software architect", you are in the blind until the day of layoffs.
I feel good managers often delegate the decision making power to the group or team leads. This creates scale for the manager, and allows room for the development teams to develop leaders and judgement.
Companies that are set up well also give minimal control over bonus allocation or salaries. These things should be controlled by HR and recruiting, along with salary and compensation policies based on role and level. Managers supposedly have the best view on IC performance, so within some band they should be able to influence rate increases and promotions. Anything outside of that would need to be a conversation between the manager/IC and HR. My advise here is if you feel there is a deviation in your pay, get your manager to bat for you, do not go to HR yourself.
And by design, management will have access to more information than individual contributors, but that's the purpose of the role. This person brings in information, priorities, and resources to the team to execute. This is where the "power" idea comes in, but anyone in this position long enough would tell you its more of a "responsibility." It's not always clear what is right and what isn't, nor even a way to really prove it ex post facto. Could it give someone enough perspective to make self-interested decisions that ICs could not? Probably.
I suppose the question is, is that bad and how is it bad, and how would you eliminate it?
Edit: My wishful novelist inside me says its the software program that automates resource allocation, charter, and IC development. You could essentially build an autonomously managed organization with IC roles being the only true human employees.
Relaying on HR for anything related to company development and future (i.e., bonuses) is very very dangerous. I was there and you have to see shenanigans and company politics in that case.
So the problem is:
1. you can give power to HRs to allocate bonuses
2. you can give power to EVPs and VPs to allocate bonuses
It is much better to give this power to EVPs and VPs.
> And by design, management will have access to more information than
> individual contributors, but that's the purpose of the role.
And that cause of the problem :( ICs will have less information and thus when things come to making decisions, people on management track will make better decisions (since they are have more information) and thus subsequent promotion. I was also there...
I wasn't considering performance based bonuses. Either way, the company hopefully has a bonus policy that is at least enforced by HR when it comes to cutting checks.
Either way - I think you may have misinterpreted my remarks about HR.
If you set up the culture right, this isn't as big of a problem as you might think. On our team, it doesn't matter if you're the manager or not, the decisions for the product are made by consensus of the team. Sure management will still do approvals for time off and deal with the skinned knees and runny noses. But for day to day operations, it's peers working for a common cause.
I've found consensus decision making to be frustrating in the environments I've encountered it.
A lot of flip flopping and lack of follow through.
Who made that decision? We did. Can we give up on that and try something else? Of course.
I kinda like to have at least a shepherd for the day to day decisions, if not a commander.
In practice in my current environment it's been the occasional PM that takes some ownership that fills that role, but in many groups I see the floundering without leadership.
Internally I think they think they're making progress because everyone on the team is always happy with their decisions, I may just be the old curmudgeon that's frustrated with what I see as wasted effort.
While I've always thought that essay made good points, it's somewhat dangerous to overinterpret the thoughts of a Stalinist on groups without structure. Her solution is (obviously) to just have hierarchical structure, but this leaves you with the same problems as structureless, there's now just a channel by which people who play the game well can pretend to be accountable. Stalin himself proves that hierarchical groups aren't more accountable, even if they nominally have mechanisms to be so.
To illustrate how consensus-decision-making can be a tricky balance, I've been in a situation before where I was managing a team of a few other developers (about 50% hands-on myself) and so tried to stay away from being "the decider" since there were others closer to the code.
The feedback my own manager shared with me that had been collected from my reports was that they appreciated what I was trying to do, but that they also wanted me to have a more active technical leadership/decision-making roles.
What I'd failed to do was talk enough specifically with the rest of the team around what they wanted the roles to be, vs just assuming they'd want maximum autonomy. This will vary depending on composition of team, familiarity of the devs on the team with the problem area and stack, etc.
It will also depend on if managers are expected to be almost-purely people-managers or if they're also expected to be domain knowledge leaders as well.
There's no one-size-fits-all approach, but the thing I've seen that separates a good manager from a bad manager is being able to adjust their approach in things like that based on the situation vs sticking to a script.
More importantly, who decides who's manager next quarter/year? I've never seen non-managers exercise much leverage on this front. Being able to determine who works with whom is a very powerful position.
Actually, I planned on writing a blog post on this at some point. I work at Hired, and we had an interview process to determine who (internally) would become the next manager. This involved three interviews with engineers, and a presentation with management.
In the "traditional" method of selecting a manager, most engineers don't get selected either. However, the process is less transparent that way.
I'm saying this as a candidate that didn't get selected. I got great actionable feedback on how to be a better leader, and I'll keep my fingers crossed when there is another opportunity available.
Product decisions can never be solely by consensus. At some point, barring massive groupthink, there will be a disagreement on some product decision (what color should this icon be?) but the icon will ultimately be assigned a color. There is some process by which that decision is made.
Yeah I'm not sure why people think consensus is a good strategy. The consensus established by a group should be about who you trust to make a decision, not the content of the decision itself.
i.e. when it comes down to the icon, your group should agree to trust the designer, and then trust the designer. The benefits are numerous: 1) People get to make the decisions within their realm of expertise, 2) No aimless debate, products are built faster, 3) If there was a bad decision, there is one person who made the decision, but the whole team should share accountability since they all agreed to trust the person who made that decision.
The process by which that decision is made is the process by which you select a person to make that decision. Ideally, that happens at the hiring level, so once, for example, a designer is assigned to your team, you already know that s/he is good enough to pick the right color. You don't have to engage in office politics to discover whether or not you can trust him/her, and you don't have to engage in office politics to allocate praise/blame in the event of particularly good/bad decisions.
Do you really work for a genuine co-operative where all decisions are made by consensus of the workers? I'd be surprised and interested to learn more if that's the case.
There's a Brazillian company (Semco) that's like this supposedly, but I have to wonder how they're doing today with so much of the company involved with energy.
"decisions for the product are made by consensus of the team"
I favor democratic decision making processes.
Use voting systems appropriate for the task. Roman eval for new hires, go/no go. Approval voting for triage, new features. JADs for "visions". Creative writing exercise for post-mortems. Etc.
"Democratic" does not mean winner-takes-all, which is suboptimal.
Rarely should everyone have an 'equal say'. You are not 'equal citizens' in this. Second - is that it leads to politics - 'I helped you last time, you help me this time' etc. Unless you get into crazy things like 'hidden ballots'.
There is no substitute for leadership.
Often, a mediocre decision, executed upon well, will lead to better outcomes than 'great decisions' wherein their is fudging, lack of insight etc..
In situations that require broad input, a decent moderator should be able to assess the 'consensus' and go with that.
In many design situations, architects and designers should basically set the direction, absent issues brought up by team members.
Things like 'should we all use the same IDE' or 'what IDE's can we use' - obviously require a lot of input from team members and maximum flexibility.
But things like API design ... that needs to be really well curated and it's best left to the experts - with strong feedback from team members.
This is very true. Hierarchy is hierarchy. Any organization can pretend they don't have such blasphemous thing, but if that was really true then there would be no "management" to begin with. What's wrong with accepting a leader as leader? You can't have it both ways - either you lead or be led. There's no equal footing there.
It's not about making everyone equal at all times. What's important is how do you choose a leader and when.
I don't think "leadership" is synonymous with "management". Some of my best managers have been mediocre leaders. Conversely, some of the strongest technical people I've worked with are great leaders.
This is true. I think organizations need to create more space for developers to grow as leaders which I don't see happening.
In silicon valley contacts are as valuable as money and a person with manager in his title will build contacts faster and achieve more than a developer who actually might have made more impact for his employer.
People with manager in title can work from home more often, travel on company paid trips more often and in general have a better social life than developers. At the end of the day managers can make a developers life bad if he/she wants too. That is what matters.
we do this at my (very large) company. it's awesome.
the best thing about it? engineers who aren't good at the strategic, human high-touch, or political issues, but excel at execution and implementation aren't managing teams of people -- they're busy executing and getting paid (and further promotions) based on their ability to execute, not on their ability to manage herds of programmers.
as a software engineer, i love that my boss is my boss because he's good at managing teams of software engineers. not because he's the best software engineer in the house.
This is true, but not everyone wants decision making power. Some people want to be promoted simply for more money, or to feel a sense of progression. While there are flaws to this approach, it's nice to let people continue to get more compensation and recognition without forcing them into managing people and making broader decisions if that's not something they want to do or have a talent for.
it's absurd in any practical sense. but it's a great story to keep the rank and file mostly satisfied most of the time.
politics in the end is a part of life; it should not dominate or overshadow goal oriented work, but it is a natural, unavoidable consequence of people holding different viewpoints.
on the other hand, all the openness strategies they suggest are great, and these do work well in practice to mitigate conflict [but politics does not equal conflict].
It is much more of a parallel track there, in the sense that it's a completely different job from that of a software engineer. Notice that they don't say anything about the length of each of the tracks. If it's money and power you care about, by all means, become a manager. Just don't expect that your job will be easy, or that you'll be able to do a ton of coding.
I can't speak about FB personally, but I learned the hard way my first few years out of college that at most companies managers are simply given more respect, power, and money than engineers in general. It takes an extraordinarily talented high-impact developer who revolutionizes the company's technology in order to match a run-of-the-mill Director or VP who just shows up to work and "manages" teams of developers -- and even then the match will only be in salary, not in overall power in the organization and probably not in bonus structure either. You'll still be left out of countless meetings and kept in the dark on many decisions you could contribute to effectively.
I say that I learned the hard way because I focused on being that high-impact developer. At my first job, I rewrote the company's core software to make it (really) an order of magnitude faster, providing the basis for the company's sustainability for the next decade. My salary skyrocketed. My title did not. I was forever stuck in a limbo of being just a "developer" while being paid as much as an executive but being excluded from every executive meeting and not even being involved in hiring for the team that would maintain the software I wrote on which the entire company depended. I was still stuck in a cubicle while the managers were sure to get very nice, spacious offices with ludicrous window views.
I really don't understand this view. They're different jobs. If you want to have the power an exec has become an exec. More than likely you cannot do both effectively at the same time. Yes, there are shitty managers but there are also a lot of them doing stuff an engineer doesn't have the skills to do. In all industries people think they could do a better job than their boss - usually it's not true and if it is learn new skills to take their job from them or start your own company.
I didn't say they were the same job. I said they were accorded different levels of respect and prestige, which is what this post is about. I didn't want to be a pure executive or manager.
At that company, it was, frankly, impossible for a developer to get the same perks as a manager. I'm sure there are companies out there that handle this a lot better and don't make management the only path to promotion. These have just been the minority in my personal experience.
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I also agree with you for what it's worth that management is a skill in and of itself that most developers wouldn't be good at. The point I was making in my previous post was a little more nuanced. Think of it like this. At a large company, there might be 100 VPs who are pure managers, and there might be 5 very distinguished engineers who are at the same VP level. This creates the impression that developers can rise up just as high in the company, when in reality it's more of an illusion. The technical skill level necessary to reach VP level as a developer is astronomically high. The management skill level necessary to reach VP level as a pure manager is certainly not low by any means, but it's comparatively much lower than it is for VP engineers.
One thing that helps is to get to personally know the people up the management chain better. Respect comes easier when they know you as a person instead of just a name on a document.
I learned this the easy way at a company when our manager left and it took a long time to find a replacement so all the directors and VPs would come directly to us for questions, advice, etc.
> I was forever stuck in a limbo of being just a "developer" while being paid as much as an executive but being excluded from every executive meeting and not even being involved in hiring for the team that would maintain the software I wrote on which the entire company depended.
Some companies have gotten wise to this problem and created dual career tracks for engineers, management track and technical guru track, to ensure that great tech talent that want to stay in tech has a way to advance in title, pay, and responsibility without having to go into management.
If that's you, then make sure to add that to your list of jobsearch criteria and don't join a company that doesn't have it. Lack of it is almost a guarantee management is unenlightened about tech talent.
Yup. It's likely the "fellow" or "principal" position. The technical impact crosses teams and organizations, and can reach outside of VPs as well. Especially if you are writing software "the entire company depends on."
our company (few 1000 devs) has a parallel hierarchy of ICs going all the way up to VP reporting directly to CEO. They are one of the most respected and influential people in company. While each team has complete freedom in terms of tech stack and other decisions, they drive company wide things like migration to cloud, inhouse big data platforms.
But do they get a seat at the table when the company sets its strategic direction? Likewise, do they get a say when the company decides how the budget is allocated and to whom?
In my experience if the answers to these questions are no then the company is still being run by PHBs with PHB priorities and PHB viewpoints in which technical people are largely interchangeable cogs.
I understand this frustration. I really really do. Just being a code monkey to the direction the PHBS set.
I do ask you to take the flip side. Do you want your non tech savvy PHBS at your meeting setting your technical direction? Should they tell you what Web framework to use? What IDE? Tabs vs spaces? OOP vs FOP?
Most engineers who I know are really mad about not helping more with business decisions, but they won't listen to a pointy hair boss making technical decisions. Why is that?
Agreed. Where I find this especially bizarre is in technical companies, or even the tech department of a company. There's a layer of devs, then a glass ceiling, then above that countless layers of management.
I have a bunch of friends at Facebook - and from what I hear, this article is not very far off from what is happening. And it's all about many of the seniors leading with example.
Take Philip Su, who was the site lead for Facebook London. In most organizations, that would translate to "manager of everything happening at Facebook". After 3 years he decided to take another lateral move - to move back to software development (no lead, just a software engineer) https://www.facebook.com/the.philip.su/timeline/story?ut=32&...
When you work at a company where managers demonstrate that it is a lateral move - moving from management to individual contribution - well, then this stuff starts to work.
Another thing that this article does not touch on, is the transparency that people at Facebook share what's going on with them professionally. My buddy said a senior person shared on Facebook @work how he had gotten a bad performance review, and how this made him feel... for all other employees to see, and comment on. My buddy was saying that "when I joined, I thought that people were just drinking kool aid about how our culture is different. But now that I'm in - I seriously have not expected it to be this different to anywhere I've worked before"
I do think that Facebook is doing something incredible with keeping a very startup like and transparent culture going at this large scale. No other company of this size even comes close.
Yes, but this doesn't add much because any human situation involving more than 2 people involves interpersonal dynamics, AKA politics. It's a question of how much.
The Philip Su example is great, but being an early employee and a manager has basically has insurance against getting fired and he can do what he pleases. That IMHO does not reflect the life of an average facebook employee.
Philip is not unique, FB engineering managers of all levels and tenure move into development roles. It's a relatively common occurrence; I'd guess around 5% of managers switch back to coding each year.
Some of the organization structure setup is not unique to Facebook. My former boss was a long time Microsoft employee, from what I heard from her anecdotally, Microsoft has long been setup with dual tracks for technical employees. The management track and the engineer track. One moves from engineer track to management track is a true lateral move in that salary don't necessarily get raised even though responsibilities will vary and may expand.
Also, the rank on engineer track may also be converted to a lower rank in management track. On top of that, long tenured Distinguished Engineers might also get a much higher compensation than a mid-level manager.
Once the incentives are leveled up, personal interests and motivation really becomes the driver for employees to do their most appropriate job.
Obviously these were all anecdotal stories I heard. Microsoft now may also be different from the Microsoft then. I welcome someone who has first hand experience with similar organizational structure setup to clarify and elaborate on this.
At most companies, Distinguished Engineer is the "technical track" equivalent of Vice President.
So making more than a mid-level manager may not be all that great. :-)
(I imagine Distinguised Engineers at MSFT do very well, and when you factor in quality of life may be happier with their jobs than VPs. But that doesn't make it parallel.)
The problem is that most companies have a small handful of such people, and lots of vice presidents. They want you to think it's equivalent, but the reality is that, Facebook and anywhere, there's only so far you can go on the technical track.
Exactly. Managers decide who is high level on the engineering side and also want to save money and have high management salaries. It's completely stupid to think that there won't be 500 VP's and 3 distinguished engineers in this situation, which is how it exactly is at the large tech companies.
Ideally, those should be in balance if the track are truly parallel.
Thus, if 1% of engineers are in the highest, distinguished level then 1% of managers should be in the highest managerial level. If those 500 VPs amount to 10% of all managerial positions then they should be comparable in impact and salary to all those engineers whose engineer contributor level amounts to 10% of all engineering positions.
Seems to me the solution to that problem would be to make the salary bands for engineers wider, so you can keep growing salary wise even if you pretty much cap out in terms of technical ability.
How would that be a solution? The problem is that managers don't want to pay engineers and would rather pay themselves, so everything else follows from that.
IBM is set up the same way, to a degree. They have "IBM fellows" who are essentially executive-level engineers. I don't think it extends all the way down though.
All large tech companies (Apple, MS, LinkedIn, Oracle, Google at least) have the same official ranks for engineers that go Senior, Staff, Distinguished, Fellow. But that doesn't mean anyone ever gets promoted up there. I think there's at most three Fellows in any of those companies at a time.
However, the gist of the matter is that despite being on-par with compensation (assuming metrics like years of experience / company tenure), a manager role is simply more powerful, allowing easier leverage for more compensation more quickly.
Worked in Microsoft and i agree with what you said. We never had pressure of , if we don't get to management track with in certain year we may never make that means you might lose on monetary benefit.
It's interesting to compare what Facebook does with how Galois organizes itself. They just published a blog post about how many traditional management functions are handled on a rotating basis—instead of having people who always manage, they have individual researchers and engineers step up to lead efforts on specific projects. This general approach even extends to firm-wide management (via a "Jedi council") and finding new clients.
Galois is a private research lab/consulting firm that specializes in high-assurance computing relying heavily in programming language techniques and Haskell. I mostly know about them because they publish a whole ton of cool tools for security, low-level programming and verification. They also seem like a wonderful place to work partly because they're tackling fascinating, research-level problems and partly because the internal culture seems like something fundamentally special.
> Take the incentive out of “climbing the ladder.”
In other words, pay everyone the same? Of course the author didn't mean that; and pay and power are the primary drivers of upward mobility. If I get paid as much as Zuck's SVPs, sure, I won't feel the urge to climb the ladder; but until that happens, I will.
There are definitely Individual Contributors who are on the same compensation level as directors. These are the engineers who revolutionize how the company operates, such as inventing HHVM and saving tons of resources.
There are going to be a couple director level IC's and several hundreds of directors. Those IC's have to make industry changing tech worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Those directors just have to show up to work and be 'in charge' of whatever those IC's are doing. That's how the scam works.
"Climbing the ladder" has the connotation of stepping on other people in order to get ahead. Thinking about the analogy, if there are a bunch of people trying to climb the same ladder as you are, you have to pull people off or climb over them.
It's possible to create an incentive structure that discourages cannibalizing your coworkers.
I'm not sure, but when I was in the military, my SSgt told me not to burn bridges because I might end up in a situation where my life depends on that person helping me out. I thought that was an interesting incentive to cooperate. So maybe a reputation system can work, but I'm not good enough with people to know.
To be clear, I'm fine with rivalry and competition. I just think there's a sane and reasonable way to do it.
> "Managers focus on ..., creating a vision for how that team will execute its goals"
Confusing management with leadership is one of the main reasons for politics and empire building. Once managers think they're in charge of figuring out the vision, instead of that being the whole team's responsibility, you're lost in top-down management land.
In more traditional structures, managers are often in charge of figuring out that vision because they argue the buck stops with them, so they need the authority to make decisions to arrive at the outcome that meets their goals.
Unfortunately, what often happens is managers think they are more knowledgeable than the ICs on the team. This in turn leads to ICs not being invested in the outcomes as much as if it were their ideas, and can lead to resentment because they do not feel their input is valued.
A good leader is not "The Decider." A good leader is the one who asks their team "given X, Y and Z goals, how would you solve for this knowing these are the constraints?"
Funny, I had one of those meetings at work just yesterday.
"Given X, Y and Z goals, how would you solve for this knowing A) these are the constraints and B) that me and the other cofounder have already decided what we want to do, and really just want your buy in."
> Managers focus on building a great team, creating a vision for how that team will execute its goals, and helping the people on that team develop in their careers. They are put in those positions because of their strong people skills. They aren’t there to tell teams what to do.
That almost brings a tear to my eye. This is such a huge contrast to what my current experience is at BigCorp. And that's just a few miles away from Facebook.
The question then becomes, how much power does a manager have at Facebook? Can they block you from transferring to another team? Can they block your vacation/time off requests? Are they the only ones responsible for doing the performance reviews? Is said performance review audited so as to contain verifiable facts?
> We make escalation “legal” by making sure people know they won’t be blamed or punished for speaking up or asking hard questions.
I really wish that was expanded on. Theoretically, I could escalate. In practice, that would backfire horribly. After all, if there's no accountability, what's preventing your manager from simply retaliating by giving you a hard time, possibly a while after the escalation happened? There are lots of subjective ways your work can be criticized/sabotaged which are not obviously connected to the escalation.
> Obviously, these strategies are at their most effective when the whole company adopts them.
Actually, it is way, way worse when the whole company doesn't support that. You can move from a great project to your own personal purgatory.
No, manager can't prevent you from switching to any other team or even start a team on your own. The idea behind this is that it ensures that talent naturally gravitates towards teams with most impact. Managers have no say!
Reviews are written by your peers (that usually includes your manager).
Reviews need to quote actual success metrics to prove the impact you had...just writting "bob is dope" won't take you far :)
Throwaway for obvious reasons. I have first hand experience with both FB and Google. When it comes to office politics, Google is currently turning into shit pretty rapidly, comparatively speaking. It's still miles better than most other companies, but the deterioration is now beyond the point of no return. There are _tons_ of layers of management, and 90% of the time, you'd be hard pressed to see what they actually do besides playing power games and fucking up the products as a result (as if Google needed any help with that). Managers here are mostly ex-engineers, and most of them suck at managing. The reason why they are managers in the first place is that it's virtually impossible for an engineer to attain a level beyond T6 (and massive increase in comp that comes with that), whereas the requirement to do so if you're a manager is that you have a pulse, and you're able to take credit for your reports' work. You won't believe what kind of people get L7 and above at Google once they switch to management. At Google you don't have to be good at managing to actually manage. TL;DR: as an engineer your career at Google will end at T6 if you're lucky, and at T5 if you're not; this is where things _begin_ for managers. So Google values managers more.
FB is actually more mindful of the quality of their management talent. They put a bonfire under their feet in the form of charging managers with direct responsibility to hire for their teams, and _encouraging_ team members to leave for other teams every now and then to overcome human inertia. If you suck or if your project sucks, you will have trouble hiring and retaining talent, so pretty quickly you won't be a manager anymore.
I'm not sure that Google is turning into shit. It seems to me it's always been like that. I've been at Google for 4 years and noticed very quickly that turning software engineers into managers could not possibly work. I've switched teams recently and am happier for the time being, but my previous manager sucked ass.
My new project is actually quite interesting. There's very little politics involved too, which is a plus, and I'm glad I'm not writing yet another chat app that we will deprecate in 2 years time.
The worst part about Google for me is the level of incivility. This is what, the 4th time a senior exec has to call people out and tell them to behave on memegen? And it's only getting worse.
Also, considering how mediocre many Google engineers are, I never understood where all that arrogance comes from.
The level of incivility is more of a side effect of being a large company. Google is also full of professional victims who blow even the minor transgressions (e.g. telling someone they look good at an offsite) completely out of proportion. This makes it seem like there is a lot more incivility than there really is. VPs on memegen is virtue signaling, nothing more, pay no attention.
As to the quality of engineers, I've worked with some AMAZING people at Google, far and away the best I've ever seen in my long career. After a while Google skews your perception as to what it means to be "good", because even the very worst SWEs at Google are well above average in the industry. Google would not be able to function without this, given that it takes a full 3-4 months to just become productive with its internal infra and kinda-sorta figure _some_ things out.
> The worst part about Google for me is the level of incivility. This is what, the 4th time a senior exec has to call people out and tell them to behave on memegen? And it's only getting worse.
Memegen is actually the best part about Google. It's an internal meme site where people poke fun at the various failings (perceived or real) of Google, each other, and upper management. You can even poke fun at the founders and the CEO, and people often do. Though of course neither the founders nor the CEO actually read it.
>Successful candidates should clearly demonstrate that their priorities are company, team, and self — in that order. This makes it more likely that they’ll put the company’s mission above their individual interests and that they’ll set the proper example for others.
Ah. I understand. So there are people that will set a company/team above their own interest and are reasonably intelligent at the same time?
They're just looking for good liars, nothing else.
I think this concept works well until you consider "lateral movement" between companies. ie. it works as long as a developer leaving / laid-off-from the company will be compensated at their new job just as well as the manager will.
Don't get me wrong. Some people will embrace this. Namely those who aren't interested in managing others. But it seems a bit disingenuous to say you can "level the playing field" by having a value structure that doesn't map well to how most other companies' value structure is set up.
Whiners in the interview process seems like a good one. I'm conscious about complaining about a tech stack, or even a build system. It doesn't matter if you don't like it.
* "Influencer" - you can say that well respected technical people have as much influence as management - but if you spend most of your day coding you don't have the same information about the organisation so you just won't know there are decisions being made that you can influence. Management is like politics - it is a full time job.
* at some point companies need to become more democratic. Yes "influencers" should be involved in these discussions, and management should almost be the press - letting people know these decisions are underway.
* I personally think if we spend more time writing good discussion documents around our projects we will be able to write good discussion documents about our organisations
Some time ago at my workplace new top management proclaimed that "there was too much politics". In retrospect, what they really meant is they were uncomfortable with middle management holding too much decision-making power. So they took steps to ensure a more top-down structure and middle management was basically left with a task of overseeing their reports so they don't slack off.
I think the root of office politics comes when positions and influence within the company become a zero sum game. It wasn't until relatively late in Microsoft's career that you started hearing about all the reindeer games in Redmond. I'll be interested in seeing how this culture develops as Facebook reaches a growth fixpoint.
Kudos to FB. It's a hard problem as you scale. I have a few friends who suggest the article matches their experiences there.
Being a 40-something engineer, you hear the same things over and again. I used to work at MSFT and my first manager there used to espouse company, team, self every day as the HBR article does. He'd regular re-evaluate his priorities based on what is the most beneficial task I can work on for the company today. Makes me wonder if it appears in management books or people just get wired that way.
It definitely a reasonable way to proceed most of the time. Firsthand, I have no doubt that most of the unpleasantness I've witnessed in tech companies is due to team or self over everything.
Leaving the interesting article aside for a moment, the page has an insane weight of fixed tool/menu/other bars. On my small laptop screen they account for 24% of the whole viewport height. Who thought that's a good idea?
Probably a good idea, but I can say that when I worked there in 2011 it was EASILY the most political place I've ever worked, including the US Government.
Lost job recently to office politics at a fortune XXX. It sounds good in theory but I doubt Facebook or any Corp will ever manage to get people put self secondary (tertiary according to article). Or may be they have.. They are awfully successful and it has to come with great team spirit
FB is big enough I'm sure different teams vary pretty widely. Even at the ~300 person company I was at previously the difference between project team culture and manager interference was pretty huge.
I agree. And these same folks also like their jobs at FB despite the politics ... they see it as one of the cons but are still happy with all of the pros.
I only commented because it's frustrating to see any company painted as if it's the one magical place in the universe that has solved office politics. Facebook is not that company.
"Successful candidates should clearly demonstrate that their priorities are company, team, and self — in that order"...right there you are creating a selection bias for exactly the kind of people you claim not to want. No-fucking-body in his right mind orders things that way. You are filtering for liars who know which lies to tell.
I consider myself very not into office politics and I'm confident a would fail massively to answer most of the proposed interview questions
The author should have been more specific in referring to the professional 'self', rather than the general self. My takeaway was that they don't want people who value their own professional advancement at the expense of the company/product as a whole (e.g. backstabbing co-workers, hoarding resources).
I don't think that the author was suggesting that the employees are expected to value the company's interest over their own personal lives. At least I hope not.
I respectfully disagree that nobody orders things that way. I have generally had that attitude wherever I've been working. The times I didn't have that attitude were where I discovered that I was being lied to by my boss or by those further up the chain. Lying kills my motivation to work for anyone, and when it happens, I immediately begin planning my exit in earnest.
Now, it may be a rare trait. I have no idea really whether it is or not. I've certainly known many who operate in the reverse order, but it is what I was taught by my parents growing up, and has served me well during various careers.
None of this means I want to work for Facebook, but they may actually be doing this there. I have read complaints by former employees that it is a little cult-like to work there, but again, those are a few out of thousands.
1.03. Approve software only if they have a well-founded belief that it is safe, meets specifications, passes appropriate tests, and does not diminish quality of life, diminish privacy or harm the environment. The ultimate effect of the work should be to the public good.
You think Facebook engineers can seriously go to work every day and abide by that?
Could you point to the part of the ACM code that stack ranks priorities? I must be missing it. It's a code to act ethically in conducting job functions, not how to set personal priorities around a career.
In fact the code says it's all in service of the public, if there is any sense of priorities to derive, the employer is not on top. And besides, "The Code is not a simple ethical algorithm that generates ethical decisions."
>8. SELF - Software engineers shall participate in lifelong learning regarding the practice of their profession and shall promote an ethical approach to the practice of the profession.
I think what you are pointing out is that those priorities shouldn't be misaligned in the first place. Asking someone to do professional suicide to help the company shouldn't be a thing.
I mean, if you are are part of a team and identify something that goes against you and the team but in favor of the conpany, your team's goal should be revised and realigned, and you should get credit for that. In the end pointing out the problem and eventually offering a solution shouldn't go against your own professional interests (your "self" shouldn't get the short end of the stick for a correct behavior)
6. Producer co-ops. Often in agriculture, though others exist. Blue Diamond Almonds, and, previously, both Visa and MasterCard (the latter have both since reorganised as for-profit joint-stock companies).
I don't know of any business organisations that perform software or consulting services on a cooperative basis, though of course, the entire Free Software movement is a non-business organisation of such work.
Depends what set of priorities and how far you draw the line, in my mind.
Project/work priorities? Should be company first, then team, then self. I think that goes without saying, and I think thats what they're trying to get across. Going for self glory in projects isn't good for a company. Going to team glory isn't good for a company, but its better than self glory.
Financial priorities? Everyone has to take care of themselves in that sense. Every individual has to take care of the bottom of their hierarchy of needs. This might be what you're comparing here. At the same time, past a certain point self needs are fulfilled financially - holding a project hostage for a raise for example wouldn't be great.
Social priorities? Self probably comes first there as well - but its not that great a scale since self improvement from working around good people is a benefit to the company as well. But if done in such a way that you stand on the bodies of your vanquished foes you've created a win/lose situation where it could be a win/win. Don't be like oracle, basically.
>Going for self glory in projects isn't good for a company. Going to team glory isn't good for a company, but its better than self glory.
you and FB missed the most important - going for the glory of your boss. It is good for the both - for the company (as the company did make sure that the glory of the boss is aligned with the glory of the company) as well as for the team (as the company did make sure that glory of the boss is aligned with the glory of the team). And it is obviously also good for yourself as bosses value the ones who bring them glory.
What an amazingly hierarchical type of thinking! Glory for the boss is just that, glory for the boss. Sometimes it may be good for the company, sometimes it might build up the boss in ways that aren't aligned with the companies interests. You get ivory tower syndrome and "kingdoms" really quick with that type of thinking.
So many of you are so ready for your Facebook interview. And I believe none of you. Unless you have ever quit a job without having another one to jump to, because you concluded that your current employer couldn't possibly ever get value out of you greater than what they are paying for you. Then I would believe you and consider you out of your mind with misplaced loyalty.
Some of you claim the question is about putting your personal glory above the success of the team. If so the author states it horribly
Kinda are, tho'. Stress, burnout, depression, carpel tunnel, strain on relationships, poor diet and lack of exercise, sleep deprivation - these are all things that many companies demand of their employees.
Professional responsibility doesn't supersede social responsibility and personal responsibility.
I already have to make decisions and produce value. If a company is paying me, I will choose to be more tolerant of making such decisions as part of that company's processes and with consideration to that company's needs. However, payment does not obligate me to serve those things. At least, not morally.
I guess I need more detail to understand your position on this one. An employee that is working for their own personal benefit and gain only is not going to work well in most team settings and will likely not care to work on projects that move the company forward. I don't think they are saying you need to die for the company, simply that your work should be focused on the goals of the company. It's kind of what you get paid for when you go to work.
> An employee that is working for their own personal benefit and gain only is not going to work well in most team settings
Well, that wasn't what GP said (specifically your "only"). What was stated was that company > team > self is not a natural ordering. And I agree.
In particular, people will generally rank team > company. This is well-known to anyone who's studied small unit leadership, and has been well-known since von Clausewitz, perhaps even since antiquity.
However, having some degree of overall faith in the leadership of the company, or at least in the purpose of the company (what's typically referred to in the military literature as Esprit de Corps) is a necessary precondition for small unit cohesion.
TL;DR: the relationship between self, unit and company is much too complex for a linear ranking of their priorities to be useful in anything but vacuous statements.
> The relationship between self, unit and company is much too complex for a linear ranking of their priorities to be useful in anything but vacuous statements.
I generally like HBR articles, but it's very annoying to end up deleting HTML nodes because of their stupid menu bars and x articles left notice.
Poor web design.
anyway...
> Successful candidates should clearly demonstrate that their priorities are company, team, and self — in that order.
This just sounds so obnoxious to me.
> At Facebook, moving into management is not a promotion. It’s a lateral move, a parallel track. Managers are there to support people and to remove barriers to getting things done. Managers focus on building a great team, creating a vision for how that team will execute its goals, and helping the people on that team develop in their careers
All of those things sound like they add up to much more influence and responsibility than you get as an IC.
> “Then who is in charge?” Lest anyone think it’s a Lord of the Flies scenario, our managers still moderate, facilitate, and tie-break.
So the manager is in charge. But you know, feel free to suggest stuff plebs.
> We provide different opportunities for growth by empowering employees to work on new projects or in new groups when interested. This keeps ICs engaged by allowing them to broaden their areas of expertise and expand or focus their scope by moving to projects at different levels of development
So does this mean you don't make me jump through hoops to switch to another team? Large part of why I quit my last job was because I find the idea that I have to do an interview, to get the same job I'm already doing, ridiculous.
The idea of the hackamonth sounds like it could help with this acutally. You are already employed by the company, just go talk to the manager and ask to switch for a month. At the end talk again and decide if it is a good fit.
Way better than getting stuck on a lousy team, with a poor manager, who is able to trap you with bad reviews and threats.
It's really unclear whether whatever they are doing actually does anything. And the author doesn't sound like he has any idea on what matters for productivity, given that productivity is what they were after.
But at least it's clear that anyone can get far in management as long as they don't screw up too much.
Here's another perspective – "management" is a job that can be poorly executed by some, but is important as a method for effectively disseminating and collecting knowledge and goals from different parts of a larger community.
The reason my current manager is there is to communicate the business's priorities to me, and effectively deal with any grievances I have. This is astonishingly effective, in that I no longer have to spend time researching the reasons why I am performing certain tasks – I have a manager who can prioritise, but who is willing to take my views on board if I have them. Everybody wins, and I don't really want her replaced with an automated system.
Everybody wins insofar as you don't challenge the status quo. If you do, they will isolate you (i.e. not promote you) and/or terminate you. This stifles innovation and creativity. There are no places left anymore like Bell Labs - where pure research was carried out and management got out of your way.
I find it hilarious that the vast majority of people on here will agree to automating away everything, except management (we really need them!). What I also find hilarious is the amount of downvotes I'm getting. If anything, that proves my point.
Monkeys in business suits are a cancer and plague upon Silicon Valley, and the sooner we get rid of them, the sooner we can focus on solving real problems.
What I see in most SV companies is massive bloatware - managers upon managers upon managers that don't really do anything. They create no value. Yet the incentive structure is skewed in their favor. This inefficiency will be addressed eventually, either exogenously (tech bubble bursting) or endogenously (engineers finally get sick of this corrupt and infected system).
This is nice in theory. But when your "peers" with Manager in their title have access to more information and more decision-making power, it is not in fact a parallel track. Just saying people are equal doesn't make it so, and it doesn't change the underlying organizational structures.