Comment by dasil003
2 years ago
Your point is that managers are more upwardly mobile, which is fair, but that doesn't mean when you make the switch it is a promotion. G9 IC -> M0 will not increase your salary. It does grant you more power, but that is not a promotion per se.
The other thing to watch out for is manager growth over the last 10-15 years was a result of the structural needs of an unprecedented tech bull run. Now that the industry has moved into belt-tightening mode, the heaviest scrutiny is falling on managers. The type of political games a typical 35 year-old EM (5 years coding, 10 years EM) may not be as effective as they were in the previous environment. There are a LOT of EMs getting pipped or knocked back to IC these days, whereas ICs with a bit of product/UX sense, ability to think a bit beyond their silo, and willing to work on "boring" business applications will continue to be highly valued, especially given the amount of dead weight that has found its way in by grinding leetcode.
That's a great insight. I hadn't considered how the bull run led to the current structure, as we switch from "keep this ship together while we grow" to driving operational efficiency.
Yep. Literally straight from Mark Zuckerberg's mouth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff4fRgnuFgQ&t=6585s
<quote> [From 1:49:53] Um, you know, at the beginning of this, we, um, I asked our, our people team, what was the average number of reports that a manager had? And I think it was, it was around three, maybe three to four, but closer to three. I was like, wow, like a manager can, you know, best practices that person can, can manage, you know, seven or eight people. Um, but there was a reason why it was closer to three. It was because we were growing so quickly, right? And when you're hiring so many people so quickly, then that means that you need managers who have capacity to onboard new people. Um, and also if you have a new manager, you may not want to have them have seven direct reports immediately because you want them to ramp up. But the thing is going forward, I don't want us to actually hire that many people that quickly, right? So I actually think we'll just do better work if we have more constraints and we're, um, you know, leaner as an organization. So in a world where we're not adding so many people as quickly, is it as valuable to have a lot of managers who have extra capacity waiting for new people? No, right? So, um, so now we can, we could sort of defragment the organization and get to a place where the average is closer to that seven or eight.