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Comment by analog31

1 day ago

If it's any consolation, this is also a mystery to non developers like me. And developers likewise wonder why a business needs so many managers and what they do all day.

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analog31

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ojbyrne  1 day ago

Managers schedule meetings so that developers can’t get anything done. Then they hire more developers, which means even more meetings. Virtuous cycle!

  • ZWoz  1 day ago

    Good managers are like firewalls: they shield from negative outside influences and let good or important information and tasks pass.

    That includes representing department in stupid meetings, instead of wasting developers/engineers time.

Terr_  1 day ago

There is certainly room to add developers to a "simple" project if one is ensuring everything works with screen readers for the blind, that it had worldwide I18N support, meets every law around privacy and data jurisdiction, has systems for requesting personal copies/deletion, etc...

But instead it was probably for Messenger's portion of telemetry and marketing and ads and hacking out of your phones security model to spy on you. [0]

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/protect-yourself-metas...

  • tliltocatl  8 hours ago

    But that's core product. That's how they make money. Whatever it's a good idea to make money that way is a different story.

Aurornis  1 day ago

> And developers likewise wonder why a business needs so many managers and what they do all day.

I wondered, too, until I spent some time as a manager.

I thought I’d have all this time to mentor juniors and updated documentation and maybe even code still.

Nope! Too much communication, negotiation, and dealing with drama. What the team sees is a nicely distilled and cleaned up version of a lot of meetings and conversations. Looks minimal but it’s the final product of all the work, not a sum of the inputs.

I was also disappointed by how much of my time went to dealing with a very small number of problem makers. I expected a bunch of management politics but 80% of the junk I had to deal with came from a small number of problem ICs, mostly on teams we worked with.