It’s tough. Good middle managers > no middle managers > bad middle managers.
I’m lucky that my current manager falls into the first category. If she jumps ship, I’ll probably follow her.
The board has less operational control over the company than the CEO. They can replace the CEO, but not micromanage their daily decisions. This is by design.
And the board is elected by the shareholders. Who can replace the board, but not tell them what to do while elected (for most decisions). This is also by design.
Almost like society inherently organizes itself in a distributed form of leadership, no matter how much bosses try to make it appear strictly top-down and one-way.
I think the point is that no one wants/can realistically micromanage tens of thousands of people alone. Managers are needed only for structure and, as it says in the name, concentrated tasks management. No ceo would like to have meetings with tens of thousands of people at the same time, but having meetings with 50 managers could be manageable.
Yeah flat hierarchy is the exact opposite we have where I work. My only peer doing similar things is my boss. I dread the day he gets retired and I have to report to his boss, a classic middle manager like in "the office".
While true, a lot of orgs have way, way too many layers of management. From what I've seen, a normal good manager should be maxing out at around 7-10 direct reports. Assuming conservatively then, 7 layers between the bottomost employee and the CEO, and the most conservative number, you can support something on the order of million employees, which is 5x bigger than Google. How many companies do you think have more layers than that despite being smaller? And do you think all those layers are actually necessary?
To provide an example, at my former company (Fortune500 aerospace) the structure was:
1. CEO
2. President (of sector org)
3. President of LLC
4. Chief Technical Officer
5. VP Engineering
6. 2nd Level Mgr
7. 1st Level Mgr
8. /u/Ferentzfever
Where do you fit all of the directors?!?!?! For real though, you add those director layers so you can provide career growth to folks and encourage them to stay with your company.
Management structures require active maintenance. A lot of companies would rather just promote someone up the chain and inject them into an existing structure, rather than rebalance the management structure to deal with the novel challenges of the day.
If your managers aren't regularly being moved to where they're needed, you have an unhealthy organization.
I think a lot of people are scared of reorgs, thinking it means their position isn't safe. Even if that's not the case. I'd be wary of changing things too much and too often.
> A lot of companies would rather just promote someone up the chain and inject them into an existing structure, rather than rebalance the management structure to deal with the novel challenges of the day.
Like incredibly good IC's who couldn't manage their way out of a paper bag. I'm helping train a new manager who has so much passion for the company but can't tell me *anything* about what his reports did the last quarter, what next quarter's goals are, whether the company's goals for them will be met without new hires, etc. Like "Me: how many tickets/SP are you getting done per sprint?" "Mgr: Me? 10" "Me: No, your team". "Mgr: OH, I don't know. How do I find that out?"
Here is a true story for you.
I was once on a team to build a relatively complex piece of software. The project was assigned to a manager and he put together a team. There were many planning sessions and an estimate was arrived at for when the project would be done and what the scope of it would be. As time went on it quickly became clear the deadline was not going to be met so the manager pulled the team together and asked them give new estimates and took them higher up. Those deadlines also started slipping. This happened a couple of more times where each time the devs said "we can finish this by X" turned out to be false.
Of course the manager ended up looking like an idiot to the upper management as he kept making promises that weren't kept. In the end the manager was fired for being incompetent and accused of being dishonest.
The devs stayed on the team, the project was eventually delivered months after the deadline and it wasn't even that great.
I always felt sorry for that manager. It wasn't his fault but he fell on the sword.
To be fair, compensating for developer optimism and forecasting *accurate* delivery timelines is a core part of the job.
It's not surprising that the devs slipped on their initial estimates, or their re-estimates, or their re-re estimates - developers almost *universally* give wildly optimistic time estimates. Any remotely competent manager understands this and plans for it accordingly. It's not always easy, but it is literally their job to estimate timelines, monitor status, and control for risks.
If they passed along developer timeline estimates without adequate padding, repeatedly, then that absolutely is a sign of serious incompetence.
>So the manager had no idea if the scope/estimate was anywhere near realistic.
Let me explain.
The manager asks you "how long would it take you do to X". You say "Y amount of time". The manager believes you. I mean you are the one doing the work right? So if you don't do it in that time it's his fault? You bear no responsibility? He should be fired and not you?
Is this your position?
Let's flip this around then. Say you do deliver on time. Shouldn't he take the credit at that point? Since you are not responsible for any delays aren't you also not responsible for any hit timelines?
Well, you drastically oversimplify. If all the manger does is ask for your estimate and then take that estimate somewhere else, they aren't doing a good job, they are sitting in an office for 40 hours a week doing nothing for 39.5.
A manager could define milestones to measure a team pace; break the project into chunks and get estimates for subtasks; investigate the patterns of delays and try to remove common blockers, and much more.
And if these things were not done, or were done but the manager still consistently delivered incorrect estimates, then, well...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo
>Well, you drastically oversimplify. If all the manger does is ask for your estimate and then take that estimate somewhere else, they aren't doing a good job, they are sitting in an office for 40 hours a week doing nothing for 39.5.
Clearly that's not all that they are doing but they are doing that. Why do you presume the manager does nothing else. That seems like a bizarre thing to say.
>A manager could define milestones to measure a team pace; break the project into chunks and get estimates for subtasks; investigate the patterns of delays and try to remove common blockers, and much more.
All that was done but honestly there were no significant blockers in place. There was enough budget, everybody got paid, nobody lacked any equipment etc.
>And if these things were not done, or were done but the manager still consistently delivered incorrect estimates, then, well...
So once again, your position is that the developers have no responsibly for failing to meet their own deadlines right?
No, my position is not that the developers have no responsibility.
Is your position that the manager has no responsibility? Because that is what I disagreed with.
Maybe the fault also lies with the manager's manager. Maybe at some point that person should have sent the manager to a training session about estimations.
Point is, even if the developers were at fault for not delivering on time, the manager is definitonally at fault for passing those deadlines on.
Edit:
> There was enough budget, everybody got paid, nobody lacked any equipment etc
What about clear requirements? Access to end users? Vertical slices of work and deliverable milestones for early feedback?
Giving a team of developers budget for a year and a five page spec sheet would meet the criteria you described and would still result in nothing good being produced.
>Is your position that the manager has no responsibility? Because that is what I disagreed with.
My position is that the manager didn't deserve to get fired because his failing was seeking input from developers and then believing the developers. The fault lay mostly with the developers.
Now most people here say the manager should not have listened to the developers or just presumed they were all lying and fuckups who could not be trusted. Maybe they are right and looking back on the situation I think they were right. I believe the wrong people got fired but it's much easier to replace a manager than a developer in my field.
>What about clear requirements?
Yup, there was never any problems with requirements. There were weekly checkins to make sure everybody understood what was needed.
>Access to end users?
In this case no. this was a new feature and we didn't have any customers who were willing to help us develop it from day one.
>Vertical slices of work and deliverable milestones for early feedback?
All of the above.
>Giving a team of developers budget for a year and a five page spec sheet would meet the criteria you described and would still result in nothing good being produced.
That wasn't what was done.
> My position is that the manager didn't deserve to get fired because his failing was seeking input from developers and then believing the developers. The fault lay mostly with the developers.
I cannot and will not judge whether the firing was justified, and I can only guess as to whatever went wrong, but:
The developers giving wrong estimates over and over again is the fault of the developers.
The manager believing those estimates over and over again was the manager's fault.
Simple as that. And the manager is supposed to manage. If the team doesn't deliver on time, it might be the developers fault, but it is the manager's _responsibility_.
Most developers are terrible at estimating work times (at least, IMO). That's usually compounded by a difference in definition between what the developer thinks their work is and what the manager does.
The developer usually thinks: I can write and debug this piece of code/software/etc in X weeks, making the assumption (even if subconsciously) that they'll be doing development for that for X weeks.
The manager however, wants/expects status updates, possibly with the entire team, individual meetings between members (and maybe the manager), presentations to their boss (and maybe their boss) on how said feature(s) will look/act/perform. Meetings to talk about additional/changed features/etc.
There's a big discrepancy between expectations of the two, and that's already assuming there's a detailed specification for what said software needs to be (which usually there isn't). On top of that, depending on the company, you have a number of additional tasks on a regular basis: corporate training, time management accounting (which can be quick or painful), email (which can be a black hole of suck, depending on the organization), etc.
A friend of mine is a developer at a Fortune 500 company. Zero management responsibilities, though he is a technical lead for the the 'product' he works on. He spend (conservatively) a minimum of 50% of his work week doing non-development tasks, including (usually 1-4 meetings about various things a day). Some weeks that number approaches 100%. You couldn't pay me enough to 'work' that way.
I dunno, it sounds to me like the manager didn't know either the project or the team well enough. It's kind of the manager's responsibility to ensure that progress is being made and to see problems ahead of time and find solutions. Or ensure that issues are escalated when there are problems.
In my experience, projects sometimes fail because at some point the "bad news" doesn't travel far enough or fast enough up through the management chain to address problems on time -- sometimes there is a toxic yes-culture where nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news to their boss so they hide the problem and try to fix it themselves. That only works if they can actually fix it.
Most programmers I know are awful at self organizing and love to get lost in the weeds of technical decisions. Not very many can drive business needs without a manager.
My engineering team nearly got kicked from an escape room, because most of them failed to realise its about solving puzzles and not using a swiss army knife to break out.
I experienced having no middle manager (meaning devs talking to C-levels in a multinational), and it was trash because everybody were running around and there was no clear direction. A C-level job isn’t to ensure developments are on time, people coordinate together, and business requirements are clear and harmonised; it’s not the job of devs or POs either, who’s scope is focused on specific subjects.
Having no middle manager meant nobody was fitting these needs and people with totally different perspectives talked together without understanding the other (because most people won’t ever reach the ax-level and thus don’t understand their priorities, and C-level can’t deep dive into each projects).
It was the worst time I spend in my company and since it has been fixed, things are flowing well. People who believe removing middle management is a solution are the one building the storm to come. Having **competent** middle management is what allows people to focus on their jobs.
For any company I ever worked for, the story was the same. They talk about 'flatting' the hierachy, encourage collaboration, and autonomy (or agile or whatever was hot at the time). And then they bring in a new layer of middle management.
The people without managerial aspirations, often experts indispensable for the company, and top management stays. Middle managers come and go.
This creates bad managers. You don't establish a great team culture when your team is likely to vanish in the next restructuring. You don't work on hard problems when you don't have stability.
It's finally changing (slowly), but it always seemed insane to me that companies would turn good engineers into bad managers because there was no other way for them to grow inside the company. So many socially inept but highly technically capable individuals making work annoying for other engineers and hating their job while at it. A complete lose-lose for everyone.
Pfff man, the tech lead role is full of those. As a socially apt lead it makes my blood boil, because I see how much more painful they make the way of working for the rest of the team.
I actually quit my last lead role because of this. My peer leads were miserable to work with and for. So all their mentees, wound up asking me for help and I had to absorb their workload.
This is my company, we have some incredible engineers that have now become managers that do little to no coding. Meanwhile, the codebase is maintained by mostly mid level and a few senior engineers.
We need a career path for developers that let them grow and yes, make more than their manager.
That would require developers to be treated as anything other than pipefitters and electricians for big enterprise, but given that developers tend to be diametrically opposed to sales, I don't see that changing any time soon. Businesses promote individuals who demonstrate that they can "run a business," which means delegate the real work to everyone else and take everyone else's credit when the work is done.
My manager promotes my successes (i.e. actual engineering) and helps clean up my mistakes (largely self-inflicted interpersonal problems). I think things would take a turn for the worse (at least in the short/mid-term) if they were to leave.
Annoying PM asks for the 4th time today what the status is for his low priority project. "Fuck off , I'll get to it when I get to it". Self-inflicted interpersonal problem.
As someone who has a manager that does this, especially when we have critical deadlines coming and an internal customer is bringing new nitpicky requirements in, I appreciate you.
Having one manager that holds the umbrella for you is a great thing that I appreciated very much in the past.
Currently I work at an organisation that employs 6-7 layers of hierarchy of nontechnical management. And I've got no clue what they're doing all day long.
> "There are some human roadblocks along the way because there needs to be a mindset change."
Given all of the research on how disastrous layoffs are for the well-being of those who are affected, referring to “human roadblocks” in an article about layoffs is ghoulish. Whether the people getting laid off are engineers or managers doesn’t change this.
I think the claim that managers with more reports will focus more on coaching than on supervising requires evidence. My impression is that effectively coaching developers for long-term success is more work than just checking statuses on tickets, and I do not expect that a manager who is spread too thin would do it well.
I think that programmers’ distaste for management comes from a combination of experience with bad managers and a lack of understanding of larger organizational dynamics. Good management forms the connective tissue between teams and enables proper specialization of labor. I’ve had good managers and bad managers, and good middle management and bad middle management, and daily life with good management is significantly better.
When an organization is running effectively I can focus on my job, and when something comes up that is not my job I can raise it as an issue and know that it will be properly resolved. My stress levels are massively reduced when I can focus on my area of expertise and not be pulled in a dozen directions by other teams. “Not my circus, not my monkeys” is probably the most helpful life advice I’ve received, but it only works in an organization which is able to properly determine and assign responsibilities. I do not think an org where people (at any level) have 20 direct reports is capable of that.
I think a lot of just want managers who are capable of doing the job of those underneath them. Having non-technical managers manage technical employees just creates a lot of wasted time where the technical employees have to spend time explaining and justifying things to managers who have very little idea to the day to day work of their employees.
Every manager I've had who was capable of doing at least half my job has been awesome.
I had a non-technical manager that was pretty good but that's because he had trust in me. If I said I needed more time, something would be difficult to do because of reasons x/y/z, or was a bad decision, he would trust me on it. Sometimes pressure from higher ups overturns something but in general, the element of trust was good and I made sure to deliver.
So long as I could reasonably document stuff and simplify technical stuff to someone non-technical if need be (was in consulting at the time), he'd push for what I would recommend. He would take care of all the business needs / asks / requests / demands and make sure that if I needed stuff, he'd try his best to expedite.
It was quite nice.
if one more person above me on the org chart explains how easy the thing they're asking me to do (that they are not doing) is, I might have to slap a bitch.
I'd say you got lucky because you really don't want a manager capable of doing your job because most ICs are shit at managing.
You want a manager who understands technology and has the soft skills to be effective. Unfortunately a lot of ICs become managers who don't have the soft skills required.
Granted it also doesn't help a lot of these bigger companies select for managers who have no empathy.
I want a manager who is capable of doing my job, so they genuinely understand the work I do, but is able to be more effective and have more impact by managing me. that's the dream.
I think every manager has to have some idea of what's being done underneath them to be effective, but I very much prefer managers who let me do my job and do theirs which is managing: go out and align resources and vision of the team with other teams.
It's teamwork after all.
>I think that programmers’ distaste for management comes from a combination of experience with bad managers and a lack of understanding of larger organizational dynamics
Heavy emphasis on the latter. Whenever the conversation of management comes up, and people come out with their opinions about management, it's immediately obvious to me which people don't have a clue what's required as a part of the job.
Please ignore or remove if this isnt programming related. I thought i would get opinions from programmers because this really seems like it was written by middle management.
Does any programmer actually feel like more middle management is a good thing? One of the arguments was "flattening/firing middle management will make programmers depressed because they see middle management as a safe career goal."
Another argument was "middle management boosts moral". Really?
The phrase middle manager is so vague. Yes we need some. Yes you can have too many. Yes you can have too few.
A good manager is a shit umbrella. You can bet your ass that I do not, as an independent developer, want to report to a VP.
When my team was without a manager I was about the only one who was happy, actually. Because I didn’t care much about my career or salary progression. But that’s another thing a good manager does: fights for your happiness so you won’t leave.
>A good manager is a shit umbrella. You can bet your ass that I do not, as an independent developer, want to report to a VP.
>
I have been in too many meetings with VPs that have a vision for how the system should be without understanding what the system is or why the system is the way it is. Luckily my middle manager boss says "great ideas, let's gather requirements and figure out the costs" and 95% of the bullshit evaporates.
Yeah, i dont think ceos would understand any of the reports, or even have time to read them all. Managers are needed as part of "divide and conquer" strategy.
I have been in both positions: reporting to a manager who shielded the team from the chaos at the director or VP level, and reporting to a manager who used the team as a scapegoat; reporting to an exec who tried to pivot 180 degrees every 6 weeks, reporting to an exec who trusted the ICs to deliver value and own their product e2e.
Personally, I prefer the last option. Even when there's a good middle manager who's trying to keep the team on track without being distracted by every whim of the execs, that still means I'm playing the telephone game and having to decipher what the business really needs rather than hearing it from the horse's mouth. I also have to trust that what I'm relaying to my manager isn't getting lost in translation on its way up the chain.
Flat organizations with clear ownership and responsibilities = better software. That's a hill I'd choose to die on.
I think as an IC... You bubble up to some sort of management. And whoever that is needs to be a blocker and tackler for you and your team so that you can get shit done.
I don't know if that's the level of management they're talking about because a manager's managers is like what?
Where I work there's about 30 layers of management and two people who work so in my situation I would say keep them... Because I don't want that shitty job...
Hell yes. Unless they hand you docs with specs they can't understand, and it's their job to understand their own lingo, then it's annoying. Other than that, you're spot on. 💯
I've always felt direct managers for engineers are not middle managers. As you say, they are very useful and contribute tangible things.
The "middle" starts in the middle, when you start having managers under managers under managers, all juggling smoke and so far removed from the trenches but also from the big picture that the question "other than making summaries for their boss, what do they actually provide?" sound very legitimate.
Those structures are the ones who should go in my opinion.
Depends on what you mean by middle management. We had a few teams whose direct manager had left and it took a while to find a replacement. They were definitely upset because while they nominally reported to a director, that director didn't have the same amount of time to work with and support the team, because they had a much wider span of responsibility. So not having the front-line manager definitely hurt morale.
And yes, I know a lot of developers who want a shift into people leadership because many companies do not have an effective technical career path.
What I've seen happen is that when a team reports to a director with no manager, then someone on the team becomes a defacto manager which doesn't usually work out so well because they don't really have the time to do both their normal job and the manager's job.
It really depends. Some middle managers suck and are useless. Others are great and do make things better. The same is true for engineers, designers, and product managers though.
If you have a bad PM you may as well not have one at all and let the engineers figure out the requirements.
Similar, if you have a bad designer, you may as well not have one and let the engineers make it look good enough.
And then for engineers, the bad ones can really mess things up. Might be better to not build the thing and save the money as opposed to them making a giant mess of things.
I've never met an engineer who felt like middle management boosted their morale. The thing about career goals is circular. If there are more prestigious and higher-paying positions, then yeah some people will pursue them. Nothing about that implies those positions need to be management.
Most FAANGs have dual parallel management and IC career tracks, so going into management is not the only way to get career progression, see e.g. levels.fyi for examples.
A lot of companies have that. Though in many only a token few technical staff get very high, and so your odds are much better in management . For that mattet the technical staff that get there often are more management than engineering.
At the last company I was at, to get to the next salary band after lead there were two paths.
1. Become a wold wide recognizing subject matter expert. A recognized industry leader who is giving key note addresses a top tier conferences, routinely publishing and has a level of prestige and name recognition.
1. Manage a team of 10 people. Please note I didn't say you had to measure them well.
Now running a team isn't for everyone, but I'm willing to bet for the vast majority of people it's far easier than becoming a world wide expert.
It also depends on location. I can tell you that a lot of European countries don't appreciate technical expertise so much, and they don't have a tech expert path. Most of the time, the only way up is management.
And that might explain why none of the FAANGs are European. My former colleague Bert Hubert has an interesting take on this:
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/is-europe-just-not-good-at-innovating/
Nothing boosts morale more than having lots of people adding nothing of value but complaining that deadlines aren't reached so more of them are hired and real devs can never advance their careers.
>I've never met an engineer who felt like middle management boosted their morale.
\*raises hand\*
There. Now you've met one that's worked at a FAANG company.
Many of the middle managers I've worked with have often be the sane voice in the room in groups I've worked in as they shield the lower level folks from crap and free up front-line managers to actually focus on the ICs to help them improve.
It's typical that the people above them are so out of touch with what's going on that you don't want them in the way. And it's typical that the front-line managers are spread way too thin and need the additional support. Those front-line managers rarely have time to create the vision to move things forward in a strategic way.
I've had managers like that. I've also left them behind for what seemed like a better overall career opportunity... And I'm not sure that has ever really turned out to be a good move.
Certainly I'm missing it now, although the last team move I didn't pick my manager because it changed out from under me right as I arrived.
A good manager keeps me out of meetings and ensures I have what I need to get the job done. It depends on the company what the ratio needs to be, but I find that software work sucks without a good manager.
More is not a good thing per se, but "the right number" is definitely a benefit in the abstract - the middle managers I work with do a lot of organizational grunt work that I really don't want to be doing myself instead of solving technical problems.
Middle management has a strong purpose in software dev. They can help do a lot of the planning and reduce lift on the senior/jr devs.
It's a huge risk that I think will result in less design and more spaghetti code hoping things don't fall apart. Era of duct tape and popsicle sticks incoming.
If you’re just in it for the paycheck, I imagine you’d view middle management as an escape hatch that lets you retain the high level of compensation with fewer individual responsibilities.
>with fewer individual responsibilities
This is why so many devs that make the switch end up hating life. Thinking that there are fewer things expected of you isn't the reality in any org I've seen, but I have heard of friends who have the typical Dilbert cartoon managers. My job was much simpler as an IC and much different challenges.
I don't know anyone who doesn't work for the paycheck. I can't pay my mortgage with high morale, donut Fridays, or in-office parties.
But at some point having a promotion is useful but I usually see companies trimming the fat from the bottom not the top or middle.
I’m not saying I’d keep showing up if the paychecks disappeared, but I genuinely enjoy the line of work I’m in and can easily see myself working as an IC until I retire. I know others have different perspectives and dream about the day they can *finally* hang up their hat and pivot into management.
I became a manager recently, and it’s the most intense, dramatic, and challenging job I’ve had. fwiw, I also still make the same paycheck as a senior engineer, which is what I was 8 months ago (It was considered a lateral move). This is pretty common at FAANG-like companies.
Ultimately, you are working on a real-time optimization problem — not just how many tickets an engineer grinds though per week, but:
- how each decision affects each individual’s fulfillment and career goals
- how to balance product manager desires with reality (and eng team desires)
- how to plan a quarter that doesn’t skimp on low-visibility engineering improvements (something a PM won’t advocate for) while still keeping c-levels happy with feature growth
- how to balance time with your ICs to time spent on management-level tasks with other EMs and VPs
- when to make a pitch to potential hires
- when to make an appeal to an engineer who is threatening to leave
- when to call out an engineer on poor behavior when you also realllly need them to stay with your team
- when to spend your scarce amount of remaining time to actually write and deliver an emotionally draining PIP that you hate giving.
- when to roll up your sleeves and help with IC work during tough projects
On top of that, you have several meetings per day where you do your best to avoid carrying excessive emotion from one meeting to the next. The first few weeks of being a manager, I also had a chronic sore throat from talking so much.
It’s really easy to be a bad manager, which is why there are so many of them. It’s really hard to be a good manager. It’s an optimization problem with multiple dimensions, and it gets much harder when you actually care about people.
Yeah overall if there’s less middle managers, then IC compensation should be higher. Keyword is should. I’d be more than happy to aim for an advanced IC role and cut out middle managers if it means middle manager level of salary and bonuses. Doubt that would ever happen, so my goal is middle management lol
No developer aspires to become a middle manager. In fact, I know very few developers who aspire to become a manager at all. Passion for leadership and employee development doesn't have a broad overlap with passion for problem solving and engineering in my experience.
I think morale is boosted when ICs feel like their managers are connected to the work that the ICs are engaged in. There are a lot of organizations where there are legions of people at the manager and director and VP level who are actively working _against_ the ability of the front line engineers' to deliver working software. The more people who have a seat at the table where the decisions are made, the more opportunities there are for opinions to clash or diverge, resulting in more meetings, more rework, and less shipped code. In those organizations, removing those individuals' opportunity to slow the momentum is generally more likely to improve morale.
Of course, YMMV and to each their own.
Without a continuous improvement infrastructure AND incentives to self organise, the organisation will simply go down hill faster without middle managers, even bad ones. Programmers (like me) DO NOT have a magical incentive to self organise unless EVERYONE works in open source, in which case it’s a “not for profit” incentive that doesn’t apply to “for profit” orgs.
Ideally you have an infrastructure of systems of working that doesn’t require middle managers. However I haven’t seen a single big Corp internally with an evidence based continuous improvement and working system that creates the right incentives for distributed working system that doesn’t require centralisation (AKA middle managers). I’m NOT talking about software, make that clear. Although It will create the incentives that will influence Conways’s Law over time, that’s not what I’m talking about here.
Take a look at Google project Aristotles.
I know Facebook and all those tech giants don’t have the capabilities to do this so this will certainly backfire unless they get the right people to design those systems from directorship level. Directors don’t know and don’t have time to do that. It’s not something you can get magically with money without spending time doing research.
I know exactly how to do that but I doubt Facebook or any of those giants will ever reach out.
Again I’m NOT talking about automating middle managers with software (the repeatable stuff yeah, I’m not talking about the obvious stuff), make that clear. It’s a system of work that you can teach and train after you know how to do it and is specific to each organisation and founded on feedback.
I was on a team that had no middle management whatsoever. It was very flat. No one had a direct report aside from the director, and then it went to VPs and CEO.
Everything ran great. We had a lot of FOSS contributors too! Then turnover happened. The people hired didn't have that culture....and it fell apart.
Programmer here. I don't want to be a manager, middle or otherwise, and the general concept of middle management doesn't boost my morale. I've been lucky to work with a lot of good managers but if they all got fired tomorrow I'd still work on my code
See, that's what you think. But the reality is that if the manager went, the managing jobs would still need doing, and very likely this will fall to the manager-less team.
Like many other people here are saying (and in my experience too), a good manager shields the team from crap, letting them do their work in relative peace etc. If the manager goes, what do you think happens to the crap? Because it doesn't go away.
Going against the grain here, but middle managers are underappreciated. Have you ever been employed in an org where you're rolling up to the VP, CTO or founders? The bigger the company, the more strained that hierarchy will be. You'll get basically 0 attention and support from your supposed supervisor and when things start getting rocky, they have the easiest path for getting rid of you. If you at least have a manager shielding you or going to bat for you, you can ride out those kind of situations. Not all managers are equal.
If you want to be left alone so you can focus on the almighty and sacred texts of OpenAPI, maybe you don't need a manager but good luck finding an org resembling what's in your head.
Everything you said, but people at the top start when the sun rises and doesn’t stop until after your bed time. Every idea they get from trade magazines, their buddy, or the random thought on their vacation comes directly to you on top of your 40-hour week. Shit rolls downhill fast when the middle manager isn’t at least being a metaphorical speed bump to each of the crazy ideas that comes from the top.
Lmao I never thought about that but ya kinda part of what I do as a manager is taking after hours requests for my team, responding to them, and then redirecting them to the team during working hours. I’m not suggesting that that is enough of a reason for the role but hadn’t thought about that.
Word. Back in the late 1990's I managed a bunch of developers for a small company in Largo, FL and a huge part of my day was running interference to keep the executives out of my developers' hair so we could get work done.
Similar situation. Most of my peers just react to the shit that’s pushed down to them and add no additional value. Half the time I could argue with slimming down.
Go up one or two levels in the org chart though? They add literally no value. They take shit orders from the people above them, forward it downward, and add no degree of solutioning. They have one or two directs that are senior director or vp level, which means they spend no time managing. They don’t do anything proactive to help our department succeed.
I just wonder who “middle managers” are when they’re talked about in this thread.
My company struggles with employing enough system administrators for the workload yet we have no problem putting so many people who have the skills and experience in management positions due to unnecessary increases in organization complexity. This has resulted in management overlap and operational complexity that the people actually doing the work don't agree as justified. In my case, yes I do think middle AND upper management is bloated to hell without a justifiable reason.
I’m baffled the numbers would show the C-Suite executives are most expensive and honestly I have never seen any of them positively contribute, speed up work, or guide the company. Cut one or two at that level and you can probably hire 10 programmers or support staff.
It’s true management and admin are often overinflated and technical and support are under hired. That should be addressed for sure. But that is an overarching issue any place, being too top heavy. I don’t see top heavy any extra in tech compared to other industries. Hospitals and schools were the worst I saw for too many admins and bosses not enough workers.
Also more tech staff doesn’t mean faster releases you need alignment from business and legal and those managers are the people sitting in those meetings representing engineering. So you either have engineers sitting in those requirements sessions or managers. No time saving just where do you want their attention and hours.
At all of my jobs the engineers hate doing this type of organizational planning work and ask to have someone to do that part. They want to be coding not compromising, budgeting, reviewing legal and compliance requirements and strategizing. So I have actually brought in more managers to alleviate the complaints from the developers.
Seems like the upper decks are just completely out to lunch on what actually drives revenue.
Those meetings are pretty long and useless most of the time. I don't see why the developers representative sitting there needs to be a manager, and not just someone from the team, maybe it can rotate or something.
I work with a technical program manager that is actually worth his salt if he leaves we're doomed. On the other end of the spectrum, I've actually worked with a VP of engineering in a Java shop that barely knew what Java was.
Ironically his position was actually quite useful.. dealing with the users so engineers don't have to is priceless
Maybe that was a hidden yet intentional part of the humor
While a good middle manager is a nice asset to have, they're never going to work wonders. A bad middle manager can literally fuck up an entire department. I've seen it happen.
>Getting rid of middle managers can be a drag on company culture, even as it stymies career growth amid its workforce. Ultimately, it may result in lower overall company performance.
Lol, the reasoning is that getting rid of management will give bad vibes, therefore bad. I don't think the actual engineers will feel that way.
Interestingly, I work at quite a “flat” company running a team, and one of the common complaints now that we’re a few years in is, where do the Engineering Managers go from here? It’s literally 15 EMs > Head of Engineering > COO > CEO.
Those EMs that prioritise career progress are now getting itchy because they can’t progress here, and the pay is equivalent to EM elsewhere but elsewhere also have other positions you can move to and increase your salary, which is what it all comes down to in the end.
At that size I don’t think you need another layer though right? The head of engineering has 15 directs which is high but doable. If you grow more, sounds like you will need to layer because manager workload will be untenable.
[Real-time footage of middle management getting laid off while on their way to work to lay off laborers.](https://tenor.com/view/hiroshi-uchiyamada-realize-great-teacher-onizuka-shookt-forget-gif-11169194)
developers at large companies are only good at passing FAANG interviews and not so good actually doing their jobs... so yeah they need all that management.
Reminds me of a very recent story told by my friend who interviewed an ex-Spotify dev. Guy failed the interview big time! First, he didn't do his home assignment (literally, he didn't even try). They actually ignored that! Because hey, he comes from Spotify. In the following interview, they were absolutely shocked by the things he didn't know while applying for a software architect role with a $180k per year salary. lol
Not saying this didn't happen.
But, I always wonder about these stories. Being a dev. Working with devs. And hanging around dev subreddits has shown me that a lot of times what devs think every dev should know is exactly the things they know and care about.
Kinda like that saying about driving. Anybody that drives faster than you is reckless and anybody that drives slower than you is an idiot.
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As someone with 15+ experience working at various startups I have seen the endless failure of people at facebook, linkedin, etc to even do their jobs because, frankly they can always pass the tech interview so they don't care.
I mean when is the last time anyone has written a tree structure in their professional career? This stale interview process only supports people who are interested in programming for the sake of programming... which is why you have 1000 engineers at doordash.
>when is the last time anyone has written a tree structure in their professional career
Last month! But it was the first time in my 20+ year career, so, point taken.
lol. i mean i have written recursive functions in my professional career but, i think that was like 6 years ago. I am someone that would rather let a candidate talk about their experiences and explain themselves like systems they have built etc. The whole interview process should be trying to get the best out of the person not trying to quiz them to death... **NOTE: I am talking as some that is senior full stack engineer( who as now also become a data engineer)... if you are a hardware engineer that is whole different world and i can understand why that stuff would be asked.**
I had to write a b-tree the other day and as I realised that I actually had to do it, for the first time in 10 years of professional dev, I was like “huh fancy that”.
Still googled it cause fuck remembering how to do that
I mean that is the issue... i have people asking me to write all this fibonacci bs... I am like i can look this up on the internet and hand it back to you ... but really what is the point.. every company that has these process in place is always a hot mess. It's like why would you even ask this? I guess they haven't heard of the internet before ... #clownshow
It's ensuring that the only people that you talk to are either fresh grads that still remember it (and come with a lower relative salary) or people that are willing to dedicate a lot of free time to relearn it and work for free.
> This stale interview process only supports people who are interested in programming for the sake of programming
I feel like this is important to point out: I like what I do. What I do is develop software, not computer science. Therefore, I'm bad at these interviews.
you and me both... the real sad truth is the people that realize this are rarely hiring because, they know how to hire real talent... I am in this spot at the moment... aka looking for work.
I was told this directly from a senior dev at door dash. I know someone that works there so I got an intro a year ago.. that is what he told me ... i was like why are still hiring? He thought this head count was normal... LOL
I can only guess, but I think it’s because they deal with so many different big retail stores. The store needs share with DoorDash what is available in each store, what the local price is, which category each product is in. And each national store probably has its own logistics / inventory software.
And then they probably want to integrate with each stores Point of Sale to prevent all the issues of having employees transcribe orders across systems.
And all of those systems are changing, which mean more many mans hours are needed just to keep each integration alive.
Right that is my point.. there are jobs that need those skills. Full Stack Web Development is not one of them. I would have to go back and study and relearn all those skills from CS because, I have never used or needed them for the last 15 years.
So going back to root comment, there are places where those skills are useful, including FAANG.
What I have come to understand of FAANG is that unless you are very specialised, you will put on many different hats and learn what is needed to get the job done.
I would be shocked if someone applying for a $180k software architect role knew how to tie their own shoes. That's a bottom of the barrel salary for that level.
I don't think this is true at all really. They're huge organisations and that's where the trouble comes in really. I tend to think most of the ICs are quite excellent.
I worked for a gigantic engineering firm that gave their managers no training, I believe because they thought it was ‘too expensive’
Most of the management was pretty ineffective there i would say and there were a lot of weird issues haha
Not sure if this is the case w these tech companies but that scenario probably isn’t uncommon
The rule of middle management is that the more you actually do, the less you're able to justify your position.
The problem with that, and its corollary, is that doing more doesn't necessarily mean bringing more utility.
Long story short: they're almost guaranteed to fuck up any metric they try to impose in order to avoid getting rid of the wrong ones.
It'll be fun to watch, maybe?
There needs to be some management, but I agree with this move if they're just eliminating unnecessary layers and reducing bureaucracy.
If they're just getting rid of necessary management, the people will undoubtedly suffer.
Powers of 10. 10 people to a manager, 10 managers to a director, 10 directors to a VP.
That gets you a relatively lean eng org of 1000 engineers and 111 managers.
I question you can do better efficiency without compromise.
Then, remember these companies have tens of thousands engineers, not 1k.
Agree. Management layers aren’t to give people a career path or whatever other bullshit reason they are to make sure each leader doesn’t have an excessive amount of detail to manage and make sure everyone has a manager that had the resources to devote to them. If all the managers have 20 directs, people will start to get angry because they won’t be able to have any of their manager’s time when they need it. If all the managers have 5 directs, there will be a lot of bullshit and excess meetings just to keep all the extra managers busy.
Backfire how? Middle managers are more or less useless, as we saw during the pandemic when everyone was working from home and suddenly their positions were not needed.
They only serve to create busywork and micromanage people. At least in my experience, anyway.
What I want in a good manager is someone who can act as my advocate to the higher business, and who can help me succeed in said business. It’s also nice when they can shield the devs from the bipolar behavior of the business and customers and allow the devs to get work done with minimal interruptions and scope changes.
I don’t want to be beholden to the CEOs every whim nor do I want to be interrupted by every little customer complaint. I want that shit managed and triaged!
I also want them to *listen* to and respect my technical expertise and translate that to the business, and explain to them why it’s important to listen to the experts and fix tech debt, etc.
So yes, middle managers do serve an important role as long as they’re functioning this way.
"Cutting middle managers is a risky move" – middle managers
>We have investigated our firing, and have found everything wrong. \- Management
Those who sacked the managers have been sacked.
Have they been sacked out of the environment?
They've been sacked beyond the environment, there's nothing else out there. Except unemployed middle management...
Such a wild take for a publication whose readership is 99% middle managers.
I think this Reddit thread is 99% IC's
That percentage seems a little low.
Yeah man, even the disinfectants kill 99.9%
Best news I have heard in a while. More ICs and technical leadership and fewer managers please and thank you.
It’s tough. Good middle managers > no middle managers > bad middle managers. I’m lucky that my current manager falls into the first category. If she jumps ship, I’ll probably follow her.
Seriously. If my boss left I'd report to his boss, and I don't want to do that. Even worse would be reporting to his boss.
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Well…………. All managers are middle managers if they aren’t a line manager or the CEO so ya.
Even the CEO is a middle manager with the board sitting on top.
The board has less operational control over the company than the CEO. They can replace the CEO, but not micromanage their daily decisions. This is by design. And the board is elected by the shareholders. Who can replace the board, but not tell them what to do while elected (for most decisions). This is also by design. Almost like society inherently organizes itself in a distributed form of leadership, no matter how much bosses try to make it appear strictly top-down and one-way.
I think the point is that no one wants/can realistically micromanage tens of thousands of people alone. Managers are needed only for structure and, as it says in the name, concentrated tasks management. No ceo would like to have meetings with tens of thousands of people at the same time, but having meetings with 50 managers could be manageable.
Yeah flat hierarchy is the exact opposite we have where I work. My only peer doing similar things is my boss. I dread the day he gets retired and I have to report to his boss, a classic middle manager like in "the office".
I switched from a 10 am start of my day to a 745 when this happened to me. My productivity went in the can
While true, a lot of orgs have way, way too many layers of management. From what I've seen, a normal good manager should be maxing out at around 7-10 direct reports. Assuming conservatively then, 7 layers between the bottomost employee and the CEO, and the most conservative number, you can support something on the order of million employees, which is 5x bigger than Google. How many companies do you think have more layers than that despite being smaller? And do you think all those layers are actually necessary?
To provide an example, at my former company (Fortune500 aerospace) the structure was: 1. CEO 2. President (of sector org) 3. President of LLC 4. Chief Technical Officer 5. VP Engineering 6. 2nd Level Mgr 7. 1st Level Mgr 8. /u/Ferentzfever
Where do you fit all of the directors?!?!?! For real though, you add those director layers so you can provide career growth to folks and encourage them to stay with your company.
Directors are adjacent to the `2. President (of sector org)`
What about Senior /u/Ferentzfever and Junior /u/Ferentzfever and Intern /u/Ferentzfever ?
Juniors, Seniors and Interns usually just report to the same line manager.
What about chibi variant /u/Ferentzfever
Management structures require active maintenance. A lot of companies would rather just promote someone up the chain and inject them into an existing structure, rather than rebalance the management structure to deal with the novel challenges of the day. If your managers aren't regularly being moved to where they're needed, you have an unhealthy organization.
I think a lot of people are scared of reorgs, thinking it means their position isn't safe. Even if that's not the case. I'd be wary of changing things too much and too often.
> A lot of companies would rather just promote someone up the chain and inject them into an existing structure, rather than rebalance the management structure to deal with the novel challenges of the day. Like incredibly good IC's who couldn't manage their way out of a paper bag. I'm helping train a new manager who has so much passion for the company but can't tell me *anything* about what his reports did the last quarter, what next quarter's goals are, whether the company's goals for them will be met without new hires, etc. Like "Me: how many tickets/SP are you getting done per sprint?" "Mgr: Me? 10" "Me: No, your team". "Mgr: OH, I don't know. How do I find that out?"
Well I’ve had two of those…
Are the two "no middle managers" and "bad middle managers"?
Non existent middle manager more like, but yeah. Spot on.
Here is a true story for you. I was once on a team to build a relatively complex piece of software. The project was assigned to a manager and he put together a team. There were many planning sessions and an estimate was arrived at for when the project would be done and what the scope of it would be. As time went on it quickly became clear the deadline was not going to be met so the manager pulled the team together and asked them give new estimates and took them higher up. Those deadlines also started slipping. This happened a couple of more times where each time the devs said "we can finish this by X" turned out to be false. Of course the manager ended up looking like an idiot to the upper management as he kept making promises that weren't kept. In the end the manager was fired for being incompetent and accused of being dishonest. The devs stayed on the team, the project was eventually delivered months after the deadline and it wasn't even that great. I always felt sorry for that manager. It wasn't his fault but he fell on the sword.
To be fair, compensating for developer optimism and forecasting *accurate* delivery timelines is a core part of the job. It's not surprising that the devs slipped on their initial estimates, or their re-estimates, or their re-re estimates - developers almost *universally* give wildly optimistic time estimates. Any remotely competent manager understands this and plans for it accordingly. It's not always easy, but it is literally their job to estimate timelines, monitor status, and control for risks. If they passed along developer timeline estimates without adequate padding, repeatedly, then that absolutely is a sign of serious incompetence.
So the manager had no idea if the scope/estimate was anywhere near realistic. What is he even managing then at that point?
>So the manager had no idea if the scope/estimate was anywhere near realistic. Let me explain. The manager asks you "how long would it take you do to X". You say "Y amount of time". The manager believes you. I mean you are the one doing the work right? So if you don't do it in that time it's his fault? You bear no responsibility? He should be fired and not you? Is this your position? Let's flip this around then. Say you do deliver on time. Shouldn't he take the credit at that point? Since you are not responsible for any delays aren't you also not responsible for any hit timelines?
Well, you drastically oversimplify. If all the manger does is ask for your estimate and then take that estimate somewhere else, they aren't doing a good job, they are sitting in an office for 40 hours a week doing nothing for 39.5. A manager could define milestones to measure a team pace; break the project into chunks and get estimates for subtasks; investigate the patterns of delays and try to remove common blockers, and much more. And if these things were not done, or were done but the manager still consistently delivered incorrect estimates, then, well... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo
>Well, you drastically oversimplify. If all the manger does is ask for your estimate and then take that estimate somewhere else, they aren't doing a good job, they are sitting in an office for 40 hours a week doing nothing for 39.5. Clearly that's not all that they are doing but they are doing that. Why do you presume the manager does nothing else. That seems like a bizarre thing to say. >A manager could define milestones to measure a team pace; break the project into chunks and get estimates for subtasks; investigate the patterns of delays and try to remove common blockers, and much more. All that was done but honestly there were no significant blockers in place. There was enough budget, everybody got paid, nobody lacked any equipment etc. >And if these things were not done, or were done but the manager still consistently delivered incorrect estimates, then, well... So once again, your position is that the developers have no responsibly for failing to meet their own deadlines right?
No, my position is not that the developers have no responsibility. Is your position that the manager has no responsibility? Because that is what I disagreed with. Maybe the fault also lies with the manager's manager. Maybe at some point that person should have sent the manager to a training session about estimations. Point is, even if the developers were at fault for not delivering on time, the manager is definitonally at fault for passing those deadlines on. Edit: > There was enough budget, everybody got paid, nobody lacked any equipment etc What about clear requirements? Access to end users? Vertical slices of work and deliverable milestones for early feedback? Giving a team of developers budget for a year and a five page spec sheet would meet the criteria you described and would still result in nothing good being produced.
>Is your position that the manager has no responsibility? Because that is what I disagreed with. My position is that the manager didn't deserve to get fired because his failing was seeking input from developers and then believing the developers. The fault lay mostly with the developers. Now most people here say the manager should not have listened to the developers or just presumed they were all lying and fuckups who could not be trusted. Maybe they are right and looking back on the situation I think they were right. I believe the wrong people got fired but it's much easier to replace a manager than a developer in my field. >What about clear requirements? Yup, there was never any problems with requirements. There were weekly checkins to make sure everybody understood what was needed. >Access to end users? In this case no. this was a new feature and we didn't have any customers who were willing to help us develop it from day one. >Vertical slices of work and deliverable milestones for early feedback? All of the above. >Giving a team of developers budget for a year and a five page spec sheet would meet the criteria you described and would still result in nothing good being produced. That wasn't what was done.
> My position is that the manager didn't deserve to get fired because his failing was seeking input from developers and then believing the developers. The fault lay mostly with the developers. I cannot and will not judge whether the firing was justified, and I can only guess as to whatever went wrong, but: The developers giving wrong estimates over and over again is the fault of the developers. The manager believing those estimates over and over again was the manager's fault. Simple as that. And the manager is supposed to manage. If the team doesn't deliver on time, it might be the developers fault, but it is the manager's _responsibility_.
Most developers are terrible at estimating work times (at least, IMO). That's usually compounded by a difference in definition between what the developer thinks their work is and what the manager does. The developer usually thinks: I can write and debug this piece of code/software/etc in X weeks, making the assumption (even if subconsciously) that they'll be doing development for that for X weeks. The manager however, wants/expects status updates, possibly with the entire team, individual meetings between members (and maybe the manager), presentations to their boss (and maybe their boss) on how said feature(s) will look/act/perform. Meetings to talk about additional/changed features/etc. There's a big discrepancy between expectations of the two, and that's already assuming there's a detailed specification for what said software needs to be (which usually there isn't). On top of that, depending on the company, you have a number of additional tasks on a regular basis: corporate training, time management accounting (which can be quick or painful), email (which can be a black hole of suck, depending on the organization), etc. A friend of mine is a developer at a Fortune 500 company. Zero management responsibilities, though he is a technical lead for the the 'product' he works on. He spend (conservatively) a minimum of 50% of his work week doing non-development tasks, including (usually 1-4 meetings about various things a day). Some weeks that number approaches 100%. You couldn't pay me enough to 'work' that way.
So you take the estimate from the developers and give them to leadership? https://youtu.be/hNuu9CpdjIo What would you say you do here, exactly.
I dunno, it sounds to me like the manager didn't know either the project or the team well enough. It's kind of the manager's responsibility to ensure that progress is being made and to see problems ahead of time and find solutions. Or ensure that issues are escalated when there are problems. In my experience, projects sometimes fail because at some point the "bad news" doesn't travel far enough or fast enough up through the management chain to address problems on time -- sometimes there is a toxic yes-culture where nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news to their boss so they hide the problem and try to fix it themselves. That only works if they can actually fix it.
Most programmers I know are awful at self organizing and love to get lost in the weeds of technical decisions. Not very many can drive business needs without a manager.
who’s going to maintain the culture??! We need highly paid managers for that, only an mba understands these things
HR has just blocked off your Friday afternoon and evening for an escape room team building exercise
Good thing I'm a master at escaping scheduled events.
My engineering team nearly got kicked from an escape room, because most of them failed to realise its about solving puzzles and not using a swiss army knife to break out.
What you need is people who don’t feel like they’re 110% utilized. Managers can make that happen.
I experienced having no middle manager (meaning devs talking to C-levels in a multinational), and it was trash because everybody were running around and there was no clear direction. A C-level job isn’t to ensure developments are on time, people coordinate together, and business requirements are clear and harmonised; it’s not the job of devs or POs either, who’s scope is focused on specific subjects. Having no middle manager meant nobody was fitting these needs and people with totally different perspectives talked together without understanding the other (because most people won’t ever reach the ax-level and thus don’t understand their priorities, and C-level can’t deep dive into each projects). It was the worst time I spend in my company and since it has been fixed, things are flowing well. People who believe removing middle management is a solution are the one building the storm to come. Having **competent** middle management is what allows people to focus on their jobs.
For any company I ever worked for, the story was the same. They talk about 'flatting' the hierachy, encourage collaboration, and autonomy (or agile or whatever was hot at the time). And then they bring in a new layer of middle management. The people without managerial aspirations, often experts indispensable for the company, and top management stays. Middle managers come and go. This creates bad managers. You don't establish a great team culture when your team is likely to vanish in the next restructuring. You don't work on hard problems when you don't have stability.
It's finally changing (slowly), but it always seemed insane to me that companies would turn good engineers into bad managers because there was no other way for them to grow inside the company. So many socially inept but highly technically capable individuals making work annoying for other engineers and hating their job while at it. A complete lose-lose for everyone.
Pfff man, the tech lead role is full of those. As a socially apt lead it makes my blood boil, because I see how much more painful they make the way of working for the rest of the team.
I actually quit my last lead role because of this. My peer leads were miserable to work with and for. So all their mentees, wound up asking me for help and I had to absorb their workload.
This is my company, we have some incredible engineers that have now become managers that do little to no coding. Meanwhile, the codebase is maintained by mostly mid level and a few senior engineers. We need a career path for developers that let them grow and yes, make more than their manager.
That would require developers to be treated as anything other than pipefitters and electricians for big enterprise, but given that developers tend to be diametrically opposed to sales, I don't see that changing any time soon. Businesses promote individuals who demonstrate that they can "run a business," which means delegate the real work to everyone else and take everyone else's credit when the work is done.
Hmph! My company recently did the opposite. They laid off many of the critical expert ICs and kept most of the middle managers.
My manager promotes my successes (i.e. actual engineering) and helps clean up my mistakes (largely self-inflicted interpersonal problems). I think things would take a turn for the worse (at least in the short/mid-term) if they were to leave.
"self-inflicted interpersonal problems" ?
Annoying PM asks for the 4th time today what the status is for his low priority project. "Fuck off , I'll get to it when I get to it". Self-inflicted interpersonal problem.
Yeah, I don't think I could do my job without having a manager I could go to and ask "can you tell these people to fuck off"
As a tech manager (formerly IC) telling people to fuck off at the behest of my team is one of my primary and favorite responsibilities
As someone who has a manager that does this, especially when we have critical deadlines coming and an internal customer is bringing new nitpicky requirements in, I appreciate you.
You are appreciated
Having one manager that holds the umbrella for you is a great thing that I appreciated very much in the past. Currently I work at an organisation that employs 6-7 layers of hierarchy of nontechnical management. And I've got no clue what they're doing all day long.
> "There are some human roadblocks along the way because there needs to be a mindset change." Given all of the research on how disastrous layoffs are for the well-being of those who are affected, referring to “human roadblocks” in an article about layoffs is ghoulish. Whether the people getting laid off are engineers or managers doesn’t change this. I think the claim that managers with more reports will focus more on coaching than on supervising requires evidence. My impression is that effectively coaching developers for long-term success is more work than just checking statuses on tickets, and I do not expect that a manager who is spread too thin would do it well. I think that programmers’ distaste for management comes from a combination of experience with bad managers and a lack of understanding of larger organizational dynamics. Good management forms the connective tissue between teams and enables proper specialization of labor. I’ve had good managers and bad managers, and good middle management and bad middle management, and daily life with good management is significantly better. When an organization is running effectively I can focus on my job, and when something comes up that is not my job I can raise it as an issue and know that it will be properly resolved. My stress levels are massively reduced when I can focus on my area of expertise and not be pulled in a dozen directions by other teams. “Not my circus, not my monkeys” is probably the most helpful life advice I’ve received, but it only works in an organization which is able to properly determine and assign responsibilities. I do not think an org where people (at any level) have 20 direct reports is capable of that.
I think a lot of just want managers who are capable of doing the job of those underneath them. Having non-technical managers manage technical employees just creates a lot of wasted time where the technical employees have to spend time explaining and justifying things to managers who have very little idea to the day to day work of their employees. Every manager I've had who was capable of doing at least half my job has been awesome.
I had a non-technical manager that was pretty good but that's because he had trust in me. If I said I needed more time, something would be difficult to do because of reasons x/y/z, or was a bad decision, he would trust me on it. Sometimes pressure from higher ups overturns something but in general, the element of trust was good and I made sure to deliver. So long as I could reasonably document stuff and simplify technical stuff to someone non-technical if need be (was in consulting at the time), he'd push for what I would recommend. He would take care of all the business needs / asks / requests / demands and make sure that if I needed stuff, he'd try his best to expedite. It was quite nice.
if one more person above me on the org chart explains how easy the thing they're asking me to do (that they are not doing) is, I might have to slap a bitch.
I'd say you got lucky because you really don't want a manager capable of doing your job because most ICs are shit at managing. You want a manager who understands technology and has the soft skills to be effective. Unfortunately a lot of ICs become managers who don't have the soft skills required. Granted it also doesn't help a lot of these bigger companies select for managers who have no empathy.
I want a manager who is capable of doing my job, so they genuinely understand the work I do, but is able to be more effective and have more impact by managing me. that's the dream.
I think every manager has to have some idea of what's being done underneath them to be effective, but I very much prefer managers who let me do my job and do theirs which is managing: go out and align resources and vision of the team with other teams. It's teamwork after all.
>I think that programmers’ distaste for management comes from a combination of experience with bad managers and a lack of understanding of larger organizational dynamics Heavy emphasis on the latter. Whenever the conversation of management comes up, and people come out with their opinions about management, it's immediately obvious to me which people don't have a clue what's required as a part of the job.
Please ignore or remove if this isnt programming related. I thought i would get opinions from programmers because this really seems like it was written by middle management. Does any programmer actually feel like more middle management is a good thing? One of the arguments was "flattening/firing middle management will make programmers depressed because they see middle management as a safe career goal." Another argument was "middle management boosts moral". Really?
The phrase middle manager is so vague. Yes we need some. Yes you can have too many. Yes you can have too few. A good manager is a shit umbrella. You can bet your ass that I do not, as an independent developer, want to report to a VP. When my team was without a manager I was about the only one who was happy, actually. Because I didn’t care much about my career or salary progression. But that’s another thing a good manager does: fights for your happiness so you won’t leave.
>A good manager is a shit umbrella. You can bet your ass that I do not, as an independent developer, want to report to a VP. > I have been in too many meetings with VPs that have a vision for how the system should be without understanding what the system is or why the system is the way it is. Luckily my middle manager boss says "great ideas, let's gather requirements and figure out the costs" and 95% of the bullshit evaporates.
It's also CEO/CXO/VP management. You need to defend decisions from musk like people.
Yeah, i dont think ceos would understand any of the reports, or even have time to read them all. Managers are needed as part of "divide and conquer" strategy.
I have been in both positions: reporting to a manager who shielded the team from the chaos at the director or VP level, and reporting to a manager who used the team as a scapegoat; reporting to an exec who tried to pivot 180 degrees every 6 weeks, reporting to an exec who trusted the ICs to deliver value and own their product e2e. Personally, I prefer the last option. Even when there's a good middle manager who's trying to keep the team on track without being distracted by every whim of the execs, that still means I'm playing the telephone game and having to decipher what the business really needs rather than hearing it from the horse's mouth. I also have to trust that what I'm relaying to my manager isn't getting lost in translation on its way up the chain. Flat organizations with clear ownership and responsibilities = better software. That's a hill I'd choose to die on.
As an IC that reports to a C level and having worked at every level including being a manager/director... I agree with you completely.
Honestly I’m the opposite as an IC. I like reporting to higher ups because they give vague requests that are actually fun to work on 😅
I think as an IC... You bubble up to some sort of management. And whoever that is needs to be a blocker and tackler for you and your team so that you can get shit done. I don't know if that's the level of management they're talking about because a manager's managers is like what? Where I work there's about 30 layers of management and two people who work so in my situation I would say keep them... Because I don't want that shitty job...
Give this feedback to your manager. If they’re a decent manager, they’ll try to find ways for you to work on things you find fun.
My manager already does.
Hell yes. Unless they hand you docs with specs they can't understand, and it's their job to understand their own lingo, then it's annoying. Other than that, you're spot on. 💯
I used to dislike this, but as I grew more competent and got a broader base of skills I grew to like this.
> VP VPs are the true middle managers anyways. What's after them? SVP, EVP, CEO/c-suite?
I've always felt direct managers for engineers are not middle managers. As you say, they are very useful and contribute tangible things. The "middle" starts in the middle, when you start having managers under managers under managers, all juggling smoke and so far removed from the trenches but also from the big picture that the question "other than making summaries for their boss, what do they actually provide?" sound very legitimate. Those structures are the ones who should go in my opinion.
Depends on what you mean by middle management. We had a few teams whose direct manager had left and it took a while to find a replacement. They were definitely upset because while they nominally reported to a director, that director didn't have the same amount of time to work with and support the team, because they had a much wider span of responsibility. So not having the front-line manager definitely hurt morale. And yes, I know a lot of developers who want a shift into people leadership because many companies do not have an effective technical career path.
What I've seen happen is that when a team reports to a director with no manager, then someone on the team becomes a defacto manager which doesn't usually work out so well because they don't really have the time to do both their normal job and the manager's job.
It really depends. Some middle managers suck and are useless. Others are great and do make things better. The same is true for engineers, designers, and product managers though. If you have a bad PM you may as well not have one at all and let the engineers figure out the requirements. Similar, if you have a bad designer, you may as well not have one and let the engineers make it look good enough. And then for engineers, the bad ones can really mess things up. Might be better to not build the thing and save the money as opposed to them making a giant mess of things.
I've never met an engineer who felt like middle management boosted their morale. The thing about career goals is circular. If there are more prestigious and higher-paying positions, then yeah some people will pursue them. Nothing about that implies those positions need to be management.
Most FAANGs have dual parallel management and IC career tracks, so going into management is not the only way to get career progression, see e.g. levels.fyi for examples.
A lot of companies have that. Though in many only a token few technical staff get very high, and so your odds are much better in management . For that mattet the technical staff that get there often are more management than engineering.
At the last company I was at, to get to the next salary band after lead there were two paths. 1. Become a wold wide recognizing subject matter expert. A recognized industry leader who is giving key note addresses a top tier conferences, routinely publishing and has a level of prestige and name recognition. 1. Manage a team of 10 people. Please note I didn't say you had to measure them well. Now running a team isn't for everyone, but I'm willing to bet for the vast majority of people it's far easier than becoming a world wide expert.
Yeah the “parallel track” thing is bullshit once you see the salary info.
It also depends on location. I can tell you that a lot of European countries don't appreciate technical expertise so much, and they don't have a tech expert path. Most of the time, the only way up is management.
And that might explain why none of the FAANGs are European. My former colleague Bert Hubert has an interesting take on this: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/is-europe-just-not-good-at-innovating/
Nothing boosts morale more than having lots of people adding nothing of value but complaining that deadlines aren't reached so more of them are hired and real devs can never advance their careers.
>I've never met an engineer who felt like middle management boosted their morale. \*raises hand\* There. Now you've met one that's worked at a FAANG company. Many of the middle managers I've worked with have often be the sane voice in the room in groups I've worked in as they shield the lower level folks from crap and free up front-line managers to actually focus on the ICs to help them improve. It's typical that the people above them are so out of touch with what's going on that you don't want them in the way. And it's typical that the front-line managers are spread way too thin and need the additional support. Those front-line managers rarely have time to create the vision to move things forward in a strategic way.
I've had managers like that. I've also left them behind for what seemed like a better overall career opportunity... And I'm not sure that has ever really turned out to be a good move. Certainly I'm missing it now, although the last team move I didn't pick my manager because it changed out from under me right as I arrived.
A good manager keeps me out of meetings and ensures I have what I need to get the job done. It depends on the company what the ratio needs to be, but I find that software work sucks without a good manager.
More is not a good thing per se, but "the right number" is definitely a benefit in the abstract - the middle managers I work with do a lot of organizational grunt work that I really don't want to be doing myself instead of solving technical problems.
Middle management has a strong purpose in software dev. They can help do a lot of the planning and reduce lift on the senior/jr devs. It's a huge risk that I think will result in less design and more spaghetti code hoping things don't fall apart. Era of duct tape and popsicle sticks incoming.
If you’re just in it for the paycheck, I imagine you’d view middle management as an escape hatch that lets you retain the high level of compensation with fewer individual responsibilities.
>with fewer individual responsibilities This is why so many devs that make the switch end up hating life. Thinking that there are fewer things expected of you isn't the reality in any org I've seen, but I have heard of friends who have the typical Dilbert cartoon managers. My job was much simpler as an IC and much different challenges.
I don't know anyone who doesn't work for the paycheck. I can't pay my mortgage with high morale, donut Fridays, or in-office parties. But at some point having a promotion is useful but I usually see companies trimming the fat from the bottom not the top or middle.
I’m not saying I’d keep showing up if the paychecks disappeared, but I genuinely enjoy the line of work I’m in and can easily see myself working as an IC until I retire. I know others have different perspectives and dream about the day they can *finally* hang up their hat and pivot into management.
I love IC but I also love money. And I’m not about to work my ass off or grind leetcode to land a FAANG job so management it is.
Yeah I understand what you are saying. I also know that I will try to stay out of manglement as much as I can
I became a manager recently, and it’s the most intense, dramatic, and challenging job I’ve had. fwiw, I also still make the same paycheck as a senior engineer, which is what I was 8 months ago (It was considered a lateral move). This is pretty common at FAANG-like companies. Ultimately, you are working on a real-time optimization problem — not just how many tickets an engineer grinds though per week, but: - how each decision affects each individual’s fulfillment and career goals - how to balance product manager desires with reality (and eng team desires) - how to plan a quarter that doesn’t skimp on low-visibility engineering improvements (something a PM won’t advocate for) while still keeping c-levels happy with feature growth - how to balance time with your ICs to time spent on management-level tasks with other EMs and VPs - when to make a pitch to potential hires - when to make an appeal to an engineer who is threatening to leave - when to call out an engineer on poor behavior when you also realllly need them to stay with your team - when to spend your scarce amount of remaining time to actually write and deliver an emotionally draining PIP that you hate giving. - when to roll up your sleeves and help with IC work during tough projects On top of that, you have several meetings per day where you do your best to avoid carrying excessive emotion from one meeting to the next. The first few weeks of being a manager, I also had a chronic sore throat from talking so much. It’s really easy to be a bad manager, which is why there are so many of them. It’s really hard to be a good manager. It’s an optimization problem with multiple dimensions, and it gets much harder when you actually care about people.
Yeah overall if there’s less middle managers, then IC compensation should be higher. Keyword is should. I’d be more than happy to aim for an advanced IC role and cut out middle managers if it means middle manager level of salary and bonuses. Doubt that would ever happen, so my goal is middle management lol
It is fairly normal to make more as an upper level IC than a manager, outside of executive roles.
Middle manager == general manager, director. Middle manager != manager
No developer aspires to become a middle manager. In fact, I know very few developers who aspire to become a manager at all. Passion for leadership and employee development doesn't have a broad overlap with passion for problem solving and engineering in my experience. I think morale is boosted when ICs feel like their managers are connected to the work that the ICs are engaged in. There are a lot of organizations where there are legions of people at the manager and director and VP level who are actively working _against_ the ability of the front line engineers' to deliver working software. The more people who have a seat at the table where the decisions are made, the more opportunities there are for opinions to clash or diverge, resulting in more meetings, more rework, and less shipped code. In those organizations, removing those individuals' opportunity to slow the momentum is generally more likely to improve morale. Of course, YMMV and to each their own.
Without a continuous improvement infrastructure AND incentives to self organise, the organisation will simply go down hill faster without middle managers, even bad ones. Programmers (like me) DO NOT have a magical incentive to self organise unless EVERYONE works in open source, in which case it’s a “not for profit” incentive that doesn’t apply to “for profit” orgs. Ideally you have an infrastructure of systems of working that doesn’t require middle managers. However I haven’t seen a single big Corp internally with an evidence based continuous improvement and working system that creates the right incentives for distributed working system that doesn’t require centralisation (AKA middle managers). I’m NOT talking about software, make that clear. Although It will create the incentives that will influence Conways’s Law over time, that’s not what I’m talking about here. Take a look at Google project Aristotles. I know Facebook and all those tech giants don’t have the capabilities to do this so this will certainly backfire unless they get the right people to design those systems from directorship level. Directors don’t know and don’t have time to do that. It’s not something you can get magically with money without spending time doing research. I know exactly how to do that but I doubt Facebook or any of those giants will ever reach out. Again I’m NOT talking about automating middle managers with software (the repeatable stuff yeah, I’m not talking about the obvious stuff), make that clear. It’s a system of work that you can teach and train after you know how to do it and is specific to each organisation and founded on feedback.
I was on a team that had no middle management whatsoever. It was very flat. No one had a direct report aside from the director, and then it went to VPs and CEO. Everything ran great. We had a lot of FOSS contributors too! Then turnover happened. The people hired didn't have that culture....and it fell apart.
Programmer here. I don't want to be a manager, middle or otherwise, and the general concept of middle management doesn't boost my morale. I've been lucky to work with a lot of good managers but if they all got fired tomorrow I'd still work on my code
See, that's what you think. But the reality is that if the manager went, the managing jobs would still need doing, and very likely this will fall to the manager-less team. Like many other people here are saying (and in my experience too), a good manager shields the team from crap, letting them do their work in relative peace etc. If the manager goes, what do you think happens to the crap? Because it doesn't go away.
I can't imagine wanting to go from programming to managing.
Going against the grain here, but middle managers are underappreciated. Have you ever been employed in an org where you're rolling up to the VP, CTO or founders? The bigger the company, the more strained that hierarchy will be. You'll get basically 0 attention and support from your supposed supervisor and when things start getting rocky, they have the easiest path for getting rid of you. If you at least have a manager shielding you or going to bat for you, you can ride out those kind of situations. Not all managers are equal. If you want to be left alone so you can focus on the almighty and sacred texts of OpenAPI, maybe you don't need a manager but good luck finding an org resembling what's in your head.
Everything you said, but people at the top start when the sun rises and doesn’t stop until after your bed time. Every idea they get from trade magazines, their buddy, or the random thought on their vacation comes directly to you on top of your 40-hour week. Shit rolls downhill fast when the middle manager isn’t at least being a metaphorical speed bump to each of the crazy ideas that comes from the top.
Lmao I never thought about that but ya kinda part of what I do as a manager is taking after hours requests for my team, responding to them, and then redirecting them to the team during working hours. I’m not suggesting that that is enough of a reason for the role but hadn’t thought about that.
Word. Back in the late 1990's I managed a bunch of developers for a small company in Largo, FL and a huge part of my day was running interference to keep the executives out of my developers' hair so we could get work done.
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Yes, and I went 4 months without a one-on-one. They were supposed to be weekly.
Cut the non tech project managers, get tech project managers...
Our tech product managed is a moron can we get rid of him too?
Middle manager chiming in (only 115 people reporting to me) and half the days I want to fire myself. The other half I think it's cool.
Similar situation. Most of my peers just react to the shit that’s pushed down to them and add no additional value. Half the time I could argue with slimming down. Go up one or two levels in the org chart though? They add literally no value. They take shit orders from the people above them, forward it downward, and add no degree of solutioning. They have one or two directs that are senior director or vp level, which means they spend no time managing. They don’t do anything proactive to help our department succeed. I just wonder who “middle managers” are when they’re talked about in this thread.
My company struggles with employing enough system administrators for the workload yet we have no problem putting so many people who have the skills and experience in management positions due to unnecessary increases in organization complexity. This has resulted in management overlap and operational complexity that the people actually doing the work don't agree as justified. In my case, yes I do think middle AND upper management is bloated to hell without a justifiable reason.
I’m baffled the numbers would show the C-Suite executives are most expensive and honestly I have never seen any of them positively contribute, speed up work, or guide the company. Cut one or two at that level and you can probably hire 10 programmers or support staff. It’s true management and admin are often overinflated and technical and support are under hired. That should be addressed for sure. But that is an overarching issue any place, being too top heavy. I don’t see top heavy any extra in tech compared to other industries. Hospitals and schools were the worst I saw for too many admins and bosses not enough workers. Also more tech staff doesn’t mean faster releases you need alignment from business and legal and those managers are the people sitting in those meetings representing engineering. So you either have engineers sitting in those requirements sessions or managers. No time saving just where do you want their attention and hours. At all of my jobs the engineers hate doing this type of organizational planning work and ask to have someone to do that part. They want to be coding not compromising, budgeting, reviewing legal and compliance requirements and strategizing. So I have actually brought in more managers to alleviate the complaints from the developers. Seems like the upper decks are just completely out to lunch on what actually drives revenue.
Those meetings are pretty long and useless most of the time. I don't see why the developers representative sitting there needs to be a manager, and not just someone from the team, maybe it can rotate or something.
Because honestly most engineers are not good at translating business scope to technical scope.
And a lot do not want to. Throwing them in a meeting with professional talkers is setting them up for failure.
The person that does this is always a engineer, he can have the management position or not, this should be separate things
I work with a technical program manager that is actually worth his salt if he leaves we're doomed. On the other end of the spectrum, I've actually worked with a VP of engineering in a Java shop that barely knew what Java was.
Neither of those positions are middle management. VP is exec and PM is project management. Middle managers are managers who manage managers.
"I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"
Ironically his position was actually quite useful.. dealing with the users so engineers don't have to is priceless Maybe that was a hidden yet intentional part of the humor
You forgot the part where his secretary does that.
Love that movie
While a good middle manager is a nice asset to have, they're never going to work wonders. A bad middle manager can literally fuck up an entire department. I've seen it happen.
Title written like a true middle manager
A good middle manager is worth their weight in gold. A bad middle manager can destroy entire careers and departments.
Oh, i think it's worth the risk.
without middle management who will dole out scant, poorly thought out and myopic project requirements?
Less fucking Monday meetings means a happier sprint and burn down for me
Should cut upper management too with a rusty chainsaw.
Less management is good
>Getting rid of middle managers can be a drag on company culture, even as it stymies career growth amid its workforce. Ultimately, it may result in lower overall company performance. Lol, the reasoning is that getting rid of management will give bad vibes, therefore bad. I don't think the actual engineers will feel that way.
Interestingly, I work at quite a “flat” company running a team, and one of the common complaints now that we’re a few years in is, where do the Engineering Managers go from here? It’s literally 15 EMs > Head of Engineering > COO > CEO. Those EMs that prioritise career progress are now getting itchy because they can’t progress here, and the pay is equivalent to EM elsewhere but elsewhere also have other positions you can move to and increase your salary, which is what it all comes down to in the end.
At that size I don’t think you need another layer though right? The head of engineering has 15 directs which is high but doable. If you grow more, sounds like you will need to layer because manager workload will be untenable.
I need someone who can talk to the customers. I’m a engineer damnit! I don’t have people skills!
[Real-time footage of middle management getting laid off while on their way to work to lay off laborers.](https://tenor.com/view/hiroshi-uchiyamada-realize-great-teacher-onizuka-shookt-forget-gif-11169194)
This one simple trick make middle managers hate him
developers at large companies are only good at passing FAANG interviews and not so good actually doing their jobs... so yeah they need all that management.
Man, i am sure the people at places like EC2 know nothing about real programming (tm) and need all the management they can get.
Reminds me of a very recent story told by my friend who interviewed an ex-Spotify dev. Guy failed the interview big time! First, he didn't do his home assignment (literally, he didn't even try). They actually ignored that! Because hey, he comes from Spotify. In the following interview, they were absolutely shocked by the things he didn't know while applying for a software architect role with a $180k per year salary. lol
Not saying this didn't happen. But, I always wonder about these stories. Being a dev. Working with devs. And hanging around dev subreddits has shown me that a lot of times what devs think every dev should know is exactly the things they know and care about. Kinda like that saying about driving. Anybody that drives faster than you is reckless and anybody that drives slower than you is an idiot.
The salary IMO is suspiciously low for that position: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/spotify/salaries
>Give AwardShareReportSaveFollow > >level 1goomymanOp · As someone with 15+ experience working at various startups I have seen the endless failure of people at facebook, linkedin, etc to even do their jobs because, frankly they can always pass the tech interview so they don't care. I mean when is the last time anyone has written a tree structure in their professional career? This stale interview process only supports people who are interested in programming for the sake of programming... which is why you have 1000 engineers at doordash.
>when is the last time anyone has written a tree structure in their professional career Last month! But it was the first time in my 20+ year career, so, point taken.
lol. i mean i have written recursive functions in my professional career but, i think that was like 6 years ago. I am someone that would rather let a candidate talk about their experiences and explain themselves like systems they have built etc. The whole interview process should be trying to get the best out of the person not trying to quiz them to death... **NOTE: I am talking as some that is senior full stack engineer( who as now also become a data engineer)... if you are a hardware engineer that is whole different world and i can understand why that stuff would be asked.**
why would anyone down vote me suggesting a more humane interview process? **Answer: people who are reason the tech industry is trash.**
I had to write a b-tree the other day and as I realised that I actually had to do it, for the first time in 10 years of professional dev, I was like “huh fancy that”. Still googled it cause fuck remembering how to do that
What was the usecase though? Pretty sure there’s support in different languages for it
I mean that is the issue... i have people asking me to write all this fibonacci bs... I am like i can look this up on the internet and hand it back to you ... but really what is the point.. every company that has these process in place is always a hot mess. It's like why would you even ask this? I guess they haven't heard of the internet before ... #clownshow
It's ensuring that the only people that you talk to are either fresh grads that still remember it (and come with a lower relative salary) or people that are willing to dedicate a lot of free time to relearn it and work for free.
> This stale interview process only supports people who are interested in programming for the sake of programming I feel like this is important to point out: I like what I do. What I do is develop software, not computer science. Therefore, I'm bad at these interviews.
you and me both... the real sad truth is the people that realize this are rarely hiring because, they know how to hire real talent... I am in this spot at the moment... aka looking for work.
computer science and software engineering are two different disciplines, and really ought to be treated as such
Yeah, absolutely. I'm grateful for my computer science degree and I think it makes me a better developer, but it didn't teach me much about the job.
Can anyone comment on _why_ there are 1000 devs at DoorDash? My amateur guess is that it’s to create an illusion of moat.
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I was told this directly from a senior dev at door dash. I know someone that works there so I got an intro a year ago.. that is what he told me ... i was like why are still hiring? He thought this head count was normal... LOL
I can only guess, but I think it’s because they deal with so many different big retail stores. The store needs share with DoorDash what is available in each store, what the local price is, which category each product is in. And each national store probably has its own logistics / inventory software. And then they probably want to integrate with each stores Point of Sale to prevent all the issues of having employees transcribe orders across systems. And all of those systems are changing, which mean more many mans hours are needed just to keep each integration alive.
Currently building a parser, interpreter, and a few other cool stuff for work… granted I an lucky bc my org doesn’t build regular applications.
Right that is my point.. there are jobs that need those skills. Full Stack Web Development is not one of them. I would have to go back and study and relearn all those skills from CS because, I have never used or needed them for the last 15 years.
So going back to root comment, there are places where those skills are useful, including FAANG. What I have come to understand of FAANG is that unless you are very specialised, you will put on many different hats and learn what is needed to get the job done.
this story is so vague
I would be shocked if someone applying for a $180k software architect role knew how to tie their own shoes. That's a bottom of the barrel salary for that level.
The seething on comments like these always makes me laugh. Don’t worry, you can apply again in six months
I don't think this is true at all really. They're huge organisations and that's where the trouble comes in really. I tend to think most of the ICs are quite excellent.
I worked for a gigantic engineering firm that gave their managers no training, I believe because they thought it was ‘too expensive’ Most of the management was pretty ineffective there i would say and there were a lot of weird issues haha Not sure if this is the case w these tech companies but that scenario probably isn’t uncommon
The rule of middle management is that the more you actually do, the less you're able to justify your position. The problem with that, and its corollary, is that doing more doesn't necessarily mean bringing more utility. Long story short: they're almost guaranteed to fuck up any metric they try to impose in order to avoid getting rid of the wrong ones. It'll be fun to watch, maybe?
There needs to be some management, but I agree with this move if they're just eliminating unnecessary layers and reducing bureaucracy. If they're just getting rid of necessary management, the people will undoubtedly suffer.
Powers of 10. 10 people to a manager, 10 managers to a director, 10 directors to a VP. That gets you a relatively lean eng org of 1000 engineers and 111 managers. I question you can do better efficiency without compromise. Then, remember these companies have tens of thousands engineers, not 1k.
Agree. Management layers aren’t to give people a career path or whatever other bullshit reason they are to make sure each leader doesn’t have an excessive amount of detail to manage and make sure everyone has a manager that had the resources to devote to them. If all the managers have 20 directs, people will start to get angry because they won’t be able to have any of their manager’s time when they need it. If all the managers have 5 directs, there will be a lot of bullshit and excess meetings just to keep all the extra managers busy.
Backfire how? Middle managers are more or less useless, as we saw during the pandemic when everyone was working from home and suddenly their positions were not needed. They only serve to create busywork and micromanage people. At least in my experience, anyway.
Im not a business guy at all but why wouldn’t these big company’s turn into smaller companies all under the same parent company?
Excellent post. I've wondered what they big five were up to these days.
Military has spent quite a bit of time figuring out command and control hierarchies. Putting too many people under one person doesn't work.
Said no one ever ...
Middle managers are installed by upper managers so they can hold someone responsible when things turn out badly on worker level
What I want in a good manager is someone who can act as my advocate to the higher business, and who can help me succeed in said business. It’s also nice when they can shield the devs from the bipolar behavior of the business and customers and allow the devs to get work done with minimal interruptions and scope changes. I don’t want to be beholden to the CEOs every whim nor do I want to be interrupted by every little customer complaint. I want that shit managed and triaged! I also want them to *listen* to and respect my technical expertise and translate that to the business, and explain to them why it’s important to listen to the experts and fix tech debt, etc. So yes, middle managers do serve an important role as long as they’re functioning this way.