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Comment by deanCommie | Hacker News Reader

> they are the gatekeepers to your advancement while you aren't on a critical path to theirs,

That's not true. In organizations that have these kinds of parallel tracks, advancement for managers is DIRECTLY tied to their ability to promote engineers on their team.

It's an aggregate effort. If you can't promote engineers that report to you either have * Limited soft skills * Inability to attract quality engineers * Inability to take ownership of projects of significant complexity

In any of those cases, how can you promote a manager like this?

Managers are ABSOLUTELY incentivized to advance the careers of their reports (the good ones at least, but should this not be merit-based?)

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Never heard of this at all. Managers are weakly incentivized. The way it works in my FANG company is you put in your rankings of your reports with one top contributor. HR uses their model to spit out customized compensation. I know because I assisted HR in developing the model. At a high enough management level it’s possible to raise all boats but the article covers that as L6+ manager ie upper management.

L6 management isn't "upper" management. L5 is the first level you can manage engineers. At L6, you may, or may not, be managing another manager or two.

Semantics and not true of all FAANG companies, eg check https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Microsoft&tr.... Historically, the org levels pull from military enlisted/officer E1-7 vs O1-7 splits so actually would lean towards our definition more.

Levels.fyi supports what I said. Amazon, Facebook, and Google have L6 as the second level of management. (Facebook sometimes uses the "L" indicator, and M1 is L6). There is no company where "L6" means upper management.

> Historically, the org levels pull from military enlisted/officer E1-7 vs O1-7 splits so actually would lean towards our definition more.

I don't think there's reason to believe this. Google, for example, doesn't have a split. Nor does Amazon. Facebook does, but it only resembles the military rankings by coincidence, since it likely took more from Google's leveling system originally (and afaik there are still leftovers from that).

To the main point, while the compensation methodologies work differently at every company, I expect that the "rising tide" effect is always present.

Even if what you describe is true (which varies from company to company), it doesn't mean that engineers make the decision about whether their manager gets promoted, which is what TFA is talking about ("they are the gatekeepers to your advancement").

Managers will fight for status quo, its their only thing. If you can not resolve conflict with the manager, quitting is the only right answer.

Or you go to their manager and to your HR department. Good companies provide more than one escalation path.

> Or you go to their manager

From the managers manager perspective its too much work to oversee people at 2 levels. If the manager gets the job done, that idle for him/her.

In my experience HR department always sides with the most people who have most power. This is not surprising, they don't have any direct contribution and have much less power.

how do they work ?

is it human feel driven (through months of meetings, observing initiative, quality of conversation) or quantitative (throughput, commit count, bug count) ?

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