Let Your Top Performers Move Around the Company | Hacker News Reader

Let Your Top Performers Move Around the Company

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49 pointsmooreds19 comments

This is pretty much the norm many FAANG companies * — mobility is a huge driver of competition among internal teams to create a great culture, provide growth opportunities and do impactful work. Downside is that some important but not sexy or hard to quantify work gets ignored or avoided because employees have a ton of choice to move (usually after a 1 year min stint)

* At least at Facebook and Google. At Apple I have heard that people are encouraged to stay in one area and become experts in that area. Mobility seems to be less of an emphasis.

Yup. It's a huge mechanism for success, it punishes managers for not treating their developers well. Especially since other teams can see all of the code you wrote. If youre good, no amount of politics from your manager will stop other teams from figuring that out and hiring you.

I think this ability to quickly move around is heavily underrated.

Can managers not block transfers?

It depends on the company, but generally as long as you havent received performance concerns, you can switch.

> ...but generally as long as you havent received performance concerns, you can switch.

Bad manager is just incentivized to lodge preemptive mild performance reports against his best performers. Not enough to become a stain on the team members, just enough to prevent them from switching teams. Bonus to the bad manager: they are rewarded for keeping compensation plans from expanding as much as other teams because the mild performance reports help curve down pay adjustments.

The only practical way I've seen to counter this response is strong leadership over such a manager that recognizes what is actually happening and has a quiet talk with the manager. That rarely happens. I'd like to hear what policies others have seen that mitigate this dynamic.

But does it result in the same quality of product? My broad experience is "no"

It definitely does, it exposes the bad managers. Attrition can be used as a gauge across an organization to shed light on who isn't doing their job well.

Important but not sexy work often gets offloaded to onsite contractors, who also don't play career games (in FAANG, not in their actual employers). Maybe only Apple doesn't work vendors, others are pretty good with it.

Amazon as well.

I don't care.

Hear me out. Why is the entire IT culture trying to do whatever Google and the FAANG companies are doing? Its ridiculous. The rest of the world have completely different needs, completely different skill levels, and completely different management. There is literally nothing the rest of the world has incommon with FAANG.

What they do will not work for the rest of us. I'm super tired of hearing about what they do. I do not look up to them and I'm not impressed by them.

Remember tech before FAANG? If you don't, you probably think I'm a raving lunatic because today, it sure seems every single engineer loves whatever FAANG does.

It might even mean having someone transition down so they can eventually transition up.

Anyone have a success story surrounding this they’d like to share? Asked another way: has anyone ever stepped down from leadership and gone on to be an IC within the same company?

I tried this at last job. Without pouring out all the details, the way the company handled it was poor, and shortly after I departed the company so did three other managers. One of which never wanted to be in a management or leadership position in the first place.

Anecdotally I've seen it quite a few times. In most cases, mentorship and the environment play a role in how successful you can be as an IC versus as a manager, and even within the same organization, the IC culture versus the Management culture can be drastically different and one or the other might not set you up for success.

That said, in my experience when there is a mass exodus of the kind you talk about, the underlying symptom is some flavor of poor management and toxic culture. Doesn't matter if that organization incidentally happens to implement something which would otherwise qualify as "best practices of management" - in that environment it is simply putting lipstick on a pig.

Opinions are my own.

I actually have seen the reverse. All the TLs I saw that stepped down to be ICs left their team shortly. It's obviously anecdotal, so I wouldn't generalize from that. On the otherhand, the TLs that switched to be a manager tend to stay in the teams much longer. Many of them openly said they don't enjoy managing, but that didn't seem to affect their decision to stay.

Do you know why they were unhappy? I could imagine reasons why, but wouldn't want to poison the well, so to speak.

I know, but I wouldn't be able to give much specifics due to privacy reasons. I can say that the common theme is dissatisfactions with the velocity of making decisions, leading to conflicts/frustration. In a large org, ICs are at the mercy of the management for velocity. When you step down from the TL position, you may feel pretty frustrated that your impact is now tied to some one else's (sometimes slow) decision. This feeling is already common between the normal ICs, but for TLs-turned-ICs, I think they experienced it much worse. All the people I knew burned out, complained about management, and left for another team or another company.

acronym: IC?

Individual contributor- not a tech lead or manager.

I was an IC program manager. I was asked to manage program managers. I stepped back to become an IC within a year.

I did this because my team was immediately starved for engineering resources upon my appointment, I was asked to continue my IC product management responsibilities while managing the team, and I kept getting PMs that were the problem children of the group.

I went on to run product management for tooling and ops processes around that tooling in the post-manager PM role. I never looked back.

However, I got the bug so bad I left to start my own company, so now I manage everyone?

You probably already know this, but in case anyone else hasn't had this experience, learn from my mistake and think of it as "so now I manage these 4-5 leaders" instead of "so now I manage everyone". I thought this was the same thing, but I learned the hard way there's a reason middle managers exist :)

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