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Comment by nh23423fefe | Hacker News Reader

This actually sounds like a meaningful change, unlike proposals from the peanut gallery "to fire the CEO for layoffs," instead demand more output from those you keep in exchange for a job.

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And to be fair, until about 2015 or so, all managers at FB were expected to be able to do their reports job.

This is definitely a good move, as I've heard some horror stories of management bloat at FB since I left in 2018.

That is interesting. I've been working in the field professionally for 22+ years and I've never had a manager that had any technical skills. None of them could even begin to do my job.

That must suck (unless you're really senior in which case it's normal). Hilariously enough, I learned so much more from my one non technical manager at FB but having leaders that understand what you do is incredibly helpful.

Pretty much all my Google managers were ex-ICs who would have been fully capable of jumping into the codebase if they had to. Some of them still did, if they could squeeze it in.

Most FAANG companies grow managers from within, with many managers starting as ICs.

Anecdotally, I've never had a manager that wasn't super technical. They wouldn't last.

Yeah, I've never worked for a FAANG company. I do work for a Fortune 100 company, but it is not a tech company (When I was hired, I was once in a meeting where I heard the founder of the company say that we would never have an IT department because we were not a tech company. We do have an IT department now, but that happened after the founder gave up the reigns.)

OTOH, if I tried to be a manager, even if I could do it, I'd be incredibly bad at it.

I don't need my manager to know how to do my job.

I just need my manager to know they don't know how to do my job and stop telling me how to do it.

Tell me what needs to be done. Trust me to figure out how.

Kind of my thoughts as well - it's "cool" there are technical managers out there and engineering managers should be technical "enough" but I'd never expect them to be competent with all the ICs' jobs

Sure, neither do I (now). At that point in my career though, it was incredibly helpful and levelled me up significantly in a relatively short space of time.

But agreed that your manager should set goals rather than plans. Fun fact, at FB at the same time all ICs came up with their own goals rather than these being passed down from management.

> I've been working in the field professionally for 22+ years and I've never had a manager that had any technical skills. None of them could even begin to do my job

Technical skills may or may not be required, but understanding is...

"Each of my managers explained carefully his own theory of what had gone wrong and all the theories were different. At last, there breezed into my office the most senior manager of all, a general manager of our parent company, Andrew St. Johnston. I was surprised that he had even heard of me. "You know what went wrong?" he shouted--he always shouted-- "You let your programmers do things which you yourself do not understand." I stared in astonishment. He was obviously out of touch with present day realities. How could one person ever understand the whole of a modem software product like the Elliott 503 Mark II software system? I realized later that he was absolutely right; he had diagnosed the true cause of the problem and he had planted the seed of its later solution. "

- C.A.R Hoare, 1980 Turing Award speech

Good understanding is a management trait. It’s great that managers have that, when managing.

Technical skills are DEFINITELY required to be an IC. Understanding without the ability to implement makes for a lousy IC.

That is interesting. I've been working in the field professionally 20 years (I'm not including grad school or postdocs) and every manager I've had had technical skills (deep ones) although most of them couldn't have done my job exactly the same way I did. Some would have done it better. Others, worse. Even others- would have cancelled the project, or morphed it into something else entirely.

The managers I enjoyed working for the most came up through the ranks and were better at my job than I was. But that was only maybe 25% of the time in the 20ish years I spent as an IC. The worst for me were the ones with no understanding of how I did what I did.

Wow, in my 15 or so years I've never _not_ had a manager who had engineering chops. Admittedly, I prefer working for smaller companies so this has often been a hands-on CTO, and I was filtering these job opportunities for technical leaders that I respected.

At Netflix I can't think of a single manager at any level managing engineers that didn't start as one, all the way up to the CEO. In some cases they couldn't necessarily do their employee's job, but they at least understand the technical aspects well enough to make useful contributions to technical discussions.

My then manager, that become a director after he grew the team large enough, was writing code after 12 hours of meetings.

That's just sad.

Why? He probably loved it

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