Hacker News Reader

Comment by _9omd | Hacker News Reader

Chamath talked about manager bloat on a recent All-in podcast in a way that seemed to make sense. Basically there is pressure to grow your career by moving from being an IC to a manager and once a manager there are incentives to grow your number of reports. The organizational efficiency suffers when you have top tier ICs start managing teams of average people. You might get a team of 6 engineers that’s only doing 2x as much work as the former IC that’s managing them used to do, which means the cost per unit of work has increased tremendously.

View on HN

If the reward for competence is promotion, in the steady-state equilibrium everybody's incompetent at their current job: If they were competent, they would have been promoted into a different job.

It's called the Peter Principle [1] and it's pretty well-known.

I suppose Facebook's realized it's in a Peter Principle situation, and the remedy for it would, in theory, be to send some of the people back to previous jobs where they were competent.

The problem is that, in practice, it seems a lot like a demotion, especially if the original move was touted as a promotion, and the pay and prestige of your new old job is less.

It's a real puzzle how this can be done without demoralizing the affected employees into quitting -- especially the best ones, who presumably have lots of good career options elsewhere, and whose value is the entire reason for doing this in the first place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

The answer is to pay the top IC as much as managers

The premise of this always puzzled me. I’ve seen many people “promoted” to a “higher” level because they displayed characteristics that they would be more successful at that role than anyone else despite lacking competence in their current role.

I’ve also seen people who are great at their current role but lack the attributes to rise into higher roles.

So the premise of competence being rewarded by promotion doesn’t really seem useful in practice.

Incompetence being rewarded as in your case doesn't seem better at all though.

The Gervais Principle

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

... illustrates the fallacy of the Peter Principle.

It is called 'Up or Out' culture. It is practiced everywhere, even in the military. You don't see 50+ year soldiers, do you? Except may be in 'Top Gun' sort of movies, which just only proves the point.

You are supposed to retire or give way to top performers to take the top places.

Also sometimes referred to as the Cravath System:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cravath_System

Some organizations have tried to limit manager-bloat by offering an alternative track for ICs (senior-> staff -> principle -> whatever). But the expectations at those levels have been hard to define and individual output seems to plateau or even degrade back to 'senior' level or even less when these high ranking ICs are asked to join a plethora of meetings on behalf of the team.

It's also common at some of these companies to get "demoted" from a higher track. That basically never happens to managers.

Sorry, do you mean it’s common for someone to go from, say, L6, to L5?

Yes.

I've never heard of that happening.

Imagine what Michelangelo could’ve accomplished if he was tasked with managing a team of painters.

Is this ironic, I can't tell?

"The Mythical Man-Month" seems relevant in any case.

Has to be ironic, since that's what Michelangelo did

He hired the painters to complement him, he never stopped painting altogether. I’ve seen the same pattern work. Make star IC a TL, pair them with good product and manager, add many engineers who can take care of all the simpler work and let the star do the main work. For orgs which can’t or won’t hire “A people”, this is the only workable solution I think.

This concept is as old as any organizations existed. Not sure why it needs a modern podcast.

David Sacks, not Chamath.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com