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Comment by gardenhedge | Hacker News Reader

All the talk to a flatter structure, being lean, focusing on the tech actually makes me want to work at Meta. If only they would change their leetcode interview process!

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> All the talk to a flatter structure, being lean, focusing on the tech actually makes me want to work at Meta.

Do you take those claims as seriously as you do "Meta is building the future of human connection", "Year of Efficiency", and "Meta builds new ways for people to feel closer"?

This is a PR fluff message about layoffs. I wouldn't take any claims in it at raw face value.

Its not fluff entirely. My friends who are in managment are now coding and some middle management people have quit.

This announcement says the layoffs and reorg will occur "over the next couple of months". They haven't happened yet.

Not sure what you are implying. They have asked many managers to start coding or leave a while ago, their title is still EM maybe will change to IC now.

I'm implying companies tend to come up with all sorts of great sounding PR fluff to explain layoffs, and that I'm generally skeptical of claims to be making orgs "flatter". If this statement specifically makes someone want to work at Facebook, I think their bullshit meter needs adjusting.

i believe they're already happening. i have one friend at meta who's manager was swapped to an IC role already, and one friend who's an EM that's in the process of swapping to an IC role

I’ve always found Meta’s self deception about where they innovate really funny. I can’t think of any social technology they brought to market which helps me feel close to those around me, besides maybe Facebook Events and Groups.

  1. Work at Meta
  2. Be top performer
  3. Get promoted to manager
  4. Manage <5 people as a newbie manager
  5. Get fired because you don't manage enough people

Or, alternatively:

  1. Work at Meta
  2. Be top performer
  3. Never get promoted

I don't know, this doesn't make me want to work at Meta. Certainly not as a top performer.

The best people I've worked with stayed in the same role for 20+ years without any promotion. They did great work, knew exactly what to do and didn't have to play the politics game to get some favorable review for promotion. I wish more companies would encourage that. Even in tech, the world doesn't change as quickly as we sometimes think.

Personally, if I enjoy my work and my pay stays at or above market rate, I don't need title promotions.

  1. Work at Meta
  2. Be top performer
  3. Remain in your role for too many years
  4. Get fired because you're expensive with no growth trajectory

You got me there :)

I'm not in the demographic anymore to be hired by Meta, but I'd definitely choose the second scenario over the first one 10 times out of 10. Managing people is a chore.

If you're a top performer, then you can make seven figures at $meta as an IC

I don't work at Meta, but if its anything like where I currently work, the ones who become "managers" have no correlation to coding performance, or perfomance at all for that matter.

Which is a good thing. You should be become a manager because you think you would enjoy being a manager more than being a coder, and are passionate about being really good at managing. Being good at coding doesn't mean you'll automatically be good at (or enjoy) dealing with admin, budgeting, resource planning and personnel issues.

I've been managed by truly brilliant coders who just wished they could go back to sitting in their office and code. No one was happy with that situation.

I didn't write it out, but our managers have no idea of the code at all. They have never been programmers. Hence the programmers sit around all day, like posting on HN, and not much gets done at all. But hey they are surely really passionate about managing.

Depends on the location. I'm an Engineering Manager at $FAANG (MANGA?) and I moved into management after senior engineering roles. At the same time, I'm still programming a lot in my "free time". Your experience doesn't apply everywhere.

As for motivation (I know no one asked): I genuinely enjoy the human aspect of the job and thinking further out into the future with product and engineering leaders. Plus I learned that I really enjoy programming when it's a hobby without the corporate overhead, and that it's less fun (to me) in a company.

Not to discredit your experience - but it's not a universal truth.

At Meta and pretty much all other tech companies Engineering Managers have to have been decent programmers first, so I'm not sure what you're describing applies there.

Cases where managers are appointed to oversee dev teams without having any engineering experience at all are more common in non-tech companies. Those situations can still work, but rarely work well.

But if the managers were programmers, suddenly everyone would magically want to work instead of fucking around on HN.

It's not about will, but the managers capability to oversee what is going on. Since they dont know anything about programming, they cant even really know if someone is slacking, or working really hard.

That is, their capability to manage.

Huh? Of course they can. Is the person shipping what they're supposed to be shipping?

Which is a discussion of what they are supposed to be shipping. Usually a description of a program, in text. A discussion that very often ends in court over disagreements. Have you ever worked on a commercial software?

Forgive me for asking, but why would you work at a place like that? Aren't you bored doing nothing?

It's my first gig, so my options are limited. Things might still shake up when people start asking where all the money is going. But I've also come to realize that my situation is not unique, there's a lot of non-work going on in modern tech.

Do you use scrum? How are people's capacities not being filled?

We do, they named the least productive yet most experienced gentleman to "teach lead" to lead the scrums because they started getting a notion that not much was getting done. This is the guy who love writing documentation (One A4 per week of 40h hour, about). The end result was nothing changed: "I am working on X", "OK, good good" and nothing really gets done. Then the customer started changing the demands 9 months into the project which justified the inproductivity even more. It's all around just a shit show.

Sure. Same reason the State Department doesn't typically source its diplomats from the Navy SEALs. Different skills, different types of people.

For most FAANG companies, it's IC -> TL -> TLM -> EM, unless you explicitly insist on remaining IC/TL (and then you're on the chopping block, because promotion trajectory for ICs becomes very, very slow beyond a certain point).

This isn’t true. I personally know gray hairs that retired as ICs in at least three of those letters in your outdated acronym.

It should be MAAAM by now- Microsoft is famous for the IC rest-and-vest to ‘55 lifestyle.

This isn’t true in my experience across a few FAANGs. And promotion is very slow on both tracks once you get to terminal level + 1.

> and then you're on the chopping block, because promotion trajectory for ICs becomes very, very slow beyond a certain point

The former does not follow from the latter.

It makes me think I’d get efficiently laid off within a year or so.

I’ve worked at a few places that thought they were lean and flat as well, but they aren’t. Someone in leadership likes the idea and goes on and on about it, but the actual structure and legacy of past structures creates a complete mess. The only thing that gets done is talking about how great the team is and how much awesome stuff is getting done. Then everyone gets laid off again.

Yeah they're gonna be real flat and lean with the 60k employees left after this 10k get laid off. I'm no operations expert but I'm pretty sure all this is going to do is free up some payroll funds

Same. Sounds like a place where actual work is respected.

And you can feel all warm and fuzzy inside knowing you're helping to make teenage girls suicidally depressed.

Please don't post like this to HN. We've had to warn you about this many times before*. The slack here is finite and if you keep it up we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please fix this, that would be good.

I'm not denying at all that the psychological well-being of young people is intertwined with social media and corporate interests in complex ways that deserve critique. But it's not ok to post snarky drive-by attacks on HN. Those are two separate things and it's the commenter's job to distinguish them.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33340849 (Oct 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30630713 (March 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27401192 (June 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19534285 (March 2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17734563 (Aug 2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16059003 (Jan 2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's all of social media. I don't like what's happening there but I also don't see how Facebook engineers can change that. Closing Instagram just drives more people to TikTok which is arguably worse.

Meta isn't just Instagram, and Instagram isn't just suicidal tendencies. You could just as well do the argument with any big company.

I get depressed readying about mind-blowing tech on HN every day and feeling old and inadequate. YC, what are you doing?

Me too. I wish I could work at a company where I dont have a "project manager" making more than I do for sending a few emails and holding a weekly project meeting. I've decided to practice leetcode if that's what it takes.

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