Shopify elevated the non-manager career path and ditched meetings
creatoreconomy.so
creatoreconomy.so
I'd like to make an HN grassroots proposal... that people impose a moratorium period on indulging a company's PR attempts to sell their enlightened management culture, right after something like that.
Layoffs looks like either a huge fudge-up that screws employees, or screwing employees as a greedy or dumb business move.
In neither scenario is it in the interests of the hiring pool to pretend it didn't happen.
Only mentioning this as I'm not sure it categorizes the same as these huge 10%+ layoffs the rest of tech have participated in, sometimes multiple times by the same company.
Is that so bad? If I was a Meta shareholder I'd very much like the firm's profits to me, rather than funding Zuck's metaverse escapades.
> We belive out stock is undervalued, so we will buy it ourselves. This will reduce our cost of capital and generate value for our shareholders in the long term.
this phrase makes no sense because it's an executive buzzword: the value of a stock is what someone will pay for it
no stock is undervalued, it's at exactly the correct value. Executives conducting buybacks thus simply want the stock to be valued more than it is (so they can make more stock-priced-based-compensation money)
that an executive from a company like Shopify has options for cash like creating value via growth, or paying their workers better, but instead chooses to just increase their personal wealth (and, incidentally, that of shareholders as well), is precisely the leadership failure being pointing out here
Because that's how companies are supposed to operate? Broadly speaking, companies are generally expected to pay their gross revenue three groups of people:
1. shareholders
2. bondholders/creditors
3. employees
Employees get first dibs on the cash, but the amount they're expected to earn is capped. Bondholders comes next, and shareholders come last. If there isn't any money left over, they get nothing. In exchange, they also get all of the returns, should the enterprise succeed, as well as control over it.
I always considered employment a fairly simple exchange of my services for a fairly set rate, and investors/owners/funders to be the risk takers for ups & downs?
if you think that executives don't value that, or don't receive any additional compensation from it, feel free to rebut the claim that they do, but the point is that the money went into executive pockets (among others) instead of worker pockets
also, "it's their money" is a morally bankrupt argument that could be used to justify anything money can buy, and ignores that it isn't: it's their shares, the money belongs to the company, who can choose to spend it on value creation vs compensation bumps
Take two hypothetical companies. One is conservatively run, never takes on anyone that they might need to let go. The other hires aggressively when times are good, and fires when they get bad.
The second company will (if well run otherwise) likely be more successful over time and create more wealth than the first.
Layoffs only positively impact the business in the long run if the cuts are essential to the company's survival (otherwise, they would go bankrupt). Spotify likely had enough cash to weather the storm.
In can see the drop in moral in my team. We are busier than ever, as the work hasn't dried up, but there are no decent pay rises on the horizon. As soon as the economy recovers, most of my team will find job elsewhere.
But it's kool-aid drinking to assume a company that is over aggressive at hiring in a bull market and fires in a bear market will create more wealth. Wealth for whom is the better question to ask — certainly not the thousands of laid off employees.
I think that depends on the pay structure. If a large part of your compensation is in stock then you'll still benefit from the additional wealth creation. Assuming a decent severance package it's certainly possible you come out ahead compared to the more conservative company, even being laid off.
Oh yes, the beautiful golden handcuffs will give those laid off workers wealth. Except... the handcuffs come off and are kept by the employer. Otherwise they wouldn't have been handcuffs
Perhaps, but it's the first company that I'd rather work for.
But if I look at my last position and consider everything identical except that one case has laying employees off as an intentional part of the business plan, and the other case where that's not true, I would have wanted to make at least twice as much as compensation for the layoff risk.
But... working at a place where I feel insecure would have other knock-on effects. Primarily, being much less invested in the company, and so less willing to make sacrifices or take risks, regardless of pay rate. And that means that I'd be likely to be unhappy in the position. So it's all very complicated.
As a caveat, though, I am not particularly motivated by money, as long as my minimum requirements are met. I tend to be motivated more by the work and work environment itself.
I have learned that there are quite a lot of things that can't be made better through increased compensation.
The psychological effects for employees can be greatly harmful, though. Additionally, there is a cost to society when projects are cancelled that would be beneficial to the world, even if not profitable, and such flitty business practice could become exaggerated if lay-offs did not carry such stigma.
This is making a lot of assumptions that I think make the hypothesis very shaky. The only people who can decide if they'll be better off when this happens are the individuals being laid off, because they're the only ones who have enough information to know.
I would be very curious to know what I'm missing in this picture; would you have the time to elaborate?
Oh, OK. I agree with that. I thought that you were saying that being laid off is a good thing when economic times are good. I think that it's never a good thing.
However, if it has to happen, it's certainly better when times are good than when they aren't.
> Thus, my intuition is that smaller but more frequent lay-offs would smooth-out the troughs and peaks
I suppose, but I would not want to work for a company that engages in regular layoffs, even small ones. It means that you can never really settle in to the job.
I've turned down several job offers from companies solely because they engage in regularly-scheduled layoffs.
1. There are many more sr mgr/director+ positions than sr. staff+
2. Corporate politics is brutal and a seasoned mgr is adept at it. Unfortunately, the sooner you get better at it the better for your career. This is one of the reasons why a seasoned director will always be able to command a much bigger scope than sr. staff+.
3. The bar for rising in the IC ladder is astronomically higher than that for mgmt ladder.
4. And let's not forget interviews. Management interviews are much easier than ICs. (think leetcode).
5. Last but not the least, even in big tech companies (FAANGM or whatever acronym) you should really measure how many of sr. staff+ folks became sr. staff+ after a stint in mgmt. They used mgmt to catapult their career after seeing stagnation/difficulty of moving up as an IC. You would be surprised how many of these very senior ICs have had mgmt careers for several years before. It's easy to extol the virtues of being an IC once you've reached there but no one sees how they got there :-).
Now, don't get me wrong. There are some companies/orgs/teams where higher ICs are valued much more and do better than mgrs but it's really the minority. It's in your best interest to switch to mgmt after 8-10 yrs of IC career (8-10 yrs is sufficient enough to gain a solid footing in tech) and learn the ropes fast. I waited for 18 yrs and can see the difference.
A very narrow view which is adopted by the vast majority of managers and successful salespeople. Otherwise, why did they get to become manager?
> If it makes the company less attractive to types who think like that
Not at all... this article is supposed to attract eager, naive kids who will work their butts off for little reward.
Machiavellians will find an easier time of becoming manager at this company. Staff positions are super limited, but the "possibility" reduces competition for management positions.
I suppose for a company that's better than attracting managers who work their butts off to do nothing but enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else?
It just depends on who really holds the power at the company - the people who want a return on investment (the company to succeed), or the people who want to extract as much value from the company for themselves (the execs).
When companies start making decisions left and right that don't make any sense - it's not because execs are morons. It's because things are working as intended, and the execs are extracting value for themselves at the expense of everything else.
Besides, most of us here on Hacker News can easily avoid big companies and go work at small start-ups or even our own businesses. If you hate the Machiavellian corporate world then vote with your feet.
I think using the word evil to describe anything in economics is a bit of a stretch. But then again, I don't think what you're describing is even possible, so whether it's "evil" or not is a moot point. Even fatcat investors thousands of miles away from factories are contributing to the production with their capital and the organization and financing of the systems of production, so the concept of a "pure extractor" that you believe to be evil never exists in the first place.
If you want to find wiggle room with the word "directly" in "directly producing", then you're inviting a purely subjective argument that will eventually leave you on the evil end of the morality spectrum from someone else's point of view.
I'm not sure what you're referring to, but I'm fine with agreeing that is not morally defensible. The Tucker Carlsons of the world are behaving as close to indisputably evil as possible, but I wouldn't lump them in with every business owner that is extracting more value than they're directly producing with their own hands on a daily basis.
And how much of the real work in any given tech company is actually done by those eager naïve kids who are unreasonably loyal to the company and have not yet burned out? Perhaps the majority?
You can filter people who want career progression out of engineering, you will still have them in all of other functions. You will still be working for these people.
I'll donate to someone who needs it, not wealthy capitalists.
If capitalists want my time, they need to pay what it's worth.
Not only this, but management levels is pretty well recognized across the industry. The titles themselves might not be the same, but where you fit in is.
High level engineering positions is not that way. It often can depend a lot on your experience with the company and not necessarily tech in general. You could be a staff engineer one place, and {bigCo} just decides based on one person during the interview that you should only be an SDE 2 during the interview. So often, the non management track leads you stuck without options other than being "downleveled" and taking a demotion to leave.
And the ICs themselves are to be blamed for encouraging and fostering such ridiculous processes.
This is the root of all evil. Just getting from Sr -> Staff Engineer is not only a product of skill and experience, but also what problem you are working on, how many ICs exist on the team/org at your level, what opportunities exist in your org and much more. When a staff engineer leaves a company, the probability of a senior engineer getting promoted is the same as an external hire getting the spot. When a senior manager leaves, one of the other managers gets a promotion almost every time. In management you can just hire enough people under you to automatically climb the corporate ladder. Management often rewards inefficiency whereas as an IC you get punished for it.
Your points seems be based on the assumption there's more people managers than IC's.
I'm not certain that is accurate (or at least accurate at a well operated company).
A manager path is just a chiller life. No leetcode interviews, performance review is focused on hiring/firing/delivery rather than actual product building, maintenance etc. Managers create arbitrary processes for their team just to show to their bosses that they are doing something important. Managers also scapegoat ICs when their policies fail.
It's a wild paradox. Companies want ICs, to develop and maintain but the corporate ladder is designed to favor/give power to managers. Wild!
As someone who has done both multiple times each, this statement comes off as someone who hasn't spent time in management. My stress levels are always much lower when I'm an IC. Even when I'm a high level IC. My blood pressure levels drop when I'm an IC. etc etc etc.
This is not to say that everything about being a manager is harder than being an IC. Not at all. But they're just not directly comparable the way you're doing here. They require completely different skillsets, and come with different challenges. For me, it turns out that the hard parts of manager life stress me out, big time. Thus I prefer IC work.
Being able to be done at the end of the day is something I'm really looking forward to but it's going to take some time to get back into that mindset.
As a manager, I felt like I was always on.
All manager did was collect status reports, weekly meetings, promo and optics documents and managing upwards. He even fired people that made him look bad.
At some point, I started asking, why am I doing all the scoping, project management, product management, people management and sprint running? What exactly is my manager doing to move the product/service ahead?
In IC work there's often a 'right' answer. At least an answer that can be tested and pass some sort of test. Management is murky, "will this deal work out?", "why are employee A and B constantly fighting?", "partner is asking when X will be done, that I'm only tangentially in control of" ugh, the list goes on.
> A manager path is just a chiller life.
Not quite correct. Once you get to a point in management seniority, everything that goes wrong is your fault. When your immediate manager is at that point, they will absolutely twist your thumbs off, rather than have your failures be reflected on him. They aren't interested in your excuses, because their boss isn't interested in theirs.
And if you aren't high up in management seniority, you still be standing in line to get a bucket of shit dumped on you (courtesy of the management fight I've described above), but it's also your responsibility to shield your team from it. How you do it is up to you, have fun. :)
... And once you've cleaned yourself and your team off, and think 'Gosh, that was bad, but hey, at least I survived getting through that messy place in the line', you'll discover that the line is actually circular.
Guess whose fault it becomes once the line manager is being blamed from above.
Management games are detrimental to innovation.
Obviously it's going to be designed in the way that works best for them.
You'd think so, but it's not. During mgmt interviews, you have to show how did you rally your team and had impact. It's much easier to rally yourself (think leetcode) than rally 6 other people.
For me at least this hasn't been true.
In general, most companies do not value higher level ICs, including the one I'm at now. But I don't like going to meetings all day, so what am I to do?
Absolutely hate corporate politics when I have not enough equity to put that much effort in.
There are of course exceptions if you are a true rock star and have worked on/led household-name projects as an IC. But again, if you jump ship, you might end up in a manager-esque role anyway. Once you reach a certain level of seniority/experience you are just way more valuable in the force-multiplying role of "leader" than anything you can do with your hands on the keyboard.
Basically if you dont "hop" to management in the first 1-6 years into your career, it quickly becomes too late.
After years of discussion about this with my manager, I recently accepted a low level managerial role at my current company. It was a large step down title wise (from highest level IC title to low level manager title). The only reason I did this was because HR agreed to let me keep my current salary (albeit "frozen" until I get promoted)..
I found that in general the pay for entry level tech manager was a large pay-cut for me , but I was also under qualified for type of Director role.
Or maybe because they had no interest in management work?
If I can be allowed to split hairs a little, ackshually you're compensated based on your level/title which sometimes, but not always (maybe not even often) is proportional to your ability to create business value. Companies like to say that they pay based on business value because it sounds good. But they don't have really great ways to measure that, especially if you're not in sales.
The level/title is merely a tool that attempts to frame someone relative to the alternatives to make that determination easier.
Which is fine! I'd rather have my current salary and not have to manage people. I wouldn't want a manager's job for twice my salary. It would make me unhappy, and a spare salary wouldn't make it up to me.
And software is one of those things where an IC or small team lead can end up owning and being responsible for a huge amount of scope/impact.
is that not just another version of "shipping code"?
sure it's one degree removed from your physical fingers on the actual keyboard, but that junior only got to ship because of your mentorship/management
Being a force multiplier by being technical leadership to other devs is fine by me. I just don't want to spend all day in an office managing upwards.
Teaching people management skills is probably a whole heck of a lot easier than teaching them technical skills, but companies don't see it that way. Companies will pay top dollar for a fresh Harvard MBA, and put them in-charge of a large technology thing they know little about, but reject the idea of a IC8 moving into that role.
Imagine it the other way around; I would not expect the head of HR at my employer to move directly into a Staff Engineering position if they expressed interest in moving towards a technical role.
I share your bias, but if I'm being intellectually honest with myself, this is an unjustified bias.
Agreed with this, but only for traditional management track. Like if you want to be a CEO of a F500, you need to hop on the management track early and spend the time rising through the ranks. But there is more flexibility in startup world. In a small growing company you can have 15+ of exp as IC but quickly become VP or C level if you show aptitude and the situation allows for it. And if you have success there, you have generalized management credibility.
I only recently became a manager. I'm somewhere around year 28 of my career, depending on how you want to count some early jobs.
It happens.
You're telling me these guys are making absolute shitloads of money doing what they are good at and you're saying it as if that's a bad thing.
Sign me up. If I wanted to manage I'd have a business degree, not a CS degree.
Here you have motivated , respected, talented individuals who wants to take all of the things they have learned and apply it to a broader set of things across the company. They are literally asking to provide more value to the company by broadening the scope of their influence.
For a crappy sports analogy, its like never letting the MVP become a coach.
There's a reason athletes only become coaches after their prime. Once they can no longer be superstars on the field, they can try to pass on some knowledge to the next generation.
I don't really see how taking deep knowledge of stuff like databases and webservers and applying it to "broader sets of things" is useful. That's like taking rocket science knowledge and applying it to cooking. Sure, you may find some use for some stuff but the vast majority of your knowledge is just wasted now, it isn't being "applied to a broader set of things". It's just deteriorating.
Broader set of things != Different things.
So you don't think that moving a Distinguished NASA engineer with an illustrious 25 year career into management is a good idea? They arent moving fields, just positions within their field. Your cooking analogy doesn't apply.
The case example of this working well is Boeing, which was ran (top to bottom) mostly by engineers for a while.
That is not my experience. FAANG pays significantly more for the same level of management.
TC for mid-level manager/director at FAANG = TC for high level manager/VP/C-suite in non-FAANG
TC for maxx level IC in FAANG = Doesn't exist!
The ceiling for manager is higher and is actually possible, whereas you will literally never make an IC8 TC as an IC outside of FAANG, no matter what.
FAANGs, and SV more generally, have figured out how to leverage the effort of top-quality engineers to create tremendous business value. This is reflected in the performance of these stocks in the public market.
Other parts of the economy do not have the need for such high levels of technical skills. They simply don't know what to do with it! Hence they cannot pay ICs as high either.
We will eventually get to a point where few engineers, controlling larger number of computers, can produce significant business value. IC salaries will rise then.
Contrary to popular narratives, management outside the c-suite is a mostly a thankless grind with no glory. Getting competent people to do it requires some major incentives, and every team, at every level, requires management.
There is an endless availability of engineers who can push JSON to an API, but people who can lead a team, handle cross team comms, architect, and code the hard problems are fairly rare. This is why they command salaries comparable to specialist doctors.
Meanwhile, MBAs are an endless resource, given that that and Law School are the default for people who haven't figured out what they want to do in undergrad.
I would be thrilled to take on my VP or SVP's "thankless grind" for just 25% of their salary. There are probably many more like me lined up, too.
Isn't this sort of the point? It's not a matter of respect so much as impact. Having say director level impact as an IC requires working on the right sorts of problems, at the right sorts of scale, in an organization that is structured to take advantage of it. It shouldn't really be surprising that this doesn't describe most positions.
I agree with that, but my experience has been on the flip-side. At other companies when I get beyond staff level I've been expected to manage people, when my strength is on the technical side. Being able to lead technically and elevate the tech level of teams is more effective and rewarding for me. There are other ways to force-multiply without being a chain-of-communication person:
> Once you reach a certain level of seniority/experience you are just way more valuable in the force-multiplying role of "leader" than anything you can do with your hands on the keyboard.
This is the key statement. People don't like to hear this, but the reality is that it becomes incredibly difficult to move the needle to a sufficient degree as a high level IC. There are people who can pull this off, but the number of people who believe they can are orders of magnitude different than those who actually can.
For almost all people, all paths to be worth the lofty title involve being able to have an indirect influence on a larger sphere of influence as their hands on keyboard results only go so far. And however one wants to slice it, these paths start to sound like the types of things that people say they don't want to do when they decry "management". Influencing people, politics, mentorship, building trust & alignment, etc.
Leadership roles provide a clear path forward for this, but while there are other ways they tend to still get poopoo'd by the "I just want to code!" crowd.
Mind you, there's nothing wrong with "I just want to code!", I'm currently in such a phase myself. One just needs to be realistic about what that means for their progression.
If you spend enough time in threads on this topic here, you'll see people popping up complaining that there's no IC path forward without taking time away from coding and requiring building good soft skills.
What I was getting at is that with few exceptions, no such path exists.
You're 100% right that one doesn't need to go into leadership roles, and definitely not management roles, to get there. But one's hands on keyboard contributions will top out at some point and the only way to move the needle further is to do something else on top of that.
I personally separate the concepts of leadership and people management. So to me, most paths forward start to enter the sphere of "leadership" one way or another. But this is just nomenclature, YMMV.
> What I was getting at is that with few exceptions, no such path exists.
What I believe the post to be about is what such an exception could look like as a model for other orgs.
I think this is entirely dependent on industry and company size/stage.
Anything from a well funded startup to a high-growth pre-IPO "unicorn" will likely gain much more from a very senior engineer than from a "leadership" hire.
An existing fortune 500? Yeah you're probably right.
Even for hiring in the circumstances you describe, I don't think you're wrong per se. But there aren't many situations or people where I'd prefer someone who just wants to sit in a corner and code vs someone who can do all the other stuff at a high level too.
You think if you're an L8 manager at Google, you're going to get hired at some ecom hotdog startup and not take a MASSIVE pay cut?
This doesn't make sense to me. How? If I'm really fucking good with software development, how does it make sense to have me do something other than software development? If we were talking about tech lead or architect type positions I'd be in agreement, but what force are you multiplying otherwise?
The leaders in my company don't do any force multiplication. They just handle the shit we don't want to deal with, like talking to clients and being middle men. I don't see how a good developer is any better at any of that than some random person you pull off the street and I'd go as far as saying the dev is wasted in such a role. Grab someone with a business degree or some other bullshit who wants to do this stuff. Even the people who used to be devs quickly lose touch with the dev role once they transition to management.
Removing distractions and time-sucks from the engineers is a force multiplication though.
Like I just said in the message you responded to, anyone can do that role. It doesn't have to be a dev.
The goal of engineers at a company is not to write code but to generate some type of business value. Making engineers more efficient at generating business value by understanding client needs or coordinating across departments is force multiplication.
I think it's not about FAANG vs tech vs other sectors. It's about blow-out growth vs no growth. An IC has great value only when a company needs her to build something that directly impacts the top line. Otherwise, an IC is just a cog in giant machine. Of course, some ICs are so good that they can create opportunities in a well-established organization, but they are exceptions.
There sadly doesn't seem to be much appetite for finding parity with the product engineering side of the house, even when the work is quite similar. A principal architect is a principal architect, whether the systems they are tying together are Istio and Redis and Kubernetes or Salesforce and Marketo and Tableau. A Senior Developer is a Senior Developer whether the code they're writing is for our product or for the backend of our CMS.
I have seen a "Principal" Product Manager role at some companies I have worked at, but the Distinguished Product Manager level role is not one that I have seen in practice unfortunately.
Interested in hearing other's experience with this!
Many meeting rooms at Microsoft were, at one point, installed with devices that showed the cost of a meeting based on the titles of the people attending. It was abandoned for several reasons, one of which being that more junior folks ended up even more intimidated by senior-level folks than before.
They won't go on a PR blitz about it like they are now, but Shopify will stop this practice sooner or later, too. Nothing unique or interesting to see here.
In that environment, it's important to push smart people toward management to be able to keep scaling the company.
But clearly everyone in the economy cannot develop software. So if we start slowing down the employee growth within SV, it's completely rational to stop pushing smart people into management, and perhaps even pulling them out of management. Non-manager career paths are a way to indicate to smart people they should be spending their time here.
Finance is an industry to look at as an example of one where plenty of money can be made by ICs. There must be others as well.
nonsense.
Apple is a perfect counterexample of your assertion. (disclaimer: worked there for years with an excellent role and what you said was then countercultural, in our engineering world at least).
Because that fits how the engineering division i enjoyed and in which i and most others flourished was run.
Can't agree enough.
Notice how the rating is negative for corporate BS and not for actual service/product.
None of the engineers were affected. Many were quickly absorbed by other companies who always had dearth of talent
I don't trust Shopify to do this properly and forever. This will be like Covid WFH. Once the tide recede companies will be back to what they are
How likely is it that the people who were not laid off will stay if economy enters a boom cycle? Not very likely. This article is a tongue in cheek admittance that they messed up. IC tracks being prioritised because people who contribute to product development in a growing tech company are much more valuable than managers.
In the coming years many managers will be forcefully moved to IC tracks and will be laid off if they aren't keeping their builder chops up to date. We have seen this happening at Meta.
Imagine a little start-up with a 'Distinguished Engineer' and slew of Principals and Staffs, it'd seem a bit weird wouldn't it? Even if they distinguished themselves elsewhere. Maybe it's just me.
No weirder than a little young startup with a CEO, a CTO, a CMO, etc. etc.
Titles in general aren't that meaningful without context, no?
Have you ever seen/heard of one with a DE? My starting point was that it basically/presumably doesn't happen - 'imagine' - and that it would seem weird if it did. If it is fina and normal as you suggest then ok, it is just me (as I said it might be), and I haven't come across it.
Hell you don't need any C levels at all. The legal structure doesn't require it, corporate directors is not tied to title ... there are few things that have to exist, and it's mostly about who can sign contracts that bind your company.
Fundraising is probably easier if you go out as "CEO" just because expectations are met, but that's a separate issue.
It's a bit like making sure the characters in a game are balanced so the game "works".
If managers are paid more you're putting a price on how much someone has to dislike managing people or prefer spending their time ICing for someone else. I don't think many people will pay much (in opportunity cost) for that.
And probably more significant than the initial bump for many is when they're looking for the next job elsewhere, and can say 'led a team of x many' vs. not.
In most companies that's definitely the case. You can make way more as a mediocre manager than as an outstanding IC.
Most technical people I've met who bemoan the "fact" that they would make more at their company as a manager (mediocre or otherwise) would also have the option of moving companies and/or industries to a technical role that pays better. And yet, they don't. Mostly because it turns out the preference isn't just about $$, but about all the other factors (I don't want to move, I don't want to work on X, I only want to work on Y, it's too big, it's too small, they don't give enough holiday, whatever).
So what it really comes down to is that they disagree with the company about how it values their relative contributions. Which is obviously fine, but do you really think the average IC has the data or experience to evaluate this well? Many of the rants I've heard along these lines were pretty naive about the business.
Now maybe one of these engineers that “love” to build “great” products could take a look at the “great” Shopify PHP SDK [1], where no issue or feedback is ever answered and the developers who use it (and who are actually promoting Shopify by using their API) are left in the dirt to fend for themselves.
They did it right after the holidays too — when many employees are just reacquainting themselves with channels and comms again.
Despite some wisdom in the idea of promoting crafters over meetings this isn't some genius mantra of productivity. It was just poor systems neglected by the company being cleaned up in the dumbest way possible. A poor management sandwich.
Some people seemed to thrive there, but for me it was a devastatingly bad fit. My ADHD (clinically diagnosed) certainly played a major part in this. With everything being up to the individual, it was too easy for me to get caught up in all the myriad things a proper org structure provides, but that I had to do myself: prioritization, assistance with career growth, feedback loops, and the like. Everything was a struggle, and I was ineffective to the point that I was fired.
If only my company understood this, we would spend so less time on optics. Managers would be rated on their ability to build products rather than on generating "short-term impact" documents for optics.
Engineers these days are asked to spend far too much time documenting their work for optics than on the actual work itself. This comes from a place of career-ladder managers who don't really know anything about the business except people management. These management practices are an incredible overhead on the business.
At some point, they decided that an IC career ladder was important and instituted it. Management always had a ladder so that's not new.
What changed?
Async is 100% more efficient and cost effective. You can skim/ignore the content that is irrelevant to you. You can set aside the time that is most efficient for you to work through it. No one has to slice their day according to what is least inconvenient for the group at large.
I find it hard to believe that optimizing for the individual vs the group is obviously 100% more efficient and cost effective when what really matters is the overall results of the group.
And that's not even getting in to things like individuals' happiness and the results of turnover.
The overall result of the group is not just a straight sum of the results of the individuals.
I dispute it. There now you know someone that disputes it, so show me some evidence I'm wrong.
It's axiomatic that people can work more efficiently when they have fewer interruptions and more power over their schedules. There are many studies on this. One by Gloria Mark et al. found that it took around 25 minutes for individuals to regain their focus after an interruption or context switch.
I'm not sure how increased productivity during the pandemic correlates to measuring the impacted of increased async communications vs meetings. I had a whole lot of meetings while working remote. They just occured via Teams, Zoom, Google Meeting, etc instead of in person.
Ah yes, apparently the only thing every single company I've ever worked for has in common is that each and every one is a special snowflake.
From his perspective: they have dual career ladders, PMs iterate over the same product for longer periods of time, driven by close customer feedback. What company doesn't say they do this?
Basically: does this just mean that everything is migrating to written form? If so, is that good?
Operating system .... Those words don't mean what you think they mean.
Prior to 2000s ish you needed people to do most tasks manually. Software has eaten enough of the world that most (middle class middle world) jobs are automated or can be.
And so you have a league of coders organising the work of the compmay on CPUs and then a layer of legacy managers who can't or don't code trying to work out how to pull levers they cannot see anymore.
Resources are now CPUs. A farm that bought a thousand tractors and combine harvesters but still tried to have the same manual labourer management practises, hiring, compensation would struggle.
We are seeing old labour practises trying to meet a world where one coder can launch and co-ordinate thousands or hundreds thousands of CPUs globally.
There is a management impedance mismatch
Why the guess? What makes young people think management is mostly wasted space but not older people?
put tersely, they aren't, and can't be in the relevantly immediate future, so the optimistic take might have been misconstrued as youth (since such optimism on average tends to decrease with age, in my experience)
it's a good premise for a sci-fi novel at the moment
I’ve only been a low level IC, so I don’t know what it looks like. Anyone care to share their experience?
But I don't have to do the real people management stuff like perf reviews, dealing with personal issues, hiring/firing, reporting to the execs/board, etc.
I have some previous "real" management experience from a prior job but I noped out of it for staff+ IC, for now.
This is misleading.
They opened up the doors to move up as Product Manager without needing to manage others. In other words MBA's and not the highly technical people (engineers - which is much harder to do). This isn't hard to do and shouldn't be treated as some significant accomplishment.
I'm not doing anything else either way, so a call doesn't help that.
Curious what this mean/what this actually looks like
But I may just be overfitting to my own experience with something like that (not at Shopify) and don't know why that couldn't just be Jira (or whatever) comments. To have a more product-oriented than ticket-micro-managing view perhaps?
When they released the library that let namespaces explicitly control their public and private interface, I had my good OO sensors tingle.
I've gone from worse to better in the companies I've worked with but I really feel the blast doors closing on the promise of ten years ago. There was a time when there was a real effort at engineering for the sake of the engineer and user. The window seems to close day by day.
So, maybe Shopify and 37Signals can be the last stand in a way Fog Creek, and many others could not.