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> If we as an industry are going to move away from headcount as a professional growth metric, we need to have some other, more direct way of measuring the business impact a manager delivers so we can reward that.

A manager’s job, fundamentally, is to ensure that their reports are delivering appropriate value to the company, so the most direct measure of a manager’s performance is the performance of the ICs that report to them (possibly indirectly). If you’re going actually to use this, however, you need a way to fairly evaluate the performance of ICs that doesn’t rely on input from their management chain which is itself a hard problem.

> If you’re going actually to use this, however, you need a way to fairly evaluate the performance of ICs that doesn’t rely on input from their management chain which is itself a hard problem.

Why would you need to decouple that to evaluate managers? TBF at manager level this can be a rather simple and robust “how did the org subtree rooted at this person fare at contributing to the stated business objectives?” Along team performance, this depends on staffing matching the expectations. Negotiating which are core responsibilities of a manager.

Seems much easier than evaluating ICs.

> Why would you need to decouple that to evaluate managers?

If a manager’s performance evaluation is based primarily on their reports’ evaluations, then there’s a conflict of interest: The manager is incentivized to inflate their reports’ evaluations because doing so directly improves their own evaluation.

Perfect. Then maybe the managers would be working with their teams instead of just setting up goalposts.

You're approaching your stated problem wrong. See:

> A manager’s job, fundamentally, is to ensure that their reports are delivering appropriate value to the company, so the most direct measure of a manager’s performance is the performance of the ICs that report to them (possibly indirectly).

Now, you're arguing that `sum(evaluate(impact) for each IC)` is absurdly bad. Which it is, because you're compounding errors in individual evaluations. These are hard to do, because you're trying to distribute team's achievements between contributions from particular people. I say that `evaluate(sum(impact for each IC))` is easy and robust. In fact simpler than an evaluation for a single IC, because you don't have to distribute anything and a lot of things that are external distractions for ICs fall into responsibility of managers.

Using functions in text just makes it hard to read.

And shows a poor command of English.

It was the only thing that made me understand his point.

Because he wrote the key points in a function instead of properly explained english.

I only tried this meh notation because hn doesn’t do LaTeX.

> Now, you're arguing that `sum(evaluate(impact) for each IC)` is absurdly bad.

No, I’m not. I’m arguing that it’s unwise to trust someone to do an evaluation who has a personal stake in the result of that evaluation.

Looking at how well a team works together to advance company goals is an important factor in any evaluation system, but using that as the only factor in a manager’s evaluation is as shortsighted as evaluating a software engineer solely on how many LOC they produced.

In practice, overall team performance should be a factor in IC evaluations as it’s reflective of various hard-to-quantify contributions of the team members. It should also be a somewhat larger factor in a manager’s evaluation, with the weight between IC and team performance shifting from mostly-IC at the bottom of the hierarchy to mostly-team at the C-suite level.

I think GPs point is that evaluate(sum(impact of ICs) can be evaluated by the manager of the person-to-be-promoted.

My concern with this is: How do you correct for luck/easy tasks?

It’s hard to compare the performance of departments unless you have been inside and seen the challenges they’ve been facing.

You don't need to use the individual evaluation of ICs, you use the overall success of the team in delivering whatever it's their job to deliver. If nobody but the manager is capable of evaluating that, somebody has really messed up.

One thing I've learned in my career: no policies apply to anyone the company views as a valuable asset.

This. If you write the server code alone and chill in the lounge in the afternoon alone, the hierarchy spiders leave you alone after one public tear down..

One thing I've learned in my career: eventually they will hire a new shiny management who has no idea who or what is a valuable asset and in their infinite wisdom fire all the most valuable assets.

The person who was viewed as a most valuable asset, and got exceptions is of course still safe then!

Another learning: Understand and calculate probability*impact and invest accordingly.

That is not relevant to this conversation which is about retaining managers the company views as talented in light of a no promotions policy. It’s almost guaranteed Meta will give managers they think are important to retain secret comp increases (bonuses, RSUs out of band) to make up for the lack of an on-paper promotion.

Really depends on the tech company too.

Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and NVIDIA have been huge on personnel growth.

Apple has quite famously been very stingy in growth that way.

On the flip side it meant they had fewer layoffs, if any, when everyone else was recalibrating with mass layoffs.

> Apple has quite famously been very stingy in growth that way.

It's not that Apple was shrewder than others - it's just that since it is primarily a hardware business, Apples "Covid boom" was far smaller than the rest (online services). Meta, Amazon and Microsoft had massive growth due everyone being at home all the time (Nvidia took advantage of from supply-chain restrictions to increase margins, and non-covid-related crypto boom)

> Big Tech has measured headcount as a metric of manager skill

This is pretty much any company over a certain size.

> Standing up and telling a roomful of high-leverage hires that their career trajectories are frozen for 2-3 years is probably not a winning strategy by itself. If I were a hungry startup founder, I'd read this as an invitation to ramp up recruiting.

This is how I read the article. This move is basically: the people already at the top removing the ladder behind them so fewer people can climb it. I wonder if the new criteria will be re-applied to those senior execs who already got through before the door closed.

> On the other hand, it's already difficult to retain talent, and a single good manager can be transformational for a team. Between this and the RTO shenanigans — both of which seem to be widespread across the tech industry these days — it's tough to see why talented managers would stay, let alone put in hard work.

It's too hard to actually measure performance, so most managers are just horribly incompetent parasites

Using headcount seems like the wrong thing to measure. But, it seems like maybe there’s a method to the madness? If you reward growing the pie then you avoid nastier politics like Wall Street firms might have. It’s a luxury that big tech has been able to afford. Now that they can’t afford this anymore I wonder if we see the relatively friendly tech cultures turn into a more brutal survival of the fittest. Seems like the good times are really coming to an end.

> relatively friendly tech cultures turn into a more brutal survival of the fittest

The problem is that often you have to collaborate a lot in these companies - you need to use services or libraries written by another team, for example. "Fittest" really makes no sense, because almost no one has a PnL sheet broken out by team like wall street.

That said, not all companies (Apple, Amazon) had super friendly cultures. If you maintain a core service at amazon, for example, you can expect to constantly have every dependents' roadmap shoved at you all year as it is.