I'm at LI and my reporting chain is Sr mgr > Sr Director > VP > Sr vp > CEO.
A year ago it was mgr > sr mgr > director > sr Director> vp> svp > ceo.
No one in my management chain was impacted but the flattening has been happening organically as folks leave. LI has a distinctive lack of chill right now contrary to the company image, but generally things are just moving faster.
I used to work for Large Tech Company and I would pretty frequently fly out to San Francisco Suburb for work. One of the more interesting time periods of that phase was when the office building I worked at for Large Tech Company was across the parking lot from LinkedIn in San Francisco Suburb. We frequently played a largesse game of hangman with the LinkedIn employees drawn on the windows across our parking lot. LinkedIn employees then were fun and living the Hooli roof meme for sure from our perspective.
Yes, for sure. Don't know if being acquired by MS resulted in this reputation (MS has had the same reputation for decades) but they are well known as a chill workplace.
> a distinctive lack of chill right now contrary to the company image
I can't imagine a company image being less "chill" than LinkedIn. Perhaps the reputation as an employer is that, but as a Company (and product) it's basically Facebook, for people who are not "chill"...
Speaking as someone who has been a "middle manager":
I've seen a trend where a company is trying to do WAY too much outside of their core competencies or too many things at the same time.
A strong temptation is to to just say "well, we will just hire a bunch of managers to oversee each project we are working on b/c having 17 direct reports who are front line employees is too many people."
Then, times get tough and you think: "Well we can't fire X b/c they are the front line employee actually doing the work for Project Make Money so we'll just fire their manager. The manager manager will just have to deal with having 19 direct reports again"
Having 17 direct reports is too much. Managers are not just a link in the chain of command. They also do stuff that needs to be taken care of. All kinds of unusal things happen and not all are suitable for delegation. 17 direct reports is not only a measure of how many colleagues they need to manage. It is also a measure of the large the weird-things-that-needs-taking-of-scope is.
I have 10 direct reports across 2 teams, with responsibility for a number of actual deliverable work pieces external to these staff.
10 direct reports is about half a week's work at a bare minimum without development, process improvement, etc. 20 is insane and would lead to skill atrophy and team dissatisfaction in short order.
I have a long held belief that engineering managers are mostly a scam, and are actually just overpaid scrum masters. This is from working at some top companies
Silicon Valley used to have engineering managers who managed engineering.
As the money got bigger we got more grifters / professional manager types. First thing they do is rebrand middle management as “leaders” and the other thing they do is make management non technical.
This has even bled into making higher level IC engineering roles being “above” coding. “Staff engineers don’t code, they set high level architecture “.
This is toxic to an engineering org in many ways. Firstly you now have a bunch of highly paid technical employees completely removed from how things actually work. But what’s worse is you created a culture where you’re incentived to follow - a senior engineer who wants to get promoted should write less code because coding is associated with being a low level employee.
The fundamental root cause is a misunderstanding of code as low level factory work and not intrinsically tied to the design and architecture. But it’s one of many ways in which traditional business structures and software engineering do not mesh and you need an extremely strong engineering leader to keep software culture on track, which very few organizations have.
> As the money got bigger we got more grifters / professional manager types.
That. Same for all the decorative functions with low value added.
> make management non technical
This is a big flag to me. I know this is a devisive opinion, but I don't think you can do a good job at managing people without knowing their core business.
> making higher level IC engineering roles being “above” coding.
There is little that revolts me more than people working in technical companies, and seeing themselves as above the technical layer. I don't mind people not being software engineers, a lot of them are great, willing to learn a bit of context in order to do their job efficiently and facilitate mine. The same way I learn about the other functions. But I've worked with quite a number of managers, PMs and TPMs who talk down to me the moment I tell something even remotely technical, like I'm some sort of amateurish geek only tolerated at the adult's table. I do my best to stay away from these folks.
Wow. You've also just described oil and gas Operator engineering departments perfectly. It's got to the point in oil and gas operating companies, where even the simplest piece of technical work is outsourced, and even if you wanted to produce quality engineering deliverables yourself, it's hard to hunt down someone who is willing to review and sign them off because so few have that competency themselves. Of course nobody admits to that, so they're just slippery and try to reassign or deprioritise any work that involves actually doing a calculation.
I moved over to Silicon Valley fairly late (in 2018), and I was immediately shocked at how frowned upon... even disincentivized technical knowledge was at the management level.
To the extent that people started removing hard numbers from their presentations and replacing them with smiley faces.
Needless to say, I left and that company TANKED.
I think Steve Jobs said something about A people versus C people... well he was right (even though he was bullshitting, b/c as we all know, Wozniak had the A team at Apple, and Jobs at the C team)
This is how you get the Office Space "I have eight different bosses" environment. And they all play "hide the problem, fluff the status" games so the leaders above++ have no idea how big of a shit show the ground level is.
> As the money got bigger we got more grifters / professional manager types. First thing they do is rebrand middle management as “leaders” and the other thing they do is make management non technical.
God I hate this, having to attend all of these "brown bag" meetings where we get talked down to by these grifter types about "devops mentality" or whatever or BS they've latched onto
Who gave these people the right to wave their hands in the air and talk about bullshit all day? Where do these people come from? Is it nepotism or something?
To be frank, I'd rather trade some money to never have to interact with these fuckers ever again. They're literally a disease. Or at least, unionize, but don't demand money, demand that these people shut the fuck up, permanently, or gtfo
This is true for every tech company outside of Silicon Valley as well.
I doubt the process is even specific to tech companies. Code is work, and the one thing that signals moving up the social ladder is not having to work. That has been true for a large part of history.
Programming is often a bit of a special case when in the context of work because we it so completely isolated from the physical process of work. Programming fundamentally is describing processes at multiple abstraction levels all at once, and therefore inseparable from software architecture. This is also why it can be hard to humans to learn.
(This, incidentally, is also why I despise each and every one using the term automation in a programming context. Running a command and clicking a web interface is conceptually identical, one is not more automated than the other.)
Fantastic comment. Btw the same dynamic also exists in other areas such as other engineering disciplines, finance, etc, as Im told. Software was probably an outlier until people realized you could make a good career out of it
Well with size comes management. Management of money and architecture.
I am also not a particular fan of excessive management structure, but as an architect I have to completely reject your proposition that non-coding roles are toxic or excess. I work with highly brilliant minds, with coding and non coding architects and one thing is very clear: the non coding architects are contribute more value to the end product than the coding principle engineers. And why not: they are a specialization which focus on one part of the engineering while a traditional coder focuses on another part.
I think you're right on the money, with a single exception: there is a value to engineering managers being trained in professional management skills.
Honestly, most of the dysfunction I see in orgs is as a result of "senior" (read: tenured, not skilled) engineers being put in charge of teams/work without having the competencies needed to be successful.
On the other hand, manager writing production code is a terrible footgun for the team. Time/resource conflict between helping a team and shipping code has no good outcome, either I let team down by decrease their productivity, or I let team down by slacking behind.
You might be right, but that might be because they're just really bad managers.
A good engineering manager shouldn't be there to herd engineers. A good engineering manager is there to protect their engineers from the organization, ensure they have the resources required to do the work, and to make sure their organizational goals, development, and wellbeing are being advocated and cared for. Scrum masters shouldn't care about that. Managers should.
A good engineering manager should be like a warrior in a garden; mentoring and fostering the engineers, and ready to go to "battle" for them at a moment's notice.
Bruh, I don't know where you've been but "Engineering Manager" positions are the new "Devops" from 10 years ago in terms of needing to do multiple jobs. Every position I've both applied for and gotten has required that I can
-Complete technical tasks at the minimum of a senior engineer level if not staff/principal
-Train the <senior engineers on a weekly basis
-Project Management
-System Design, to the point that I am willing to put my name on each and every design as the architect
-Understand all the projects my team owns to the level that I can answer extremely explicit technical questions from other teams line engineers immediately in that meeting and not need to refer to my team's expertise
-Be on call 24/7. This isn't asked explicitly, but I am told that I need to be available to support my team for every on call event, which funnily enough means I cover 100% of the on 24/7 call schedule my team has
-People Management
-Employee growth
-Vendor Management
-more I am probably forgetting
I am not super incensed about this because the total comp has kept increasing as the expectations grow, but I am now 3 jobs in a row with companies expecting this combination of perfect high level engineer and perfect MBA accredited business leader in one role. If you have engineering managers that legitimately seem like overpaid scrum masters you should probably look to join a more mature software company.
Also if you're at a FAANG or close to FAANG startup and still feel this way, odds are that you have no idea what goes into 90% of running a team in an well running business and think that the company is making bad decisions because they don't dump 90% of their revenue into feature development instead of stupid choices like fulfilling government mandated regulation.
Edit: Also I've worked on teams with Scrum Masters. Its been more than 7 years since I last came across someone with that title. My Scrum Master equivalent planned tasks equate to less than 6 man hours total a week and 5 of that is the standup set for 15 minutes for 4 engineers a day that we normally end 5 minutes in
My manager does little else besides asking what everyone is working on every day. We could automate her position with a slack bot and get the same results.
My manager filters my email. And tells me what the new priority is.
Two levels up is a director. Above that is a department head. Out of 100 people there are about six that truly build, ship, accelerate the goal arrival.
The rest of us make waves allowing the divers to have a soft landing.
The problem with "Engineering Managers " in our software verticals is that we mostly get people who are shitty engineers and shitty people managers.
What are the JDs of "Engineer Managers" ? And what are their REAL responsibilities.
Their responsibilities are basically improve and maintain the performance of whoever they "manage" . But for some reason we decided that shitty engineers that decided they dont want do do development are the ones looking for management positions. And they get good at playing the politics game.
My wife works in a non tech position and had a manager, who studied for people management and understand in the long term what makes people perform (hint, it's not keeping them sad, overworked and getting all the shit politics).
Good managers filter the shit from you. Push back on stupid deadlines and double drippings, and act on your needs as a person.
And they may not know shit about the technical side of things, but they trust you do your job.
I think Industrial Engineers with some specialization in people management make the best managers for Software Dev.
I'm not a scam, I like to believe, because I've always gotten good feedback from my teams. But definitely the job description is quite light and a bit handwavy, so all companies could use fewer engineering managers, not more. I myself would volunteer to go back to IC right now.
You think someone is leaving honest feedback on those forms? It's trivial for any manager who is not a complete moron to figure out who left a bad review and retaliate as I've seen happen multiple times in my career (mostly to other ICs but sometimes entire teams)
Scrum masters don't really need to be super technical right? They just need to make sure the rituals work and eventually make themselves redundant. I'm an IC and thinking of following some courses so I can fill that role in my team but only because it may give some credence to the rituals, not because my technical insights make it better. I think the rituals can add value but only if they're taken seriously - otherwise they're a waste of time.
Where are all of these scam manager jobs where I don’t have to do anything other than a little bit of scrum mastering? Sign me up!
For some reason I can only find the heavy workload manager jobs. It’s different work than being an IC (I’ve gone back and forth) but I wouldn’t call being a manager easier.
AFAIK This isn’t true at any FANG-like companies. Engineering managers I’ve seen either code or at least do technical reviews. This is true for senior managers and often still true regarding technical direction at the director level.
My manager filters my email. And tells me what the new priority is.
Two levels up is a director. Above that is a department head. Out of 100 people there are about six that truly build, ship, accelerate the goal arrival.
The rest of us make waves allowing the divers to have a soft landing.
firing entire levels of middle management seems to be a fashion these days, but from experience in my org it has been counterproductive. my current manager now has >60 direct reports so can’t even find the time to handle each of our basic hr tasks, let alone provide any leadership.
in theory i can see the board salivating to pretend they are elon but in practice it’s a dysfunctional nightmare.
plus it’s bad for ic morale because there is now no path forward for advancing our careers to the managerial level.
Nothing new. Middle managers are the traditional food for layoffs. Have been, for decades.
For me, I was a "first line" manager of a small, rather high-functioning team, for 25 years.
I was quite capable of going up the food chain, but didn't want to. I liked getting my hands dirty, and being directly connected to the product.
I was a really good manager. I took the job seriously, and did well for the company (see "25 years," above). It was a Japanese company, and it's pretty tough to keep Japanese managers happy.
I also hated being a manager. When I left the company, and got to do my own gig, I ran back to IC status, as fast as my little legs could go.
if you hated it, how and why did you stay for 25 years? i’m at 7 years as an ic at a fortune 500 co and want out. ideally i’d start my own co without taking vc money, but so far i’ve been too afraid of the risk.
> plus it’s bad for ic morale because there is now no path forward for advancing our careers to the managerial level.
Why would one want to advance to a level that gets very rapidly shafted as soon as the s*it hits the fan? Just increase the programmers' comps to the same level of the managers' comps, if that low morale is actually about the money, and you've already solved half of the problem.
It's a big mess, for sure. I'm currently trying to interview as many of those managers with>10+ direct reports as possible to see what their biggest pain point is with staying on top of it. If you're one of them, ping me (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sascha-manuel-reuter-3177752b), and let's see how we can ease the pain for you and your directs.
I am dying to leave the management track and go back to SDE. Pretty much every company out there bloated their ranks to include more middle managers and it became an unbearable mess. After 12 years in management, though, I can't get interviews for SDE, so I am kind of stuck. Imagine writing code for a living? DREAM.
The worst thing is that I never wanted to be a manager but somehow always got pushed that way by the higher ups. I blame my background as evangelist being able to explain technical things to management. Ugh.
Typical ratio of people to managers in a company is about 1:4, so that tracks.
And before this becomes controversial, I don’t mean every manager has 4 reports, but because organization is a tree, for every 4 ICs, there’s one manager.
For example, you could have 3PMs, 3 designers and 10 engineers, but the org could have 4 managers: 1 PM manager, 1 Design manager, 1 eng manager with 7 reportees and a sr manager with 3 engineers & the 3 managers reporting to him/her.
Every time I see more than 10 direct reports, I think of this quote:
"Yasser Arafat had 17 lieutenants (aka direct reports). Why? So he could pit them all against each other: if they were fighting each other and jockeying for position then they were too busy to go after him."
Interesting. Parent comment is about 4:1 even.
In my career I saw from 5:1 to 20:1 IC to managers on a direct level.
However the higher one go the better the ratio, like VP to SVP ratio rarely reaches 10:1 even. Now I'm curious what are the industry 'standard' numbers.
When I started my career it was pretty common to have a team of ~12 under one manager with a couple of TLs. Nowadays it's more like 1:4 or even 1:3 - that's 3x management bloat for mostly bureaucratic reasons and with no obvious improvement in productivity or retention. Then there's the thing you said - people with "manager/lead" in title but no obvious managerial responsibilities.
> Typical ratio of people to managers in a company is about 1:4, so that tracks.
Over the last 10 years, we have improved productivity tools, and for every other role the expectations are higher.
I find it funny that the ratio of ICs:Managers has not gone up and the industry doesn't discuss that it should go up or what tools we need to help make it grow.
Productivity tools don't help you when dealing with people problems. You can't throw a TODO app or some other bullshit on someone who is underperforming or to coach someone for a promotion.
I do think all of these various kinds of managers - none with any actual clout, is part of the problem. It is although the structure is designed by employees for employees, not stakeholders.
Readit News
A year ago it was mgr > sr mgr > director > sr Director> vp> svp > ceo.
No one in my management chain was impacted but the flattening has been happening organically as folks leave. LI has a distinctive lack of chill right now contrary to the company image, but generally things are just moving faster.
I don't get it. Did linkedin have an image of being a chill place to work?
https://youtu.be/X5TZVhKDwpk
I can't imagine a company image being less "chill" than LinkedIn. Perhaps the reputation as an employer is that, but as a Company (and product) it's basically Facebook, for people who are not "chill"...
I've seen a trend where a company is trying to do WAY too much outside of their core competencies or too many things at the same time.
A strong temptation is to to just say "well, we will just hire a bunch of managers to oversee each project we are working on b/c having 17 direct reports who are front line employees is too many people."
Then, times get tough and you think: "Well we can't fire X b/c they are the front line employee actually doing the work for Project Make Money so we'll just fire their manager. The manager manager will just have to deal with having 19 direct reports again"
10 direct reports is about half a week's work at a bare minimum without development, process improvement, etc. 20 is insane and would lead to skill atrophy and team dissatisfaction in short order.
As the money got bigger we got more grifters / professional manager types. First thing they do is rebrand middle management as “leaders” and the other thing they do is make management non technical.
This has even bled into making higher level IC engineering roles being “above” coding. “Staff engineers don’t code, they set high level architecture “.
This is toxic to an engineering org in many ways. Firstly you now have a bunch of highly paid technical employees completely removed from how things actually work. But what’s worse is you created a culture where you’re incentived to follow - a senior engineer who wants to get promoted should write less code because coding is associated with being a low level employee.
The fundamental root cause is a misunderstanding of code as low level factory work and not intrinsically tied to the design and architecture. But it’s one of many ways in which traditional business structures and software engineering do not mesh and you need an extremely strong engineering leader to keep software culture on track, which very few organizations have.
That. Same for all the decorative functions with low value added.
> make management non technical
This is a big flag to me. I know this is a devisive opinion, but I don't think you can do a good job at managing people without knowing their core business.
> making higher level IC engineering roles being “above” coding.
There is little that revolts me more than people working in technical companies, and seeing themselves as above the technical layer. I don't mind people not being software engineers, a lot of them are great, willing to learn a bit of context in order to do their job efficiently and facilitate mine. The same way I learn about the other functions. But I've worked with quite a number of managers, PMs and TPMs who talk down to me the moment I tell something even remotely technical, like I'm some sort of amateurish geek only tolerated at the adult's table. I do my best to stay away from these folks.
To the extent that people started removing hard numbers from their presentations and replacing them with smiley faces.
Needless to say, I left and that company TANKED.
I think Steve Jobs said something about A people versus C people... well he was right (even though he was bullshitting, b/c as we all know, Wozniak had the A team at Apple, and Jobs at the C team)
God I hate this, having to attend all of these "brown bag" meetings where we get talked down to by these grifter types about "devops mentality" or whatever or BS they've latched onto
Who gave these people the right to wave their hands in the air and talk about bullshit all day? Where do these people come from? Is it nepotism or something?
To be frank, I'd rather trade some money to never have to interact with these fuckers ever again. They're literally a disease. Or at least, unionize, but don't demand money, demand that these people shut the fuck up, permanently, or gtfo
I doubt the process is even specific to tech companies. Code is work, and the one thing that signals moving up the social ladder is not having to work. That has been true for a large part of history.
Programming is often a bit of a special case when in the context of work because we it so completely isolated from the physical process of work. Programming fundamentally is describing processes at multiple abstraction levels all at once, and therefore inseparable from software architecture. This is also why it can be hard to humans to learn.
(This, incidentally, is also why I despise each and every one using the term automation in a programming context. Running a command and clicking a web interface is conceptually identical, one is not more automated than the other.)
I am also not a particular fan of excessive management structure, but as an architect I have to completely reject your proposition that non-coding roles are toxic or excess. I work with highly brilliant minds, with coding and non coding architects and one thing is very clear: the non coding architects are contribute more value to the end product than the coding principle engineers. And why not: they are a specialization which focus on one part of the engineering while a traditional coder focuses on another part.
Honestly, most of the dysfunction I see in orgs is as a result of "senior" (read: tenured, not skilled) engineers being put in charge of teams/work without having the competencies needed to be successful.
A good engineering manager shouldn't be there to herd engineers. A good engineering manager is there to protect their engineers from the organization, ensure they have the resources required to do the work, and to make sure their organizational goals, development, and wellbeing are being advocated and cared for. Scrum masters shouldn't care about that. Managers should.
Deleted Comment
-Complete technical tasks at the minimum of a senior engineer level if not staff/principal
-Train the <senior engineers on a weekly basis
-Project Management
-System Design, to the point that I am willing to put my name on each and every design as the architect
-Understand all the projects my team owns to the level that I can answer extremely explicit technical questions from other teams line engineers immediately in that meeting and not need to refer to my team's expertise
-Be on call 24/7. This isn't asked explicitly, but I am told that I need to be available to support my team for every on call event, which funnily enough means I cover 100% of the on 24/7 call schedule my team has
-People Management
-Employee growth
-Vendor Management
-more I am probably forgetting
I am not super incensed about this because the total comp has kept increasing as the expectations grow, but I am now 3 jobs in a row with companies expecting this combination of perfect high level engineer and perfect MBA accredited business leader in one role. If you have engineering managers that legitimately seem like overpaid scrum masters you should probably look to join a more mature software company.
Also if you're at a FAANG or close to FAANG startup and still feel this way, odds are that you have no idea what goes into 90% of running a team in an well running business and think that the company is making bad decisions because they don't dump 90% of their revenue into feature development instead of stupid choices like fulfilling government mandated regulation.
Edit: Also I've worked on teams with Scrum Masters. Its been more than 7 years since I last came across someone with that title. My Scrum Master equivalent planned tasks equate to less than 6 man hours total a week and 5 of that is the standup set for 15 minutes for 4 engineers a day that we normally end 5 minutes in
That’s mgmt for you
My manager filters my email. And tells me what the new priority is.
Two levels up is a director. Above that is a department head. Out of 100 people there are about six that truly build, ship, accelerate the goal arrival.
The rest of us make waves allowing the divers to have a soft landing.
What are the JDs of "Engineer Managers" ? And what are their REAL responsibilities.
Their responsibilities are basically improve and maintain the performance of whoever they "manage" . But for some reason we decided that shitty engineers that decided they dont want do do development are the ones looking for management positions. And they get good at playing the politics game.
My wife works in a non tech position and had a manager, who studied for people management and understand in the long term what makes people perform (hint, it's not keeping them sad, overworked and getting all the shit politics).
Good managers filter the shit from you. Push back on stupid deadlines and double drippings, and act on your needs as a person.
And they may not know shit about the technical side of things, but they trust you do your job.
I think Industrial Engineers with some specialization in people management make the best managers for Software Dev.
I don't think feedback in a corporate setting from someone you have power over can be relied on.
Just like home inspectors...failed contractors
For some reason I can only find the heavy workload manager jobs. It’s different work than being an IC (I’ve gone back and forth) but I wouldn’t call being a manager easier.
I have worked at orgs that have chains of middle managers. Each one of them asking for updates on the same shit.
My manager filters my email. And tells me what the new priority is.
Two levels up is a director. Above that is a department head. Out of 100 people there are about six that truly build, ship, accelerate the goal arrival.
The rest of us make waves allowing the divers to have a soft landing.
in theory i can see the board salivating to pretend they are elon but in practice it’s a dysfunctional nightmare.
plus it’s bad for ic morale because there is now no path forward for advancing our careers to the managerial level.
For me, I was a "first line" manager of a small, rather high-functioning team, for 25 years.
I was quite capable of going up the food chain, but didn't want to. I liked getting my hands dirty, and being directly connected to the product.
I was a really good manager. I took the job seriously, and did well for the company (see "25 years," above). It was a Japanese company, and it's pretty tough to keep Japanese managers happy.
I also hated being a manager. When I left the company, and got to do my own gig, I ran back to IC status, as fast as my little legs could go.
Why would one want to advance to a level that gets very rapidly shafted as soon as the s*it hits the fan? Just increase the programmers' comps to the same level of the managers' comps, if that low morale is actually about the money, and you've already solved half of the problem.
And before this becomes controversial, I don’t mean every manager has 4 reports, but because organization is a tree, for every 4 ICs, there’s one manager.
For example, you could have 3PMs, 3 designers and 10 engineers, but the org could have 4 managers: 1 PM manager, 1 Design manager, 1 eng manager with 7 reportees and a sr manager with 3 engineers & the 3 managers reporting to him/her.
"Yasser Arafat had 17 lieutenants (aka direct reports). Why? So he could pit them all against each other: if they were fighting each other and jockeying for position then they were too busy to go after him."
Over the last 10 years, we have improved productivity tools, and for every other role the expectations are higher.
I find it funny that the ratio of ICs:Managers has not gone up and the industry doesn't discuss that it should go up or what tools we need to help make it grow.
Personally I wish we needed fewer managers but I often see their necessity.