"At Facebook, moving into management is not a promotion. It’s a lateral move, a parallel track. "
This is nice in theory. But when your "peers" with Manager in their title have access to more information and more decision-making power, it is not in fact a parallel track. Just saying people are equal doesn't make it so, and it doesn't change the underlying organizational structures.
I think you're absolutely right, in general, but I've been at Facebook for 5 years now, and the one thing I'll say about it is that once you establish a track record of 1) doing good work and 2) making good long-term decisions, that trumps any considerations around level. The culture is definitely such that the very senior folks (Director++) will value trust over level, so it's very much "influence over authority."
Personally, this has lead to me getting messed with my managers ~never, which is a very high-order bit in my work happiness.
If, say, a Software Architect and a Senior Director have the same pay and the same perks and the same bonus structure, and it really does take a talented person the same amount of time to climb that high from (say) Software Engineer and Manager, then they're parallel.
If any of that favors one side over the other then they're not.
I doubt any company is going to give access to enough data to prove or disprove the claim; but the default believability isn't very high.
Many large software companies have very similar structure.
Since I had personal experience working in these companies here what I found as problem:
- Management has decision making power.
- Management has ability to control $$ (bonus allocation, etc.)
- Management has access to more information than employees on "individual contributor" track
It is important to note that system work up to mid-level managers. I.e., it is works well when there is "team lead" and "manager". Manager ensures that the team is not bothered by politics and get all necessary resources while team lead ensures that things are done.
But when you come to mid-level and up even if the pay is comparable, the life is much better for managers. For example, if you are in 40s it is important to have job security. Senior managers and VPs will know when are layoffs are coming or certain groups will be sacked (since they have access to more informations). They can prepare for it. If you are "software architect", you are in the blind until the day of layoffs.
If you set up the culture right, this isn't as big of a problem as you might think. On our team, it doesn't matter if you're the manager or not, the decisions for the product are made by consensus of the team. Sure management will still do approvals for time off and deal with the skinned knees and runny noses. But for day to day operations, it's peers working for a common cause.
This is very true. Hierarchy is hierarchy. Any organization can pretend they don't have such blasphemous thing, but if that was really true then there would be no "management" to begin with. What's wrong with accepting a leader as leader? You can't have it both ways - either you lead or be led. There's no equal footing there.
It's not about making everyone equal at all times. What's important is how do you choose a leader and when.
This is true. I think organizations need to create more space for developers to grow as leaders which I don't see happening.
In silicon valley contacts are as valuable as money and a person with manager in his title will build contacts faster and achieve more than a developer who actually might have made more impact for his employer.
People with manager in title can work from home more often, travel on company paid trips more often and in general have a better social life than developers. At the end of the day managers can make a developers life bad if he/she wants too. That is what matters.
we do this at my (very large) company. it's awesome.
the best thing about it? engineers who aren't good at the strategic, human high-touch, or political issues, but excel at execution and implementation aren't managing teams of people -- they're busy executing and getting paid (and further promotions) based on their ability to execute, not on their ability to manage herds of programmers.
as a software engineer, i love that my boss is my boss because he's good at managing teams of software engineers. not because he's the best software engineer in the house.
This is true, but not everyone wants decision making power. Some people want to be promoted simply for more money, or to feel a sense of progression. While there are flaws to this approach, it's nice to let people continue to get more compensation and recognition without forcing them into managing people and making broader decisions if that's not something they want to do or have a talent for.
it's absurd in any practical sense. but it's a great story to keep the rank and file mostly satisfied most of the time.
politics in the end is a part of life; it should not dominate or overshadow goal oriented work, but it is a natural, unavoidable consequence of people holding different viewpoints.
on the other hand, all the openness strategies they suggest are great, and these do work well in practice to mitigate conflict [but politics does not equal conflict].
It is much more of a parallel track there, in the sense that it's a completely different job from that of a software engineer. Notice that they don't say anything about the length of each of the tracks. If it's money and power you care about, by all means, become a manager. Just don't expect that your job will be easy, or that you'll be able to do a ton of coding.
I can't speak about FB personally, but I learned the hard way my first few years out of college that at most companies managers are simply given more respect, power, and money than engineers in general. It takes an extraordinarily talented high-impact developer who revolutionizes the company's technology in order to match a run-of-the-mill Director or VP who just shows up to work and "manages" teams of developers -- and even then the match will only be in salary, not in overall power in the organization and probably not in bonus structure either. You'll still be left out of countless meetings and kept in the dark on many decisions you could contribute to effectively.
I say that I learned the hard way because I focused on being that high-impact developer. At my first job, I rewrote the company's core software to make it (really) an order of magnitude faster, providing the basis for the company's sustainability for the next decade. My salary skyrocketed. My title did not. I was forever stuck in a limbo of being just a "developer" while being paid as much as an executive but being excluded from every executive meeting and not even being involved in hiring for the team that would maintain the software I wrote on which the entire company depended. I was still stuck in a cubicle while the managers were sure to get very nice, spacious offices with ludicrous window views.
I really don't understand this view. They're different jobs. If you want to have the power an exec has become an exec. More than likely you cannot do both effectively at the same time. Yes, there are shitty managers but there are also a lot of them doing stuff an engineer doesn't have the skills to do. In all industries people think they could do a better job than their boss - usually it's not true and if it is learn new skills to take their job from them or start your own company.
> I was forever stuck in a limbo of being just a "developer" while being paid as much as an executive but being excluded from every executive meeting and not even being involved in hiring for the team that would maintain the software I wrote on which the entire company depended.
Some companies have gotten wise to this problem and created dual career tracks for engineers, management track and technical guru track, to ensure that great tech talent that want to stay in tech has a way to advance in title, pay, and responsibility without having to go into management.
If that's you, then make sure to add that to your list of jobsearch criteria and don't join a company that doesn't have it. Lack of it is almost a guarantee management is unenlightened about tech talent.
our company (few 1000 devs) has a parallel hierarchy of ICs going all the way up to VP reporting directly to CEO. They are one of the most respected and influential people in company. While each team has complete freedom in terms of tech stack and other decisions, they drive company wide things like migration to cloud, inhouse big data platforms.
Agreed. Where I find this especially bizarre is in technical companies, or even the tech department of a company. There's a layer of devs, then a glass ceiling, then above that countless layers of management.
I have a bunch of friends at Facebook - and from what I hear, this article is not very far off from what is happening. And it's all about many of the seniors leading with example.
Take Philip Su, who was the site lead for Facebook London. In most organizations, that would translate to "manager of everything happening at Facebook". After 3 years he decided to take another lateral move - to move back to software development (no lead, just a software engineer) https://www.facebook.com/the.philip.su/timeline/story?ut=32&...
When you work at a company where managers demonstrate that it is a lateral move - moving from management to individual contribution - well, then this stuff starts to work.
Another thing that this article does not touch on, is the transparency that people at Facebook share what's going on with them professionally. My buddy said a senior person shared on Facebook @work how he had gotten a bad performance review, and how this made him feel... for all other employees to see, and comment on. My buddy was saying that "when I joined, I thought that people were just drinking kool aid about how our culture is different. But now that I'm in - I seriously have not expected it to be this different to anywhere I've worked before"
I do think that Facebook is doing something incredible with keeping a very startup like and transparent culture going at this large scale. No other company of this size even comes close.
The Philip Su example is great, but being an early employee and a manager has basically has insurance against getting fired and he can do what he pleases. That IMHO does not reflect the life of an average facebook employee.
Some of the organization structure setup is not unique to Facebook. My former boss was a long time Microsoft employee, from what I heard from her anecdotally, Microsoft has long been setup with dual tracks for technical employees. The management track and the engineer track. One moves from engineer track to management track is a true lateral move in that salary don't necessarily get raised even though responsibilities will vary and may expand.
Also, the rank on engineer track may also be converted to a lower rank in management track. On top of that, long tenured Distinguished Engineers might also get a much higher compensation than a mid-level manager.
Once the incentives are leveled up, personal interests and motivation really becomes the driver for employees to do their most appropriate job.
Obviously these were all anecdotal stories I heard. Microsoft now may also be different from the Microsoft then. I welcome someone who has first hand experience with similar organizational structure setup to clarify and elaborate on this.
At most companies, Distinguished Engineer is the "technical track" equivalent of Vice President.
So making more than a mid-level manager may not be all that great. :-)
(I imagine Distinguised Engineers at MSFT do very well, and when you factor in quality of life may be happier with their jobs than VPs. But that doesn't make it parallel.)
IBM is set up the same way, to a degree. They have "IBM fellows" who are essentially executive-level engineers. I don't think it extends all the way down though.
However, the gist of the matter is that despite being on-par with compensation (assuming metrics like years of experience / company tenure), a manager role is simply more powerful, allowing easier leverage for more compensation more quickly.
Worked in Microsoft and i agree with what you said. We never had pressure of , if we don't get to management track with in certain year we may never make that means you might lose on monetary benefit.
It's interesting to compare what Facebook does with how Galois organizes itself. They just published a blog post about how many traditional management functions are handled on a rotating basis—instead of having people who always manage, they have individual researchers and engineers step up to lead efforts on specific projects. This general approach even extends to firm-wide management (via a "Jedi council") and finding new clients.
Galois is a private research lab/consulting firm that specializes in high-assurance computing relying heavily in programming language techniques and Haskell. I mostly know about them because they publish a whole ton of cool tools for security, low-level programming and verification. They also seem like a wonderful place to work partly because they're tackling fascinating, research-level problems and partly because the internal culture seems like something fundamentally special.
> Take the incentive out of “climbing the ladder.”
In other words, pay everyone the same? Of course the author didn't mean that; and pay and power are the primary drivers of upward mobility. If I get paid as much as Zuck's SVPs, sure, I won't feel the urge to climb the ladder; but until that happens, I will.
There are definitely Individual Contributors who are on the same compensation level as directors. These are the engineers who revolutionize how the company operates, such as inventing HHVM and saving tons of resources.
"Climbing the ladder" has the connotation of stepping on other people in order to get ahead. Thinking about the analogy, if there are a bunch of people trying to climb the same ladder as you are, you have to pull people off or climb over them.
It's possible to create an incentive structure that discourages cannibalizing your coworkers.
> "Managers focus on ..., creating a vision for how that team will execute its goals"
Confusing management with leadership is one of the main reasons for politics and empire building. Once managers think they're in charge of figuring out the vision, instead of that being the whole team's responsibility, you're lost in top-down management land.
> Managers focus on building a great team, creating a vision for how that team will execute its goals, and helping the people on that team develop in their careers. They are put in those positions because of their strong people skills. They aren’t there to tell teams what to do.
That almost brings a tear to my eye. This is such a huge contrast to what my current experience is at BigCorp. And that's just a few miles away from Facebook.
The question then becomes, how much power does a manager have at Facebook? Can they block you from transferring to another team? Can they block your vacation/time off requests? Are they the only ones responsible for doing the performance reviews? Is said performance review audited so as to contain verifiable facts?
> We make escalation “legal” by making sure people know they won’t be blamed or punished for speaking up or asking hard questions.
I really wish that was expanded on. Theoretically, I could escalate. In practice, that would backfire horribly. After all, if there's no accountability, what's preventing your manager from simply retaliating by giving you a hard time, possibly a while after the escalation happened? There are lots of subjective ways your work can be criticized/sabotaged which are not obviously connected to the escalation.
> Obviously, these strategies are at their most effective when the whole company adopts them.
Actually, it is way, way worse when the whole company doesn't support that. You can move from a great project to your own personal purgatory.
No, manager can't prevent you from switching to any other team or even start a team on your own. The idea behind this is that it ensures that talent naturally gravitates towards teams with most impact. Managers have no say!
Reviews are written by your peers (that usually includes your manager).
Reviews need to quote actual success metrics to prove the impact you had...just writting "bob is dope" won't take you far :)
Throwaway for obvious reasons. I have first hand experience with both FB and Google. When it comes to office politics, Google is currently turning into shit pretty rapidly, comparatively speaking. It's still miles better than most other companies, but the deterioration is now beyond the point of no return. There are _tons_ of layers of management, and 90% of the time, you'd be hard pressed to see what they actually do besides playing power games and fucking up the products as a result (as if Google needed any help with that). Managers here are mostly ex-engineers, and most of them suck at managing. The reason why they are managers in the first place is that it's virtually impossible for an engineer to attain a level beyond T6 (and massive increase in comp that comes with that), whereas the requirement to do so if you're a manager is that you have a pulse, and you're able to take credit for your reports' work. You won't believe what kind of people get L7 and above at Google once they switch to management. At Google you don't have to be good at managing to actually manage. TL;DR: as an engineer your career at Google will end at T6 if you're lucky, and at T5 if you're not; this is where things _begin_ for managers. So Google values managers more.
FB is actually more mindful of the quality of their management talent. They put a bonfire under their feet in the form of charging managers with direct responsibility to hire for their teams, and _encouraging_ team members to leave for other teams every now and then to overcome human inertia. If you suck or if your project sucks, you will have trouble hiring and retaining talent, so pretty quickly you won't be a manager anymore.
>Successful candidates should clearly demonstrate that their priorities are company, team, and self — in that order. This makes it more likely that they’ll put the company’s mission above their individual interests and that they’ll set the proper example for others.
Ah. I understand. So there are people that will set a company/team above their own interest and are reasonably intelligent at the same time?
They're just looking for good liars, nothing else.
I think this concept works well until you consider "lateral movement" between companies. ie. it works as long as a developer leaving / laid-off-from the company will be compensated at their new job just as well as the manager will.
Don't get me wrong. Some people will embrace this. Namely those who aren't interested in managing others. But it seems a bit disingenuous to say you can "level the playing field" by having a value structure that doesn't map well to how most other companies' value structure is set up.
Whiners in the interview process seems like a good one. I'm conscious about complaining about a tech stack, or even a build system. It doesn't matter if you don't like it.
* "Influencer" - you can say that well respected technical people have as much influence as management - but if you spend most of your day coding you don't have the same information about the organisation so you just won't know there are decisions being made that you can influence. Management is like politics - it is a full time job.
* at some point companies need to become more democratic. Yes "influencers" should be involved in these discussions, and management should almost be the press - letting people know these decisions are underway.
* I personally think if we spend more time writing good discussion documents around our projects we will be able to write good discussion documents about our organisations
Some time ago at my workplace new top management proclaimed that "there was too much politics". In retrospect, what they really meant is they were uncomfortable with middle management holding too much decision-making power. So they took steps to ensure a more top-down structure and middle management was basically left with a task of overseeing their reports so they don't slack off.
I think the root of office politics comes when positions and influence within the company become a zero sum game. It wasn't until relatively late in Microsoft's career that you started hearing about all the reindeer games in Redmond. I'll be interested in seeing how this culture develops as Facebook reaches a growth fixpoint.
Kudos to FB. It's a hard problem as you scale. I have a few friends who suggest the article matches their experiences there.
Being a 40-something engineer, you hear the same things over and again. I used to work at MSFT and my first manager there used to espouse company, team, self every day as the HBR article does. He'd regular re-evaluate his priorities based on what is the most beneficial task I can work on for the company today. Makes me wonder if it appears in management books or people just get wired that way.
It definitely a reasonable way to proceed most of the time. Firsthand, I have no doubt that most of the unpleasantness I've witnessed in tech companies is due to team or self over everything.
Leaving the interesting article aside for a moment, the page has an insane weight of fixed tool/menu/other bars. On my small laptop screen they account for 24% of the whole viewport height. Who thought that's a good idea?
Probably a good idea, but I can say that when I worked there in 2011 it was EASILY the most political place I've ever worked, including the US Government.
Lost job recently to office politics at a fortune XXX. It sounds good in theory but I doubt Facebook or any Corp will ever manage to get people put self secondary (tertiary according to article). Or may be they have.. They are awfully successful and it has to come with great team spirit
[+] [-] wskinner|9 years ago|reply
This is nice in theory. But when your "peers" with Manager in their title have access to more information and more decision-making power, it is not in fact a parallel track. Just saying people are equal doesn't make it so, and it doesn't change the underlying organizational structures.
[+] [-] alexgartrell|9 years ago|reply
Personally, this has lead to me getting messed with my managers ~never, which is a very high-order bit in my work happiness.
[+] [-] biztos|9 years ago|reply
If, say, a Software Architect and a Senior Director have the same pay and the same perks and the same bonus structure, and it really does take a talented person the same amount of time to climb that high from (say) Software Engineer and Manager, then they're parallel.
If any of that favors one side over the other then they're not.
I doubt any company is going to give access to enough data to prove or disprove the claim; but the default believability isn't very high.
[+] [-] tlogan|9 years ago|reply
Many large software companies have very similar structure.
Since I had personal experience working in these companies here what I found as problem:
- Management has decision making power.
- Management has ability to control $$ (bonus allocation, etc.)
- Management has access to more information than employees on "individual contributor" track
It is important to note that system work up to mid-level managers. I.e., it is works well when there is "team lead" and "manager". Manager ensures that the team is not bothered by politics and get all necessary resources while team lead ensures that things are done.
But when you come to mid-level and up even if the pay is comparable, the life is much better for managers. For example, if you are in 40s it is important to have job security. Senior managers and VPs will know when are layoffs are coming or certain groups will be sacked (since they have access to more informations). They can prepare for it. If you are "software architect", you are in the blind until the day of layoffs.
[+] [-] dreamsofdragons|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thkim|9 years ago|reply
It's not about making everyone equal at all times. What's important is how do you choose a leader and when.
[+] [-] tn13|9 years ago|reply
In silicon valley contacts are as valuable as money and a person with manager in his title will build contacts faster and achieve more than a developer who actually might have made more impact for his employer.
People with manager in title can work from home more often, travel on company paid trips more often and in general have a better social life than developers. At the end of the day managers can make a developers life bad if he/she wants too. That is what matters.
[+] [-] m3mnoch|9 years ago|reply
the best thing about it? engineers who aren't good at the strategic, human high-touch, or political issues, but excel at execution and implementation aren't managing teams of people -- they're busy executing and getting paid (and further promotions) based on their ability to execute, not on their ability to manage herds of programmers.
as a software engineer, i love that my boss is my boss because he's good at managing teams of software engineers. not because he's the best software engineer in the house.
[+] [-] nv-vn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zippergz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikek|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blackkettle|9 years ago|reply
politics in the end is a part of life; it should not dominate or overshadow goal oriented work, but it is a natural, unavoidable consequence of people holding different viewpoints.
on the other hand, all the openness strategies they suggest are great, and these do work well in practice to mitigate conflict [but politics does not equal conflict].
[+] [-] elgoog1212|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shostack|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shas3|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xdeadbeefbabe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nilkn|9 years ago|reply
I say that I learned the hard way because I focused on being that high-impact developer. At my first job, I rewrote the company's core software to make it (really) an order of magnitude faster, providing the basis for the company's sustainability for the next decade. My salary skyrocketed. My title did not. I was forever stuck in a limbo of being just a "developer" while being paid as much as an executive but being excluded from every executive meeting and not even being involved in hiring for the team that would maintain the software I wrote on which the entire company depended. I was still stuck in a cubicle while the managers were sure to get very nice, spacious offices with ludicrous window views.
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tshaddox|9 years ago|reply
In other words, my dream job.
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|9 years ago|reply
If that's you, then make sure to add that to your list of jobsearch criteria and don't join a company that doesn't have it. Lack of it is almost a guarantee management is unenlightened about tech talent.
[+] [-] blackoil|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logingone|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gregdoesit|9 years ago|reply
Take Philip Su, who was the site lead for Facebook London. In most organizations, that would translate to "manager of everything happening at Facebook". After 3 years he decided to take another lateral move - to move back to software development (no lead, just a software engineer) https://www.facebook.com/the.philip.su/timeline/story?ut=32&...
When you work at a company where managers demonstrate that it is a lateral move - moving from management to individual contribution - well, then this stuff starts to work.
Another thing that this article does not touch on, is the transparency that people at Facebook share what's going on with them professionally. My buddy said a senior person shared on Facebook @work how he had gotten a bad performance review, and how this made him feel... for all other employees to see, and comment on. My buddy was saying that "when I joined, I thought that people were just drinking kool aid about how our culture is different. But now that I'm in - I seriously have not expected it to be this different to anywhere I've worked before"
I do think that Facebook is doing something incredible with keeping a very startup like and transparent culture going at this large scale. No other company of this size even comes close.
[+] [-] embiggen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shekispeaks|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devy|9 years ago|reply
Also, the rank on engineer track may also be converted to a lower rank in management track. On top of that, long tenured Distinguished Engineers might also get a much higher compensation than a mid-level manager.
Once the incentives are leveled up, personal interests and motivation really becomes the driver for employees to do their most appropriate job.
Obviously these were all anecdotal stories I heard. Microsoft now may also be different from the Microsoft then. I welcome someone who has first hand experience with similar organizational structure setup to clarify and elaborate on this.
[+] [-] biztos|9 years ago|reply
So making more than a mid-level manager may not be all that great. :-)
(I imagine Distinguised Engineers at MSFT do very well, and when you factor in quality of life may be happier with their jobs than VPs. But that doesn't make it parallel.)
[+] [-] Retra|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r00fus|9 years ago|reply
However, the gist of the matter is that despite being on-par with compensation (assuming metrics like years of experience / company tenure), a manager role is simply more powerful, allowing easier leverage for more compensation more quickly.
[+] [-] jsudhams|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tikhonj|9 years ago|reply
https://galois.com/blog/2016/06/undirector-of-engineering/
Galois is a private research lab/consulting firm that specializes in high-assurance computing relying heavily in programming language techniques and Haskell. I mostly know about them because they publish a whole ton of cool tools for security, low-level programming and verification. They also seem like a wonderful place to work partly because they're tackling fascinating, research-level problems and partly because the internal culture seems like something fundamentally special.
[+] [-] 1024core|9 years ago|reply
In other words, pay everyone the same? Of course the author didn't mean that; and pay and power are the primary drivers of upward mobility. If I get paid as much as Zuck's SVPs, sure, I won't feel the urge to climb the ladder; but until that happens, I will.
[+] [-] jankassens|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctrlalt_g|9 years ago|reply
It's possible to create an incentive structure that discourages cannibalizing your coworkers.
[+] [-] tibbe|9 years ago|reply
Confusing management with leadership is one of the main reasons for politics and empire building. Once managers think they're in charge of figuring out the vision, instead of that being the whole team's responsibility, you're lost in top-down management land.
[+] [-] Swizec|9 years ago|reply
Office politics are more rampant in places without externally defined hierarchies because people have to figure out the hierarchy on their own.
[+] [-] officepolitics|9 years ago|reply
That almost brings a tear to my eye. This is such a huge contrast to what my current experience is at BigCorp. And that's just a few miles away from Facebook.
The question then becomes, how much power does a manager have at Facebook? Can they block you from transferring to another team? Can they block your vacation/time off requests? Are they the only ones responsible for doing the performance reviews? Is said performance review audited so as to contain verifiable facts?
> We make escalation “legal” by making sure people know they won’t be blamed or punished for speaking up or asking hard questions.
I really wish that was expanded on. Theoretically, I could escalate. In practice, that would backfire horribly. After all, if there's no accountability, what's preventing your manager from simply retaliating by giving you a hard time, possibly a while after the escalation happened? There are lots of subjective ways your work can be criticized/sabotaged which are not obviously connected to the escalation.
> Obviously, these strategies are at their most effective when the whole company adopts them.
Actually, it is way, way worse when the whole company doesn't support that. You can move from a great project to your own personal purgatory.
[+] [-] natarius4k|9 years ago|reply
Reviews are written by your peers (that usually includes your manager).
Reviews need to quote actual success metrics to prove the impact you had...just writting "bob is dope" won't take you far :)
[+] [-] elgoog1212|9 years ago|reply
FB is actually more mindful of the quality of their management talent. They put a bonfire under their feet in the form of charging managers with direct responsibility to hire for their teams, and _encouraging_ team members to leave for other teams every now and then to overcome human inertia. If you suck or if your project sucks, you will have trouble hiring and retaining talent, so pretty quickly you won't be a manager anymore.
[+] [-] winfred|9 years ago|reply
Ah. I understand. So there are people that will set a company/team above their own interest and are reasonably intelligent at the same time?
They're just looking for good liars, nothing else.
[+] [-] datashovel|9 years ago|reply
Don't get me wrong. Some people will embrace this. Namely those who aren't interested in managing others. But it seems a bit disingenuous to say you can "level the playing field" by having a value structure that doesn't map well to how most other companies' value structure is set up.
[+] [-] ryanlm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|9 years ago|reply
* at some point companies need to become more democratic. Yes "influencers" should be involved in these discussions, and management should almost be the press - letting people know these decisions are underway.
* I personally think if we spend more time writing good discussion documents around our projects we will be able to write good discussion documents about our organisations
[+] [-] dunkelheit|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warcher|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrZipf|9 years ago|reply
Being a 40-something engineer, you hear the same things over and again. I used to work at MSFT and my first manager there used to espouse company, team, self every day as the HBR article does. He'd regular re-evaluate his priorities based on what is the most beneficial task I can work on for the company today. Makes me wonder if it appears in management books or people just get wired that way.
It definitely a reasonable way to proceed most of the time. Firsthand, I have no doubt that most of the unpleasantness I've witnessed in tech companies is due to team or self over everything.
[+] [-] Etheryte|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryguytilidie|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] negamax|9 years ago|reply