I don't understand the shit 'managers' get on here. I've been in this industry for 15+ years and with one or two rare exceptions every manager has been great.
They respect my time, when I need something they're incredibly helpful, and they care about my career development.
IMO the culling over managers over the past few years is really a way to make sure you don't have someone you can discuss career development, promotion, and pay increases with. I have very honest conversations with my managers about these things regularly. If I had to deal with someone a few layers above I doubt I'd have the same success.
Another 'benefit' for the company in culling managers is that the manager track generally has higher pay at each level. Understandable given it seems to involve more time commitment and dealing with people can be much more tricky than dealing with code. Less options for IC's to transition == lower salary burden. Reduce the number of people on the manager track and you reduce the amount of salary an employee can hope to attain. I've definitely been put off switching from IC to manager because I feel the jobs are less secure over the last few years.
My experience has generally been that a group of intelligent adults are capable of both planning and steering the course of their development efforts as well as carrying out those development efforts. It's not unprecedented, or a particularly radical thesis: in university research labs, as a PhD student, post-doc, or professor, you manage yourself (PhD students meeting with their advisor once every few weeks).
Sure, there are meta-conversations about process and compensation, and there are younger employees who may need more guidance, and there are intersections with product managers etc. But the ratio of managers to ICs is often higher than needed.
I've had mostly bad managers. Most of them maybe wrote code for a year or two and think they understand team dynamics and how to build software. They then burden a good running team with whatever cult processes of the day is without taking any time to understand those team dynamics and which processes fit in those dynamics. It's like a coach that calls nothing but pass plays for a run centric team and makes the 180lb guy play lineman and the 300lb guy play defensive back while thinking 20% turnover is good. No higher understanding of software development what so ever. For me and my teams, they've mostly been a burden.
A good manager protects the team from political shit rolling down hill. They understand who is good at what and allows people to thrive in what they are good at. They keep the team focused, and reward and acknowledge teams for their milestones. They explain to the team why they are doing something and what they hope to achieve while asking the team for their thoughts and adjustments. They also go to bat for the team when it's time for praise, raises and recognition. They privately criticize and publicly praise. They know when a team member is a liability and act accordingly. Most today are just ladder climbers or people who have been Peter principled or nepotism-ed into their role.
I've been in the field for nearly 30 years now. Managers in the late 90s, early 00s were way better than the lot I've experienced since.
I'm going to make the observation that politics in a company is caused by management. The more "politics" you have at a company, the more you pay in a "political tax". Effort which should benefit the company is delayed or made harder as employees have to bob and weave to get through the politics.
I do believe if you want real culture change in a company, the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because that's how you got there in the first place.
Edited to add:
I'm not saying get rid of management. I'm saying get rid of bad management. And if your bad management is a malignant tumor, well, it's too late to fix it manager by manager -- because they've internalized how to game the system for themselves.
(Context: I’m an IC and told my
Manager multiple times that I’d quit if they ever make me a manager)
If you truly believe that, please do yourself a favor and read “The tyranny of structurelessness” to understand what a managerless place becomes. everyone and no one becomes a manager, and there’s no explicit avenue of recourse. There’s a good reason management arises. We can discuss good management vs bad management, but pretty fundamentally there’s no such thing as “no management”.
The tricky part is who are you showing the door. My experience is that layoffs is a highly political event as well, and the "most political" managers are the one who stay.
Which is natural, as they are the ones who leadership has more visibility to.
That team-player, hands-on manager, is worth nothing if (s)he didn't play the politics game.
So the company might be worse after this.
The most egregious office politics I've ever experienced came from the company that had a pathological aversion to managers.
They aimed for minimizing managerial positions to an extreme. The result was that a lot of ICs were playing hardball politics with nobody to keep them in check.
Really opened my eyes to the reality of office politics.
IMHO, workplace politics can happen and be caused at any level of a company. I think it's a natural thing for some people to do.
Especially at big companies, which kinda resemble small countries. You get "who likes whom", supervisors' pets, weird alliances, power struggles, backstabbing and other toxic stuff.
What management (at any level) is at fault of is failing to actively weed out these behaviours or indeed straight up doing the same thing.
Also, companies often fail to reward silent, but effective and solid people, and instead opt into creating a loud, noisy rockstar culture even if the overall quality suffers. This in turn motivates people to seek other means of being recognized, including workplace politics.
I've seen all of it while being a manager. I hated it with a passion, and fell a victim of it quite a few times myself.
And I agree that people playing workplace politics should either change their behaviour or be let go.
I think this is a simplistic take. In companies where there are clear management structures there are clear and obvious ways for managers to fuck around and play politics. When there aren't clear management chains, people with probably similar characteristics fuck around in different ways - it's just less obvious to some people.
Management is a tool used by people with their own motivations to acheive their goals. But a lack of management lets those same people acheive those same goals in different ways. Whether that's starting up duplicate projects and products, causing chaos and confusion by inserting themselves into topics that don't concern them, or simply picking fights. The same people get along in any organisation, the tool of management is just the easiest to spot from below.
> I do believe if you want real culture change in a company, the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because that's how you got there in the first place.
Which managers? The CEO, CxOs, and VPs are the place to start.
If you want to change the culture of a place - business, family, community - start by changing yourself.
> I do believe if you want real culture change in a company, the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because that's how you got there in the first place.
You can say that but it only really works if you give agency to your employees. That doesn’t seem to align with Amazons policy’s lately like RTO5.
How do you micromanage employees without managers? And note if your answer is “don’t”, I don’t think that’s an option as the drive for shit like that appears to be coming from the top, not middle managers misinterpreting orders
Note the "politics" do not necessarily come from any malicious intention. It's just part of the company dynamics. As more layers are added to a company, visibility decreases. As a result, people have to be more political savvy to defend their misses and get resources, which leads to more politics.
Deming agreed with you: Quality control is a management problem. But there's management and there's management. If we're talking about 14000 people, they're not the top managers of the business, and getting rid of them won't change the culture.
They're workers, and Deming also said: Don't blame the workers.
You want to solve this problem? Then promote from below. We all understand that representative democracy is the best organizational form and then we turn around and run ALL our corporations as dictatorships.
It's not a mystery why - the providers of capital want complete control of the business decisions. But let's at least not be surprised when, like all dictatorships, the organization inevitably implodes.
Nah, they're both downstream of complexity. Complexity creates both managers and politics. But managers do create more complexity and more politics.
The problem in companies like this is there are often few incentives for reducing complexity, even in a company like Amazon that claims to value eliminating it.
Politics happen due to people. There is this myth that you don't need management or leadership at all. But there are enough examples of bad managed teams and bad self directed teams that its pretty obvious that politics happen in the absence of management.
I'm an engineering manager (EDIT - not at Amazon or at a very large firm), and I do 10,000 bazillion things a day, usually involving fixing lousy project management, setting processes so random people on the team don't get slammed by random external demands, guiding people's careers, talking people off the ledge / therapy, matching people's skills and interests to the projects and work, creating other teams to run ops so engineers can engineer, talk to senior management in a way they need to hear to protect the people below from nonsense, proving to the people above that I need headcount (and then creating a hiring process), helping people below being new managers, helping junior people learn, and interacting with clients and business people so the engineers are protected from it.
Whenever I try to funnel some of these tasks to the senior engineers, almost all push back because it's not engineering.
But after reading this thread, I'm actually completely useless, and engineers should do better without me.
To that I laugh, and cry in frustration at the same time. Go at it.
As an engineer your new boss is a project manager from another org, senior group leaders from other groups, and generally the loudest yeller who's waiting on you. Have fun managing that.
Don't take it too harshly, most of HN would build facebook in a weekend and exit for billions. And usually they only see their circle of influence without actually trying to be a manager in a first place to understand what does it take.
Their manager is now a business stakeholder, that is even worse...
This is old news and refers to the 15% figure that was announced last year (more than 6 months ago!) and for which the "layoffs" are already completed.
Overall, nothing at all happened, managers looked after their own kind and the worst that happened for some was having to go back to IC positions.
The article is most likely AI generated since it says this was announced "last month" and the article is from March, but the real announcement was September 2024:
Haha a friend was just recommending I apply for a job there. I told her hell no. It's one of the worst in big tech. Probably second worst after twitter.
The next one she came up with was Microsoft lol. I work with them a lot and I hate it.
I work for an enterprise now but a pretty decent European one. I don't think I could work for a US big tech company.
I have had a long career working for F50 companies across a few decades. I can tell you, my time as a senior manager at Microsoft in mid 00’s has been the most pleasant experience I have had working in the private sector. A lot has changed in the past 20 years, but I am in touch with many colleagues still working there, and we still recommend Microsoft over the rest.
Working with Microsoft's customer facing tools and people is very different from working inside Microsoft. Not that you'll like one if you hate the other but just that they're different enough that you can't judge one by your experience with the other.
Where I happen to work management is like the clergy in a regime that grants them much power, but no control.
They may care about each member of their 'congregation' and provide 'support' where they can, but ultimately they know their own head depends on staying true to doctrine and interpreting edicts.
SDE, just passed ten years at Amazon; opinions my own, obvs. The three best managers I've worked with in my career have all been at Amazon (you know who you are). Also the three worst (ditto). And the respective bars were pretty [high | low] coming in. Just like everywhere else I've been, it comes down to the individual. Amazon, as far as I can tell, have never tried to homogenize management. Your team delivers? You're in.
I tend to agree with Amazon leadership here, as they increase the management layer on a company, the team accountability and ownership gets lost. A more horizontal company is able to do more (per capita) and faster.
The tricky part is what to do when you scale, as you can't simply leave teams to their own devices as they will run their separate ways, so you do more and faster but in the wrong direction.
But then again, when you add management layer you start a chain reaction that creates this complex cake that might stop everything from happening.
My experience is that most managers are between good and okay, some are great, countably few are obstacles. What's different are many layers of middle managers which I don't deal with directly. A fair number, though not much fault of their own create broken telephone communication pathways. Some are actively out for themselves and growing their little empires, alignment be damned. It's good to maintain good technical communication signals with fewer mis-translation points, so flatter orgs are more agile.
This is also more than just saving a few billions of dollars but making a giant like Amazon more efficient, especially when it comes to making decisions. It's just too soul crushing to have a dozen of people who spend all day gatekeeping each project instead of building anything.
> CEO Andy Jassy said last month that he wanted to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025.
It appears the rest is speculation and hypothesizing from analysts, which is why they're quoting Morgan Stanley as a source.
Just a few weeks ago I was contacted by Amazon recruiter and refused for exactly this reason. I expect more layoffs as they figure out they don't need this many engineers after all. They will turn into money pumping google search analog.
Note that 14,000 managers amounts to 13% of all managers at Amazon. So, this isn't them flattening the hierarchy and making teams autonomous, self-organizing squads. Or, at least, this article doesn't make that claim.
> Amazon is set to cut around 14,000 managerial positions by early 2025, aiming to save between $2.1 billion and $3.6 billion annually.
If the number is $2.1 to $3.6, I wonder why the headline went with $3.5. Weird.
[+] [-] basisword|1 year ago|reply
They respect my time, when I need something they're incredibly helpful, and they care about my career development.
IMO the culling over managers over the past few years is really a way to make sure you don't have someone you can discuss career development, promotion, and pay increases with. I have very honest conversations with my managers about these things regularly. If I had to deal with someone a few layers above I doubt I'd have the same success.
Another 'benefit' for the company in culling managers is that the manager track generally has higher pay at each level. Understandable given it seems to involve more time commitment and dealing with people can be much more tricky than dealing with code. Less options for IC's to transition == lower salary burden. Reduce the number of people on the manager track and you reduce the amount of salary an employee can hope to attain. I've definitely been put off switching from IC to manager because I feel the jobs are less secure over the last few years.
[+] [-] Myrmornis|1 year ago|reply
Sure, there are meta-conversations about process and compensation, and there are younger employees who may need more guidance, and there are intersections with product managers etc. But the ratio of managers to ICs is often higher than needed.
[+] [-] Clubber|1 year ago|reply
A good manager protects the team from political shit rolling down hill. They understand who is good at what and allows people to thrive in what they are good at. They keep the team focused, and reward and acknowledge teams for their milestones. They explain to the team why they are doing something and what they hope to achieve while asking the team for their thoughts and adjustments. They also go to bat for the team when it's time for praise, raises and recognition. They privately criticize and publicly praise. They know when a team member is a liability and act accordingly. Most today are just ladder climbers or people who have been Peter principled or nepotism-ed into their role.
I've been in the field for nearly 30 years now. Managers in the late 90s, early 00s were way better than the lot I've experienced since.
Here's a decent summary of how we got here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6gMf5zR2c4
[+] [-] steveBK123|1 year ago|reply
I think career wise in 20 years I'd break down my experience as - 25% benign, 25% malign, 50% good.
This is across 6+ companies, 15-20 managers.
[+] [-] wnolens|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bb88|1 year ago|reply
I do believe if you want real culture change in a company, the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because that's how you got there in the first place.
Edited to add:
I'm not saying get rid of management. I'm saying get rid of bad management. And if your bad management is a malignant tumor, well, it's too late to fix it manager by manager -- because they've internalized how to game the system for themselves.
[+] [-] cscheid|1 year ago|reply
If you truly believe that, please do yourself a favor and read “The tyranny of structurelessness” to understand what a managerless place becomes. everyone and no one becomes a manager, and there’s no explicit avenue of recourse. There’s a good reason management arises. We can discuss good management vs bad management, but pretty fundamentally there’s no such thing as “no management”.
[+] [-] dakial1|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Aurornis|1 year ago|reply
They aimed for minimizing managerial positions to an extreme. The result was that a lot of ICs were playing hardball politics with nobody to keep them in check.
Really opened my eyes to the reality of office politics.
[+] [-] 0rzech|1 year ago|reply
Especially at big companies, which kinda resemble small countries. You get "who likes whom", supervisors' pets, weird alliances, power struggles, backstabbing and other toxic stuff.
What management (at any level) is at fault of is failing to actively weed out these behaviours or indeed straight up doing the same thing.
Also, companies often fail to reward silent, but effective and solid people, and instead opt into creating a loud, noisy rockstar culture even if the overall quality suffers. This in turn motivates people to seek other means of being recognized, including workplace politics.
I've seen all of it while being a manager. I hated it with a passion, and fell a victim of it quite a few times myself.
And I agree that people playing workplace politics should either change their behaviour or be let go.
[+] [-] LittleTimothy|1 year ago|reply
Management is a tool used by people with their own motivations to acheive their goals. But a lack of management lets those same people acheive those same goals in different ways. Whether that's starting up duplicate projects and products, causing chaos and confusion by inserting themselves into topics that don't concern them, or simply picking fights. The same people get along in any organisation, the tool of management is just the easiest to spot from below.
[+] [-] mmooss|1 year ago|reply
Which managers? The CEO, CxOs, and VPs are the place to start.
If you want to change the culture of a place - business, family, community - start by changing yourself.
[+] [-] lovich|1 year ago|reply
You can say that but it only really works if you give agency to your employees. That doesn’t seem to align with Amazons policy’s lately like RTO5.
How do you micromanage employees without managers? And note if your answer is “don’t”, I don’t think that’s an option as the drive for shit like that appears to be coming from the top, not middle managers misinterpreting orders
[+] [-] raincom|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hintymad|1 year ago|reply
Note the "politics" do not necessarily come from any malicious intention. It's just part of the company dynamics. As more layers are added to a company, visibility decreases. As a result, people have to be more political savvy to defend their misses and get resources, which leads to more politics.
[+] [-] analog31|1 year ago|reply
They're workers, and Deming also said: Don't blame the workers.
[+] [-] ryandvm|1 year ago|reply
It's not a mystery why - the providers of capital want complete control of the business decisions. But let's at least not be surprised when, like all dictatorships, the organization inevitably implodes.
[+] [-] asdfman123|1 year ago|reply
The problem in companies like this is there are often few incentives for reducing complexity, even in a company like Amazon that claims to value eliminating it.
[+] [-] firecall|1 year ago|reply
How do you tell the difference?
[+] [-] aaalll|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] beambot|1 year ago|reply
How do you propose measuring good versus bad management?
[+] [-] blueboo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] megadata|1 year ago|reply
Even with with a manager, if the manager isn't doing much managing then the flies will start buzzing.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mancerayder|1 year ago|reply
Whenever I try to funnel some of these tasks to the senior engineers, almost all push back because it's not engineering.
But after reading this thread, I'm actually completely useless, and engineers should do better without me.
To that I laugh, and cry in frustration at the same time. Go at it.
As an engineer your new boss is a project manager from another org, senior group leaders from other groups, and generally the loudest yeller who's waiting on you. Have fun managing that.
[+] [-] apple4ever|1 year ago|reply
Yes some are bad at it. It's why I got into management, so I could replace those bad managers. And so far, for the most part, my employees love me.
[+] [-] kirso|1 year ago|reply
Their manager is now a business stakeholder, that is even worse...
[+] [-] iLoveOncall|1 year ago|reply
Overall, nothing at all happened, managers looked after their own kind and the worst that happened for some was having to go back to IC positions.
The article is most likely AI generated since it says this was announced "last month" and the article is from March, but the real announcement was September 2024:
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy...
[+] [-] wkat4242|1 year ago|reply
The next one she came up with was Microsoft lol. I work with them a lot and I hate it.
I work for an enterprise now but a pretty decent European one. I don't think I could work for a US big tech company.
[+] [-] Kurd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] xmprt|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nomel|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] netdur|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] piecerough|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] VincentEvans|1 year ago|reply
Maybe they should fire the guy responsible for THAT.
[+] [-] jimt1234|1 year ago|reply
Sounds like Jassy has gone full Elon. I'm guessing a chainsaw for the next earnings report.
[+] [-] lysace|1 year ago|reply
I continue to find it so bizarre that they are the same company.
[+] [-] justmarc|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] boredatoms|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] subpixel|1 year ago|reply
They may care about each member of their 'congregation' and provide 'support' where they can, but ultimately they know their own head depends on staying true to doctrine and interpreting edicts.
[+] [-] alberth|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] davidrupp|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dakial1|1 year ago|reply
The tricky part is what to do when you scale, as you can't simply leave teams to their own devices as they will run their separate ways, so you do more and faster but in the wrong direction.
But then again, when you add management layer you start a chain reaction that creates this complex cake that might stop everything from happening.
It is a complex balance.
[+] [-] karmakaze|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hintymad|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Aurornis|1 year ago|reply
TL;DR:
> CEO Andy Jassy said last month that he wanted to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025.
It appears the rest is speculation and hypothesizing from analysts, which is why they're quoting Morgan Stanley as a source.
[+] [-] sampton|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] funnyAI|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] karaterobot|1 year ago|reply
> Amazon is set to cut around 14,000 managerial positions by early 2025, aiming to save between $2.1 billion and $3.6 billion annually.
If the number is $2.1 to $3.6, I wonder why the headline went with $3.5. Weird.