> 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.
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.