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 worked in a University lab during grad school, then worked in the private sector for 16 years, and have been back working on research software for the last four years. All I'll say is that the software world should not look at the research world for best practices on delivering software products, except maybe to do the exact opposite of what they do.
I've been in academia for 10 years, now 'out in the real world' for 3 years - I agree with your assessment, the only project management strategy academia knows is 'just work longer hours'.
I worked in academia for years before moving to the commercial sector, and in academia management seemed to run on the "in the real world" mantra. Yet if the managers in academia did half of what I saw them do in the commercial sector, they'd get walked out in minutes.
A lot of PI’s pull rank and crack the whip on post docs it’s super toxic and the hours are atrocious with weekends and expectation to work at night. I’ll take a tech middle manager over an arrogant PI every time.
Yes, it is the "real world" for research, of which industry does nearly zero. Research pushes humanity forward. The sort of anti-intellectualism in your comment is part of what is causing the decline we are seeing in society today.
I think it all depends on finding a group of people who share the same goal of making something great together. One person who isn’t interested in that goal can be insidious to a self-managed team. And getting everyone involved means having some reward for doing well, like a validating mission or direct interactions with customers, which can be hard in some roles.
I manage a team of software engineers. While they are all quite good at what they do and care about doing the Right Thing, collectively they're not always great at working towards a common goal.
One of the many challenges I have is that some of them will literally tinker their way to nowhere i.e. they have strong cases of Shiny New Toy Syndrome. If it weren't for me, there would be piles of unfun/unsexy work that never gets done and we'd suffer for it, and it would impact the rest of our engineering org.
It's a thankless job though, I often feel like no one likes me when I'm actually doing my job well. It's OK, I actually agreed to go back into management becauseI was terrified about the prospect of reporting to some new manager my company pulled in off the street (my old manager left).
I'll say this too, while I'm not very hands on these days, I understand what my team is doing and why and can speak with them about the details. I feel like that goes a long way helping me do my job well and understanding what they need to do, to do their jobs well. Non-technical software managers don't really make sense in my worldview.
These don’t even remotely compare. In academia, timelines are long, failure is extremely high, total team involvement on a project is small, motivation is different, as is team selection criteria.
Just look at a large project for academia that requires lots of people and is a deliverable. It reverts to standard practice
Ahead of the game, soon we'll only be able to spend Bezos Bucks. Company Towns walked so the Company Country could innovate
edit: I've enjoyed two managers since I started working ~2008. The rest were either harmful or generally ineffective, unfortunately. We can get along well... but I know the job's not for me. It's like HR, for the business.
Contrary to GP, career development has yet to meaningfully happen within the same business. I have to move to advance, so I do.
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.
In my experience, most contemporary managers also think they know everything now because they can write genAI prompts without realizing the AI will tend to agree with whatever they put into it.
Micromanagement has gotten really horrible in the past few years. They hire SMEs then discard everything they suggest.
> 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
One of the most incompetent women I've ever worked with, a sociopath and pathological liar who to my knowledge never wrote a single line of code, is now a senior manager at Google inflicting pain on some unknown team.
Oh, I can hate both. :) The (possibly) good news is now the free money train is gone, companies will actually have to pay attention to how their teams are working. The bad news is they might just chop off heads regardless of ability.
The way people on HN sometimes talk about "management," you'd think the universal experience is 1% good, 9% benign, 90% actively seeking the downfall of civilization
Managers seem like a good example of the "toupee problem" -- the ones you notice, and really remember, are the bad ones; the best, you might never see at all.
The economic cards seemed more stacked against workers, so resentment for managers builds more quickly than the opposite direction. Management who resents their workers can also fire them. Workers who resent their managers must go find another job. And offshoring/nearshoring for workers happens more than managers.
Would be interested in comparing the interview processes for ICs vs. managers at Amazon. Probably no leetcode-equivalent for managers?
A lot of women complained about the "boys only club" in the 70s/80s/90s. While things have gotten better for women, there is still a lot of "club" going on.
I think you also need to account for the amount of bad.
Like a bad programmer can push terrible code, get caught at review and performance managed.
But a bad manager can cause much more harm. An organisation with bad management can punch itself in the face very hard and cause significant issues.
Like I have only seen a terrible management culture in 2 of my employees, but for 1 of them, it lead to:
30 or 40 careers damaged, internal stalinist purges.
Months wasted on drama.
21 million yearly recurring in wasted IT expense. Probably close on 500 million in non recurring waste over 4 years.
4 million yearly recurring in executive waste.
Significant brand damage, significant resume damage for people who worked through it.
Actual end user harm.
> Like a bad programmer can push terrible code, get caught at review and performance managed.
But a bad manager can cause much more harm. An organisation with bad management can punch itself in the face very hard and cause significant issues.
Ironically every place I've worked, a lot of these bad programmers got placed into the management pipeline, because they had not the skills to hack it as an IC, so it was a worst case scenario of "fake it till you make it".
You could be the most incompetent programmer in the world, but a suave bullshitter is a shoe-in for management, where they now get to tell the competent programmers how to do their jobs.
In all fairness, a bad programmer can do a lot of damage. They can create attack vectors, destroy data and cause production outages. None of that is good. There are things in place to prevent that, but if those also fail, it'll be a busy week. Ask Crowdstrike.
Bad managers can also lead to a lot of bad programmers because all the good ones left. I reckon a bad manager is a multiplier of bad programmers. Bad is just bad no matter what level you are in.
I think the main difference is that programmers have (or should have) more transparent processes that they go through (code reviews, design doc reviews / signoffs, CI/CD to catch mistakes) compared to managers. Granted, I'm an IC so I know more about those - maybe managerial roles have similar ways to ensure you catch the "bad" early enough.
I think its genuinely harder to measure the squishy productivity / collaboration / delivery output stuff that managers are supposed to own, but also .. managers aren't as incentivized to create processes to measure managers ..
It's just negativity bias. We're hardwired to remember our wounds and avoid getting them again. And apparently we're hardwired to engage with those more than praising the great ones.
For a lot of people, the difference between a good manager and a benign manager is smaller than the difference from benign to bad.
If you are working for an emotionally unstable shouter, the negativity seeps into your work and quality of life. I've seen bad managers make adult men cry (rarely for any good reason) and still last 2-3 years.
If you work for a good manager, you learn a little more stuff, maybe.
Maybe it's because this isn't about looking at other people's toupees?
At the least a bad manager can make the place you spend a majority of your waking hours a worse place to be, and at their worse they can permanently harm the trajectory of your career or even your mental (and by proxy physical) health.
Some analogies are limited by the weight their original context conveys. I wouldn't let a surgeon get away with "the ethics board will only talk about this heinous thing I did, when most of the time they don't see me at all".
>>you'd think the universal experience is 1% good, 9% benign, 90% actively seeking the downfall of civilization
It might not be a grand conspiracy or might not come from meticulous planning, but what happens is they just work for self preservation. Its no secret that people who work on a thing are bound to know things about them better than some body who just approves leaves, or makes abstract decisions. You will get replaced if you don't assert authority often and proactively kill the biggest threat to your position. This also means maintaining pets, and rewarding them more than people who are performing better.
All of this resembles a pattern of behaviour over the years with managers sabotaging everything good around to save themselves.
Over years I have seen managers are the biggest reason why companies go down. There are few other reasons.
Right and there's asymmetry between what a good & bad manager can do.
A good manager can motivate people, but in absence of interesting projects or budget to pay people, they can still lose talent.
A bad manager can make even interesting work and good compensation intolerable and lead to a revolving door of B players as no one with better options wants to stick around.
The through line for me of genuinely bad managers is guys (always guys) who are emotionally unstable and/or have anger management issues. Whether it was being put on as an effect to get a result, or they genuinely had no control, it doesn't matter.
Shouting at people, berating people in public, praising in private while criticizing in team meetings, going on tirades over petty stuff (formatting of internal non-user facing documentation), etc.
A manager can put you on PIP, have you fired, and make your life miserable for months to years. What can an engineer do? Write some bad code that is a little annoying to refactor?
Developers get marked to market quite quickly in annual reviews, if not sooner. Junk PRs, bad code, tons of bugs, acting like a jerk - it catches up fast. I've seen devs walked out the door in first 90 days of probationary period, or cut in their first annual review.
For a manager there is a longer leash as the things they can impact are harder to measure with long and variable lags. So it can take 3 years easily for an obviously bad manager to be dealt with.
My career hasn't been as long but it's been 50% good 50% bad roughly - of the bad ones, one was a sycophant to a narcissistic product owner but didn't directly cause me any trouble, while the other two were promoted developers who tried to force their will on developers while also playing political games to try and preserve themselves.
You don't quit companies, you quit managers. I've fortunately had great ones who balanced being into my development with making sure the job was being done. But that's not a universal experience, sadly. I work in games so you can find plenty of horror stories on what happens under bad management without me giving second hand stories of other teams I worked next to being raked in the coals.
I simply want to focus on working "in the ground" so management never really rung for me. My endgame goals focus on the opposite of managing a large beauracracy of tech workers on a massive project.
I've also had all good managers who helped me move up levels, etc. across 3 companies for about 5 years. I think you're right about the side effects, and it's sad to see. It reflects, in my mind, an acknowledgment from these companies that they won't grow as much in the future as people right now think they will
One or two rare exceptions over 15 years must account for several bad years, no?
As for giving and getting shit, if you evenly distribute matches over a quadrant of good and bad dev-manager pairings, then 3 out of 4 matches are gonna have a bad time. And even in the top 25% where both devs and managers are good, you can still have a personality mismatch, or other troublesome contextual factors, like your boss's boss, the company's success, the head winds, etc. Work relationships can strengthen or crumble under strain. Of course, the best way to maximize your odds is to do your best to be a good person to work with, but the odds are simply not in your favor in the first place for either party.
Yes, you can always push that admin and coordination and communication work down to the ICs. I'm sure you'll be thrilled to get that added to your plate.
And a large amount of that work will disappear because a significant amount of that work is merely maintaining reporting and answering to bosses ad-hoc.
Removal of bosses is literally more efficient because it reduces the amount of work per unit person.
They aren't removing your boss, you still have one, except your new boss (who was your former skip level) will expect all the outputs that your previous boss produced.
> They aren't removing your boss, you still have one, except your new boss (who was your former skip level) will expect all the outputs that your previous boss produced.
But you do realize that previously, you had to produce outputs for your boss and skip - but now, you only need to produce for skip?
For 2 bosses, the hypothetical low/mid manager has to consider 2 bosses perspectives, 2 bosses politics, 2 bosses promos, 2 bosses peer teams, 2 bosses meetings, 2 bosses technical skill, 2 bosses status reports, 2 bosses committees, 2 bosses ad-hoc demands.
With 1 boss, that work reduces to 1 bosses perspectives, 1 bosses politics, 1 bosses promos, 1 bosses peer teams, 1 bosses meetings, 1 bosses technical skill, 1 bosses status reports, 1 bosses ad-hoc demands.
Removal of 1 boss led to 50% decline in work for 1 low/mid manager. Scale that to 10 low/mid managers, you now have a large amount of time freed up - SIMPLY because 1 single org chart bottleneck has been removed.
> If your boss was any good at his job, he did most of the reporting and communication to keep the skip level happy.
A big IF - and now the company has to hire more HR and more bosses to check on this boss. Create more bureaucracy around checking "if they are any good".
> did most of the reporting and communication to keep the skip level happy
And someone had to do reporting and communication to this boss in the first place. Thus, a boss requires someone/some people below them to spend time reporting to them, and themselves needs to spend time reporting above them to the skip.
From the big bosses perspective, this miniature boss's existence added more work to the company than required - thus, leading to the original post.
Just yanking layers to minimal required bosses is enough to reduce total work.
Yeah, I’ve been working in the industry about 20 years, and I’ve had one bad manager experience (and also a couple of not-great experiences where I didn’t really _have_ a manager).
Tbh I think this “we should have fewer managers” thing is just the current management fad. It’ll pass sooner or later.
> 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 had two good managers, the rest ranged from innocuous to malevolent. One manager even cursed me for refusing to approve an engineering deviation to allow a passenger plane to fly when the wing composite was delaminating. He said he went through the trouble of preparing the pseudo legal document and how dare I refuse to sign. I told him a) I was not the SME on wings as I was an engine guy b) if this was such a no brainer why didn’t he or the SME sign their approval. This was when I worked at a major airline and wasn’t the only egregious thing I had experienced. This incident was one of the reasons I switched to IT because in software it was unlikely you could be criminally held responsible for such irresponsible behavior.
Anyways. My guess is if I had signed off the pilot would not have accepted the plane during his preflight. Then an investigation would have started on who would have signed off on such a thing.
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”.
I don't think OP was necessarily trying to imply "there should be no managers", but simply "I don't want to become a manager" - which is perfectly valid.
Look, you have me for the rest of your post, but let's not imagine that the kind of management we see in an orthodox corporation in the year 2025 is some kind of emergent grassroots property.
It's a tool created by owners to exercise control over the people whose labour they own.
From what I’ve seen flatter (not flat) company structures have less politics and a healthier culture. When you get into the 7, 8, 9 layer manager hierarchy at a software company is when things have really gone to shit
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.
Those people are also dead weight. I despise the fact that I have to play politics at work. Work should be based on results, period. Spending time politicking is not producing results; at best, it’s eventually producing via cajoling what could have been accomplished in 1/4 the time if you’d been left alone and trusted.
The people who play politics also have their work judged by results. Getting yourself promoted to head a project that prints money for the company with little cost doesn't necessarily cause the project to stop printing money.
If you’re buddies with higher-ups, they absolutely can and will look upon your projects with a softer eye. There’s a limit, of course, and that heavily depends on the company culture, but it’s unreasonable to expect favoritism to not factor in at all.
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.
>companies often fail to reward silent, but effective and solid people, and instead opt into creating a loud, noisy rockstar culture.
Excellent observations.
People think politics is inevitable when a bunch of people are put together. But if one has courage to retain only the right people, politics can be eliminated. I once worked for a company that achieved that - near zero politics among the managers. It left a lasting impression on me.
>. 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.
But that's also a management failure. A lot of managers ask "What can you do for my team or me so we can be more important?" But instead they should be asking, "What can my team do for you?"
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
Incredibly hard. If there were some formula and it was really easy to just keep "the good ones", then every company would only have great managers. It's simply not that easy at scale.
It's amazing how many smart people here think this is just a trivial problem that they can solve for big tech if big tech would only listen.
This is a fundamental human organization problem that many countless organizations of people have failed to perform optimally since people have started organizing into groups.
Listen to yourself. That's what management is supposed to do: manage people -- including other managers. You can't both accept and deny responsibility in the same breath.
If you truly believe that, then this is cognitive dissonance in it's highest form.
There's what you imagine and what you can see with your own eyes in reality.
Amazon, with its billions and hoards of smart people, still ended up in a situation where they find themselves in excess of 14,000 employees.
It means that there's no simple formula and perhaps once in a while, orgs just need to clear the slate and see where the pain points are and build up once again.
Listen to yourself. It's management's job to manage people. Some of those people are going to be managers. So management can't police themselves apparently?
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.
Middle management _is_ the culture of a company. A regular worker interacts not at all with the CxOs except reading their emails and every day with their managers.
Middle management is also the memory of the company.
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 think it’s subjective like any role, but mostly you are trying to evaluate what their team is delivering, are they making effective strategic plans, how’s their 360 degree feedback and survey scores of worker satisfaction, are they making successful hires and retaining their people, are they growing the next generation of leaders, and so on?
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:
1. Amazon announces new IC to Manager ratio target. Meeting this target would mean an overall reduction in the number of managers.
2. Someone at Morgan Stanley assumes that lay offs will be the mechanism used to reach the target ratio and does some math that says this'll save $XX billion, based on the number of employees at Amazon and the average manager salary.
3. Business Insider reports on the Morgan Stanley memo.
4. This trash article re-reports on it for some reason.
In reality, teams were re-org'd, managers became ICs. Maybe some were PIP'd. No large layoffs though.
It still is big. Let's not start to treat 10's of thousands of skill labor losing their jobs through no fault of their own as an everyday occurance. We may as well leave the US at that point.
It literally is an everyday occurrence. It is statistical fact. There are 340 million people in the USA. Tens of thousands of people lose and gain jobs every day. That is normal and not particularly unusual or cruel.
While the power dynamic of employment is uneven, if you wish for a company to never be able to let you go then you're also wishing for the hiring process to be far more difficult. If you wish for companies to have unreasonable processes involved in terminating employees, you're also wishing for extreme scrutiny in the hiring process rather than being able to get a job where employers take a chance on you.
Mass layoffs are not an everyday occurrence. It wasn't an occurance 2 years ago. Let alone decades ago. "person got fired" and "entire parta of an industry are laid off" are entirely different scales. It's like treating a wildfire incident with a person's single home burning down.
Literally an everyday occurrence. There are 33.2 million companies in the USA. Mass layoffs happen every day. But you know what else happens every day? Mass hiring.
There are literally fewer layoffs in tech now than 2 years ago. Go to the charts tab and scroll down to "Tech layoffs since COVID-19": https://layoffs.fyi/
There were over 4x the amount of tech layoffs 2 years ago according to this chart.
I understand the emotion behind your comments, as many people are frustrated with the economy in the US today. But your argument would be a lot stronger if you used factual, quantitative analysis.
Well, you're clearly not interested in a goof faith discussion of we can't even align on what "mass firings are" l. I'm not here to just yell words at each other over nitpicks. You know what I meant when I said "over decades"
>There are literally fewer layoffs than 2 years ago.
You probably don't understand what these people are capable of. You're right that the normal process can take several months, but I wouldn't discard them rushing a number of people to management just to lay them off as soon as possible.
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.
Also some finance guy gets rewarded for making that much cost savings, and they have meat to give to the shareholders, it’s an endless cycle. The finance folks only get the gain, the revenue/quality loss of their actions will not be measured accurately and will not be traced back to their actions. Only upsides.
A long time ago Google used to have a program called "bureaucracy busters," where submissions were reviewed by the CFO to find internal barriers to getting things done.
It was a good system. It no longer really exists and has been replaced by endless reprioritization and detailed bean counting justifying every single small action to prove to layers of management that what you are doing is worthwhile as Google slowly rots into a decayed husk of its old self.
The yellow|white|red jacks on the back of your TV are "RCA jacks." RCA stands for Radio Corporation of America. The same RCA launched NBC, which launched CNBC, which is a dominant source of financial news in the US.
You plugged your Nintendo into a TV using jacks designed by the same company that told your parents which stocks to buy and sell.
Gets even weirder when you get into acquisitions, where Ben and Jerry's ice cream is owned by the same Unilever that is famous for its soap.
Then you must have grow up at a particular time which didnt have them. There was a time period where it would be unusual to have a TV or VCR without them.
European TVs generally used SCART cables (a sort of 1970s analog HDMI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCART), from the 1980s until HDMI took over. It was, indeed, fairly common for a TV or VCR or games console to have _only_ SCART.
Odd standard; it had both composite and RGB lines, but also control lines, so, like HDMI-CEC, you could set it up so that your VCR couldn’t quite control your TV. It also supported daisy-chaining, a bit like SCSI, so you could connect your TV to your VCR and your VCR to your DVD player.
Even before SCART, European TV equipment tended to use DIN (you may remember this as the IBM AT keyboard connector) rather than RCA.
Oddly, there was a brief period where it was somewhat common for early HD TVs to have component RCA connectors; while SCART did support HD component, people apparently did not trust it.
I feel like the US has a history of inventing a thing and having an early version of it become popular. By the time it's mainstream in Europe, it has been improved and standardized, giving the appearance that Europe has more modern technology.
Perhaps the most famous example of this is magstripe card in the US vs EMV chip cards in Europe. The US had credit cards first, but standardized on swiping magnetic stripes. By the time they were widespread in Europe, the technology had advanced, so someone from the 2000s might think Europe did credit cards better. (The M and the V in EMV actually stand for the American companies MasterCard and VISA.)
In both cases, this is due to government regulation, not first-mover disadvantage. TVs showed up at about the same time in Europe and the US (first working TV was in the UK, and first regular TV station was in the US, but you’re talking about a year or so’s difference). SCART became a thing because the French government required companies to support it from 1980 on; previously European TVs generally used DIN.
As for the cards, again you can thank France; Cartes Bancaires introduced a predecessor to EMV in the 80s, and France moved quite quickly to make chip cards standard and then mandatory. Other countries followed in the 90s and early noughties. However, by the time EMV predecessors launched, there’d been credit cards in Europe since the 1960s (usually national standards).
Incidentally, this is also indirectly why the US was so late to the party with tap to pay. With chip and pin via EMV, it became essential that card terminals be available to the customer; an employee taking the card in the back wasn’t an option. So by the time tap to pay was introduced in the late noughties, more or less all shops and restaurants already had either counter-mounted or portable terminals, so it was an easy transition. In the US, it was more common to have swipe machines not necessarily directly accessible to the customer, which made tap to pay less attractive, and it didn’t really become near-universal until Apple and Google Pay forced the issue (actually, even then it didn’t become universal; I was in SF last year and was in a surprisingly large number of places which only had swipe machines).
Tap to pay felt like it took off in the US as a reaction to the germ hysteria of the pandemic. Swiping a card was arguably more convenient than getting out and unlocking your phone. There wasn't much demand for it here when it was popular in e.g. Singapore.
The amount of time people spend holding (rather than pocketing) their phones is also probably higher than it was in the 2010s, so the cost of digging it out of your purse/pocket is less relevant.
[meta] Having a conversation about credit card and video standards in a thread about managerial layoffs feels apropos to how my brain works about other curious topics. We're basically cosplaying a Wikipedia hole.
So in Europe for a long time, tap to pay was normally via _card_, not phone. I don’t think there was a common phone-based EMVish standard before Apple and Google Pay came out (there were a few weird stored value things), but tap-able EMV cards showed up around 2007 (again, there were various local and national proprietary stored value cards before that, but in most cases they never really caught on).
Another factor may be that American card terminals were traditionally quite slow, or at least vendors rarely prioritised speed (I have no idea _why_ this was the case, but it definitely seems to have been the case). Tap to pay really works best if the auth can happen within a second or so.
In Ireland (and I guess the UK), we'd have a lot of TVs with both. Usually they'd have multiple SCART connectors, but only a single RCA connector. It was common for stuff like games consoles to ship with a RCA to SCART adapter.
I will say in terms of physical connectors, by the later years it was quite common to have poor connectivity with SCART - stiff cables leaving the connector at an angle that would gradually lever it out of the socket, the flat pins that would break off after repeated insertions...
> Usually they'd have multiple SCART connectors, but only a single RCA connector
I'm in Ireland as well, but I remember that as a high-end TV thing, mostly, though it did get more common towards the end of the analog connector era, especially for flatscreen TVs. Your generic 21" CRT TV usually just had a single SCART connector and a tuner connector, tho.
I suspect that the reason RCA (especially _component_ RCA) became more common in the flat-screen/early HD era was largely that, while SCART supported component output, the UX tended to be really bad, and there was no way for the TV to signal support to the attached device. So, virtually all set top boxes and DVD players could output RGB component via SCART, but this was never turned on by default, and the user wasn't necessarily aware of it.
Two SCART was pretty common, for e.g. a VHS player and a sky box. We definitely had switcher boxes we needed to use to connect game consoles, (or dvd players when they became a thing) up though.
I think some VHS players also had some form of pass through/switching capability of their own? It's been a while.
Yeah, most VCRs, except for really cheap ones, had the pass through ability. You could theoretically chain an arbitrary number of devices, though at the best of times controlling any of this was virtually impossible.
You’d normally want your sky/cablelink box connected through your vcr, so that you could record off the box, not connected separately to the tv.
One part of the company designed infrastructure, and another part used it. The results feel disparate because they're very separate markets.
Amazon did it on a shorter timeline and shipped the usage before the infrastructure, but it's not as wildly different as you state. The same seed grew branches in different directions, whose tips ended up very far apart from one another.
It seems weird but realizing one supports the other it kinda makes sense.
For example, Discover spun out from Sears attempts at having an in house credit card. Ally started as a financing division of GM. In both cases, you'd think similarly how it's weird one company runs both a bank and builds cars or sells houses.
It doesn't seem that different, in that Amazon started AWS to support its primary business, then realized they could sell it to others.
The managers are just following the (fairly absurd imo), amazon internal processes for the most part. If the processes don't change, there are just going to be a bunch of overloaded managers. The current processes, culture, and 'principles'/dogmas are inefficient, contradictory and toxic af.
Yeah the existing managers left behind will probably be overloaded, because one person cannot scale over so many direct reports. So then perhaps Amazon has figured out how to scale middle managers so they can effectively manage multiples more. Perhaps an AI/ML tool of some kind, which would seem kinda dystopian, but might not be awful... who knows, this is just wild speculation.
If the answer you were looking for was "managers", then you have no concept of just how big Amazon is.
According to TFA they have about 106000 managers before this layoff. You don't give 106k people any meaningful control over the company's policies and procedures, that has to come from the layers above the managers, probably several layers up.
If you are not responsible for whatever decisions you make, and you don't even make any decisions that amount to anything at all, plus you don't do anything(code, SRE etc) why should you have a job?
But it is neat that the internal tooling is 15 years behind the times. It’s like being teleported to 2005. The nostalgia value surely makes up for any “inefficiency” /s
that's the definition of an incompetent / mediocre manager.
Most organizations expect their employees and managers in poarticular to be "breaking doors", which is the opposite attitude to blindly following any internal process.
You have a very warped view of the world if you think most companies, or even Amazon in particular, are expecting their employees to be “breaking doors”.
They are literally mandating people come in to sit in a room on video calls with people sitting in a room in other offices all around the country/world. That’s the most egregious one, but add up all the controls, pair it with layoffs and threats of more, and you’re not going to end up with an employee base that’s testing the limits of what’s possible. You’ll end up with a well behaved herd of docile workers.
They’re not going to change that behavior by getting rid of middle managers when those demands are coming from the C levels or the board
To be fair, OP was talking about the companies' expectations, not the behavior they are incentivizing. Many companies expect their employees to innovate, while implementing processes that prevent innovation. Many companies expect their employees to "take courageous risks" while punishing risk-taking that goes wrong. Many companies expect their employees to "act like they are owners" while giving them no equity or profit sharing.
Exactly. It is about expectations, and it is about inbalance. Every employee expects ideal benefits with minimal work, every emplyer expects ideal work with mininal benefits. The reality is balance here is one of very many possibilities with leverage being most of the times one one side, rather than in the middle.
Complaining about the structure is like your sales complaining that your customers choose your competition's product - nobody cares.
You only need managers to the extent their actions can have an effect down the line. Otherwise they don't "manage" anything, hence they become communication brokers, potentially unnecessary. The reality is that in most cases that's the reality, but that doesn't make the reality the goal and, in fact, motivates these decisions.
Almost - it's called "mission command" and the core idea is to prioritize initiative, flexibility, and independent judgment over strict adherence to orders’ exact wording.
A manager decides to spend their energy managing their relationships up, down or sideways. The very worst will focus solely on managing the upwards relationship, but that's precisely what makes them hard to dislodge: Every second of their day is spent on efforts that helped their job security by relationship building.
So it's not just that the best manager is also the best at finding a new job, but that every second they spend improving their org's performance is a second they don't spend trying to fool a typically not-so-good middle manager into thinking they are indispensable.
This is also why, every time I've seen manager culls, I have found that it was rare for upper management's idea of who was easier to replace was to match that of peers and reports. The ability of the bad manager to hide the truth from the exec is much stronger than people realize.
This is true. I've also found that there are perverse incentives when it comes to (especially upper) management. Building up enough political clout in your organization that aren't answerable to many people, and managing your image among the few you are answerable to, is the best skill one can have if the outcome is steady long term employment. Providing value to your company and coworkers doesn't correlate as much with surviving corporate haircuts like these.
Their upper managers don't want "best", they want loyal, they want yes men that will make perfect henchmen, that's what best is for them so they get exactly what they're looking for. People who rock the boat aren't gonna cut it.
No now just senior managers are supposed to pickup the slack and drag the company behind on there own. and also program managers & useless product managers.
jokes apart, long ago when I was there, once somebody did the internal org site scraping and found out in our org there were almost 6 workers (status givers) to 1 status takers. and sr. engineers are supposed to 'manage themselves', so really full of political BSers.
Well come back around. We will retry the flat structure again, realize that just leads to terrible throughput, team wise political battles and defacto leaders and start hiring the managers again. Just look at older industries that have reached a steady state because they’ve been around longer. No one is constructing a large building without a project manager, foremen or architects.
Even if they do, they've culled those that they deemed weren't a good fit, possibly changing the hiring criteria. If the criteria for both is rational, purging can be very good for an org, and the employees. Crap managers make jobs suck for everyone involved.
edit: I'll say, I've only ever left a job because of a manager. Shortly before leaving my current job, due to a crap manager, the previous manager was fired. The entire org benefited.
I don't think it's useful to look at absolutes like this.
The question is, how many managers did they hire since the last round of layoffs, and what percent are being layed off now? Or, in other words, what's the bad hire rate? How does that unavoidable number compare to the industry?
14k people is 0.9% of their employees. Let's say they have a 16% manager ratio. That's maybe 5% of their management. What's the management/non-management ratio? Is it meant to balance for the reductions in headcount?
> they've culled those that they deemed weren't a good fit…
I think it’s worthwhile challenging this assumption. In a layoff, with that many people, I don’t think you can say much beyond that the company doesn’t want to pay them anymore.
I can't really comprehend this, as someone involved with several layoffs (failing startup and corporate). Do you believe the layoffs are by lottery or something? If not lottery, who do you believe is selecting the individuals, and what's the criteria?
If these layoffs are any like I've been involved with, nobody is surprised by who stays. It's almost obvious. There are sometimes surprises by who lets go, usually having to do with the required headcount, where some better ones need to get let go too.
> In a layoff, with that many people
Absolute numbers are often used to appeal to emotion. It's less than 1%! Assuming 16% manager/non ratio, it's only 5% of management, so I suspect they aren't cutting too deep, or at all, into the high performing people.
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.
This isn't the whole story though. While Amazon might have 1.5m employees, many of those are going to be in the fulfilment and distribution process, which is a very different place to being in engineering/product/finance/business/marketing working in an office.
I think it would be more useful to split the company down that line, in which case Amazon probably have ~300k(?) on the office side, and this represents more like a 4-5% layoff, a level at which people will really notice it.
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.
People wildly underestimate how good some of the people at Amazon are. Tenured Amazon employees that have moved up the ranks over 10+ years are astounding in their ability to execute on projects.
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.
Are there alternatives? I ask this as someone who spends a lot of time doing just this. Your addition of the word "human" gave me hope there is a better/alternative system?
There's a lot of truth in this. We haven't figured out how to automate complex systems. Instead, systems operate under partial automation, and exceptions are handled by humans. This is also true of any bureaucracy. Because automation is invisible and humans are visible, it will always appear that bureaucrats are spending most of their time taking care of the failures of unnecessarily complex systems.
The engineers working on complex technology systems are doing a lot of the same kind of things. Technology is disturbingly similar to bureaucracy.
Consider the many HN threads to the effect of "<Service> just deleted my account for no reason and there's no escalation process or human to contact." Now imagine of Social Security ran that way. Health care does, to some extent.
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.
From a surface level it seems like they've operated like this since... forever. AWS is still a very nice product, at least for the use cases I have for it. I have a hard time reconciling those two things.
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.
In India, the Amazon managers are notorious for all bad practices e.g. forced PIP quota, hire to fire, demanding to work during off hours and on holidays. Now the concern is that these managers will go, join many companies and spread the same bad management practices across the industry.
I am a bad manager, which I warn new recruits about.
I need my team to be independent, make decisions and challenge my (brilliant) ideas. They simply need to be good with what they know, at their level.
I will actively evangelize my strategy (they can challenge it, ultimately I am the accountable), I will always have their back (because I am like this, there is no profound philosophy behind this) and when they did something successful, they did it and present in front of the board. When they fucked up, I fucked up.
This is not some kind of messianic approach - just generic mortality. I spend a lot of time with them and O like to have them as "work friends".
I would hate to be hit by suvh layoff, and I am rather happy with the fact that they would be pissed off as well.
If you want to fix the problem, look at the incentives. Management hasn't had an incentive to manage down in decades, because the executives no longer care about tenure nor productivity in the traditional sense (because their incentives are also messed up, but that's for another post).
You need a good culture with proper incentives to be rewarded as a good manager. But that's not really the world most live in these days. Instead, the good get exploited by the bad and either leave to protect themselves or cause discourse as they try to do their job and inevitably be overthrown by those above.
I've heard that the managers there aren't nearly as big a problem as the incentive structures that are imposed on managers. The competitiveness within the ranks compromises the office culture. This was explained to me as the origin of the plague of PIPs.
With the rise of AI, my disdain for managers has gone up. I don't think it's because AI has made managers redundant. It's because AI is making me redundant and I'm realizing they've kind of _always_ been redundant.
Imagine mistaking this for "getting rid of management," rather than kicking off a battle royale to backfill those roles with only the most efficiently, consciencelessly bloodthirsty aspirants to the power vacuum so created.
Good riddance, there's too many layers of management for a company that touts "It's always day 1", and once you become a manager you can only fail upwards.
$250K is low: Kind of a "Peak HN" comment :). I was actually going to say it seems kind of high. This looks like it's globally, not just in high COL areas, and across all levels of management, not just Directors and VPs. Kind of surprising the average is that high.
Then again, this is HN, where they say the "average" tech worker in the world makes $400K and drives a Ferrari.
I actually thought the same thing. Maybe the misunderstanding here has to do with what kind of manager. An engineering manager making 250k would be making less than many senior software engineers, but if this also includes many managers of people putting shit in boxes, or the average of the two categories, it would make more sense?
I make more than 250k as an engineer in a small startup. The only reason to join a FAANG is to make much more than 250k. According to levels.fyi an average senior SDE at amazon makes $412k total comp.
Just wait until people realize that the easiest jobs to automate aren’t usually the ones that pay $9/hr. Automated performance metrics, direct monitoring of employee active screen time, so on and so forth. All the while managers were thinking how much easier it was going to make their job.
We’re at the point that an AI can now perform the requisite performance metric failing, sternly worded cautionary performance review, translate the verbal conversation for HR records as documentation for a subsequent firing if needed, and simply not care that your kid died and it has been a rough month.
Left to their own devices, the corporate dystopia is pretty bleak.
The most generic dystopia novel premise imaginable. but it seems like America is gonna treat it like gospel instead. Anything to not pay the working class.
It's a pretty weak smokescreen. People thinking this is about "efficiency" should go work for DOGE. This has been happening for years now so the facade is long gone.
The reasons are as usual. Anticipating economic headwinds and how to make number go up despite that,s174 (sp?) changing how you amortize R&D, early attempts to incorporate AI into workflows, etc. Companies at the moment are not at all concerned with lean development nor streamlining workflows.
I imagine one thread of the logic is like dang, AI is only producing mediocre work this year. What can we replace where mediocrity is acceptable... How about a role whose primary function is interhuman language.. where we can fallback on the humans involved (engineers, c levels) naturally catching and correcting mistakes?
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.