> he'd been offered a promotion, to an Engineering Manager role
Funny how this lateral move to another function is seen as a promotion.
I've done both for significant amounts of time, and rather than a blanket, utilitarian "dont become a manager", I'd go with the antithesis to that blog buried at the very end:
> So why am I still an EM [...] the main reason is that I enjoy my job
EM positions come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and it's an entirely different function from that of a developer. I had tremendous fun being a manager in a couple startups, where left with lots of autonomy I could learn about, then experiment with better ways to deliver than "let's do 2w sprints" and ship shit. The human management was interesting, especially the continuous improvement side of things: it's especially exhilarating when you find something someone can do better and have a durable impact on their career ; it's especially tiring when you have to become something at the convergence of a psychiatrist, a referee and a nanny.
In large companies, the job isn't the same. You're stripped from autonomy and forced into a bureaucratic aspect of things. Dates are the main control dial that VPs have, so your main goal is to provide random dates, track random dates, make sure it's gonna be delivered at random dates, and make up excuses for why that date was not met.
After alternating a couple of times between the two functions, I figured development is what brings me the most joy, so I staid with it. But to each their own, and you might want to be a manager:
- if you have a true interest in the function, go fo it. There's a lot of learning to be done (the main problem with bad managers, I believe, is that they're thrown there because they were good devs, and they just make shit up rather than learn) and you'll discover things
- at the opposite side of the article's thesis, AI is a chance for you to innovate as a manager. The bureaucratic aspect I mentioned can be smoothed by it, and new tools mean a new way of working, so good times to experiment!
- don't just do it for the utilitarian side of things. Developing your career is important, but you also need to do it a sustainable way. Something I keep telling: it sucks to be good at something you hate. So do something you like.
- it is not my experience that pay is lower, Amazon paid SDMs more than SDEs, Microsoft pays them the same.
- titles mean very little. VP at MyFavoritePet who employs 12 people is not the same job as VP at Amazon. Principal (not principle - makes my eyes bleed every time) is harder to achieve at Amazon than at Facebook. Not because the job is more complex, but just because they define things differently.
//Funny how this lateral move to another function is seen as a promotion.
Not at all. IC salaries outside of the absolute top-tier companies are capped, and were traditionally always capped lower than any degree of Senior Management prior to the 2000s.
More to the point, they were capped illegally and in collusion with the main players in the game, completely separate from market forces.
This was ably demonstrated by the class action taken when five former software engineers sued Apple, Google, Adobe Systems, and Intel in a Federal District Court in California for colluding in an “overarching conspiracy” to keep wages low by promising not to poach each other’s employees.
65,000 software engineers eventually claimed they were unable to jump companies for higher pay because of a series of non-solicitation agreements by the likes of Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, and Apple's Steve Jobs.
Outside of VC/PE funded American tech hotspots, this depression of salaries for IC roles still tends to be the case - particularly in Europe - for whatever reason.
Simply put, the promotion is in the remuneration; the lateral move in functionality is simply a required re-alignment of role and responsibility to meet the expectations of the 'Leadership' tier - something always distinct from original job function, be it in Sales, HR, or Engineering.
Write tests. Most likely those 300k lines of code contain a TESST folder with 4 unit tests written by an intern who retired to become a bonsai farmer in the 1990s, and none of them pass anymore. Things become much less stressful if you have something basic telling you you're still good.
The problem with complex legacy codebases is that you don’t know about the myriads of edge cases the existing code is covering, and that will only be discovered in production on customer premises wreaking havoc two months after you shipped the seemingly regression-free refactor.
It helps if tests are well written such that they help you with refactoring, rather than just being the implementation (or a tightly coupled equivalent)
but with assertions in it.
Rare to see though. I don't think being able to write code automatically means you can write decent tests. Skill needs to be developed.
I disagree. There is no code that can't be tested. There is certainly no code that has to be changed so it can be tested.
The only reason you would decide code is untestable without touching it is because it doesn't seem worth the effort, so you test the thing that calls that code instead and mock it out.
At the highest level it is all inputs and outputs after all. Your spaghetti app can still be tested end-to-end, which will cost you the most but will work.
We're talking about SaaS and web apps and shit here of course, because we're on HN where downtime on Cloudflare equals a day off work. In other industries you'd be running full blown simulations and proofs and maybe even inventing new mechanisms of testing so you can get a hard project off the ground. Maybe even fabricating materials.
Sure, you can test more or less anything given sufficient time and force, but a massive fragile harness wrapped around the system under test is not what I mean by 'testing well'.
Also there are other things in software besides web; unit testing code that is entangled with desktop UI can be difficult or impossible without changing the original code. Try testing a WPF app that talks directly to the Dispatcher when there is no UI thread, for example.
I agree. This is one area I'm hoping that AI tools can help with. Given a complex codebase that no one understands, the ability to have an agent review the code change is at least better than nothing at all.
I've been working on react and react native applications professionally for over ten years, and I have never worked on a project with any kind of meaningful test coverage
I have not seen tests in any code base I worked on in the past 20 years. I have noticed that there is some kind of sanctimonious demeanor to quite a few people that advocate for tests (on comment boards). I find the reactions to discussions on tests fascinating because it seems to elicit very strong opinions, sort of a "do you put your shopping cart back" kind of topic, but for programmers.
I find that fascinating, because interacting with the tests in our codebase (both Python and JS) answers a _lot_ about "how is this meant to work", or "why do we have this". I won't say I do test-driven development, at least not very rigorously, but any time I am trying to make a small change in a thing I'm not 100% familiar with, it's been helpful to have tests that cover those edge cases. :)
I've checked the stats, the previous app I've worked on has 31% reported coverage and I think the actual value is higher, with coverage of most of the critical paths. But it's been a lot of work and the engineering hierarchy is supportive in adding time to manage the existing tests and test the new features.
Have you ever worked at a place where you were put on an existing codebase, and that code has no tests? Have you ever worked at a place where, when you try to fix that, management tells you that they don't have the time to do so, they have to crank out new features?
Is ipsento606 working at such a place? I don't know, and neither do you. Why do you jump to the conclusion that it's their personal failing?
> Have you ever worked at a place where you were put on an existing codebase, and that code has no tests?
Yes.
Then I added tests. Now the codebase has tests.
Funny how that works.
> Have you ever worked at a place where, when you try to fix that, management tells you that they don't have the time to do so, they have to crank out new features?
Yes.
I then added tests that covered my features. Now the project has tests.
A difficult prerequisite for that might be untangling a very unatomic codebase into testable chunks. And to determine a feasible "level of abstraction" to write tests for. Testing a full pipeline of a numerical library might be as impractical as testing super tiny functions, because both won't allow you to really work on the codebase.
I did the same mistake a few weeks ago ; my company enforces security updates and I picked the Tahoe update instead of the security one. I told myself, what the hell, might as well give it a try!
I wiped my computer and reinstalled Sequoia last week.
You’re lucky that you had a choice. The security policy in my company forces our laptop to be up to date no matter what. You can resist to update for some time but then they’ll force update through management system and sometime it happens in the middle of out meeting
One thing that I would recommend is to avoid weaving the actual lies with statements that are subject to judgement. For example, the first two rows are about the level of investment in protection tools, and are claimed as lies because of the ineffectiveness of these tools. Both sides can be true simultaneously. You can invest a lot and produce no results.
When I read that, I thought they were grasping at straws. Then carried on reading and found real, unchallengeable lies, nevertheless had a little alarm in my head that these might be interpretations more than facts.
It would probably be good to either remove those borderline "understatements" or "distortion of the truth" ; or present them as things we can't trust given all the other lies.
Ya, strongly agree. For those that don’t read the article, here are some of the more concerning ones imo
- Mark said “We don't allow sexually explicit content on the service for people of any age.” But they had a 17-strike policy, and 79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms. :(. Edit: the 79% claim is overstated. If you read the linked report[1], it is actually “65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited _on social media_ were recruited from Facebook, with 14% being recruited on Instagram” (emphasis mine). Thanks kstrauser for investigating
- Mark said “Mental health is a complex issue and the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes.” But internal study found users who stopped using Facebook and Instagram for a week showed lower rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Meta halted the study and did not publicly disclose the results – citing harmful media coverage as the reason for canning the study. I suppose he might debate whether this is a “causal” link, but it’s fairly damning.
- Instagram head Adam Mosseri told reporters that research he had seen suggests the app’s effects on teen well-being is likely “quite small.” An internal 2019 study titled “Teen Mental Health: Creatures of Habit” found (1) “Teens can’t switch off Instagram even if they want to.” (2) “Teens talk of Instagram in terms of an ‘addicts narrative’ spending too much time indulging in compulsive behavior that they know is negative but feel powerless to resist.” (3) “The pressure ‘to be present and perfect’ is a defining characteristic of the anxiety teens face around Instagram. This restricts both their ability to be emotionally honest and also to create space for themselves to switch off.”
It's the line that facebook, and functionally every platform based on user content always tries to walk. They want sexual content because it drives engagement, positive and negative, more than almost anything. But they don't want to be held liable for the content, so they put weak policies in place so that they have the appearance of doing something to prevent it.
This makes almost every current social media and content platform this weird middle ground of generally acceptable content, and porn if you look for it hard enough.
I'm obviously ignoring the giant societal can of worms around "what is sexual content, what is art, what is porn". Because we can be pretty sure that Zuck doesn't care what's art and what's porn, and we know he doesn't care about protecting _anyone_ from _anything_. It's always about the bottom line and always will be.
Okay but what about scammers, they don’t drive engagement. Why leave them be untouched. I report scammer who pretends to be e.musk with name e.musk and sent me fake musk’s passport in chat, asking to invest- what more of impersonation scam could that be. Meta’s response - we reviewed and took appropriate steps. Yet scammer guy still untouched chatting with me weeks later.
Scammers drive a lot traffic, pay for ads, people check Facebook more often while being scammed, and search for support and help from peers on Facebook after being scammed, driving engagement in the form of support, ridicule and rage.
If you're ignoring the giant societal can of worms, you're not getting a good understanding of the situation. In the 2010s the zeitgeist was that they were too prudish, and Instagram in particular faced a number of controversies for taking down topless photos that the subject of the photo felt should have been allowed. I guarantee that, for almost every piece of sexual content you've seen on Meta platforms, there's a large and passionate group of people who believe that it's perfectly acceptable and any reasonable social media platform should allow it.
Nope that's still subjective. How do you differentiate between an educational medical video about someone's asshole, vs a medical fetish asshole video?
This sounds like almost the best business environment for criminals.
"I am sorry judge, yes, it could be that we are involved in crime, but we have been too busy counting billions of dollars each year. As you might understand, businesses are not part of society, they should only be judged on their shareholder value. We reap the profits, society pays for the collateral damage, that's only fair."
Yes, you mentioned leeway. That would only make sense in the context of an entity understanding it's role. It does like in the way above.
For what reason should we allow such leeway? No hosted platform in the 80s was responsible for a similar amount. Maybe if Meta can't properly police such a large platform it shouldn't be allowed to operate one. Facebook doesn't have to exist and we don't have to accept weak cries of "it's our best effort!"
Why shouldn't we? It seems an incredibly difficult problem. They have reviewers who make subjective calls on subjective rules. The leeway not only gives the opportunity for the user to improve but also gives the reviewers leeway to flag borderline posts without harshly punishing users.
17 is a weird number but having a number is perfectly reasonable to me.
It's also possible that users could misuse the reporting system, in order to get other users' accounts suspended.
Requiring N distinct reports of a suspension reason would seem to reduce misuses of the reporting system.
The 17-reports threshold might have been found to balance type-1 and type-2 errors, as account removals are costly actions when made in error or as a result of reporting-system misuse.
79% of ALL child sex trafficking. 4 out of 5 child sex slaves exist thanks to Facebook's policies.
But sure, go on and talk about "leeway" and "limited capabilities" for a company worth nearly a trillion dollars. Do you honestly believe this is acceptable? What are your vested interests here?
Since you're emphasizing the ALL, I am obligated to nitpick that it is not all. The source article says that, but it's wrong; the underlying link clarifies that it's 79% of sex trafficking which occurs on social media. As has been discussed downthread, a social media platform with large marketshare is always going to have a large percentage of every bad thing that can happen on social media.
Do you have a citation for that? You may be right for all I know. I don't know much about it. But that seems unlikely to me, and if it's true, I'd like a reference I can show others when I'm trying to get them to finally close their account.
> [the report] found that 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited from Facebook
Even in 2020, I'm very skeptical that so many children were on Facebook that it could account for 2/3 of recruitment. My own kids say that they and their friends are all but allergic to Facebook. It's the uncool hangout for old people, not where teens want to be.
I may be wrong, and I'm certainly not going to tell someone that they're wrong for citing a government study. Still, I doubt it.
The number is wrong / the citation is misleading. It’s closer to 20-30% according to that study, the 79% is referring specifically to cases involving social media, of which Meta platforms are obviously going to make up a large percentage.
There’s also a reporting bias here I’m sure - if Meta is better at reporting these cases then they will become a larger percentage, etc.
You don't really need a majority of potential victims to go to location X for victims from location X to make up a majority of victims; that just means that location X is a low-risk, high-reward place for criminals to lurk looking for victims.
Thanks for looking into it and pulling out that quote. I notice there are some moving goalposts — the parent article claims 79% of _all_ minor sexual trafficking (emphasis mine), but the govt report found
> 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited _on social
media_ were recruited from Facebook, with 14% being recruited on Instagram
(Emphasis mine). I think the parent article is repeatedly lying about the facts, that’s super annoying. I’m not at all surprised that Facebook and Instagram have the lions share of social-media victims, because they also have the lions share of social media users.
> 4 out of 5 child sex slaves exist thanks to Facebook's policies.
Even if your 79% number is correct, this does not follow. It like if someone said, 30 years ago, that 95% of total advertisements were in the classified section that 9 out of 10 retail sales happened thanks to the classifieds.
(I’m not trying to excuse Facebook’s behavior. But maybe criticisms of Facebook would be more effective if they stayed on track.)
I’m not nitpicking a weird edge case. I’m nitpicking a completely unsound inference. Even if Facebook indeed accounts for 79% of total instances of children being trafficked, it does not follow at all that removing Facebook from the picture would have reduced the number by anywhere near 79%.
Nobody in Salem wanted to be seen to stand up for witches.
I have never had a Facebook account because I never liked what they do, but this 'evidence' against them seems like they are relying on the seriousness of the allegations more than the accuracy.
You are saying that from our perspective. I don't think the argument that witches are not real would have gained you much ground back then.
We don't have the years of analysis of what actually happened for things happening right now.
While a lot of people feel a lot of certainty about all manner of social media harms, the scientific consensus is much less clear. Sure you can pull up studies showing something that looks pretty bad, but you can also find ones that say that climate change is not occurring. The best we have to go on is scientific consensus. The consensus, is not there yet. How do you tell if Jonathan Haidt is another Andrew Wakefield?
I'm not making any claims of certaincy. I have not published any books making claims of harm. I have not gone on a tour of interviews the world over trying to build public opinion instead of building consensus that the information is true.
That's how I know.
I also don't go around talking about race based differences in IQ, but that's just Haidt.
Like, I'd think that was a bad policy for murder in particular, but "we don't allow things but we give you a lot of chances to correct your behavior" is ordinary.
Nonsense. There are lots of things that you need more than three strikes for, especially on a platform that you expect to use for decades.
I'm not here to say that Facebook's enforcement behavior is optimal, and I don't know that a "17 strike policy" is a full description of their enforcement behavior. But there are plenty of behaviors that you want to discourage but not go nuclear about.
Causal has a specific meaning related to causal modeling, most studies can't show causality, a lot only show correlation[1].
And the third one seems to be about effect sizes. But a lot of this is still concerning, even if they appear to be trying to say technically true but misleading things.
[1] Yes, newer methods can show causation, not just correlation. See The Book of Why, by Judea Pearl for an introduction to how that works.
Causation has a direction, but the equals sign doesn't, is probably an overly-pithy summary of the first section of the book. And it was hard to represent the simple observation that effects come after causes, not before.
So they introduce do calculus to intentionally break that symmetry to test causal models, which themselves are basically directed graphs going from cause to effect. These also help you see what you need to test to try to falsify your model and to show you how to measure how much of the variance in an effect is explained by variance in the cause. And it helps keep track of interventions, like opening doors in the Monty Hall problem[1].
There's a more detailed summary here that looks pretty good which probably does a better job than my quick summary. I skimmed it and it matches what I recall from the book:
There have definitely been a lot of sexually explicit ads on the platform. If you're a straight, middle-aged male, I'm pretty sure many have seen them.
"sexually explicit content" and "child sex trafficking" are rather different things. Connected? Maybe? If you want to claim that Mark was lying, you've got to demonstrate the connection as part of the claim. Otherwise, it's a non sequitur.
The amount and severity of such concerning topics still lets you agree that these are just "statements that are subject to judgement" and "interpretations more than facts"?
I encourage critical thinking and fairness but if a coin lands on one side 100 times in a row I don't need to flip it forever to see if eventually it reaches 50/50. That many lies about extremely serious issues removes any benefit of the doubt for the liar.
He/FB was very against Trump/MAGA during his first tenure with the "fact check teams" verifying majority of popular opinions on FB, until before second election Trump posted that Zuckerberg should be in prison for meddling and giving Democrats their positive push. Nothing happened until Trump won second term, then the fact check teams were gone and Zuckerberg donated 1 million to Trump. Here Google AI will say it better than I can:
Donation: Meta's $1 million donation to the inauguration fund was a departure from previous years, aimed at fostering goodwill with the new administration.
Relationship Repair: Following years of tension and accusations of anti-conservative bias, Zuckerberg has taken steps to align with the MAGA movement, including dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Policy & Structural Changes: Meta has made several changes, including reducing professional fact-checking, appointing UFC CEO Dana White (a Trump ally) to its board, and hiring high-profile Republican policy staff.
Motivations: The moves are seen as an attempt to avoid further regulation or antitrust action from the Trump administration, especially regarding artificial intelligence and business operations.
Edit: in this instance, stay out of jail card costed $1 million.
Well, not a "stay out of jail" card. It was a "quit having to worry that maybe 1) Trump actually means it, and 2) the courts will go along, and 3) my legal team can't save me.
Under current circumstances, the odds that Trump could have had Zuckerberg jailed for anti-Trump fact checking are very close to zero.
Mark's got 250 billion dollars, founded a 2 trillion dollar company, and is quite possibly the wealthiest self-made person alive today. It is highly likely Mark also possesses some form of security clearance from the NSA related to issues adjacent to his company. It it also likely that Mark has some form of kompromat
Donald Trump is a pedophile and a lying grandstander who has always talked tough and backed down when up against someone who knows what they are doing.
Donald Trump could try to put Mark in jail. Mark has hundreds of billions of dollars to prevent the government from touching him. It wouldn't happen. The second Donald Trump tried shit, Mark would simply buy the top 100 law firms in the nation, and have them work together to stop Trump, and Trump would back down.
I wasn't voting for Trump, but if you have a credible evidence that "Trump is a pedophile" then you should immediately go to your nearest police station and report it. Otherwise you might be found in a lot of legal trouble for aiding and abetting "a pedophile" even if unintentionally.
With that being said, I don't think you know much about how litigations work. Buying 100 top law firms and having I presume all those lawyers working on your case does not help you win your case; judges do not get intimidated by the law firm you use. And that's like saying drinking 100x more protein will get me muscles 100x faster.
Trump trying to put Mark in jail is all that needs to happen for a starter. He could cost his company billions; once they done with FB and all the political power then can rain, the stock would be some 80% down. Mark would be worth 90% of what he has now and would be radioactive for any future business endeavors. I mean it should be clear at this point that President of USA does have a power to destroy your life and/or business. He doesn't need to put you in prison to end your life. And Mark wouldn't pay $1 million bribe if he would think otherwise.
"But internal study found users who stopped using Facebook and Instagram for a week showed lower rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness."
This isn't causal though. The users who quit were not randomly selected. Maybe they were receiving some kind of mental health treatment, and as part of that they stopped. Then the recovery could have been from the treatment or it could have been from stopping.
So this argument you've made, you've just constructed a strawman.
> The users who quit were not randomly selected. Maybe they were receiving some kind of mental health treatment
You don't know that? You don't know anything about the selection process since facebook did not share their research. Your whole argument pins on the selection process you have no idea what happened. I'd find it very difficult to believe that researchers could not anticipate and control for situations like that. Researchers are after all, experts in research.
Facebook does not typically do academic level research - they do quick studies to verify product direction.
From what I have seen, the actual academic studies on this are mixed. It is hard to say one way or the other, and it can affect different teens differently depending on how they use it.
My point is if the people in the study were not randomly selected, there are any number of confounding factors that could influence why their anxiety changed.
You can invest a lot and get minimal results, OR, it’s possible they invested in 71-odd tools and only 17% produced results, but those results were as desired or expected so they didn’t actually need the other 83% of the tools they tried.
The number of tools that were deemed effective is not proportional to the “the effect”.
After reading the examples, I trust Zuckerberg more than the author of this article. And that's a really low bar. The evidence for Zuckerberg lying here is flimsy at best. It's almost like the author doesn't know what lying even is.
And yet you mixed strong advice with childish dismissal.
But I agree, you should present your best argument, otherwise they'll attack your weakest argument and claim victory. Such tactics are weak in logic but often successful.
Same, I read the first few and it just read as conspiracy theory material, where the "evidence" that refuses the claim has nothing to do with the claim unless you're already halfway down the koolaid pitcher.
Always better to leave the "maybe, if you squint, but just as easily no" stuff out if you're trying convince others that there's a serious, objective problem with receipts.
> Both sides can be true simultaneously. You can invest a lot and produce no results.
Evidence show that Meta can be very effective at achieving the results that drive profits. It's already suspicious when they fail exactly at the ones that would lower profits. Even more when you consider the rest of the evidence which shows intention to hide the "failure". That breaks trust and you're just choosing to believe that the lie that they got caught with must have been the only one.
Short of universal laws almost anything can go both ways. But when one is overwhelmingly more likely you can make a concession and agree Zuck was lying a lot in there.
You're bending over backwards to muddy the waters with vague "it could go both ways" statements.
Likely a lie but also they do have tools, they're just inefficient. When you have 10 other examples that are undeniable, might as well remove the ones that can be challenged, let alone open with it, or you open yourself to very standard rebuttal PR strategies that focus on these.
> Likely a lie but also they do have tools, they're just inefficient
This is the exact problem, they could solve the issue by spending a lot more money. They could hire enough human content reviews to keep up, they could force all content to go through review before it can be posted.
But those things break their business model. If you take away their ability to externalize these cost by harming society, it turns out Facebook isn't a viable business.
From this perspective, every dollar they make, all those billions that Zuckerberg is "worth" is simply value extraction at our expense.
Which is why he will do absolutely everything to protect it. It's so far beyond giving him the benefit of the doubt. To know what he knows and continue to operate Facebook like this is moving into the territory of being pure evil.
There are enough verifiable actions by Zuckerberg that proxy for some sort of behaviour unaligned with the wellbeing of society/humanity. You don't need to cut out the noise here, if there's even any on e.g. HN
Graphene is very attractive, the two things that prevent me from going are a) using your phone as a credit card, I'm too attached to that now. b) work profile does not work with rooted phones
Gotta try harder than that. There's a certain length to their paragraphs as well, you can see from their post history the general shape of their messages that will cue you off that you're probably about to read spam before you've even read the first word. Also abundant LLMisms. Four "not X but Y" and three lists of three in only five sentences. The sheer density of LLMisms is absurd. Not to mention that vague sense of incoherency despite overall being a grammatically correct series of words. There are so many tells it's criminal people aren't catching it.
If I ask a quote, get it, and answer only 2w later, I will probably apologize. If someone sends me a quote unprovoked, they shouldn't have any expectations of getting an answer, and if I answer even late, I won't apologize.
If my boss or people working on my project send me an email to get a status on something and it takes me a week to answer, I'll apologize- even if that's because I was busy on something more important. If a random colleague asks me for something unrelated with my direct responsibilities, similarly I'll get to it if I get to it when I get to it, and I dont think they should have expectations of receiving an answer, so I won't apologize
Funny how this lateral move to another function is seen as a promotion.
I've done both for significant amounts of time, and rather than a blanket, utilitarian "dont become a manager", I'd go with the antithesis to that blog buried at the very end:
> So why am I still an EM [...] the main reason is that I enjoy my job
EM positions come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and it's an entirely different function from that of a developer. I had tremendous fun being a manager in a couple startups, where left with lots of autonomy I could learn about, then experiment with better ways to deliver than "let's do 2w sprints" and ship shit. The human management was interesting, especially the continuous improvement side of things: it's especially exhilarating when you find something someone can do better and have a durable impact on their career ; it's especially tiring when you have to become something at the convergence of a psychiatrist, a referee and a nanny.
In large companies, the job isn't the same. You're stripped from autonomy and forced into a bureaucratic aspect of things. Dates are the main control dial that VPs have, so your main goal is to provide random dates, track random dates, make sure it's gonna be delivered at random dates, and make up excuses for why that date was not met.
After alternating a couple of times between the two functions, I figured development is what brings me the most joy, so I staid with it. But to each their own, and you might want to be a manager:
- if you have a true interest in the function, go fo it. There's a lot of learning to be done (the main problem with bad managers, I believe, is that they're thrown there because they were good devs, and they just make shit up rather than learn) and you'll discover things
- at the opposite side of the article's thesis, AI is a chance for you to innovate as a manager. The bureaucratic aspect I mentioned can be smoothed by it, and new tools mean a new way of working, so good times to experiment!
- don't just do it for the utilitarian side of things. Developing your career is important, but you also need to do it a sustainable way. Something I keep telling: it sucks to be good at something you hate. So do something you like.
- it is not my experience that pay is lower, Amazon paid SDMs more than SDEs, Microsoft pays them the same.
- titles mean very little. VP at MyFavoritePet who employs 12 people is not the same job as VP at Amazon. Principal (not principle - makes my eyes bleed every time) is harder to achieve at Amazon than at Facebook. Not because the job is more complex, but just because they define things differently.
reply