May 19, 2020
Managers & Bureaucrats
And how to recognize them
Managers and Individual Contributors
I joined Facebook, straight out of Grad School, as a Junior Software Engineer (SWE). “Junior” wasn’t an official title. All SWEs Junior and not-so-Junior were “Engineers”. For internal performance and remuneration purposes, I was an “E03”. This “level” was private, and only visible to my manager, his manager and other “ancestor” managers, up to the CEO.
After some time, I got promoted to E04. My external title was still “Engineer”, but my salary increased. “What was expected of me” also increased. My manager told me that E04 had to make 1.5x to 2x the contribution an E03 made. This ratio tended to be true for higher levels as well. It didn’t necessarily translate into a similar increase in raw work. While it was true that most E04 SWEs would write more code than E03s, they also wrote “better” code. Code that did more by quality and not merely quantity. That made “more impact”.
By the time I reached E05, in addition to writing code, I was also mentoring two other Engineers. While I mostly saw “mentoring” as answering questions, reviewing code, and generally nudging in the right direction, what I was effectively doing was helping these engineers make “more impact” themselves.
After I reached E06, I transitioned to management. Note, while my move from E05 to E06 was a promotion, my move from E06 to M01 (an entry-level manager) was not a promotion, but a transition. Sideways, not upwards.
E06s and M01s were “at the same level”. They had the same salaries and had to make a similar sort of contribution to the company. How they made that contribution was different, though. While an E06 was known as an “individual contributor” (IC), the M01 managed a team (or sometimes two teams) of individuals.
[NOTE: I’m somewhat oversimplifying for clarity. Especially at senior levels, there were few “pure”, 100% ICs or “pure”, 100% Managers at Facebook. Both Managers and ICs wore the other’s hat. Even as an E05, I did some of the “mentoring” types of “managing”. “Impact” was evaluated by pro-rating the IC and Manager components of an individuals performance.]
Management and Incremental Impact
Why did I transition to management? The reason was simple.
I believed that I could make more “impact” by enabling others. As opposed to being an individual contributor. I also framed this belief relative to promotions. The next level (E07 or M02) demanded the same level of impact. And I believed that I could make more impact as a manager than as an IC.
But what exactly is a manager’s impact? An ICs impact is “what they do”. The “individual contribution”. A manager, on the other hand, makes impact through others.
So, is a manager’s impact, the sum impact of their team? Not quite.
Each member of the team earned their impact. If we also credit the manager with this impact, we will be double counting. A manager’s impact is the “incremental” impact their team made, over and above the impact they would have made without their support.
How to measure this “incremental” impact is its complex and fascinating topic. I’ll leave that for another article (perhaps several). My main point is, a managers impact should be incremental.
Bureaucrats
Sadly, many people who call themselves managers don’t have an incremental impact. Some even have a “net-negative” incremental impact. In other words, their reports would have been better off without them. I use the label “Bureaucrats” to refer to these people.
How do you recognise a Bureaucrat? Here are some common patterns:
- Managers energise their reports. They find ways of making them better, in exciting and sometimes ingenious ways. I had the good fortune of having some fantastic managers at Facebook, and I remember leaving almost all of my one-on-one meetings with them with a new feeling of possibility and motivation. Bureaucrats suck the energy out of you. Just as you are not happy to meet them, they are not happy to meet you. Your encounters with them feel like a waste of time. Or merely, “a chore of the system”.
- Managers always give you credit for your work. Especially in public. Bureaucrats don’t. They might praise you in private, but in public, they tell everyone that it was their work. They claim your impact to be their “incremental” impact.
- When a Manager joins a team, it gets better. When a Bureaucrat joins a team, it gets worse. A particularly vicious type of Bureaucrat is one who jumps teams so that their weaknesses are not discovered. Often, they would join a successful team, take credit for the success (which should be due to the team, and, possibly, the previous manager), and then jump ship before it sinks. Usually, the next manager of that team takes the blame for the Bureaucrat’s mismanagement.
- People typically join teams and even companies because of good Managers. Conversely, they leave teams and companies because of Bureaucrats. Often, if no one wants to work on a team, it’s because a Bureaucrat manages it.
Happy Managing!
