Are Facebook engineers "impossible to manage"?
Business Insider is saying so in this article by Nicholas Carson:
http://www.businessinside
Evidently, everyone at Facebook is impossible to manage because:
http://www.businessinside
Evidently, everyone at Facebook is impossible to manage because:
- They are vested
- They are newbies who had other good job offers
- They were at the top of their class at MIT, Stanford, or Harvard
If the situation in that article were true, Facebook would have imploded years ago. Facebook has fired engineers who fit the description in the article (I have personal knowledge of cases of this) and will continue to do so. People with manageability problems do exist, as they do in any organization, but it's a handful of people on a team of hundreds. Generalizing from a few problem cases -- who, if their problems can't be addressed, are actively shown the door -- to, "All Facebook engineers are prima donnas and the company is powerless to do anything about it" is sloppy journalism, to be extremely generous.
There's a nugget of truth here, but it's an asset, not a liability: We do try to hire independent thinkers who will see a problem and run with it rather than waiting for a manager to tell them what to do. This is an explicitly encouraged behavior pattern, not something we're stuck with to our regret. And it is absolutely not the same as refusing to work on things that need to be done for the good of the team as a whole or the success of a larger project.
There's a nugget of truth here, but it's an asset, not a liability: We do try to hire independent thinkers who will see a problem and run with it rather than waiting for a manager to tell them what to do. This is an explicitly encouraged behavior pattern, not something we're stuck with to our regret. And it is absolutely not the same as refusing to work on things that need to be done for the good of the team as a whole or the success of a larger project.
I think one sentence in the article is pretty illustrative of the huge gap between reality and the author's assumptions about what motivates a lot of Facebook engineers: "You better not bore them because its[sic] you versus Maui." This is basically a restatement of the idea, "You put up with this awful 'work' stuff only until the moment you can stop it, at which point you've won and can sit around doing nothing for the rest of your life." Whereas in reality, a lot of us actually enjoy the job -- even when it involves grunt work, as engineering often does -- and are thrilled to come to the office every day and do stuff that touches the lives of a sizable fraction of the human race.
Finally, it's not clear to me why, as this article and others seem to imply, Facebook should be expected to be completely immune from Silicon Valley's job mobility. People in the valley job-hop all the time; it is an integral part of the area's culture, and arguably a big part of the reason the valley has remained the world's top tech center for such a long time. It's not too far from the truth to say that if you have a continuous stint of greater than four or five years on your resume, it'll be regarded with a little bit of suspicion by subsequent employers. So the notion that every time three employees leave in the same week, it's worthy of a doom-and-gloom article is a bit laughable. Though I guess it drives blog traffic which is what really counts.
Finally, it's not clear to me why, as this article and others seem to imply, Facebook should be expected to be completely immune from Silicon Valley's job mobility. People in the valley job-hop all the time; it is an integral part of the area's culture, and arguably a big part of the reason the valley has remained the world's top tech center for such a long time. It's not too far from the truth to say that if you have a continuous stint of greater than four or five years on your resume, it'll be regarded with a little bit of suspicion by subsequent employers. So the notion that every time three employees leave in the same week, it's worthy of a doom-and-gloom article is a bit laughable. Though I guess it drives blog traffic which is what really counts.
The piece is not just shoddy reporting, but it is unclear to me why Nicholas Carlson is reporting on something involving job functions he has no experience or understanding about.
Specifically, the problem with the article is that it conflates "[idiot] middle managers" and "product managers," which are two different things. A middle manager has people reporting to them, while a product manager manages a product, and often doesn't have anyone reporting to them. They have to just try to convince engineers and other people to do what they say via persuasion and argument. Product managers aren't "middle management."
During my time, it was pretty hard to be a product manager. Engineers did what they wanted, and many product decisions were made by Zuck. My sources[1] tell me that the product organization has nowadays succeeded in implementing a "product development process" that has given them more control over engineers. If this is true, it may be contributing to engineer dissatisfaction.
As for "idiot middle managers," I have to say that if you're a good manager, Facebook engineers are perfectly easy to manage. If you're not, you get what you deserve. I worked in management at Facebook for a number of years (middle management, even) and found the engineers there perfectly easy to manage.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar