Meta to Ask Many Managers to Become Individual Contributors or Leave

Re:Meta to Ask Many Managers to Become Individual Contributo... by zabzonk on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @04:00PM (#34699554)

what does TLM mean? i wish that all you folks out there would understand that nobody outside your bubble knows what these daft abbreviations stands for, much less mean.

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Re:Meta to Ask Many Managers to Become Individual Contributo... by wrigby on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @04:11PM (#34699723)

TLM (at Facebook) stands for Tech-Lead Manager - it’s a hybrid role, with engineering duties and people management duties.

From what I remember, it wasn’t intended as a long-term position, but was used in stop-gap circumstances (manager quits, tech lead temporarily takes on some people management duties) or for when an engineer was considering transitioning to the management track.

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Re:Meta to Ask Many Managers to Become Individual Contributo... by arcticbull on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @05:53PM (#34701043)

Yeah, it's an "M0" role. Generally folks who transition from senior engineer into management become TLMs. Staff engineers transition to "M1" or a full-fledged manager.

TLMs still have individual contributor responsibilities. M1s don't. The reason for that is generally that (especially junior) ICs aren't likely to push back against poor technical decisions knowing that the person they're pushing back against is also in charge of their rating. This feels quite fair based on my experience and as such I'm quite skeptical about TLMs in general.

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Re:Meta to Ask Many Managers to Become Individual Contributo... by jhj on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @06:33PM (#34701569)

> Yeah, it's an "M0" role.

Not true, TLMs can be D1+ level too at FB/Meta. Higher level TLMs more often than not tend to occur in more research-oriented organizations though (where the TLM is effectively a "principal investigator" type for some research area).

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Re:Meta to Ask Many Managers to Become Individual Contributo... by sbrother on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @08:20PM (#34702760)

Oh that’s interesting; I haven’t heard of that at Google. Makes sense though as it maps well to a PI role in a large research org.

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Re:Meta to Ask Many Managers to Become Individual Contributo... by LambdaComplex on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @04:07PM (#34699657)

Tech Lead Manager is my guess. I'm familiar with the term "tech lead," at least.

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Re:Meta to Ask Many Managers to Become Individual Contributo... by fferen on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @04:29PM (#34699971)

Transfer length method :)

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Re:Meta to Ask Many Managers to Become Individual Contributo... by rocketbop on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @04:50PM (#34700287)

Too little motivation?

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Re:Meta to Ask Many Managers to Become Individual Contributo... by tchalla on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @05:56PM (#34701091)

It’s honestly getting out of hand. It’s almost as if one requires a dictionary to communicate these days. Even though I know these abbreviations it’s just off putting.

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Re:Meta to Ask Many Managers to Become Individual Contributo... by izacus on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @06:11PM (#34701293)

Ever heard of Google?

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