A manager’s job, fundamentally, is to ensure that their reports are delivering appropriate value to the company, so the most direct measure of a manager’s performance is the performance of the ICs that report to them (possibly indirectly). If you’re going actually to use this, however, you need a way to fairly evaluate the performance of ICs that doesn’t rely on input from their management chain which is itself a hard problem.
Why would you need to decouple that to evaluate managers? TBF at manager level this can be a rather simple and robust “how did the org subtree rooted at this person fare at contributing to the stated business objectives?” Along team performance, this depends on staffing matching the expectations. Negotiating which are core responsibilities of a manager.
Seems much easier than evaluating ICs.
If a manager’s performance evaluation is based primarily on their reports’ evaluations, then there’s a conflict of interest: The manager is incentivized to inflate their reports’ evaluations because doing so directly improves their own evaluation.
> A manager’s job, fundamentally, is to ensure that their reports are delivering appropriate value to the company, so the most direct measure of a manager’s performance is the performance of the ICs that report to them (possibly indirectly).
Now, you're arguing that `sum(evaluate(impact) for each IC)` is absurdly bad. Which it is, because you're compounding errors in individual evaluations. These are hard to do, because you're trying to distribute team's achievements between contributions from particular people. I say that `evaluate(sum(impact for each IC))` is easy and robust. In fact simpler than an evaluation for a single IC, because you don't have to distribute anything and a lot of things that are external distractions for ICs fall into responsibility of managers.
No, I’m not. I’m arguing that it’s unwise to trust someone to do an evaluation who has a personal stake in the result of that evaluation.
Looking at how well a team works together to advance company goals is an important factor in any evaluation system, but using that as the only factor in a manager’s evaluation is as shortsighted as evaluating a software engineer solely on how many LOC they produced.
In practice, overall team performance should be a factor in IC evaluations as it’s reflective of various hard-to-quantify properties of the team members. It should also be a somewhat larger factor in a manager’s evaluation, with the weight between IC and team performance shifting from mostly-IC at the bottom of the hierarchy to mostly-team at the C-suite level.
My concern with this is: How do you correct for luck/easy tasks?
It’s hard to compare the performance of departments unless you have been inside and seen the challenges they’ve been facing.
The problem is that often you have to collaborate a lot in these companies - you need to use services or libraries written by another team, for example. "Fittest" really makes no sense, because almost no one has a PnL sheet broken out by team like wall street.
That said, not all companies (Apple, Amazon) had super friendly cultures. If you maintain a core service at amazon, for example, you can expect to constantly have every dependents' roadmap shoved at you all year as it is.
Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and NVIDIA have been huge on personnel growth.
Apple has quite famously been very stingy in growth that way.
On the flip side it meant they had fewer layoffs, if any, when everyone else was recalibrating with mass layoffs.
It's not that Apple was shrewder than others - it's just that since it is primarily a hardware business, Apples "Covid boom" was far smaller than the rest (online services). Meta, Amazon and Microsoft had massive growth due everyone being at home all the time (Nvidia took advantage of from supply-chain restrictions to increase margins, and non-covid-related crypto boom)
This is pretty much any company over a certain size.
This is how I read the article. This move is basically: the people already at the top removing the ladder behind them so fewer people can climb it. I wonder if the new criteria will be re-applied to those senior execs who already got through before the door closed.
It's too hard to actually measure performance, so most managers are just horribly incompetent parasites
On the other hand, it's already difficult to retain talent, and a single good manager can be transformational for a team. Between this and the RTO shenanigans — both of which seem to be widespread across the tech industry these days — it's tough to see why talented managers would stay, let alone put in hard work.
Overall, it feels like an incomplete solution. If we as an industry are going to move away from headcount as a professional growth metric, we need to have some other, more direct way of measuring the business impact a manager delivers so we can reward that.
Standing up and telling a roomful of high-leverage hires that their career trajectories are frozen for 2-3 years is probably not a winning strategy by itself. If I were a hungry startup founder, I'd read this as an invitation to ramp up recruiting.