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Dave Anderson Profile picture
@scarletinked
Dec 6 • 9 tweets • 2 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
As a Director at Amazon, I repeatedly saw that big tech career incentives basically guarantee cycles of too much growth, and then layoffs. I just had someone email me, and say that they're worried about their career as a development manager.

🧵
They only had 6 engineers reporting to them, but all their peers had more. Their manager agreed that it might look bad to their leadership team if they couldn't find more headcount for this person to manage. I asked how they were delivering on their projects.
Yes, they'd delivered on multiple important projects. Did they make visible mistakes? No. Did they have trouble earning trust with peers? No. What was their performance issue? Literally, that their team was smaller than their peers.
I know this for a fact: If you ask a random HR Partner if a person is ready for promotion to Director, do you know what they're going to ask first? "How many people are reporting to them?" This system is broken.
A level 6 manager with 20 reports is almost guaranteed a level 7 promotion. A level 6 manager with 8 reports cannot be promoted to level 7. This continues through every level. I was given explicit numbers of headcount I needed to get my promotion approved as a Director.
That number is almost always in the first line or two of any promotion document for managers. When the *most influential* metric available for a manager is "number of people working for them", it means that the strongest incentive for those managers is finding more headcount.
That might be through political infighting (steal someone's organization), pretending a project needs more headcount than it does, requesting / approving a project simply because it gets more headcount allocated to an organization, and so on.
The anti-incentives for cancelling a project are massive. Early in my career, I suggested a few times that my organization could cancel a project as it had low ROI. I quickly learned that it was hugely counterproductive to career growth.
To read more about big tech culture, and how it incentivizes growth (and inevitable layoffs in the future), read on!

scarletink.com/p/how-companie…

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More from @scarletinked

Dave Anderson Profile picture
Oct 23
Managers should prioritize resiliency in teams, just like you prioritize resiliency in software.

For example, if the manager always assigns tasks, they're a bottleneck. If employees self-choose tasks, everyone can operate independently.

🧵
If a manager unblocks their team members by talking to their peer teams, that's helpful in the short run.

But the manager is again the bottleneck. If employees are taught how to unblock themselves, they can operate independently.

What it comes down to is a tradeoff.
That independence vs helping tradeoff seems fairly simple. Except it's hard for the manager.

If the manager "helps" by becoming a bottleneck, they're often thanked by their team. They feel and look so useful!

Oddly enough, it can feel and look good to be a bottleneck.
Read 5 tweets
Dave Anderson Profile picture
Oct 5
It's easier to blame others for not giving you an opportunity, rather than recognize that you had the opportunity all along.

I was once talking to an engineer at Amazon, who wanted to move to my team. I asked her why, because I like to know what motivates people.
She said, “I'm an SDE-2, and there aren't any SDE-3 promotion opportunities on my team. We don't have any SDE-3's here because our work is not complex enough.”
For context, SDE-2 is the first promotion step above college hire, and SDE-3 is a senior software engineering position. In general, a SDE-2 works on a team, and an SDE-3 leads a team from an engineering perspective.
Read 10 tweets
Dave Anderson Profile picture
May 24
I've loved this adventure of moving from Technology Leader to Newsletter Author. I'm so privileged to have this opportunity.

Since I just figured out how to download some analytics, I thought it'd be fun to share the Top 10 Posts which drove the most new paid subscribers.

👉
10. A Couple Decades of Unlearning — Lessons on the Path to Director

Over the couple of decades of my career, I've unlearned quite a few things. I decided to share some beliefs I've since decided were wrong.

scarletink.com/couple-decades…
9. 12 Things I Learned in Big Tech

A list of 12 things which stood out to me as things I didn't originally understand before working at big tech.

scarletink.com/12-things-i-le…
Read 11 tweets
Dave Anderson Profile picture
May 22
What do managers do with all their time?

I remember having a skip-level meeting once with a junior engineer, while I was Senior Manager (before my promotion). The engineer, innocently, asks what I do.

"Since engineers do all the work, what do managers do?"

Fair question.

🧵
Considering I was in the middle of some unfortunate 10+ hour days, it seemed like a particularly funny question to ask me at the time.

And it's hard to answer. A manager's job (particularly as they get more senior), is so random.

But there are some consistent parts to it.
People - Issues between folks, and attention for great and poor performers. People take time.

Product - You need to understand what you're building, and why.

Tech - Your existing and new tech needs to be solid.

Project - Everything needs to get done, and properly communicated.
Read 4 tweets
Dave Anderson Profile picture
Apr 24
In your career, you'll build some behaviors, and they'll serve you well forever.

Other behaviors may serve you well earlier in your career, but will limit you later.

What's an example of these behaviors?

🧵
Making quick, independent decisions.

As an IC (individual contributor), I found that our team could grind to a stop if our manager didn't make decisions quickly enough. It was one reason I wanted to move into management.

As a manager, I didn't have to put up with that nonsense.
Once I was a manager, I realized that it was a career advantage for me to make decisions quickly. In fact, the quicker, the better.

I learned to recognize open questions as negatives for my team, and I'd aggressively make the decisions as quickly as possible.
Read 7 tweets
Dave Anderson Profile picture
Apr 14
Amazon expects a lot out of their engineer managers.

They expect them to run projects, mentor employees, design systems, architect platforms, manage operations, communicate with customers, and evolve products.

But they don't expect them to code.

🧵
Many people (including Twitter's owner) believe otherwise. They say that an engineering manager can't do the job well if they're not an active and skilled individual contributor.

I'll explain why a manager shouldn't code, and other things they should be doing with their time.
How you build something is rarely how you fail.

The worry is that things will go badly if the manager is not monitoring the code the team is writing.

Except that code isn't how projects fail. Projects fail due to bad product or scheduling.

The manager should focus on those.
Read 8 tweets

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