[sovietmudkipz]

Serious question: in general, does being a manager make you more likely to get fired or less? Heuristically I think "more likely" because why fire the front line workers doing the work when you can fire middle managers. However; I'm sure this thinking is missing quite a few important details.

Maybe having direct access to work politics provides an advantage? Maybe a manager is able to sacrifice others to avoid being fired themselves? Maybe taking credit and offloading blame is the name of the game?

Thanks in advance for any consideration of this question!

[sparky_]

I'm not the person you originally replied to, but just to give a bit of perspective as an EM myself: I think this depends a lot on the person and the team. One part of the gig is just being an effective project manager, and those skills are somewhat more objectively measured.

Much more subtle is the relationship you have with the team you're leading. If you have a culture/vibe of mutual trust and respect, and know when the manager helps ICs versus when ICs help the manager, then the line is blurred, and the team kind of sinks or swims together. You're all playing on the same team, and your role is to some extent a metaphor of the team/product as a whole. What is a lead singer without a band, or vise versa?

If you foster an adversarial relationship, or an overly top-down, bossy kind of vibe, that schism between you and your team can devolve into something that won't withstand the downturns. Bad managers and situations lead to finger pointing and nastiness. Who gets canned in that scenario? Depends on the company and the relationship each person has with the folks up the ladder. But before this kind of situation has come to pass, there should have been some red flags raised. As a manager, if you don't/can't get along with your team, you should find a different team to manage, because you can't ever be effective without their support.

[siva7]

Firing (due poor economics) is usually the result of bad management. A healthy company won’t have any need to fire an IC or manager, at least not because of economical reasons. I‘ve been in extremely stable companies (+500 employees) where no one has been fired for decades. People usually just quit when they don’t see career advancement or better opportunities. No need for an Up-or-out or bottom-10% strategy you sometimes see in big consultancies to have a healthy workforce.

[irrational]

I've survived many rounds of layoffs as long as I have (decades) by refusing all attempts to move me into management. It is always the middle managers that get the boot during layoffs. I have almost never seen developers get laid off (at least not as part of mass layoffs, usually they are laid off because they are plain bad).

[playcache]

You have experienced a certain amount of luck though. I have seen hugely talented teams get fired over a company pivot in direction. The last lot where I knew someone personally , were the WASM folks at mozilla.

[vanusa]

Usually they are laid off because they are plain bad

Or because their managers are bad, or the company is rife with politics.

[irrational]

Not in my experience. The most recent one was a developer who joined every standup from the ski slopes, when asked to work on a particular task responded with "I'd rather not work on that, can you give me something easier?", and failed to ever actually work on anything. We still had to go through the whole drawn out process of working on a performance improvement plan with them. They simply didn't care.

[vanusa]

I don't dispute the underperfomers are the typical case. But I've seen plenty of glaring exceptions. The point is: things aren't always what they seem. And we can't automatically assume that the people who make these decisions are making the right decisions, or even know what's happening under their noses.

BTW if they put the guy on PIP then that basically means they were in the process of firing him already. So if they called it a "layoff" that was for cosmetic purposes.

[romanhn]

As an (ex)EM, I don't think the likelihood of a first-level manager getting fired is all that different. What is different is the timeline - it takes longer to see whether the manager is underperforming (vs helping the team get out of a rough patch). There's also the consideration that a manager can at best influence their team's outcomes, while being fully accountable for them. This gets worse as you climb up the ladder, as the influencing gets more and more tenuous, while accountability only grows. The stress of this should not be underestimated by folks considering a move into management.

[nostrademons]

It's mixed and depends a lot on the specifics of the situation. I'd say that business-critical engineers (i.e. ones who have deep knowledge of a profit-center codebase) have more job security than non-business-critical managers (i.e. those who run "nice to have" projects), but business-critical managers have more job security than business-critical engineers and non-business-critical managers have more security than non-business-critical engineers, particularly senior ones.

If you're a CEO planning a layoff, your #1 priority is to minimize disruption to the organization. The worst employee is one who is still on the payroll but demoralized; hopelessness is contagious, so not only are they probably not productive themselves, but they make everyone around them unproductive. If you lay off a good manager, they're gone, but you've also demoralized all their reports. You get the same effect if you lay off a core engineer, one with deep knowledge of the codebase that everyone goes to for questions. However, you can lay off a garden variety IC, one that keeps to themselves and just does their job, without any serious repercussions to the org. And you can lay off a whole division without serious repercussions for the rest of the org, because everybody who knew them will no longer be there. This is why many companies try to structure layoffs as "We are exiting this line of business, and that is why the people who worked there are no longer with us."

The one big exception is executives, who usually have less job security than either ICs or managers. I've heard this as a reason why executive salaries are so high; few qualified people will take the job without the knowledge that they'll get F-U money in 2-3 years, because there's a decent chance they'll be fired and unhireable by then. This also fits into the framework above: typically, when an executive gets fired, it's because the business they lead is underperforming and the staff is already demoralized. At this point you lose nothing by getting rid of the executive in charge, because everyone wants to see him gone anyway.

The same logic applies to bad managers; you can and should fire these quickly, because they demoralize all of their reports.

It occurred to me recently that this may be why we have layoffs at all. The fairest approach, and one that maximizes general welfare, is to give everyone an equal pay cut when the company's revenues go down. The problem is that this demoralizes everyone. The good people will leave anyway, while the bad people will sit and do nothing useful while bleeding the company dry of the rest of its cash. So instead, companies create much greater pain across a smaller number of people, and then ensure that the people most affected are no longer with the company so they don't affect overall company morale. The ones left behind are more inclined to think of themselves as lucky, or skilled, or grateful they weren't the ones canned, which are all positives for performance.