[itronitron]

A better approach is to have separate career tracks for 'people' managers and 'project' managers.

People managers do the performance evaluations and various HR administrative tasks (signing time cards, hiring, firing, etc.) but they rely on feedback from their group which are both individual contributors and project managers.

Project managers lead the projects and have to select/attract the right combination of individual contributors to their project if they want it to succeed.

A project that 'gets more management' will usually have to justify the addition of PMs from a cost-benefit perspective. And a project that is overburdened with management types will usually see the ICs migrate to other projects in order to improve their impact.

All this happens organically, so individual contributors are empowered instead of being disenfranchised through organizational changes.

[marcinzm]

That sounds like basically matrix management which has many well documented issues. The biggest one in my experience is that the people managers need to be themselves judged on some rubric. If that rubric is success of projects then it tangentially aligns with business goals. If it's something else or they don't have power over projects then they are encouraged to play constant politics.

[itronitron]

The general rubric should be that their group is performing well. Depending on the organization that could mean a number of different things.

>> If it's something else or they don't have power over projects then they are encouraged to play constant politics.

Why would they need to play constant politics if they don't have power over projects? Not everyone is motivated by the same things.

[marcinzm]

> Why would they need to play constant politics if they don't have power over projects? Not everyone is motivated by the same things.

They do have power over the projects. Being able to PIP someone is power over everything that person does including which projects they work on. Including which projects no one works on. Except it's not their direct power which means to leverage it they need to play politics. Adding layers doesn't remove that power but simply increases the amount of politics they play to make up for it.

[itronitron]

The goal with the matrix management is to distribute the risk. If your people manager puts you on a PIP then at least your project managers will have some ability to push back on that.

But there is no good reason for the People manager to care anything about what projects have people working on them. If they start to care about which projects are successful instead of all projects are successful then they're not a good fit for the job. And yes I have experienced that, as well as it's opposite.

[pas]

and this leads to 4 engineers and 6 managers sitting in a meeting, and nobody actually being responsible for anything.

no, of course, there's a lot of value in providing escalation/descalation/rehoming processes, and dedicated ways for org-wide feedback on people's and projects' impact, but people are not just three orthonormal roles on top of each other in a trenchcoat, if there's not clear hierarchy then - as others pointed out - the informal chaos takes over (because it's the human default)