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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
