There are different flavors of not wanting to be a manager.
The good kind Jobs refers to are people who see the necessity and that no one is doing it (or doing it well). They aren't the kind of people who don't understand people and fall into the trap of simply controlling and micro-managing people.
Let me give you an example of the bad kind. Google's SWE ladder goes all the say from L3 (new grad) to L9 (ignoring exceptions like Google Fellow and execs). There is an expectation of growth from L3 to L5 (Senior SWE). There is a lot of reward if you can get promoted to L6 (Staff SWE) but it is incredibly difficult. It requires a lot of luck (eg being on the right project that doesn't get cancelled). Getting to L6 now is much harder than it was 10-15 years ago.
One of the things Ruth Porat did when she came in was to control costs by reducing the promotion target percentage because it wasn't visible to people (there was a leaked memo). All promo candidates go to committee and effectively get stack ranked across committees. There is a quota ("target percentage") of who gets promoted. This creates a backlog and raises the bar for getting promoted. It gives more time for your impact to dissipate or your project to get cancelled (which was your promotion case).
Compare this to getting promoted as a manager. Your manager level (M0 to M2, which is the same level as L5 to L7) is effectively a function of your head count with the added requirement that M2 requires you to have managers as reports. So if you're an M0 (which is rare), getting to M1 is typically as easy as getting to 10-15 reports (as long as you don't screw up so badly).
So there is a breed of SWEs that bridge these worlds. They're half an IC and half an EM in the hopes that this gets them over the line.
In my experience, these managers were generally the absolute worst. They had no interest in ever being a amanager and were just ticking a box for an L6 promotion case. Career development tended to be zero. Everything was seen through the lens of what helped them get promoted. If that means throwing someone under the bus, so be it.
I think one of the best things Facebook did was they effectively didn't allow this. Having reports as an IC generally wasn't allowed. Being an L5 with reports was mostly not allowed. I mean there were some exceptions in some orgs and for some people but it was exceedingly rare. You'd see people ask "why can't I be a manager at L5?" and you heavily suspected the main motivator for this question was an inability to get promoted to L6 as a SWE.
The good kind Jobs refers to are people who see the necessity and that no one is doing it (or doing it well). They aren't the kind of people who don't understand people and fall into the trap of simply controlling and micro-managing people.
Let me give you an example of the bad kind. Google's SWE ladder goes all the say from L3 (new grad) to L9 (ignoring exceptions like Google Fellow and execs). There is an expectation of growth from L3 to L5 (Senior SWE). There is a lot of reward if you can get promoted to L6 (Staff SWE) but it is incredibly difficult. It requires a lot of luck (eg being on the right project that doesn't get cancelled). Getting to L6 now is much harder than it was 10-15 years ago.
One of the things Ruth Porat did when she came in was to control costs by reducing the promotion target percentage because it wasn't visible to people (there was a leaked memo). All promo candidates go to committee and effectively get stack ranked across committees. There is a quota ("target percentage") of who gets promoted. This creates a backlog and raises the bar for getting promoted. It gives more time for your impact to dissipate or your project to get cancelled (which was your promotion case).
Compare this to getting promoted as a manager. Your manager level (M0 to M2, which is the same level as L5 to L7) is effectively a function of your head count with the added requirement that M2 requires you to have managers as reports. So if you're an M0 (which is rare), getting to M1 is typically as easy as getting to 10-15 reports (as long as you don't screw up so badly).
So there is a breed of SWEs that bridge these worlds. They're half an IC and half an EM in the hopes that this gets them over the line.
In my experience, these managers were generally the absolute worst. They had no interest in ever being a amanager and were just ticking a box for an L6 promotion case. Career development tended to be zero. Everything was seen through the lens of what helped them get promoted. If that means throwing someone under the bus, so be it.
I think one of the best things Facebook did was they effectively didn't allow this. Having reports as an IC generally wasn't allowed. Being an L5 with reports was mostly not allowed. I mean there were some exceptions in some orgs and for some people but it was exceedingly rare. You'd see people ask "why can't I be a manager at L5?" and you heavily suspected the main motivator for this question was an inability to get promoted to L6 as a SWE.