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The Google Caste System
managedcode writes "Google doesn't like to do things traditionally. Right from their IPO, when they dumped Goldman Sachs for secretly trying to deal with their big investor, Kleiner Perkins. Business Week covers the Google Caste System, 'in which business types are second-class citizens to Google's valued code jockeys [..] They deem the corporate development team as underpowered in the company, with engineers and product managers tending to carry more clout than salesmen and dealmakers.' At last a company is shouting at the top of it's voice, engineers make the world."
I wouldn't say the executives are in control... more like, they decide between the many innovations that the engineers provide as future directions.
This is how it should be. Engineers don't want to make those decisions... they just want to make sure that the options are the best versions of the options they can be.
So to sum up a summary; Executives execute decisions based on the available options given to them by producers, in this case software engineers, whom decide which solutions or innovations they will champion and make viable (when they are given the power to do so). Executives get to balance business opportunities with what technology is mature enough to take to the market in a real way. Engineers get to balance technology opportunities with what is viable as a mature business solution they can bring to market.
This is how it should be. Very rarely is this a reality... Google seems to do well with trying out potential technologies and discovering viable business opportunities along the way.
Long live executives who are smart enough to let engineers develop solutions in search of a problem and then discover a way to market them... Long live engineers smart enough to propose products in search of a user and then discover a way to realize them.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I always hated selling stuff because more often than not one must compromise moral standing to have the product appeal to and compensate for the insecurities and needs of the potential buyer. That is not to say that we are not good at selling things, or even being "face", it just goes to show that some of us perfer to sleep at night and look at ourselves in the mirror without disgust; hence the nature of Open Source. I know, I know, without salesmen we wouldn't be the great company we are. Blah blah.
It has to kick ass working there with that kind of weight. If I had a dollar for every time I had to live up to the mouth of some lying sales rep I'd have enough to buy myself one of those impossible systems I've built, and I only put up with that shit for a few months. But in the end it all boils down to me staring the salesman in the face saying, "If you are so fucking smart why don't you do it yourself?". I never got an answer back when I would ask. In fact, I usually got to take the rest of the day off.
The answer must be clear. Code monkeys are just that, but salesmen are a true phenomenon. I can only surmise that liars are very hard to come by these days and those who actually make the world go 'round are a dime a dozen. A true testament as to why we as a civilization are still around.
You are about to give someone a piece of your mind, something which you can ill afford...
...that the caste system has done for the Indian economy (though I jest---see my last paragraph)!
In fact, if you read TFA, you'll find that the author writes of Google's 'caste system' in negative tones (unsuprising, given that the article is from Business Week!). Western culture may not be perfect, but one real advantage it has over traditional subcontinental culture is that it has dispensed with this particular anachronism. At any rate, the point the article makes is that people with book smarts are typically terrible at running businesses. If you really want to feel superior, then feel superior because you have the freedom to indulge your intellectual curiosity, and not because you're running the show. In my opinion, intellectuals don't need to feel as though they are 'better' than business people. It is just that we find joy in different ways.
Further, if you really want to make a comparision with the Indian caste system, there are two fundamental differences with the Google approach:
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
Reading between the lines, it sounds like Google has caught onto the standard tactics used by executives in their "Deal Making". That is, making whatever deal that gives them the best kickback, as long as they're supplied with a Powerpoint deck good enough to lend plausible deniability.
I suspect this is just sour grapes on the part of executives who were called on the carpet for this type of behavior, especially since that the guy interviewed in the article seemed shocked and amazed that he was asked to demonstrate his acumen prior to being hired.
Having seen my share of "Strategic Initiatives" (code for: we're going to rip out a working system to replace it with a multimillion dollar "solution" barely works, requiring 10x the hardware and manpower to operate, and no, we aren't open to feedback from the technical staff) over the course of my career only convines me further that this is what's going on. Incorporating sanity checks by technical types sounds more to me like removing a caste system (with the suits as Brahmins) rather than creating one.
And without a caste system, why should the suits be exempt from requirements of competence and integrity?
This is probably true. After all, if everybody who read this article decided to actually have a pair and start a business, it would suddenly make it much harder to actually start a business at all. Right now is a great time to do a lean and mean startup, you can literally start an internet application company with very little capital, just enough to run and connect servers.
However, what if everyone who ends up chaining themselves to their desk tomorrow instead stayed home and started dedicating themselves to some internet application that they cooked up over the weekend? Well, so many of them would fail, because many of them would be overlapping ideas, that the conventional wisdom would quickly swing the other way, and no one would want to start a business anymore.
The moral of the story? Because right now is a great time to start a business, right now is a bad time to start a business. Wait until it is a bad (in peoples' perceptions) time to start a business, and then you'll be golden.
-decatur
The US always had a caste system, as had India, the difference is in the situation with Google, it seems to actually be a meritocracy. I never thought I'd see a merit based corporate environment but Google may be one of the first.
Usually its always a caste based environment where elite well connected white males have meetings with their friends to decide the fate of your business or your job, while at the same time giving themselves a raise and reducing your salary.
Google on the other hand is going about this in a completely different way, the idea is good, lets see how far Google can take it. On the other hand, we should not let Google be the last corporation like this, we should use the Google model in future businesses. The model seems to work, its profitable, and its not based on abusing workers. As much as Americans complain about Chinese sweatshops, lately it seems child labor and sweatshops are a good idea for the US economy, its better to have the sweatshops than the prisons.
Whether it should be or not is somewhat irrelevant. It's the results that will get people to buy into it. It's the results that will cause a wave of change. There's no denying that the world is watching Google. And anything they succeed at will likely be mimicked by others. (Trouble is, most mimickers don't understand Google's cultural foundation and that mere mimickery will simply fail.)
And yes, I wouldn't think most engineers would want "control" over the company. The good ones don't seem to have much in the way of ego. But it's hard to say really... I don't know if that's true of Google or not -- that the makers and designers don't have control over where the company is going. I mean have you noticed that Google isn't only in just one or two directions? It's moving like an amoeba. More precisely, it's growing like an amoeba. Pretty smart if you think about it. Simply let the good projects succeed on their own merit and the bad ones die quietly. "Embarassment" and ego do not appear to be factors in Google's progress. Again, as you say, "how it should be." If it's successful, let's just see if the egos of other companies will relinquish their importance to development.
Think about TV. Who runs things, the people selling air time for commercials or the station manager who chooses what shows appear and what the format is when the network isn't forcing its agenda? Or even at network level, what directs them - people who sell ads or creative people who think their program could be a hit?
From what I can tell, this example doesn't apply. The Ad people are the ones who run the company when it comes to TV. The quality of programming continues to decline to pandering for whatever will get the most viewship, becuase more viewers means more eyes at commercial break and higher rates commanded for ads in that timeslot. When a major sponsor of a show doesn't like the political/ethical fork a show's storyline takes, does the network tell the writers to edit the script? Or the sponsor to live with the story or find another show?
For insight into the correct answers, check out such movies as The Insider and the currently playing Good Night, and Good Luck .
No, Ballmer wasn't trying to attract talent. His whole point was that it was 3rd-party developers who are Microsoft's most important asset. Why is Windows so popular? Because there are like a million applications for it. VC is a platform for commercial developers; VB is a platform for in-house developers; IIS/ASP is a platform for web developers; Office is even a development platform! As a matter of fact, VB became so popular because of the whole cottage industry of custom controls for it.
Obviously MS needs talented developers, but they *ship* software. No product goes out the door without documentation, tech support, packaging, translation into various languages. All of that requires an army of additional people several times the size of the developer teams.
Google doesn't actually ship products (aside from the local search engine boxes). Their software all runs on their own servers (aside from a few things like the toolbar, the Gmail notifier, and Earth). They don't write user manuals, and tech support is nonexistent. For Google, releasing a new product takes nothing more than making a link to it on their web site. It doesn't really cost anything, so it's not really a business decision, so why not let the developers decide these things?
To summarize, Google really is mostly run by developers, while it's not really possible with Microsoft. In some cases, like the NT kernel, developers (i.e. Dave Cutler) wield an iron fist; but Windows is 100 times bigger than the kernel itself and needs executive management.
Don't forget, though, that the founders of Google (Larry & Sergei) and MS (BillG) started out as developers of their original products. Contrast this with most other computer companies that are run by business people who see their engineers merely as labor.
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I like this bill joy quote from the unix haters handboox: "Xerox PARC was a great environment because they had great people, enough money to build real systems, and management that protected them from management."
This idea of a caste system at google sounds more to me like that, where nurturing development is the primary deal - giving developers a healthy environment and keeping irrelevant crap out of their hair. Seems smart to me. But caste system? I'd imagine that no one wants their benefits coordinator to feel like they aren't doing an important job - the marketing/sales initiative doesn't seem ignored to me, but they're pretty smart about leveraging the nature of the beast to no be too obtrusive about it. Clearly the management over the aren't a bunch of drooling morons, they're doing something right and the product that gets deployed is great....
"But perhaps more compelling to Google is AOL's access to reams of content owned by sister companies such as Time Inc. and cable channel HBO."
So if Time-Warner sells off AOL, doesn't that mean that AOL won't have any more access to TW-owned content than anybody else?
Remember when AOL was so overvalued that it could buy TW instead of the other way around? And then Wall Street was going on about how the monopoly on accessing TW content via the web would cause millions to flock to AOL to get their online Elmer Fudd fix? And then that didn't exactly happen and they took AOL out of the parent company name? Maybe they're so desperate to get rid of AOL that they're willing to throw Bugs Bunny and Wolf Blitzer in to sweeten the deal.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
This article is far from flattering towards Google. In some ways it is so feline that it's hard to work out where Business Week is coming from. It quotes bankers who suggest that "Googlers" are arrogant brats who are more likely to complain about the quality of the Google canteen's omelettes than they are do do hard work and hard deals.
I guess what one senses here is anger. The business establishment doesn't understand Google, hence this dismissal of anyone who isn't a numbers man as a mere "engineer". And, perhaps, there are a lot of investment houses out there playing a double game. They know what Google is currently where the money is, but they also have a burning desire to get revenge for the way Google humiliated them in its Dutch-auction style of IPO.
Google is going to have to be very, very careful with this lot. Nothing would please some of these bankers more than to make a few billion out of Google in some crock-of-shit deal before delivering them to the trashcan with "Don't ever cross Wall Street" stencilled on their brow.
Interestingly, the article doesn't mention Apple which has been a poster child in several eras now. Apple is run by, arguably, one of the world's greatest salesmen, and yet Apple also displays engineering and design excellence that's taken them to the top of the tree. I guess such marriages of engineering and business are possible, though very rare. Google has quite a challenge ahead of it.
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Leave it to something like Business week to totally miss the point of Google's philosophy, and leave it to Slashdot to totally miss the point of an article.
About 1/7 of the article is about the second-class status of marketers, and almost all of the rest is trying to figure out why Google won't spend all of their money *right now*! Such a huge pile of money even seems to cloud the judgement of writers at business week. Near the beginning they are suggesting that it is bad that everyone and their mothers are trying to sell the next cool thing to Google, then a couple of paragraphs later it warns that Google might drop like Yahoo or crater like DoubleClick because it hasn't spent its "ephemeral" money.
I'm not even remotely surprised that Business Week would get all squishy and sympathetic to all the Marketing Bastards and their Marketing Bullshit who keep banging thier heads against the wall that separates them from all of that filthy Google luchre. When Google asked (Google Startup Day) for VCs/marketers to turn in a spreadsheet that condensed a steaming pile of vapor and marketing speak into an actual assesment of a company and its strengths and weaknesses, they got all snippy like some kind of beta male in a monkey troop. Somehow, they thought that it was a good thing for Google to have to sift through the crap and spin and promises to find out what had potential and what didn't. This venture capitalist accused Google of trying to get out of doing "homework"! Some poor banker couldn't decide if Google's hiring process was rigid or chaotic, and got all pissed that he couldn't pass a "pop quiz". Here's a hint: if you can't combine knowledge about the current state of the market and significant players in it with a given amount of specific information about an accquisition, YOU DON'T DESERVE THE FARKING JOB! Life *is* a pop quiz. I sure as hell couldn't do that, but I'm not trying to help Google buy and sell businesses! The point is that whoever is making these decisions at Google is doing a decent job of it, and isn't spending wherever good marketers push. Google hasn't come out with the Beta for Google Everything yet, and the head of corporate development for Google conceded that there would be areas for other software companies to fill demand!
I swear, I don't know which is worse: the premise that a successful business can't be second fiddle in any given area, or the idea that businesses, like horny teenagers, should merge because everyone else is doing it.
Meh. If the time is right for *you* then it's time to start a business. There was this old gas station where I went to school. Outside was a sign that said "since 1936" give or take a year. I always used to think, "Wow, that guy opened up a business during the Great Depression, and it's still doing well". OTOH, a lot of companies that were founded during the earlier go-go "robber barron" era of the late 19th century came through the Depression, and are still with us in some form. I think you and your own personal circumstances, talents, and abilities are the biggest factors, not the general mood. Also, let's face it--there is a lot of chance involved. We like to think that the best ideas win, but sometimes the best idea walks in the door 5 minutes after the VC handed money to a bad idea. Of course if your idea is so much better, you might get money from somebody else; but it's more likely your idea is only marginally better. No big loss to society, just a loss to you.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
While that sounds very nice, I have to disagree as well. I've worked for the past 16+ years in a company that can be considered "normal" in that the executives are "in charge" (as oposed to the engineers), but that is very abnormal in that almost all of the executives are engineers by education (and by the time they become executives also part-time professors) and have remained so "in their heart". The result is an endless stream of nice solutions looking for a problem (or aimed at solving an artificial problem that was only created by earlier badly thought out solutions), intermixed with the occasional gem that (only just) keeps things running money-wise.
We don't need solutions looking for a problem. What we do need is visionaries who see the important future problems and who then proactively create solutions for those.
Linux user since early January 1992.
From the earlier posts, I got the impression that the execs were the business people (who know money) with a little knowledge of what the engineers are trying to do.
If the engineers come up with concepts of what is feasible, and where the trends of technology are heading, or have an idea of a next great technology (which takes the tech background), and then table that to the execs, it's up to the execs (before the development time gets allocated) to work out if it's something that can actually make money (or be used as a stepping stone to a product/service that can make money).
That's what should be happening. Each group of education leveraging it's speciality, with a few people in the middle who are reasonably trained in both subjects who are able to communicate the finer points to both specialist groups.
The fact that a portion of your execs are also professors isn't necessarily a boon. It's that old difference between theory and practice. In theory, practice and theory are the same, in practice, they aren't..
I don't necessarily think that the behaviour patterns gained from working extensively in academia translate well to the world at large.
True though, what you need is the visionaries. But those visionaries are (in the tech world) almost exclusively the technically educated.
What they need is people clued in enough to support them, and enlighten them sometimes as to why their ideas aren't just ready for the limelight yet. And perhaps have that spark up another idea, which can be passed back as suggestion (perhaps to spark another idea) until something really great happens.
Consider my former employer, the largest heavy civil construction firm in the U.S. Warren Buffet called them "the greatest meritocracy in American business," and with good reason - the company made something like $5+ billion in revenue the last year I was with them, but there were only 1,300 or so stockholders, all current employees.
Here's how it worked: If you were in a position with profit-and-loss responsibility and were doing a good job, you'd be invited (after a few years with the company) to purchase stock. No options, no gifts - you were invited to make a purchase at the current share price and told exactly what the maximum was you could buy. Couldn't afford it? Then they'd hook you up with a bank in town that would happily loan you the money, since the stock (which had earned double-digit returns for decades) was great collateral.
What happens when everyone on the team is an actual owner, and the only way you could become an actual owner is through doing a good job? Several things:
It sounds like I'm just reminiscing, but it was a great place to work and (if you stuck around) a great place to get rich - it's a shame other companies don't follow that model.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
Absolutely 100% agreed. Of course, this becomes easier as you get more experience, and thus more bargaining power - I worked a lot more when I was just starting out. And there's also that whole "work smarter, not harder" thing that comes into play with age and experience.
The only exception to the eight hours max a day rule is when you're with a small startup or some other venture in which you have a direct stake. Then working like a madman, at least temporarily, may be worth it (full disclosure: I'm in a startup).
But on the whole, yeah, the thought of looking back at my life and thinking, "Hmm, I just spent my entire youth working" is a horrifying one.
Which brings me back on topic: I wonder how many Google developers have totally thrown themselves into their work, going at it 60+ hours a week? It doesn't matter how cool your job is - at that rate, if you're a salaried employee, then your life is slipping away.
Good points. I started my company in 2001 right _after_ the tech bubble burst. Perhaps not the best time for an IT company to crop up, since so many others were dying, yet we'll be celebrating our 5th birthday as a company this coming January.
:)
I think what you and the parent post are saying are in some ways the same thing, since he's saying wait until others aren't flocking to that industry to start companies and you've cited an example of someone starting a company during such a non-booming time. I do think it comes down to a lot of hard work, luck, and part of that is definitely that it has to be the right time for yourself. So why put off when you can get a head start now, regardless of the market? Since it's so cheap to start a company now, it's not much loss to operate under if the market isn't quite ready for you yet. Markets fluctuate, and if a company is going to survive the next downswing it doesn't really matter where you start on the curve as long as you do start, you're willing to work through challenges, and have some luck on your side too.
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Google decided to try invention instead and to maximize value by paying top dollar for inventors rather than treat R&D as a commodity and engineers as something real businessmen buy like cans of beans and that isn't important enough to keep in-house.
Makes sense in retrospect, if one is in the business of selling technology ideas embodied in the form of tech goods and services, if one wants to maximize the number of ideas under one's control that one can make money from, buy as many as possible of the very rare people who can make these ideas and turn them into real products.
The companies that hit home runs do this not by following everyone else's "tried and true" strategies, but by doing something different and executing that "different" correctly. As google has done.
I can understand why the author of the BW piece is offended by the very idea and the ideological committment to the idea that MBAs and marketdroids and buying politicians to protect one's market are the only real source of value at high-tech companies.
But "google is ineptly managed" and google's market cap suggests that either the author is full of shit or google is. I don't see anyone trying to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the author of the BW article.
Tech Public Policy stuff
MS giving up his shot at CEO means the start of the demise of the company. Before MS was the place you wanted to go work for. Right now it is not. I paraphrase Steve Jobs, when Apple went down the gutter it had a salesman at its helm, if you look at MS right now, look at who is its CEO, a salesman.
I Agree that working 60+ steadily is foolish. Any firm that runs on a regular supply and demand basis and can't find full time people enough to divide the work into 40 Hour parcels has problems entirely of its own making, and that sounds like a firm that is going to pass on many of those problems to employees. On the other hand there are some firms where those problems are imposed by the very nature of the business model, and not the fault of management. Doing 60+ or even 80+ occasionally for one of these can be a great idea.
For example, take Tax Prep firms. In the US, they all have a really steep peak in workload in late January and another Peak in April, Because just about everyone wants to file as early as possible if they are getting a refund, or as late as possible if they owe. Their coders have to update the software in late november-december, because Congress never finalizes the changes until nearly the first of the new year. There's always a lot of updates needed then, as Congress ALWAYS changes the tax code, and ALWAYS in some ways they haven't discussed publicly until the last moment (This is one of very few circumstances where the word always is clinically accurate and not hyperbole). Between April and November, there's literally no workload at all for 90-95% of the employees.
There are bound to be other businesses with variants on that last problem - i.e. anyone who relies heavily on Federal Law enforcement, OSHA, DOE, or DOD related contracts can expect a huge influx of new rules that affect code in the last month or so of the year. These firms all rely on 60 Hr+ weeks in their respective peak seasons, and often seasonal lay offs the rest of the year. The better ones usually pay worth such conditions too - there's nothing like getting 60 K for 3 months work in an area where the average income is 17 K., and realizing that your toughest decision come May is whether you want to find something else to try and make 100-120 K total or just be a beach bum until next February or so. I know people who hiked the whole Appalachian Trail rather than bother to get a second job that year.
Who is John Cabal?