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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."
Importance doesn't equal control in much respect. The executives and managers are still in control of the company's future, regardless of what the programmers, DB admins, and the like want to believe. Don't get me wrong, this is great for the company, and is theorhetically the best way to work it. If your workforce is happy, they are more productive and do better quality work. Quality work and productivity really make or break a company. Thus, if you motivate them and reward them to make them happy, the company will do well.
Its like a giant ERTW being put up there in the face of business. I like it.
Moo!
" At last a company is shouting at the top of it's voice, engineers make the world."
this reminds me of when steve balmer made his famous developers speech... "developers developers developers developers..."
I work for google. On Monday I'll work for 7.2 hours and then me and Larry and Page will go out for drinks...
will start to realise it's the employees that make their company work, not just the sales people!
http://www.gibby.net.au
The coders ARE the engineers. Software engineers, to be precise.
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?
Well, Google is still young. I'm fairly sure it will eventually enter middle age and the engineers will be replaced by marketing. Then when it gets old, the marketeers will be replaced by lawyers. It is just a question of time, years, or even decades.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Google is still young. Eventually the business types, who have spent their lives studying how to manipulate people, will slowly take control from the folks who have spent their lives studying how to manipulate computers.
I hadn't heard that Goldy refused to play by the rules from the Google founders. The rules were typical Google: no backroom deals that favor big institutional investors over smaller investors.
But Goldy wanted to get some easy money, they got caught and shut out of the deal. That makes my night. If you've dealt with bankers (esp. "New York" bankers), you'll know why.
Here's a nice article on this.
Perhaps this also explains the "Google will fail" articles that appeared before the IPO; the powers-that-be were peeved that Google did the IPO their way, and wanted it to fail.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
So if the Google "Caste System" is exceptional in that it promotes software developers over others in the corporation, what does that say about the "caste" rankings in most companies? Or do we only start seeing phrases like "caste system" when big media companies feel threatened by successful businesses using disruptive methods?
This rather reminds me of Wall Street's desperate attempts to declare the Google auction IPO a failure, even after Google got more than twice the dollars per share than they would have in an investment bank-priced IPO. If you can't beat them, have your puppet press hang an ugly label on them.
Remain calm! All is well!
# make World
Of course we do!
See my blog for my free opinions.
I hope this finally changes attitudes of business leaders. I've been working in software business for a decade now and never have I seen a software company where experts were valued above salesmen. When a salesman makes a big contract, it's like he is the king of the world. Whole company has to kneel before him (just a metaphor). When there are lay offs, the salesmen are last to go. But what we all slashdotters know and Google has now implemented, is that a deal with a customer is just a materialization of work done by the whole workforce of a company. It's not the moment when the contract is signed, that customer decides to order. It's the whole run where project managers convince the customer with a well done project, coders produce a product which customer loves, and other project people spend long hours with the customer assuring him that we really care for him. In the end, salesman is just there to present the work done by others.
Many business leaders have began to realize, that people aren't using Google's product because they're running nice commercials on TV, but because they're just good products. It's no wonder why there have been so much polemic about bad quality of software products. Atleast where I've worked, all products have been done with a minimum effort. When a first alpha version start to emerge, business leader have already arranged massive demonstration events to customers. Focus from finishing the product shifts to making a good demonstration. Google makes a difference here. Unlike its competitors (like Micro$oft), its products actually work and what I've said many times to myself, a good product sells itself.
I hope those investors (in the article), that are looking for companies to fill up market gaps left by Google, understand it's not the market gap people are willing to buy. People are looking for good products that also might fill up a market gap in the process.
Engineering driven companies are nothing new, they're just normally not sustainable.
Semiconductor and Passives components manufacturing are normally:
a. small and founded by a geek with a good idea, who either...
1. sells out early OR
2. tries to make a go of it, spends too much time on pet projects and runs the company down.
b. large companies driven by suits who:
1. understand non-R&D business, ie. Sales and Operations, and remain competitive AND
2. acquire small companies run into the ground by geeks.
Why does Google do so well run by geeks? Dunno. It's astonishing they stay so focused. Guessing, maybe it's fear -- seems like they want to win so badly.
But right now every 'free' thing they do, from maps to mail, pumps the very serious ad business with eyeballs and press.
I'd be completely behind your comment except for the code words "New York" bankers -- meaning Jews.
Ruined it for me.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Think of a newspaper. The people who sell ad space and work in Classifieds are secondary to the reporters and editors who manage what stories go into the paper and the general political tone and direction. In fact, those sales people are generally looked down-upon as a necessary evil.
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?
Radio is the same. Google's business model is: Sell non-obtrusive ads associated with information services. To do this, they need compelling services to make people get ads on the same web page. These services are like shows on TV or juicy news articles - they drive eyeballs, which allows for ad revenue.
Really, there is no other way to run it and make money.
Yeaaah baby !
(to be read with Austin Powers' voice)
--
anonymous engineer
...and she doesn't own a computer, let alone have the faintest idea of how to use one. Google is this millennium's Ford Motor Company. Ford started the assembly line and all the other automakers followed suit. Google values what they consider their most valuable assets and reward them well for their efforts.
Another example; I was explaining Picasa to someone who was looking for a way to easily email photos who wasn't the most computer savvy of all people. She was leery about trying a new piece of software until she found out it's a Google product. She was all for it after that. In a lot of people's minds, Google == Quality. I am not saying it's right, but perception rules the world.
They're gonna find out the hard way that I'm not a pussy if they don't start treating us software people better.
They don't understand. I could come up with a program that could rip that place off big time.
Google; get laid. All the other google functions seem to work pretty well. C'mon Google, please?
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.
As a programmer, obviously I think its cool that engineers & techies who work on the product are valued at the same level (or above) the corporate company structure. I just don't see how this is so different from what has been going on at other tech companies, for instance Microsoft, where people have always been able to choose between moving up the management ladder or move up the food chain as an Independant Contributor. A lot of the Distinguished Engineers and Technical Fellows at Microsoft and specifically in MSR (and I'm sure the same is true of a lot of other companies) are really just engineers with no direct reports, and they are clearly esteemed and thought of as highly as anyone in the company.
I agree its cool, I'm just not so sold that its a new idea that applies only to Google.
How can you believe that hackers arent experts in social engineering? Theres a reason why hackers like Bill Gates and the Google founders get rich. It's because manipulating people is not something that only elite businessmen can do, anyone can do it with enough practice.
Also, what makes you think Google would hire manipulators or people who seem like a threat? And if they did don't you think they have security mechanisms in place? You make it seem as if its as simple as someone just walking in and hiijacking the company, its not easy to do a hostile take over of a corporation with an educated workforce.
Lets look at the politics here for a moment, if you dare try to mess with Google, and you ever looked up anything on their search engine such as porn and anything private, they'll have so much political dirt on you that they'll have all the information they need to shut you up, or blackmail you, your bosses, etc.
It's generally very difficult to hiijack data mining companies, because these companies know way more about the people who they hire than whats in the resume.
Add to that picture all the horribly programmed engineering tools we have to use (and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for), with GUIs that were created by retarded lemurs on acid, and, well, my opinion of the current state of the science of programming is not very healthy. Nice to see someone out there is taking some initiative.
Seriously, when a Mac head like me favors using your tool via the command line and C shell scripts, you need to *FIRE* whomever it is that designs your GUIs.
Oh, and X Windows programmers? The text that's highlighted? That's what I expect to be replaced by my typing. It's not meant for the random decoration that you all use it for.
Well, he convinced me that it was a two way street. That there is no shortage of good ideas and products out there, and the ONLY reason some succeed over others is becuase people like him and Sales people make it happen. They sell products that they know aren't quite ready yet (vaporware) because the company needs the revenue. They sell products that they know are inferior to the competition because their Scientists and Engineers made a stupid mistake early on in the product development lifecycle that didn't get caught until too late and the company can't afford to start over.
Basically he convinced me (a seasoned Engineer) that we need them as much as they need us.
So, be careful in your thinking about this issue.
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 .
There have been companies like this in the past. It will change, just give it time. 10 years from now engineers will be treated the same as anywhere else ;)
"At last a company is shouting at the top of it's voice, engineers make the world."
Any company that gives too much weight to marketing and accounting types eventually runs things into the ditch of bad products...wrong thing - wrong way.
This is a leason that has been learned many times over, by many companies. Google is hardly the first to demonstrate the discipline to stick to it.
Chrysler supposedly learned this lesson the hard way in the 70's & 80's, when bean counters were allowed to decide which models cars and trucks would go to market. The company paid dearly for that mistake, and is only now comng off the ugly results.
Just remember that the group most capable to 'get it right' (right thing - right way) includes design engineers, usability engineers, mechanical and electrical engineers, as well as project managers, tech writers and testing types.
Find good ones and give them the tools they need and get out of their way. You'll be a hero without even trying.
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.
dom
joking aside, the phenomenon can be found in nearly every tech/engineering company in the whole wide world where the founders are engineers, still run the place and the company or industry has high growth rates. The suits only ever come in when growth is slowing down and the products don't sell by itself but need the help of the big, bad BS-marketing machine. Oh, by the way, I used to be a suit myself , with hundreds of engineers working for me, despite me mostly not having a clue what they were doing. It worked pretty well, mostly. The reason: Making business decisions and knowing the financials. Or to turn it around: To not get the suits into the door, get used to love making decisions and get a grasp of accounting. Then happy days. It is not that hard, actually it is bloody easy.
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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If you've never heard the phrase "software engineer", you've just admitted that you've no industrial experience.
As a software engineer in safety-related software for the last 10 years (first job was power station controls, current job is car engine controllers), I can assure you that we are *very* serious about responsibility for mistakes. You screw up, people die. As a result, only about 10% of our time is spent actually coding; around 30% of the rest is spent on requirements capture and design; and the other 60% is spent testing the living shit out of it until we're sure what we're putting out is safe.
On projects that don't have safety implications, there isn't anything like as much testing. But this is an engineering judgement based on the impact of bugs on the customer - if your car radio bugs out for example, it's annoying but it doesn't kill you. Same in any other engineering discipline - you don't think that the mechanical engineers who design plastic toys use the same level of testing that engine designers would, do you?
Grab.
A group of engineers and managers attended a conference, travelling by train. The engineers queued up to buy their travel tickets at the station but only one manager joined them. No questions were asked, but the engineers watched studiously as the manager bought just one ticket.
In the train, the engineers took their seats as did all of the managers bar two, who took up sentry positions at each end of the coach. After a while, one of the managers on sentry duty made a sign and he all the other managers headed immediately for one of the toilet cubicles. Two minutes later the ticket inspector arrived, saw the toilet door closed, knocked on the door and said "ticket please", upon which one ticket was duly slid under the door.
The engineers of course understood the ploy immediately and congratulated the managers on their guile and coordination.
Come the return journey, the engineers sent one of their crew to buy just one ticket. Puzzlingly, the managers didn't buy any tickets at all this time. Again the engineers refrained from asking questions and observed events studiously. Everyone climbed aboard the train and once again the managers immediately posted sentries. Sure enough, in due course, one of the managers on sentry duty made a sign upon which the watching engineers immediately crowded into a toilet. Strangely the managers didn't move. But as soon as the door had closed on the engineers, a passenger sitting nearby observed a manager leaving his seat, walking to the toilet, knocking on the door, and asking "ticket please".
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
I think its also a good idea if engineers get a taste of business and business people get a taste of engineering. I remember when I was the stuck-up student who believed he was the engineer of all things. I thought that users should bloody well learn to use a system correctly not the other way round. I thought that a properly engineered system was the way to go and that just making a product work so it could be sold was some kind of sin. I swore blindly to upholding standards at all costs and I wasted months trying to plan projects before I started doing anything. Back then I would look down on people because perhaps they used Flash, named a variable 'temp', used the wrong colour wires or used lossy compression in any way. Maybe I was worse than most I don't know, but someone like that doesn't work well in any kind of commercial industry, from arts to engineering, in the real world people want things that work or look good and they want them tomorrow. I only learnt that from experience and I think business people could probably learn a thing or two from the other side of the fence. Both sides are always gunning at each other because they don't understand each others issues and aspirations. Managers are always asking engineers to do something seemingly insane, engineers are always stressing that they need more time and that their system must be perfect or else it will be the end of the world.
Just to clear things up:
- Users don't need big colourful buttons to be able to figure out how something works, this does not automatically create an intuitive interface. It does however satisfy specifications and make it look like you care, if that's all that matters to you.
- Every product on the market, from TV's to computers to cars, have numerous hacks and last minute workarounds in them, they won't be a perfect system and they will have bugs or defects. you're product _will_ be the same.
- Every market has 3 products: the best, the cheapest, and the one with most value for money. While technically all other competing products are useless and not even worth assembling, that won't stop you being able to flog them to people if yours doesn't happen to fit into one of those 3 categories.
- There are two types of people: those who work 9-5, satisfy specifications and instructions *technically* and deliver on time, and those who work all the time, ignore specifications and go out of their way to make things actually work properly even if the original plan was flawed (as it usually is).
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
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"?
Article written by marketoids without understanding of the real value of Google...
Some bloppers:
That's not to say Google could afford to go out and do a big deal just for the sake of it. A mega-takeover potentially could wreak havoc on Google. Even Piper Jaffray Co's. (PJC ) 11/18/05 @ 9:05 PM --] Internet analyst Safa Rashtchy, one of Wall Street's biggest Google bulls, says: "If they were to buy AOL or eBay, it would hurt the stock."
Google buying one of the Evil Giants would certainly hurt the stock, by damaging reputation of Google. People hate AOL and at least mildly dislike eBay. Loss of capital by Google has nothing to do with it. Loss of trust does.
All the same, the lure of a big deal could prove hard to resist, particularly if Google's strategic position is threatened. For the past two months, Google has been battling Microsoft Corp. (MSFT ) at the bargaining table for a stake in Time Warner Inc.'s (TWX ) AOL unit
Whoa, Google lost such a deal to Microsoft, such a big battle, such juicy morsel...? No. Google was acting as a shill, for its own interest. Bloat the price of a mostly worthless piece of junk, make the competition offer way more than they would offer initially, and then let them have the rotten carcass for price of luxury dish.
Losing some battles gives more profit than winning them.
Young Googlers' preoccupation with these perks tend to drive mature VCs to distraction. "If I hear one more [punk] complain about his omelet, or tell me he's bored with the smoothie selection, I'm gonna, I don't know," splutters one.
What would YOU prefer to do? Make the job fun and it will be efficient. Not in terms "lines of code per day" but in terms "satisfied customers per day". Still hard to get for some.
Says the aggrieved VC: "Did it ever occur to them that this was like asking us to do their homework for them? It's the height of arrogance."
It's lots of VCs who hope to make a lot of money on that. Google just does the usual thing, and is only one. So, usual marketing rule, if the sales outweight demand, sellers must look for ways to attract the customer and the customer may afford demanding much more for the same price. I thought these guys are businessmen? You don't want to do the homework for Google? Someone else will, and they will get the candy, not you, mr Very Senior Partner.
The suits inside Google don't fare much better than the outside pros. Several current and former insiders say there's a caste system, in which business types are second-class citizens to Google's valued code jockeys.
As opposed to the caste system where the business types rule the second-class "production crew".
They argue that it could prove to be a big challenge in the future as Google seeks to maintain its growth. 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.
I think they just misunderstand "corporate development". Google took this term right. Marketoids still think it means themselves.
The candidate, a Wall Street tech M&A specialist who was looking for a change of scenery and a more relaxed lifestyle, calls the experience "chaotic, bureaucratic, and very rigid." Strung out over more than nine months and numerous coast-to-coast flights, the courtship culminated in a jarring "pop quiz."
Drummond rejects the accusations that Google is anti-businesspeople. He says Google has hired many MBAs and bankers and is constantly assessing its dealmaking strategy.
Google is just anti-assholepeople. Jerks who hope to get cash from the suckers. And they get punished pretty cruelly for attempts to pick on Google.
What's more relaxing for the coders crew than to see a super-important suit, a stockmarket shark to jump through loops and sweat heavily just to get a candy they wave in front of his nose? Less bull from your side and deals with Google would become pleas
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Screwed up the link: The Venture Capital Squeeze
This is funny and confirms some of my original suspicions.
Previously my company tried to purchase and use a google search engine box. However if you try and buy the google box for your corporate searching needs you will find it impossible to deal with their sales people. They don't offer support, they won't tell you anything. Funnily enough technically if you want to make it work its a doodle.
Google needs to improve its sales drastically if its honestly going to take over the world, technology just is not enough.
Larry == Page, but Larry ne Page
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
People hate Microsoft for being more of a marketing than a technical company, and it is in part because techies could have better jobs elsewhere producing quality work, if it weren't for the Marketing behemoth.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Good point - what many people fail to realize is that the engineers and sales people are a team - without each other a company won't succeed. Engineers need to develop good products and sales peopel need to create cash flow to keep the development pipeline funded. I've done both, and both jobs have their unique challenges.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Because it's common knowledge that Google's portfolio is impressive, and so his post is "redundant" as it conveys no new information or insight. The whole "How can the first post possibly be redundant?!" schtick is an annoyingly common and utterly bizarre fallacy.
I am sure you are right, because I have seen it happen. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was founded in 1959 by a couple of engineers. When I became aware of the company in 1963 it still had an engineering culture: the engineers ran the show, and the sales people were secondary. Somewhere around 1968, they renamed the programmers "software engineers" to give them more prestige.
As the company matured the culture changed. Even though I worked for DEC from 1975 to 1992, I cannot point to a specific event that was the watershed. The first symptom that I noticed was that the KS10 was said to be developed in secret to prevent it from being cancelled. Even if that wasn't true, the fact that engineers believed it indicates that the engineers no longer felt that they were making the decisions.
I wonder if paying commissions to the sales people was a symptom or a cause.
I don't blame the demise of Digital entirely on the shift from an engineering focus to a sales focus. There were some bad decisions made by engineering in the last few years. But I can't help wondering if those decisions might have been corrected more quickly by a younger company.
Strangely, IBM appears to be a counter-example. They are by far the oldest computer company, but they seem to have achieved some sort of dynamic equilibrium, where they are able to change direction as technology and markets change quickly enough to survive. I am sure some of that has to do with their size, but as General Motors reminds us, size is no guarantee of survival. I suppose they have internal institutions that keep them nimble.
There are some good books on Digital Equipment Corporation. See The Ultimate Entrepreneur for the story of DEC at its height, and DEC is Dead Long, Live DEC for a look back after its death.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
Both extremes are short sighted.
Microsoft has ossified because engineers, creativity, and innovation don't carry enough clout.
On the side, Apple is a second rate power in the I.T. world. They could be dominating the I.T. world like Microsoft now does, if not for the poor business decision they made when they got started of pricing their computers above IBM's crappy PCs. Giving more clout to smart business men at that time could have changed things.
A successful tech company needs to both the businessmen and the engineers sufficently empowered.
It seems Google has learned its lessons from Microsoft. Lets see if they also learn Apple's. More importantly, lets see if they remember both lessons as they expand and get big.
> The executives and managers are still in control of the company's future,
> regardless of what the programmers, DB admins, and the like want to believe.
Your statement assumes some sort of line between non-engineer execs and non-exec engineers. But there *are* no non-engineer execs. Heck, as far as I can tell, there aren't even any non-engineers PMs! Know why that is?
The exec team spends a fair amount of time thinking about, "how can we lose this" / "how does this all go wrong"? One example they cite is Apple, which was great, lost it, and is only recently getting great again... and one big problem they point out is that for a while Apple had no engineers at board level! (Remember when Sally Ride was on the board of directors at Apple??)
The lesson is clear: when you have engineers everywhere, no one at the bottom or mid level can pull the wool over your eyes. The moment you start saying "A good manager doesn't have to be an engineer", you forget that a non-engineer manager can be fooled by an incompetent engineer who "manages up well", and then things start to sink.
The troika that rules Google, Sergey, Larry, Eric: they can all code. If that over stops being the case, that's probably an early signal to sell the stock!
(sig) The last bug isn't fixed until the last user is dead. (/sig)
A pair of.... what? I've got several pairs of various things. I have a pair of breasts. In fact, I even have a pair of pears on my desk right now.
Note to self: don't try to be a smart ass until you've had enough coffee.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
Your missing the whole point.
The business method behind Google is that the engineers will create products that will be innovative and good enough that they will stand out above the crowd and be noticed. It should not require a sales team hounding you and taking your CFO out to dinner to make the sale. In many ways, HP and DEC used to be like that.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
I believe the idea is that the tech people have a certain veto power over the suits. How this can be a bad thing, I'll never know.
Are you serious?
In my company, the engineers have a lot of control over what gets prioritized. They spend the vast majority of their time working on projects that are very very cool and will never ever make a dime. Meanwhile projects like optimization and bugfixing that are unglamorous but actually affect our customers go untended.
Look, there are a lot of dumb "suits" out there. But - at least in theory - if your company has any brains then these "suits" are where they are because they understand what decisions need to be made in order to grow the business and/or keep it running. Giving engineers "veto power" is bad because they frequently use it to promote nifty nerd things that are not actually helpful to the business. A healthy partnership between producers and managers is needed in any good company ... but don't say you can't see how giving engineers final say could be a bad thing!
"95% of all Slashdot
I do and so should everyone else. If the company want you to work 50-60-70 or more hours a week, the company is mismanaged and it's time to get out!. I have never had a job that requires me to work more than 40 hours.
To quote an old movie, Auntie Mame from 1958: "Life's a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!" If you work 50-60-70 hours a week, you are starving to death! Do you really want to look back on your life and say "Geeez.... What happened? I was at work!" Not me, no thank you very much!
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
Engineers don't need more clout than salespeople, anymore than salespeople shouldn't get more clout than engineers. To have a company that really, really shines, you need the best of both.
The funny thing about mediocre sales people is that they see mediocre engineers, and don't understand what the big deal is. Meanwhile, the mediocre engineer sees the mediocre sales guy, and *also* doesn't understand the big deal.
Meanwhile, the talented engineers and sales people look at the other side and know that they couldn't do that job nearly as well as the person they are looking at.
The companies that are currently ridiculously succesful are the ones that recognize that employees are their greatest asset.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
How many companies have lost their strategic edge by placing more emphasis on "business" rather than engineering.
Intel - the king of silicon - once an engineering powerhouse, is losing its edge in the CPU business - why? By putting marketing ahead of engineering talent, it designed an architecture that would sell well based on GHz ratings. Now, the corporate market (the most profitable market for CPUs) is taking a hard look at opteron. Why? It's a better performing design with less power consumption than Intel's offerings. The day Dell starts selling 2 CPU opteron boxes is the day Intel starts regretting the GHz marketing decision.
HP - once run by engineers that flew coach instead of by private Lear jet. HP used to be the king of "technology must-haves" from medical equipment, to scientific and engineering tools. HP was the standard in many industries. Thanks to Carly and most of her management staff they decided to exit those niche (but highly profitable) markets for what???? The PC business? God - if that isn't a marketing driven decision, I don't know what is.
SGI - don't even get me started about this shell of a company. This company had some pretty impressive hardware and 3D rendering products that were way ahead of everyone else in the industry. This was another company that decided selling Windows boxes was the way to go.
You can always count on non-technical managers to screw up these types of companies. They don't understand the high-end niche technologies, so they focus on stuff they do understand - the commodity garbage you can purchase at Best Buy.
Let Engineers run tech companies - the money and success will follow.
-ted
It is interesting that, of all that TFA talks about, the poster decided to spin it towards the supposed Google caste system, which occupies that final 1/5 of the article. The other 80% of the article focuses more on how the hugimongousness of Google has altered the way of doing business in Silicon Valley: the venture capitalists, the MBAs who think they know how to capitalize on a good idea when they see one, the risk-taking technologists and start-ups, the ambitious entrepeneur who just wants to make a shitload of money selling an idea to someone larger, and the fact that Google has yet to shell out serious money to buy out a majoy company like AOL, but seem willing to acquire the long-odds small companies that have sprouted up in their wake. The focus of TFA is how Google's bucking the trend in the world of mergers and acquisition and venture capital, which has in turn ruffled the feathers of more entrenched high-tech business interests.
First, it's something for the CEO to do. Really. Acquisitions are something the CEO can actually do. If the CEO has a financial or legal background, acquisitions are something they understand. On the operational side, the CEO of a large company mostly has to just pick people and give them general direction. There are exceptions to this, but they're rare. If you can't fix the company you're running, acquisition gives the illusion you're doing something.
Second, acquisitions are highly visible events for a CEO. They get you on the cover of Business Week. You can talk to other CEOs about them. You get better golf dates. Improving manufacturing productivity by 15% doesn't do this, even though it might triple profits.
Third, acquisitions usually result in increased CEO income. The company is bigger now, so the CEO should make more. Right? Don't underestimate this. Also, acquisitions tend to increase stock volatility, and if much of your pay is in options, volatility pays off, even if, on average, the trend is neutral or even down.
Now, it can actually make sense to acquire a company for its technology or its market share. In the first case, the acquired company is usually small, and you're buying technology, not a customer base or manufacturing capability. A successful example is Google buying Keyhole. Keyhole was small, had good technical assets, and wasn't too expensive. An unsuccessful example is SGI buying Cray. Cray had a large mainframe manufacturing operation and too many people, neither of which SGI needed. (SGI comes to mind because I was in a building yesterday I'd previously visited when SGI owned it. They don't own it any more.)
Buying market share makes sense if you buy something in the same business. You're reducing competition and can raise prices. You might even get economies of scale. Blockbuster, which bought out many other video store chains, is a successful example.
On the other hand, buying companies for "diversification" or to "expand into a new business area" usually doesn't work out too well. Buying for vertical integration, where you buy your supplier or customer, used to be popular half a century ago, but is now somewhat out of favor. It made sense to buy a coal mine when you had a steel mill. It make less sense to buy an ISP when you're a phone company.
I've watched these behaviors for years. See Downside's Deathwatch for the results. (When it says "Chart not available for this symbol, it's not because there's a bug. It's because the company died.)
It is entirely bottoms-up
So much for sobriety in the workplace...
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
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..."
"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."
Well then, maybe that's why none of their products seem to support any common goal (besides being 'cool'). It often seems like Google's left and right hands are completely unaware of each other, and that could be due to teams of gifted engineers all cranking away without ever taking the time to talk to other teams and figure out what the hell the company is doing.
Engineers are important, but alone they're not sufficient to build a viable company.
I was postulating on what they *could* do if they felt like it, not what they are doing *right now* to make money.
As to financial advisors--please, 99.9% of them are clueless or crooked. As for proof of that, I give you the Great Depression and the dot bomb stock bubble crash, both orchestrated by the large financial houses and pundits and advisors. I pay little attention to what they say in public without filtering it through my crap-o-meter and then running that output through the spot-the-shill-translator. They make politicians look like honest intelligent people. Hustlers and skimmers mostly. Big smiles. Basically I think of them as three card monte dealers who work out of offices rather than on the street corner.
When I was a kid and they had real five and dime stores you could get packets of real pretty stocks,now worthless, sold as novelty items, from companies shilled to the max and sold to folks from the advice of "the pros", the casino hustlers. The stock market has long ago stopped being an "investment", it's all just speculator driven up and down programmed frenzy selling and a bewildering array of paper financial pseudo "products". Not to say people can't make money there, of course they do, but I know two professional vegas gamblers-card players- they make money too. Not so much as to get banned, but a decent steady living. but they don't produce anything themselves, except for one of them has sold quite a few books on card playing.
HGTTG reference episode: the thinkers, the doers and the middlemen, meh
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.
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
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
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?
The best product is rarely the most popular - the most popular is always the one with the best sales and marketing people.
While that is somewhat true, Google seems to be the exception to that rule.
Google hardly does any advertising or pushy sales - it has got where it is because of the quality of what they offer. I was a huge AltaVista fan and I moved to Google only because of how well it worked, no other reason needed.
Now what Google does very well at is marketing, which to my mind is bigger than sales. But the way they have been successful is to bake a little bit of marketing know-how into the culture which is then infused through products. It seems to be working really well so far.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Judaism is a religion, not a race. You can be anti-Jewish and a racist, but you can also be a racist and not anti-Jewish.