Tech Expertise Not Important In Google Managers

Hugh Pickens writes "For much of its 13-year history, Google has taken a pretty simple approach to management: Leave people alone but if employees become stuck, they should ask their bosses, whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management in the first place. Now the Economic Times reports that statisticians at Google looking for characteristics that define good managers have gathered more than 10,000 observations about managers — across more than 100 variables, from various performance reviews, feedback surveys and other reports and found that technical expertise ranks dead last among Google's eight most important characteristics of good managers. What Google employees value most are even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees' lives and careers."

Comments

So people skills win again...

[cultiv8]

most of the time I wish this wasn't true.

Re:So people skills win again...

[Starteck81]

most of the time I wish this wasn't true.

The real trick is to fhttp://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/03/13/1856240/Tech-Expertise-Not-Important-In-Google-Managers?from=fb#ind someone technically skill who is also good with people. Admittedly this is a very rare combination.

Re:So people skills win again...

[rolfwind]

Just think of it as a kind of hacking.

Re:So people skills win again...

[phooky]

What do you mean by "win"?

Managing programmers is a difficult job. There's not a lot of glory in it, it's not well understood, and it can often be very stressful. It's not anyone's dream job.

If you're worried about compensation, you'll be happy to know that managers in tech companies often make about the same or less than the engineers the manage.

Re:So people skills win again...

[epyT-R]

no they don't.. in theory, google has been benefiting from this first-generation crop of technically minded management.. if this study means they're going to move away from that, then expect to see a lot of the reasons to work for google over say, microsoft, fade away real quick. while a certain amount of people skill is important, what really gets the job done at the end of the day is someone who can code algorithms. those types tend NOT to be people people, and a management that cannot tolerate or understand such a crowd will create that typical antagonistic environment that google has up to now been able to minimize. they wont retain their best people if they go this route.

Re:So people skills win again...

[Daniel Phillips]

Laszlo just demonstrates that by selling the value of technical expertise short, he is part of the problem. But I already knew that. In all fairness, Laszlo is really the reason for the majority of management dysfunctionality at Google because he spent way too many years looking the other way as frontline managers make a mockery of the systems that were put in place. Eric having his head in the clouds didn't help.

Re:So people skills win again...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're totally missing the point. Of course, as a first-level manager at a tech company, I've got my own biases here :)

I assume we can agree that in the end, progress is made by individual contributors -- in programming, these would be the people who can code algorithms; in my field (systems engineering) it's the people who can figure out how to, say, manage systems well and efficiently. Basically, really smart individual contributors.

All other things being equal, one could make a pretty convincing case then that, basically, managers don't directly contribute to a company's bottom line. I think so far it sounds like we generally agree.

However, saying that the people who make progress are the code writers doesn't mean that progress is measured purely in your ability to go into your desk/cubicle/office/palace and write code by your lonesome. Your stuff has to work with other people's stuff.

At its most unstructured, then, a reasonably complex environment requires engineers to work with other engineers to figure out how their stuff will work together. In the worst case, this is ad-hoc and tactical; at the best case, this is how SOAs are designed and APIs are agreed upon. You could argue, of course, that this sort of negotiation work should be done by managers -- and I'd then argue you're wrong because this is the core of what being really good technical engineers is all about.

As I see it, my job as a manager is very simple:
1. I get to deal with people problems, so engineers don't have to. Our (internal) customers are sometimes as prone to peopleskill deficiencies as our own engineers are, and this sometimes leads to a situation where an interaction leads one (or, typically, both) sides feeling like something's not quite working. I get to help;
2. When an engineer is stuck on what the best way to solve a given problem is, they may (but don't have to) ask me for an opinion (not directive or decision, unless that's how they want to see it). I can probably express an opinion without knowing the very lowest level technical details of how a particular solution would be implemented (at least, in my experience). If I come up with something useful, they'll use it. Otherwise, they won't;
3. When there's a question about priorities and what direction fits with our overall larger goals, they can ask me.

But it's important to note that:
A) Me having people skills doesn't mean I have a problem working with people who don't have the same level of people skills (I don't agree with the standard logical fallacy that you can either be technically brilliant or socially adept. That's one of the reasons I love working in a company with a "no brilliant jerks" rule);
B) If I hired people whose knowledge was a subset of my own, the smartest we'd be able to be is as smart as I am, and these people would essentially just be extensions of my own capabilities. Pardon the language, but fuck that -- I want to hire people who are way, way, way smarter than I am.

Re:So people skills win again...

[Anonymous Coward]

So the business school grads are completely unqualified, once again. You can't be a back-stabbing, underling abusing sonofabitch to be a good boss. Someone should let them know.

Re:So people skills win again...

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

You call it people skills; I call it style without substance.

Managers relying on it have sunk and wrecked most great companies in the western world. We have people at the helm of many companies who don't understand even the most fundamental principles of what their company does or provides.

Why have most western companies off shored and effectively sold all their secrets, techniques and futures to China and more? Because their management simply did not understand what it was doing; their time was spent concentrating on starching their suits and studying up on the latest buzzspeak phrases.

You want "people skills", you got em. You want actual skills, look somewhere else.

Re:So people skills win again...

[shutdown -p now]

As I see it, my job as a manager is very simple:
1. I get to deal with people problems, so engineers don't have to. Our (internal) customers are sometimes as prone to peopleskill deficiencies as our own engineers are, and this sometimes leads to a situation where an interaction leads one (or, typically, both) sides feeling like something's not quite working. I get to help;
2. When an engineer is stuck on what the best way to solve a given problem is, they may (but don't have to) ask me for an opinion (not directive or decision, unless that's how they want to see it). I can probably express an opinion without knowing the very lowest level technical details of how a particular solution would be implemented (at least, in my experience). If I come up with something useful, they'll use it. Otherwise, they won't;
3. When there's a question about priorities and what direction fits with our overall larger goals, they can ask me.

As a software developer, I can agree with all of the above. I've worked under both very good and spectacularly bad managers in my time, and the difference for productivity is really night-and-day. It's all about knowing what, exactly, you're doing, and being able to do it without hindrances due to inefficient process, or due to being blocked on other people or teams.

As well, a perfect manager is, in many ways, like a perfect sysadmin - if he does the job really well, arranging the work process such that his reports don't even see the bumps on the road ahead, he's largely invisible. And that can be a problem when it comes to recognizing said job.

Re:So people skills win again...

[shutdown -p now]

... to add one more thing - there is a separate position for "guy who is a tech expert, oversees that team uses best practices, and gives specific advise on how to do such-and-such" - it's a tech lead. Not all teams need that, but for those who do, it's beneficial when this person is separate from manager proper. For one thing, because it requires a very different skillset, and I've yet to see a person who had both at the same time; and for another, because the manager can contain lead's overreaching into work of individual contributors (where it stops being about job done right, and starts being about imposing lead's personal religious beliefs on the rest of the team).

Re:So people skills win again...

[epyT-R]

I assume we can agree that in the end, progress is made by individual contributors -- in programming, these would be the people who can code algorithms; in my field (systems engineering) it's the people who can figure out how to, say, manage systems well and efficiently. Basically, really smart individual contributors.

ok, agreed.

All other things being equal, one could make a pretty convincing case then that, basically, managers don't directly contribute to a company's bottom line. I think so far it sounds like we generally agree.

well actually not quite.. GOOD managers do contribute. though, a lot of times, I don't think their contributions justify the often HUGE salary differences between them and the people who work for them. we reward upper management too much, to the point where fields like engineering barely pay for the schooling required, never mind reward. In the case of google, a technically minded first generation management created a low resistance path from directive to result because those in charge understood and could relate to those who work for them.. bring in a bunch of business management school graduates and you'll see the problems begin because they don't really understand technology, nor the kind of mindset that is good with it, and most importantly, they don't want to. business school (like law enforcement, but for more intelligent people) attracts the sort of person who wants to run things/have authority but not really work all that hard. no this does not mean that all business majors are lazy. they're not, but they seem to graduate with this insular attitude where they think it's their workers' jobs to stretch and meet their whims solely due to title. meanwhile they have no idea what it is they're managing.

However, saying that the people who make progress are the code writers doesn't mean that progress is measured purely in your ability to go into your desk/cubicle/office/palace and write code by your lonesome. Your stuff has to work with other people's stuff.

nah, I didn't mean this unilaterally, but you're right. teamwork is important. It's just that in the last decade or so it's been heavily propagandized as 'the' most important thing at the expense of actual capability. while there are exceptions, one can plot elements of sociability and elements of intuitive thinking ability on a graph, and you'll see the population cluster at opposite ends. surprise, surprise, technical people are not the most social! good tech firms set up their management so that they can deal with at least some of this idiosyncrasy so that they can retain the best people. the ones who can't or simply don't want to out of some sense of hurt feelings, produce mediocre products at best. google (at the beginning anyway) was a rare exception because the owners themselves were very technical and had the brains to start up a successful company.

At its most unstructured, then, a reasonably complex environment requires engineers to work with other engineers to figure out how their stuff will work together. In the worst case, this is ad-hoc and tactical; at the best case, this is how SOAs are designed and APIs are agreed upon. You could argue, of course, that this sort of negotiation work should be done by managers -- and I'd then argue you're wrong because this is the core of what being really good technical engineers is all about.

well it depends what the owners want to produce and how well they actually understand it.. if you leave the engineers to design it all, it will probably work well, but not fit the expectations a non technical management because they don't even know what they want, except that it be something their customers want (resulting in the customer not getting what he wants). most of their technical background comes from what they see in movies (yes this is actually a big problem in society). imo, a big part of google's success up to this point has be

Re:So people skills win again...

[crutchy]

I mostly agree with this. Being a bottom-dwelling engineer who isn't the most socially competent I have had good and bad managers. The worst manager I've ever had was one who was incapable at protecting us bottom dwellers from ever meddling senior management. My management experience has been limited to projects. From a pleb perspective, a good manager (applicable to all levels of management): 1) looks after his people, and 2) delivers results to his boss The job of senior management is to deliver targets to their middle managers and to be good managers themselves (look after their middle managers and deliver results to the board). The process by which a middle manager achieves his targets should not be the subject of riducule of senior management unless targets aren't being met, and in that case the job of senior management is still to follow the same rule of "look after his people". Any manager who ridicules any of his staff (particularly in front of other staff) is a dickhead. Also, a manager must take responsibility. Any manager who blames one or more of his people (ie the opposite of looking after them) because he couldn't deliver results to his boss is also a dickhead. One of the most common management mistakes is making promises that can't be kept. They tell their bosses that unrealistic targets can be met because they don't want to disappoint them. The staff of a manager should never be held accountable. How can a manager set realistic targets? Simple. Consult and work with your staff. Part of looking after them is to talk with them (not at them). Have regular talks where they can freely ask questions and give feedback rather than irregular and inefficient formal meetings. The Google findings aren't really shocking, except that technical expertise is important because a manager must be able to communicate and understand his staff, and if someone without any engineering experience/qualifications tries to manage a team of engineers he might find he begins to feel like a fifth wheel because he is unable to contribute. As a project manager at least it helps the team if I can assign myself a workload similarly to my team members, but always remembering that managing a project is a task in itself and so must be accounted for as (sometimes significant) workload. Also, part of being a manager is learning how to deal with people. You will always have staff that have bad days or aren't as efficient as you'd like them to be. The worst thing you can do is blame them or take on their work with the mentality of "if I want it done right I should just do it myself". Undervaluing of training and development is a sure sign of a bad manager. I don't think management is rocket science. You just have to be assertive (neither a pussy or a bully). Someone who can't say "no" to their boss shouldn't be a manager.

Re:So people skills win again...

[plover]

Managing programmers is a difficult job. There's not a lot of glory in it, it's not well understood, and it can often be very stressful. It's not anyone's dream job..

I know some people who would disagree with you. They absolutely love being managers, they enjoy mentoring people to become leaders, they like the challenge. And managing programmers is a completely different challenge than managing burger flippers. The motivations are different, the challenges are different, the options are different, and the rewards greater. For the person who likes that role, and has a talent for it, yes, it's a good job.

Re:So people skills win again...

[turbidostato]

"managing programmers is a completely different challenge than managing burger flippers"

And thaaat's exactly why Google can forget about technical expertise on their managers (at least for a while): because of their technicians.

Google happens to have a hard and long hiring process in order to be sure they hire top notch, aligned with the company culture, tech guys. When you have that, you can manage by listening, caring and taking out the rocks on the road for them because they will be motivated, able to do the work at hand and looking for themselves for new challenges.

But usually, developers make a lemon market, probably more or less motivated (sometimes not even so) but lacking skills. This you manage by setting clear orders and providing challenges to the troop to keep them growing and motivated and in order to do that you need a strong technical background on top of proper social skills.

So, no wonder Google found that about their managers but still that doesn't mean you can export the findings to a different company.

Re:So people skills win again...

[Anonymous Coward]

So the business school grads are completely unqualified, once again. You can't be a back-stabbing, underling abusing sonofabitch to be a good boss. Someone should let them know.

You obviously haven't been to business school. On day one, literally, most are taking a class in a topic often called organization behavior. Its mostly about how to organize and motivate people. How there is no one way to do so. How different people may be most efficient when employing different practices. How managers need to learn to recognize what practices work best for each individual and to structure things to accommodate this as much as possible. How one of the most important things to a worker is not whether or not they like a decision but whether the decision was made in a just process. How ...

Re:So people skills win again...

[zippthorne]

I'm very suspicious of the idea that these "non techie" managers are going to be able to guide subordinates through problems by asking questions "instead of dictating answers." Without a decent technical understanding, how would they even know what kind of questions to ask?

The socratic method is great for teaching, but the idea that you could teach something you have no experience in doesn't make sense to me.

Re:So people skills win again...

[kenh]

Amazingly enough, the folks hired by Google are not quite your run-of-the-mill employees (Want to work at Google? circa 2007), so I'm not at all surprised that they don't look to their direct manager for "technical insight." It is a viewpoint unique to low-level workers that all superiors are slightly better iterations of those that report to them, but as others have noted, being the best welder doesn't make that person the best to lead a group of welders.

Re:So people skills win again...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, kid. You keep telling yourself that... then wonder why you get pounded in the ass in your reviews.

Denigrate it all you want. It's about communication, which you clearly don't care a whit about in your current job. Good for you; the moment you get into a job or a situation where you have to work with others, or deal with others, or gods forbid, COOPERATE with others... you're up shit's creek.

Learn to adapt and communicate, punk. Or it's going to be YOUR ass on unemployment for 99+ weeks.

Re:So people skills win again...

[tftp]

The real trick is to fhttp://tech.slashdot.org/story/ [...] Admittedly this is a very rare combination.

Indeed.

Re:So people skills win again...

[aneeshm]

Doesn't the 'selection effect' of who Google's 'People Operations' group hires as employees almost completely negate the validity of this survey? Allow me to elaborate:

Even though the employees of Google may value traits 'A, B, and C' over technical skills, isn't that possible only because everyone Google admits into the company as an employee has excellent technical skills to begin with? This allows the employees to take great technical skills for granted, because everyone has them, so these skills aren't thought of a differentiating factor any more. When comparing managers, both of whom are highly technically competent, you would as an employee focus on what differs between them, not what is the same. If both these managers are also tech gurus, you'll say that it is their other skills the make the difference; this this is perfectly correct, insofar as your peculiar environment (Google) is concerned. And so when you are surveyed for what makes a good manager (or when such data are collected or mined from other tools), technical competence doesn't show up as a major factor, because it is, within your sample, practically universal.

Another reason could be that technical competence's effect on managerial ability may not be linear, but a threshold. So having less than that threshold is a great handicap, but the difference, in managerial efficacy, of people who are just above it, comfortably above it, and very highly above it, isn't all that much; after you've reached the threshold, the marginal gains are minimal and decreasing, and other factors are much more important. If everyone in Google meets this threshold, it will obviously not show up as a factor in their analysis.

Of the two hypotheses presented above, I do not know whether either is true, or whether some combination thereof. But unless they are taken into consideration and ruled out, I would be wary of using that data in any organisation that is not Google. My personal experience and intuition suggests that some combination of them explains the results obtained at Google. In fact, I would surmise that, were Google employees made to work in other environment - or were a survey conducted in organisations which are not Google - with large and highly consequential differences between the technical skills of managers, the metric of technical competence would rise significantly in the rankings, if not to the top.

Re:So people skills win again...

[nightcats]

This one comes closest to getting it. To put it in terms of inferential logic, it's the difference between the "inclusive or" and the "exclusive or": you can be this-or-that according to circumstances/audience rather than this-or-that-and-never-both. I'm lucky to have a manager who dares to advocate for what I'm doing and burns low growth to keep my path clear, but there's plenty of times where I have to explain things to other managers and content owners ("the page has to be edited because 'someone' pasted into the CMA from a Word doc and there's 300 lines of MSO code in there, which is appropriate for a Word doc but not for a web page"). But I don't do well with the bean counters and senior VPs because I'm as maladept with MBA-speak as they are with XML. That's where my boss runs interference for me.

Re:So people skills win again...

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Denigrate it all you want. It's about communication, which you clearly don't care a whit about in your current job. Good for you; the moment you get into a job or a situation where you have to work with others, or deal with others, or gods forbid, COOPERATE with others... you're up shit's creek.

You're offering up a straw man; a dichotomy between competence and communication. Nowhere in my post did I ever advocate that communication is unnecessary. Plenty of engineers and other professional can and do communicate well. They also understand their job and profession.

But a manager with "people skills" and little else is fundamentally unable to properly communicate in his postion. How can someone communicate if they don't understand what they're talking about? What kind of company results from such people at the helm instead of people who know what they're talking about.

Which isn't to say that I advocate the autistic engineer running things either. But I can't honestly say whether a flake is worse than a PHB or not. Neither is qualified for a management position.

Re:So people skills win again...

[kamikaze_late2party]

As well, a perfect manager is, in many ways, like a perfect sysadmin - if he does the job really well, arranging the work process such that his reports don't even see the bumps on the road ahead, he's largely invisible. And that can be a problem when it comes to recognizing said job.

I would agree wholly with that.

And then realise that a manager really is a Sysadmin. But the System they administer is made up of staff with various tools and skills at their fingertips.

Re:So people skills win again...

[oliverthered]

umm.. those things listed are technical expertise.

How the hell can you be a technical expert if you can't work with people and pass it on...

We call them consultants!

Re:So people skills win again...

[Kelbear]

One of the interesting points made in the study was that the most important characteristic of "being available" is a simple and achievable goal.

"Once Google had its list, the company started teaching it in training programs, as well as in coaching and performance review sessions with individual employees. It paid off quickly.

âoeWe were able to have a statistically significant improvement in manager quality for 75 percent of our worst-performing managers,â Mr. Bock says.

He tells the story of one manager whose employees seemed to despise him. He was driving them too hard. They found him bossy, arrogant, political, secretive. They wanted to quit his team.

âoeHeâ(TM)s brilliant, but he did everything wrong when it came to leading a team,â Mr. Bock recalls.

Because of that heavy hand, this manager was denied a promotion he wanted, and was told that his style was the reason. But Google gave him one-on-one coaching â" the company has coaches on staff, rather than hiring from the outside. Six months later, team members were grudgingly acknowledging in surveys that the manager had improved.

âoeAnd a year later, itâ(TM)s actually quite a bit better,â Mr. Bock says. âoeItâ(TM)s still not great. Heâ(TM)s nowhere near one of our best managers, but heâ(TM)s not our worst anymore. And he got promoted.â

"

Being "good with people" is pretty tough for some people. Socializing doesn't come naturally to everyone. But they can make time to hear other people out, so they can connect with people on a professional level, even if they are slow to make connections on a personal level.

Anecdotally, I know my morale definitely improves when I know my boss and I are on the same page with regards to what's important, and what needs to be done. It takes away a lot of uncertainty and anxiety about when my work gets reviewed.

Re:So people skills win again...

[wwphx]

Disagree entirely. I've solved many a problem just by explaining it out loud to someone else. Sometimes the act of verbalizing engages a different part of your brain in problem solving and can lead to a solution.

Scott Adams would love this.

[steeleyeball]

The only difference between this and Dilbert is that the name of the company isn't constantly changing.

Re:Scott Adams would love this.

[MrEricSir]

Well that and the pointy-haired boss didn't help anyone.

Division of labour.

[Anonymous Coward]

So in other words bosses manage people and technologists manage technology. Who knew?

Re:Division of labour.

[Anonymous Coward]

So in other words bosses manage people and technologists manage technology. Who knew?

In other words, programmers will continue to stay at lower pay scales and be treated like drones even though they do the hard work.

Re:Division of labour.

[hedwards]

If you want a more effective company, get rid of as many leeches, er managers, as you can possibly lose. Then just pay the employees something that resembles their value. Most of the time when companies complain about poor management, what they're really saying is that they don't really feel like paying for or otherwise investing in their employees, but can't figure out why the managers can't get any quality.

Well, of course you can't get quality if you're managers are incompetent, but managers have never been the source of production. At best they're coordinating things so that the employees can focus as much on production as possible.

Re:Division of labour.

[Anonymous Coward]

...even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees' lives and careers."

That is hard work as well, just in a different arena. Especially when it comes to dealing with people who are convinced that they are getting the shaft. Having a boss as described above is a rare thing.

Re:Division of labour.

[RoFLKOPTr]

So in other words bosses manage people and technologists manage technology. Who knew?

In other words, programmers will continue to stay at lower pay scales and be treated like drones even though they do the hard work.

In other other words, programmers who have no management skills will continue to stay at the level where they perform their job best: programming. The rare few that DO have both programming AND management skills will be treasured and move up the company ladder faster than any person who possesses only half of the equation.

Seniority is bullshit. I don't care if you've been with my company for 20 years. If your boss is a 25 year old kid that just started here, it's because you don't have the skills to be in his position, and he does.

Re:Division of labour.

[Baron_Yam]

"At best they're coordinating things so that the employees can focus as much on production as possible."

Managers exist to ensure employees work cooperatively instead of chaotically following their own whims. Managers exist to ensure the cooperative work being performed is on track with corporate expectations. Managers exist to ensure that expectations are reasonable so that deliverables can actually be delivered. In a perfect world, they also do what they can to ensure the people they manage are happy, not just because that's better for the bottom line, but because they're decent human beings.

I mean, it's RIGHT THERE IN THE NAME - they 'manage' resources. They are useful and necessary on any sizeable task.

Re:Division of labour.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seniority is bullshit. I don't care if you've been with my company for 20 years. If your boss is a 25 year old kid that just started here, it's because you don't have the skills to be in his position, and he does.

Yeah, let's create a world where nobody ever has the least bit of job security and where people can be replaced on a whim's notice because some newly hired personnel manager thinks some new person is better than a old person. Let's create a world where you'll get dismissed from your job --- wreaking havoc on the rest of your life --- just because you some normal life event affected your affected your work during a grieving or recovery period. Thinking seniority is "bullshit" only shows you have no idea what the consequences of eliminating it would be.

Re:Division of labour.

[PCM2]

In other words, programmers will continue to stay at lower pay scales and be treated like drones even though they do the hard work.

And yet many programmers seem to pride themselves on being arrogant primadonnas who are difficult to manage... analogies about "herding cats," etc. Sounds like maybe management really is the hard work.

Re:Division of labour.

[Dragonslicer]

At best they're coordinating things so that the employees can focus as much on production as possible.

That's what a manager's job is: to do everything they can to let the people working for them do their jobs. Somebody has to do this stuff, and you're better off having it be someone that's good at managing so that the good engineers can focus on the technical work.

Re:Division of labour.

[Caraig]

You must not have been in many jobs that required managers. Or, more sympathetically, rarely had a good manager. Which is understandable, a good manager can be hard to find. I've been lucky, I guess; I've had two or three jobs with really good managers.

Yes, "At best they're coordinating things so that the employees can focus as much on production as possible." Don't piss on that; a good manager will set out your team's goals and let you go and do them, but they'll also keep THEIR bosses from getting on YOUR case. Can you do that? It's harder than it sounds. A LOT harder. A bad manager will let upper management filter through them to you. A good one lets your team do their thing.

And if it's not stressed enough: Don't piss on the value of having a manager lay out your team's goals. Not every team is 'Do X really well.' Most real world teams outside of project development have 'Do X, Y, and Z really well' as their mission and your manager can guide you towards which of those needs work, which is going just fine, and which is slipping.

Techies love groaning about managers, but as someone said, a good manager is almost invisible, and is a guide when the team knows what it's doing. When the team looses its way, when they have no focus, when they're falling apart, either the manager is failing, or there's a new manager coming on who needs to lay into the team. (Or the team is filled with a bunch of incompetent fuckwits.)

Re:Division of labour.

[bored]

Seniority is bullshit. I don't care if you've been with my company for 20 years. If your boss is a 25 year old kid that just started here, it's because you don't have the skills to be in his position, and he does.

You, know I've been around enough to see this, and no its not always someone younger than me (has that ever happened?). Invariably, those people fail the test of time. Its one thing for people younger than yourself to be higher up the management chain. Its quite another for someone freshly hired to understand the intricacies of the position they inhabit. Whether that position is CEO, or junior test engineer. As the position becomes more critical to the success of the company, those intricacies become more important to the success of the company. Putting someone who doesn't have a couple years visibility on a position, into that position, is like flipping a coin. For all intents and purposes their decisions are random, and the results are going to reflect it. If you do this to a functional group, there is a good chance it will stop functioning. That said, if you do it to a dysfunctional group/division/company, its simply a prayer that enough of the decisions will be correct to turn it around. Far to often there are "people issues" that aren't evident from a first order approximation. This is like electing the president. The first 2-4 years, they are learning on the job, and their mistakes won't become evident for another 2-4 years, if not longer, as economic decisions can take decades. Same with swapping managers, the new manager makes some minor decision that should be a no brainier but fails to account for the fact that the two guys doing 50% of the work, decide that not having a window means they are going to respond to a recruiter, and leave 2 months later. The team shuffles around, meets their goals after working 80 hour weeks, the new manager gets a promotion/leaves for another company to work their magic. Over the next couple years the support staff has to be doubled, and the company starts loosing customers, because the product is now a POS.

No shit

[drsmack1]

News Flash: Non-Autistic spectrum people better at dealing with people!

Be honest with yourselves Slashdot - would you *really* want the average slashdot commenter managing *you*? An autocrat who only can see things in black or white and cannot work with other people - well, that is last on my list of wanted bosses.

Also, I would not want to be "modded down" in the workplace for my political views. Slashdot people love free speech - as long as it agrees with theirs.

Re:No shit

[Tablizer]

would you *really* want the average slashdot commenter managing *you*?

"Finish by 3pm or I'll make Goatse your desktop wallpaper!"

Re:No shit

[hduff]

Also, I would not want to be "modded down" in the workplace for my political views. Slashdot people love free speech - as long as it agrees with theirs.

You are wrong again.

-1

Re:No shit

[Damek]

This isn't biological. When you have a society where people think money defines who you are, and all social studies are basically done on white, educated folks, no wonder all our conclusions on "human nature" are f*#@ed up.

Slashdot can't be "honest" with "itself." That'st just too much to ask.

Re:No shit

[vux984]

Slashdot people love free speech - as long as it agrees with theirs.

Its fine for people to have opinions that differ from mine.

But I do expect them to be rational and logically consistent, without being factually incorrect, or hypocrites.

But even then I'll defend someone's freedom of speech to say something idiotic, but I'll exercise my own right to that same freedom of speech to make sure as many people as possible know that it was idiotic... :)

Freedom of speech doesn't mean I have to let someone say idiotic things without commenting on how idiotic they are.

Re:No shit

[drsmack1]

I'm not sure what message you were replying to. My intention was not to provide you with still another opportunity for you to try to insert your socialist world-view into the conversation.

Although I do find it humorous that you - a socialist - has chimed in on a discussion about autistic people not understanding human nature.

My Favorite quote about socialism:

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Socialism is a failure. It has failed everywhere it has been tried. You cannot change the fundamental need of the individual to strive to improve his and his families situation anymore than you can teach a cat to be a dog.

Socialism works great in the autistic's imaginary paper world. It fails in the real world that in run by non-autistics.

Sorry.

Re:No shit

[drsmack1]

I think it is possible that you have intentionally misunderstood my comment.

Replying to someone you disagree with is completely consistent with the principles of free speech.

Modding someone down however, is Stalinist censorship at it's most insidious.

That is what happens as a matter of fact here. It is quite revealing and consistent.

Re:No shit

[SeaFox]

Also, I would not want to be "modded down" in the workplace for my political views. Slashdot people love free speech - as long as it agrees with theirs

Yeah, because you never hear about people being fired because their personal lives "reflect badly" on the company. At least on Slashdot the political views are ones you express here "in the workplace", and you're not being punished for how you live your own life outside of work.

Re:No shit

[Beuno]

Also, I would not want to be "modded down" in the workplace for my political views. Slashdot people love free speech - as long as it agrees with theirs.

I don't think they meant it in a "Democrat vs Republican" sense, but rather internal company politics (ie, focusing on certain aspects of the project because it's good for a promotion).

Re:No shit

[drsmack1]

Also, I would not want to be "modded down" in the workplace for my political views. Slashdot people love free speech - as long as it agrees with theirs.

I don't think they meant it in a "Democrat vs Republican" sense, but rather internal company politics (ie, focusing on certain aspects of the project because it's good for a promotion).

I don't know what you are talking about. Who is "they"? Google?

Re:No shit

[Beuno]

I don't know what you are talking about. Who is "they"? Google?

Yes, Google and the orginal source, The New York Times.

Re:No shit

[drsmack1]

Also, I would not want to be "modded down" in the workplace for my political views. Slashdot people love free speech - as long as it agrees with theirs

Yeah, because you never hear about people being fired because their personal lives "reflect badly" on the company. At least on Slashdot the political views are ones you express here "in the workplace", and you're not being punished for how you live your own life outside of work.

I imagine that you only see it in one direction - say a situation where you are gay or smoke pot.

How about if you are a known conservative in a university and unaccountably you cannot get tenure, or a conservative at say ABC news.

The same people who in 1970 were agitating for their views to be aired on college campuses are they same people suppressing conversation on abortion (too inflammatory). They are quick to try to silence people with labels and personal attacks if they don't agree with global warming as a political movement.

A large percentage of people in this country believe that abortion is a horrible thing that should not be legal. Without considering the merits of their position - ask yourself: When has that position been voiced by a favorable character on any mainstream TV show?

The vast majority of people in the USA support the 2nd amendment. Without considering the merits of their position - ask yourself: When has that position been voiced by a favorable character on any mainstream TV show?

I miss the days of Archie Bunker - although the liberals always "won" on the show, at least both side got aired. That does not happen anymore.

Re:No shit

[drsmack1]

You might enjoy this:
http://www.rantsandpranks.com/2010/09/i-attack-country-of-norway-and-win.html

Re:No shit

[Sla$hPot]

People management skills doesn't come at the expense of technical abilities or any other skills for that matter.
I think your problem with technically savy bosses stems from insecurity because of your lack of technical skills.
You prefer to talk about the problem rather than handling it.
This behavior was ok a couple of years ago before the financial crisis.
Today that kind of attitude leads to bankrupcy.
Bosses have to understand what they are dealing with.
Networking and playing political games wont cut it when delivery is mandetory.
Talking is out walking is in. As it should be.
This also goes for companies like Google.

Re:No shit

[Sla$hPot]

Socialism works great in the autistic's imaginary paper world. It fails in the real world that in run by non-autistics.

Sorry.

Well there is a lot of autistic quants working in the banking world.
Creating algorithms and writing software that runs Wall street.
They kind of rule :)
And how about the Manhattan project?
I think most people would agree that these dudes (Bohr, Oppenheimer) played a pretty big role in the political arena, while being even by todays standards the über nerds.

Re:No shit

[Kjella]

Black and white isn't so much the issue, what you don't want to be managed by is a manager who'd like to be an engineer again but felt he had to get promoted that way to get any career progress and benefits. It happens far too often that people don't get enough seniority for "just" being a doer. The job of a manager - at least in terms of what I want as an employee - is run interference for me. You don't bring a building engineer to a discussion of whether this should be commercial or residential area, means of getting funding, land permit contacts and so on. You bring him in when you're ready to build something, the same should be true of IT projects.

That's where being a manager is different, you have to deal with all those sides to it. Not just ahead of projects, but during projects when they mid-way decide they'd rather make this into a football stadium. When they try stealing half your resources but still demand you deliver on time. When people aren't able to reach any decisions but at the same time they refuse to move the deadline, asking you to implement three months work in three weeks. When some absurd requirements come dropping down from management that it must be done in two weeks and built entirely out of plywood, you have to go deal with them. If there's some access rights or whatever I need and don't get, you have to be the escalation point that'll yell at them and get all those non-technical problems out of the way. Your job is to make us productive by shielding the team from all the craziness outside.

Of course there are some internally oriented issues too in how you behave to us on the team. But about 9 out of 10 times the issue is that the manager hasn't been able to deal with the external issues and tries whipping his team into rewriting reality to deliver on these horribly mismanaged expectations. Particularly the engineering managers who'd rather just end it or ignore it by agreeing to something than to trigger even more long meetings. Nothing is worse than a person who ignores doing his job because he'd rather still do my job, that'll just land us both in a pile of shit.

Re:No shit

[mind.the.oranges]

Socialism works great in the autistic's imaginary paper world. It fails in the real world that in run by non-autistics.

I do so love broad generalizations made by people too ignorant to open their eyes to the world around them. Up here in Canada we have this little thing called Socialized Healthcare where everyone is given care regardless of their ability to pay. I'm sure it'll shock you to discover this system has better health outcomes across the board and lower costs per user than the convoluted for-profit system south of the border in the US where either you're rich and can afford care, you're middle-class and will go bankrupt should you need care, or you're poor and you get what little you can wherever you can and suffer for it. I know, I know, citation required.. try the WHO's reports on healthcare for a starter. And God help you when you find out about all our evil communist institutions like Credit Unions and Co-Ops. Oooooooh... scary! Co-operative unions working for the benefit of their members? Yep, it's Stalin-ism run amok up here.. just think of all profits lost to the evils of giving a damn about others and recognizing all human beings are worthy of dignity and respect.

Re:No shit

[drsmack1]

Your brain problem is showing.

A huge technical project and needed specific skills in banking have nothing to do whatsoever with how a government should be run.

You fail critical thinking.

Re:No shit

[drsmack1]

So... there are no waiting lists for certain life-saving procedures? You guys are basically an United States protectorate - what is your military budget? A few mil?

Canadians with money who need the best health care available come to the USA.

Call me back when you guys produce anything of note other than smug self-satisfied people. Relevant counties are busy here.

Re:No shit

[Grygus]

The problem here is that it's never enough, is it? If you think abortion is horrible, you are free not to have one. If you think the 2nd amendment is awesome - well, it's in the Constitution, so you're covered - your position is in the fact the law of the land. The country has already accommodated you, so why aren't you happy? The problem is that isn't what you want - what you want is for your opinions to be the only viable answer.

Re:No shit

[drsmack1]

I take it you have not read the 2nd amendment? I can only go by your incorrect statement. Here it is:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Since the rights of the gun owner in the USA are infringed in just about every way short of an absolute ban - I'd say that you have missed on this one. You don't seem to think too clearly.

As for abortion - I do not differentiate between a human being either being inside or outside a layer of skin and organs. The protection of innocent life is the basic function of government.

I don't want it to be legal for a mother to kill her three year old child OR her three months from conception child. What kind of monster would legislate otherwise?

And for what? So someone can escape their own irresponsibility at the expense of the most innocent life possible?

The reason there is no debate on abortion is that the people controlling the public airwaves know that their position cannot stand scrutiny.

If the PEOPLE wanted abortion it would not have to been snuck in through the judiciary. That is how the left must get what they want - through unelected members of the judiciary.

 

Re:No shit

[turbidostato]

"Socialism is a failure. It has failed everywhere it has been tried"

Except for the fact that each and every corporation in the whole world is run under the premises of a communist regime, of course.

Re:No shit

[drsmack1]

That makes no sense.

Re:No shit

[colinrichardday]

A large percentage of people in this country believe that abortion is a horrible thing that should not be legal.

How large a percentage?

Re:No shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop parroting the talking points memo.

And if you think the US is relevant anymore... get over your goddamn self, pull your head out of your ass, and look around at the world. It's moving on away from us, because we keep breaking it and shitting on our neighbors.

And best health care available? BULL. You and I will NEVER get that 'best health care,' not when the the 'real' death panels -- insurance industry underwriters -- hold the strings and decide you and I aren't worth that $20K operation that will save our lives.

Shove off, you authoritarian punk. We're sick and tired of you running around with blinders on, in an endless refrain of "USA! USA!" while our country is falling down around us. DO SOMETHING USEFUL, you fuck, and maybe we'll get out of this decade with a stable economy and a rational government.

Re:No shit

[Anonymous Coward]

If you accept that "socialism has failed everywhere is has been tried" at face value, then your "socialism" turns out to be an authoritarian, centralized, top down management system. It doesn't make sense because you don't understand what the countries who tried this "socialism" actually look(ed) like, they didn't even try to follow their supposed ideology. That doesn't mean socialism is any more workable then any other simplistic ideology, but smart countries (ones where practicality takes precedence over ideology) have successfully incorporated useful elements are better of for it.

Re:No shit

[Sla$hPot]

Your short inconsistent setences shows traces of autism.
U on recep perscripted medicine kid?
I urge you to explain your radical thinking on youtube instead, while drinking some tiger blod. That would be epic...
You are winning drsmack1 :)

Re:No shit

[drsmack1]

Liberal regulations caused all of the problems with the healthcare industry. Period.

Re:No shit

[drsmack1]

The countries that you mention are just going to choak on it slower than the ones that go all in. Also, it is not about practicality or what makes sense in the US - it is about marxists using healthcare to get their policies instituted. If there is a "right" way to do it - it won't be done here in the US. These people are not socialists - they are marxists. Big difference.

Re:No shit

[drsmack1]

By changing the subject you have declared me the winner - it would be helpful to yourself if you tried to find all the other things you are wrong about due to muddled thinking.

Re:No shit

[Anonymous Coward]

If you ever see your desktop except during a reboot, you're clearly not working hard enough!

Re:No shit

[gonzonista]

You've hit the nail on the head. The US system offers the best care for those with the best ability to pay. Canada offers a relatively even level of care to everybody. As such, those who can afford to do so will get better care in the USA while those who can't get better care in Canada. For the individual, which is better depends on where you stand in the economic ladder.

For the country, it comes down to cost. The US system is expensive and not very effective on an aggregate basis. The Canadian system does not address more expensive treatments or procedures as well as the US system. That being said, you have almost no control over accidents or genetics. The cost to an uncovered individual is backruptcy or death. Because coverage is automatic in Canada, risk of bankruptcy and/or death is mitigated. The cost to the nation is about half that of the USA. For the average joe, which by definition, is most of us, the Canadian system works better.

I'm not trying to be smug about this. The USA is unique in having primarily private healthcare. Most developed nations have socialized healthcare and have not been bankrupted by it yet. Unregulated markets seem to have done a better job of that.

Re:No shit

[drsmack1]

I don't know where you live, but having something weird wrong with you medically (I mean not straight-forward) is a fucking nightmare in a rationed medical system. I am in such a situation right now and I have recieved not useful help from either the USAF medical system or the Veterans Administration.

The doctors are browbeaten to not "waste" money on outside the box medical tests or procedures. You have a broken bone or a run of the mill heart problem - you are all set. Something you don't see every day - you are fucked.

I am a believer in American Exceptionalism - socialism *anything* is an anathema to that.

ALL of the problems with the US medical system are attributable to anti-market forces instituted by marxists in our country under the guise of helping people.

Strip away all the horseshit that has gummed up the works since 1964; replace it with minimal regulation to account for changes in the world since then and we would be fine.

Re:No shit

[gonzonista]

Considering that the US system relies on private insurance to ration out care, I am not sure what you mean. With respect to a private insurer covering a weird condition, the private insurer is under the same rationing constraints as a socialized system. In either case, you are screwed because it is an expensive condition that falls outside the standard parameters of treatment. The difference between the Canadian system and the American system is that the rationing is meted out by the insurer in the USA and by the government in Canada. The private insurer has a vested interest in making a profit for its shareholders, the government has a vested interested in making a healthy taxpayer.

Note that insurance does not have the same feedback loops as other free market systems. You pay until you have a problem. When you have a problem, the insurer has no interest in fulfilling their end of the deal because their objective is to get payments from those who do not have problems. Ever try to get coverage once you have a recurring condition? We can get all idealistic about how deregulation will make a more efficient health care system but this is not practical in reality. When you break a leg, do you compare prices and services at different hospitals?

Re:No shit

[drsmack1]

With a private system at the very least I can CHOOSE to pay for something not covered. Once it goes in the socialist shithole non-standard procedures won't even exist anymore.

American has been the safety net for the socialist countries in terms of research driven by capitalistic concerns.

Obviously you do not work in or even close to anyone in the medical field - if you think deregulation is about price shopping - you are fucked in the head.

I'm talking about having to have 10 administrative employees for every doctor to handle all of the compliance and insurance BS.

Reduce the costs to what was proportional to the 1963 prices by removing all of the cruft that marxists having injected into the system and insurance would only be needed for catastrophic care - just like it was back in the day.

You lack the perspective of time - I can tell you are young and have allowed others to tell you how things work now and how they worked then.

The problems that the American system has have been caused solely by those I have mentioned. I understand that is not real easy to see as things sit right now; but had you seen how things worked before all of this BS, you would know what I mean.

Instead of feeding me back some pap that someone fed to you - talk to anyone involved with medical billing - any branch of medicine and see if they thing that what is coming will be an improvement.

Between the two of us, one of us directly supports several medical offices and doctor groups.

Between the two of us, one of us has experienced being treated in both a non-rationed and rationed healthcare system.

Between the two of us, one of us has direct knowledge of the the US medical system prior to the "Great Society" era.

Both of us are very familiar with the benefits of socialized medicine, yet the ONE of us who is in the best situation to judge their relative merits (through direct experience) has a sharply different opinion from the one who doesn't.

You are making a paper argument, and it makes some sense. But it will never work here because the people pushing it *here* have no interest in it working. It is simply a power-grab by marxist elements in our country who pose as liberals. It will not be set up like it is in Canada or the UK or wherever because the goal is not the same.

Re:No shit

[gonzonista]

Before you make any assumptions about who I am and how fucked in the head you think I am, can you offer a workable system beyond the overworn argument of "Let the free market decide?" The free market system that is in place is about twice as expensive as the socialist systems of other countries. It isn't delivering a cost effective solution to treating people's medical needs. The Canadian system, as does the hybrid mix in the UK deliver affordable health care to everyone. The UK system allows you to choose what you will pay for and the Canadian system allows that for cosmetic procedures.

Both those systems also have bureaucratic nonsense but they still seem to function and deliver affordable health care. I agree that streamlining the bureaucracy will help to lower cost but if it is the sole cause, why is it that other socialized systems are working under the same constraints?

In any case, there is a big difference between being able to choose to pay and being able to pay. The issue in the US is that about 10% of the population lacks health insurance and therefore, coverage. If you don't have coverage, your choice is to pay whatever is necessary to fix it, or have a broken leg. Is there a bit of a moral hazard here where the care provider can effectively choose whatever price they want because those in distressed situations do not have much of an option to shop around? What is the free market price to save your life? It is everything you have. I'll believe that a private system is workable when you can tell me how a private system will resist the temptation to gouge the patient.

So, no system is perfect. Socialized medicine delivers cheaper care to more people. Privatized medicine delivers better care to less people. What's your solution?

Re:No shit

[drsmack1]

My solution (which you either did not read or already forgot) was in my previous post. Even though I asked you not to reply with more pap, but instead speak to a medical billing person - you have simply typed out the standard line.

Get some first hand experience. You have no frame of reference and you really are not even showing that you read what I typed. It really is a waste of time arguing with someone who does not wish to dig deeper than the propaganda. As a quasi-informed person you are doing others a disservice by simply consuming propaganda and then releasing it out into the world as your own words.

Accept the responsibility that comes with being intelligent and inform yourself as I had previously described.

Re:No shit

[vux984]

I unintentionally misunderstood.

your talking about "mod down as a disagree" and/or "mod up as agree"

I concede there are people on slashdot who do mod that way, most of us don't though, hell I assume most of us don't even have mod points most of the time.

To be honest, I think the majority of people who make that abuse do so because slashdot lacks a way to simply flag posts as 'agree' and 'disagree' and 'factually wrong'. In other words its not so much a desire to corrupt and abuse the moderation system, but merely a clumsy work around for a feature they want.

I'm sure some small group is actively gaming and abusing the system, but every community has that sub-group, and its not representative of the whole.

Re:No shit

[gonzonista]

If this is your solution :

Reduce the costs to what was proportional to the 1963 prices by removing all of the cruft that marxists having injected into the system and insurance would only be needed for catastrophic care - just like it was back in the day.

I think you seriously need to think of whether that is workable or not. I wasn't around in 1963 to make an evaluation and I doubt that you were either. You would have to be about sixty five to really have any experience on health care back then. Times have changed since then and systems have become more complex. Smoking was not considered to be carcinogenic and asbestos was still allowed in building materials. I don't think you or I wants to go back to 1963 health treatments.

Yes, I do know doctors, too. So, don't try to throw that one at me. Health care is getting expensive because it is getting more complicated to treat older people and there are proportionally more older people than younger people than there were in 1963. Should we simply stop treating older people because they use more medical resources? Your solution will not solve this problem except to remove treatment of the elderly from the health care system. It will work but is not the system I want in place.

Re:No shit

[drsmack1]

You are very naive I think. The mods I speak of intentionally use the mod "overrated" because it is not subject to meta-moderation and they will never be subject to scrutiny. It is the same reason they go into posts from days previous and mod down people after no one is even reading it anymore - only so they can damage the karma so as to make sure they cannot post with a +2 score.

Look at any Conservatives post history and look at the scores, see how many non-flamebait posts are modded negatively.

My original post in this thread got a few overrated mods.

These posts of mine were modded down as either flamebait or overrated - or both:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1932134&cid=34738910

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1834998&cid=33990896

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1821400&cid=33899936

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1764628&cid=33356866

There was no reason for any of these posts to be modded down if there is any consistency with slashdot. A post that would be modded negative and thus invisible today would become a +5 if you just changed the word "Bush" to "Obama".

Re:No shit

[Grygus]

I rest my case.

Re:No shit

[Damek]

A few days later, I'm not sure what I was replying to, either. I might have clicked on the wrong Reply link. Apologies for the confusion.

I will say, though, I'm amused by your response because I didn't mention socialism, or anything related, anywhere in my comment. Personally, I'm an anarchist, and while your quote is simplistically clever, it's irrelevant to me.

Duh.

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

Well, yes. Being a good manager is like being a good engineer--you help people solve problems they come across, encourage good work, discourage shirking by inspiration and competitiveness more than by punishment and threats of recrimination, etc...

It's good to have an expert to go to when I have a problem. It's better to have someone who knows ten experts and can understand or walk through the general problem.

Re:Duh.

[Daniel Phillips]

And I can tell you that the general quality of Google managers is very poor in spite of supposed systems for filtering, training and guiding them. This is in fact the worst thing about working at Google: self important, self absorbed managers who only care about milking their own situation for everything they can get. Often nonexistent or weak technical skills just pours salt on this bleeding wound.

The few guidelines that Google puts in place tend to be unmonitored by anyone who matters and are widely and cynically ignored. Peer review is very much one of those. There are of course good managers at Google, I know a few. But they are badly outnumbered by facetimers and soulless climbers.

Re:Duh.

[Daniel Phillips]

Another thing: managers at Google widely believe that they are better than engineers simply because they are managers, in spite of a supposed explicit ban on this attitude. For that matter, so do the sysops, because they are in control of the facilities engineers need to do their work, and because they get first dibs on any shiny new equipment that arrives. I got the distinct impression that Google sysops think of themselves as managers, or at least, very important people, and in particular, more important than engineers. By the way, I was a Google sysop before I moved to engineering so I saw this from the inside.

Re:Duh.

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree with most of what you've said... nobody really cares what the sysops believe. Most of the sysops are people that couldn't cut it as developers/engineers, and their pay almost universally reflects this. What the managers think matters to everyone.

Re:Duh.

[joebagodonuts]

Not limited to Google.

Re:Duh.

[Daniel Phillips]

True to some extent. But try pissing off a sysop or two and see how that works out for you.

Re:Duh.

[JamesP]

So, PHBs and BOFHs

Re:Duh.

[Daniel Phillips]

So, PHBs and BOFHs

Yup.

Re:Duh.

[yuhong]

And that is exactly what Google is trying to fix by the project. Did you see OP?

Re:Duh.

[Daniel Phillips]

And that is exactly what Google is trying to fix by the project. Did you see OP?

Of course. And I saw plenty of high-sounding initiatives at Google that had no useful result. I am skeptical about this one. It plays well, but does Laszlo really have his heart in it or is he just going through the motions, hoping that whatever concern came down from the owners will dry up and blow away after a while and everything can go back to business as usual?

Re:Duh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of your viewpoint is that you worked in the SMO office.

Re:Duh.

[weicco]

I don't think manager has to be technically expert. I wouldn't hurt though.

I'm hired as a expert so it's my job to know technical stuff. Manager's job is to provide me whatever I need to get that job done and focus my aim if I get lost with all the customer needs in various projects. If there's something I don't know it's manager's job to put me in training, hire a consultant, etc.

To put it shortly: manager manages, I write code.

Re:Duh.

[Daniel Phillips]

Part of your viewpoint is that you worked in the SMO office.

True. But I spent time in Mountain View as well and observed similar situations, just not as shamelessly out of control.

Fair enough

[starfishsystems]

Given the choice between (A) a manager who listens to me and takes care of all the organizational overhead so that I can focus on my work, and (B) a manager who challenges me or competes with me on every technical decision, I'll take (A) any day.

Yeah, sure, I'd like the best of both worlds, of course I would. A mentor would be very nice. But we're talking about a list of priorities. If I really wanted to be in a mentoring environment, I'd be back in academic research. You don't find people of that calibre in industry, not most places, and if you do, they're narcissistic jerks most of the time. That's been my experience, anyway. Maybe a few of you have been luckier. If so, count your blessings!

Re:Fair enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Then, what you are looking for is a friend not a manager...

All this survey shows is that Google employees don't have friends enough, and are wishing for more.

Re:Fair enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoever you are- nice post.

Re:Fair enough

[mooingyak]

Completely agreed. I've got one of those right now. While he's not clueless on the tech end, it's not what he spends most of his time on. I go to him when the requirements from finance don't make any sense, he comes to me when he can't remember exactly which shell command does what he wants. His lack of technical expertise hasn't lessened my respect for him. It's simply not what he's there for. In exchange, he doesn't argue with my design decisions. He may sometimes question or make suggestions, but he leaves me with complete decision making authority in the technical realm. I don't think I'd want it to be different.

Re:Fair enough

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a boss like B. I don't work there anymore, and as far as I can tell, he doesn't have anyone working for him anymore. He didn't have technical chops, didn't have *ANY* ability to lead people, was a self-centered, all-for-me-none-for-you and if I can't take anymore then you might wind up with a few scraps kind. No ability to reason. Back stabbing at every opportunity. Quick to claim credit for my work, faster to assign blame when he screwed up. The job was very boring (maintenance mode), but having a jerk boss made it worse. An un-challenging, very boring job is bad. An ass hole boss is worse. I would take a boring job and an ok boss over an interesting job and a jerk boss. As it was, I had a boring job and a jerk boss. No wonder I don't work there anymore.

Re:Fair enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, couldn't agree more. A good manager is one that takes care of the bureaucracy and clears the way for people on the ground do the work and make the technical decisions. I love my boss because I basically tell him what I think the right thing to do is, and then he figures out how to get me the time/resources to do it.

I think some of the problems with management in tech fields is that there's confusion between a technical leader and a team manager. They're two different roles.

Re:Fair enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, sure, I'd like the best of both worlds, of course I would. A mentor would be very nice.

I'd go so far as to say that I'd prefer one of my superstar peers to be a mentor than my supervisor (unless it is a career goal for me to move into management).

Re:Thank goodness, I don't work at Google

[Anonymous Coward]

lol goatse fail.

Google is maturing

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like the maturation phase of every other technology focused corporation in history...

1. Founded by engineers
2. Rapid growth
3. Founding engineers become wealthy and retire early
4. Sales, marketing and management folks take over
5. Bureaucratic creativity sucking shithole

Re:Google is maturing

[Daniel Phillips]

Just like the maturation phase of every other technology focused corporation in history...

1. Founded by engineers
2. Rapid growth
3. Founding engineers become wealthy and retire early
4. Sales, marketing and management folks take over
5. Bureaucratic creativity sucking shithole

You nailed it precisely. So sad, I expected better of Google.

Re:Google is maturing

[Blymie]

I might add, just because I have to (my angst and anger requires it). You've just described Volkswagen.

Prime example: most modern Volks don't even have a real hardware differential. Do you really think any engineer would ever design a car that way?

Yes, there is EDL (electronic differential lock). It is absolutely not the same as a real diff. I've seen people unable to get out of a steep grade, gravel driveway, because of EDL.

Pfft. EDL is only one example of the sadness of modern VW. I'm not going to say it's all bad ; hell, I still drive one.. and love it. However, when Ford has caught up to the same build quality / hardiness of VW, that shows something.

Re:Google is maturing

[Anonymous Coward]

They have a "hardware differential", but it's a purely-open differential. You're thinking of a limited-slip differential. If I were engineering a moderately-priced medium-performance car, I probably wouldn't put one in either due to cost and weight concerns. For that type of application, using the stability control/braking system to implement LSD functionality is a better trade-off, IMHO.

The only reason I can really see for using a true LSD or locking differential anymore is either in very high performance situations or in very low traction off-road/rock-crawling situations. Otherwise, intelligent application of the brakes to stop spinning wheels is IMHO a better compromise.

Also, I think that Ford has beaten VW in build quality/hardiness for at least a decade, at least in the North American market.

Re:Google is maturing

[tweak13]

I think you fail to understand what a differential does. These cars absolutely have a "hardware" differential. What they do not have is a locking differential. Almost no vehicles have locking differentials except vehicles intended for severe off-road conditions or racing vehicles. The reason is, locking differentials are clunky as hell, and most people would never understand how or why they work and complain when they locked up in turns.

I'm not going to go into a full explanation here, because explaining the operation of a differential is beyond this comment. EDL is a completely valid way to transfer torque through a standard differential to whatever wheel is not spinning. If both wheels spin, the wheel with the highest torque gets to apply that torque without being limited by the low torque wheel.

As to your question if engineers would build a car this way, the answer is obviously yes. I am an engineer, and although I don't design cars, I do understand what these systems actually do. The design concept is sound, and it absolutely provides benefits over a non-locking differential without this system. There are various other systems to combat this problem. So called "selectable" systems, that are mechanical lockers with some sort of manual actuator to actually perform the lockup. Limited-slip systems, which are clutch based or fluid based. However most vehicles have none of these. I encourage you to do some more reading about differentials to understand why and how these systems do what they do.

Re:Google is maturing

[Anonymous Coward]

Volkswagen never had better build quality. They're alright but nothing special. I would equate them with about the same quality as Dodge. Ford, Chevy, BMW were always a little better and about the same to each other (I own vehicles from all three plus VW).

For top build quality you have to go to Honda, Toyota, etc. (I have never owned any of these but know lots of people who do)

Re:Google is maturing

[Anonymous Coward]

> As to your question if engineers would build a car this way, the answer is obviously yes.

Only because told to do so by Sales & Marketing. Otherwise, every vehicle would have a locking diff as it is the superior solution.

If engineers were free to design a car, it would simply be sold at the price dictated by its design. Instead, the accountants tell the engineers to cut corners to chase a particular price point.

Re:Google is maturing

[roman_mir]

I'm not going to go into a full explanation here, because explaining the operation of a differential is beyond this comment.

- however it can be explained in a video

Re:Google is maturing

[Anonymous Coward]

If engineers were free to design a car, it would simply be sold at the price dictated by its design. Instead, the accountants tell the engineers to cut corners to chase a particular price point.

I don't see contradiction here. Engineers make a car which costs a lot, at first. Business people tells engineers need to do it cheaper. This drives engineers to make better designs, which drives sales because you can sell cheaper. Everyone's happy.

But this doesn't work in software. Business people can't tell engineers to write cheaper code. The prize of the code is the amount of time spent writing and testing it. To cut the prize you need to ditch testing. Customer won't buy because software won't work. Everyone's miserable.

Re:Google is maturing

[Blymie]

They have a "hardware differential", but it's a purely-open differential. You're thinking of a limited-slip differential.

Quite. I should have stipulated 'open' not 'none'. It is simply that in my mind, when I first learned of diffs when I was a youngin', the limited slip was what was discussed. Just a mental fart.

If I were engineering a moderately-priced medium-performance car, I probably wouldn't put one in either due to cost and weight concerns. For that type of application, using the stability control/braking system to implement LSD functionality is a better trade-off, IMHO.

The only reason I can really see for using a true LSD or locking differential anymore is either in very high performance situations or in very low traction off-road/rock-crawling situations. Otherwise, intelligent application of the brakes to stop spinning wheels is IMHO a better compromise.

It certainly isn't as efficient as a true limited slip, I can attest to that.

I have absolutely no issue replacing hardware with electronics + hardware at a discounted price, as long as the result is the same. Here's an awesome example of just that:

http://vps.l8r.net/Electro-Mechanical_Power_Steering.pdf

I owned a 2007 VW Jetta 2.0T, and I now own an EOS. Both have the above, and while there are minor issues, I do find this tradeoff acceptable. It certainly provides for power failure, it isn't drive by wire, but at the same time it provides for fuel savings, less load on the engine, and a cheaper cost.

That's something I can live with.

EDL though? In a $40k+ car? In cars designed for performance (2.0T cars with 'racing suspension' (marketing term))?

Most certainly, such a car should not have issues getting out of steep gravel driveways, due to EDL. I also don't like how, under heavy acceleration, the entire steering wheel jerks violently as the power shifts back and forth between the two drive wheels. EDL doesn't work above 40km/hr (or so, not sure of the precise speed it necessarily shuts off at).

Also, I think that Ford has beaten VW in build quality/hardiness for at least a decade, at least in the North American market.

Well, I won't disagree, as my Ford experience is from the 80s, and from now... so I can't attest to the last 10 years. I will certainly agree that they seem to be right on their game now, and in the 80s -- horrid, HORRID product. So, they've done a 180 as far as I'm concerned...

And frankly, so has VW.

Re:Google is maturing

[Blymie]

I think you fail to understand what a differential does. These cars absolutely have a "hardware" differential. What they do not have is a locking differential. Almost no vehicles have locking differentials except vehicles intended for severe off-road conditions or racing vehicles. The reason is, locking differentials are clunky as hell, and most people would never understand how or why they work and complain when they locked up in turns.

Every car I've owned, except for my last two VWs (EOS 2.0T and Jetta 2.0T) have had a limited slip. (Sorry for saying 'none', I mean 'open').

Certainly, all of my previous VWs had them... including a Rabbit of all things.

Re:Google is maturing

[Blymie]

Volkswagen never had better build quality. They're alright but nothing special. I would equate them with about the same quality as Dodge. Ford, Chevy, BMW were always a little better and about the same to each other (I own vehicles from all three plus VW).

For top build quality you have to go to Honda, Toyota, etc. (I have never owned any of these but know lots of people who do)

VW most certainly *had* better build quality. I can tell you that the VWs of the early 80s were incredible. Tough bastards.

Meanwhile, Fords would fall apart if you looked at them wrong.

That's changed now, of course. I certainly place Ford well above VW in terms of build quality now. However, back in the early 80s, I'd place VW up there with Toyota, hands down.

Self-reporting.

[Anonymous Coward]

Breaking news: Self-report data not a good indicator of anything.

Google: INT 18 WIS 7

[Mark Atwood]

It has taken Google ten years, a huge study, and suffering under what is their #1 cause of employee turnover, to learn something that is in nearly every good book on management? Most other companies can't do it because they are too stupid to be wise. Google can't do it because they think they are too smart...

Re:Google: INT 18 WIS 7

[hduff]

Google only took it this far because they wanted 'their way' to be true.

The dream is for geeks to be ruled only by geeks because only geeks 'get it'.

Sadly, the truth is that people skills are always important when working with other people.

At Google, they just forgot to read the People HOWTO first.

Why don't they just google for an answer?

[nick357]

I didn't RTFA but if google is known for hiring some very smart, technical people, perhaps when they run into a problem, its not purely a technical issue. Probably the individual workers know their field pretty good (and are capable of simply googling for answers if they need a technical answer). I would think they need a manager for the other stuff that isn't just finding the best algorithm for a given problem.

Re:Why don't they just google for an answer?

[Daniel Phillips]

Google is known for hiring very smart, very technical people, then abusing and humiliating them. There are exceptions, if you are one of them then count your blessings, but this is the prevailing climate at Google today. I don't know how many truly awe inspiring, highly educated people I saw stuck in crap jobs there doing things like rebooting servers while their managers are off running around the countryside getting drunk at offsites and stroking each other about what smart people they are.

Re:Why don't they just google for an answer?

[TheRaven64]

Google is known for hiring very smart, very technical people, then abusing and humiliating them

You've posted something similar a few times in this story, but that doesn't reflect my experiences with them. Admittedly, I've not worked there, but I know a few people that do and I've visited their London and Zurich offices a few times. I'd definitely say that Google has problems, but those are not the ones that I've seen. Their biggest problem is that their hiring process is focussed entirely on finding people who are good at solving problems, but doesn't find enough people who are good at determining which problems are worth solving. Their second problem is that they're falling into the same trap as Netscape, and hiring people who are there because it's a great place to work, not because they want to build something exciting. Netscape and Google both started with employees from the second category, but gradually became filled with ones from the first. We all know what happened to Netscape after that...

Re:Why don't they just google for an answer?

[Daniel Phillips]

...Admittedly, I've not worked there...

Nuff said.

Re:Why don't they just google for an answer?

[Daniel Phillips]

Sorry about that, your thoughtful comment deserved better. To put it simply, the Google you see from the outside and the Google that actually is are two different things. Even when you visit, you don't really see inside. Google is indeed falling into a number of traps, which you would think that as certified smart people they would recognize and avoid. But that's where the Google myth is already kicking in. You see, Google isn't really full of smart people, it's actually full of entirely typical schmucks like you and me.

Re:Why don't they just google for an answer?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was treated quite well. The work was a bit dull but what do you expect in industry. Everything else was amazing. The people were fun and smart, expectations were reasonable, yet performance above and beyond was recognized. Then again I was just a humble intern.

Re:Why don't they just google for an answer?

[SuperQ]

Wow, you seriously sound exactly like the people you're bashing. Egotistical raving asshole.

Re:Why don't they just google for an answer?

[Fastolfe]

I do work at Google, and I am in agreement with you: I do not believe Daniel's assertion that Google "abuses and humiliates" its employees is representative. I have never seen an example of that, so either he's being a bit hyperbolic with his language, or this happens infrequently and secretively enough to not really be visible.

I believe most of the individual complaints I've been reading about Google here fall into two categories:
1. The individual did not adapt to Google's culture.
2. The individual could not perform in a meritocracy, or at least believed that he/she could not.

And possibly, in Daniel's case:
3. The individual got stuck staffing an on-call shift during a team offsite.

Google's culture, while similar to other companies like Facebook and Twitter, bears no resemblance whatsoever to the "IT department" at any other company. Externally, people say that Google is all about advertising, but internally, it's all about software, and there is an intense focus on its engineers as a result. Some people (non-engineers and engineers alike) don't like that.

The Google meritocracy can also be confusing for some people, causing them to make poor work-life decisions. If you take two people that have equal skills, and have A work 60 hours a week and B work 40, obviously A is going to outperform B. A will get larger bonuses and raises. B may feel pressure to perform more like A, under the (mistaken) belief that B can't meet expectations without doing so. This myth of "grading on a curve" causes some people to grow resentful and leave. Don't blame your employer for your dumb decisions. (And if it turns out that you can't meet expectations at your salaried job without working 60-hour weeks, and giving up on vacations, I would say that's a sign that you shouldn't be there and you'd personally be happier someplace else.)

Re:Why don't they just google for an answer?

[Fastolfe]

You see, Google isn't really full of smart people, it's actually full of entirely typical schmucks like you and me.

Perhaps I'm just an idiot then, but I am in awe every day by how smart my peers at Google are.

Parent is a Goatse link

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice hemorrhoids.

Re:Thats is awfull.

[Anonymous Coward]

His boss demanded he stretch his ass to ludicrous dimensions?

Seriously, give up the link-shortener trolling -- these days everyone has a browser extension to resolve them on hover, it just makes you look pitiful.

Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

"[...] whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management in the first place."

Stunned. Just stunned.

Plagiarized

[jbrodkin]

Looks like the article was ripped out (i.e. plagiarized) from the NY Times. original article, with better formatting, is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/business/13hire.html?hp

Re:Plagiarized

[Hugh Pickens writes]

Plagarism is taking credit for something someone else has written and claiming to have written it yourself. But this cannot be plagarism because the article clearly states that it comes from the NY Times and credits the original authors of the article. Perhaps it is infringment, but plagarism it is not.

BTW, the reason the link isn't to the original story in the NY Times is that registration is sometimes required to access articles in the Times and slashdotters don't like it when they have to register to read an article and complain about it in the comments.

Just for laughs, check the link in my original submission.

Best Regards,

Hugh Pickens

Re:Plagiarized

[jbrodkin]

Yes, you're right. It is copyright infringement, not plagiarism. Unless the site is owned by NY Times.

Re:Plagiarized

[Hugh Pickens writes]

It is possible that the two newspaper have some sort of reciprocal agreement. Maybe the India Times provides the NY Times with reporting from Central Asia.

But it's not the first time I have seen articles from the Times posted on this web site, and if they did it consistently without permission I think the Times would go after them.

Best Regards,

Hugh Pickens

Re:Plagiarized

[jbrodkin]

Sure, that's possible. It does look unauthorized to me, though. All the time I see my articles reprinted on sites we have no agreement with, and they put the whole text with a mention of my website's name, but no byline, no link back to the original article, and the formatting is screwed up. I could be wrong but that's what this one looks like to me.

Re:Plagiarized

[Rexdude]

Uh, it very clearly credits NYT just above the headline!

Re:Plagiarized

[jbrodkin]

That doesn't mean you're allowed to reprint an entire article. Unless they have a specific deal with the NY Times, that is copyright infringement. It's similar to the fact that you cannot reprint a book and sell it, unless it is out of copyright (i.e., 100 years old).

Re:Plagiarized

[Rexdude]

They obviously must have. . Haven't you heard of news syndication (Associated Press, Reuters etc all do that)? ET must have syndicated this article from NYT. It's hardly a new concept.As for having a deal,Economic Times is THE most widely read business newspaper in India(sister publication to the 180+ year old Times of India), owned by the Bennett & Coleman media group, they're not some hole in the wall publication. They regularly publish articles from NYT, Washington Post, Reuters etc, and have their own syndicated news service.

Re:Plagiarized

[jbrodkin]

I am a journalist so of course I know what news syndication is, but I also know my work and articles by other publications are routinely reprinted in their entirety without permission. This one might be legitimate, but reprints without permission far outnumber legitimate ones, in my experience.

Re:Plagiarized

[Rexdude]

Ok. I guess it's a question of what one can get away with, then. My point was that Economic Times has a reputation of its own to consider, so they would not want to be called out for open plagiarization of this sort.

Re:Plagiarized

[jbrodkin]

You're probably right in this case. I just assumed it was an unauthorized copy because that's how I'm used to seeing my articles reprinted. My apologies to the Economic Times!

I agree

[Anonymous Coward]

My manager for the past 5 years has very little technical background, he however is amazing at keeping this organized and understanding the business needs of the company. So he talks to the VPs picks the projects and lines up the budgets. Then he leaves the technical work to us.

I think the key is that he doesn't try to be a tech. He doesn't care about the gritty details of how a solution works. He trusts our skill and when a project is done he just evaluates it based on the simple criteria of " does it solve the problem it is meant to solve?" So at the end of the day I get to spend my time implementing solutions the way i see best without having to deal with things like meetings. The key here is that my manager respects and trusts my technical skill while i respect his management ability.

Re:I agree

[turbidostato]

"The key here is that my manager respects and trusts my technical skill"

Which is only a valid approach if you *really* have the technical skills.

It's obvious when don't have the tech skills *at all* because then "it doesn't solve the problem". But what happens when you are tech savvy enough to be a danger to your environment? What if you are the king of the spaghetti code, the unmaintainable nightmare or the rube goldberg design?

I hate people who are good at handling people

[mangu]

Be honest with yourselves Slashdot - would you *really* want the average slashdot commenter managing *you*? An autocrat who only can see things in black or white and cannot work with other people - well, that is last on my list of wanted bosses.

I've worked with both kinds, and I'd rather have a boss that understand how the business works than a boss who has a great ability to manipulate people.

The absolutely worst type of boss is one who's always demanding I do something in the most ineffective way because that's the consensus that was reached by everyone in the meeting, a meeting where no one understood what it's all about but a smooth talker convinced everyone that it must be done that way.

The best kind of boss is one that was promoted due to his technical skills and hates managing people, so he lets everyone work the way they know how to.

Re:I hate people who are good at handling people

[drsmack1]

Maybe the distinction here is the difference between technical managers and people managers. Large projects have both.

Re:I hate people who are good at handling people

[hedwards]

Typically if you run a business where the managers set the course and standards and the employees are free to go about it however they like to finish their piece you don't have much trouble getting things done. Provided the manager has the sense to actually ask about how realistic the plans are from a technical standpoint.

There's no reason why a manager needs to understand the industry, provided he's smart enough to recognize when subordinates are more informed and can focus on getting things coordinated so that things run smoothly.

Re:I hate people who are good at handling people

[mikael_j]

There's no reason why a manager needs to understand the industry, provided he's smart enough to recognize when subordinates are more informed and can focus on getting things coordinated so that things run smoothly.

Well, this is generally the thing that people who manage IT or development teams fail at.

My suspicion is that it's especially common in managers used to environments where there is always a bit of "flexibility" (if an employee says "it can't be done" it means "it will be hard to do", if an employee says "three weeks" it means "two weeks with less time in the break room") who end up managing developers and IT people and don't understand that when their "The decision has already been made by management, we will [foo]" gets a "That's not possible, not just with the current state of computing but most likely not with our current understanding of the laws of physics" that's generally not negotiable, it really means that it's impossible.

I've heard outright demands that developers figure out a way to write code that computed things that can't be computed, that they somehow invent a report for a backend system that can't be generated because there's no way to get the data without involving actual magic and of course the order to build a website that could do XSS by exploiting browser bugs in IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome (no, that last one never got completed, and this was a perfectly legit company, it was just that management had decided they wanted things to work a certain way and they just couldn't work that way without exploiting XSS bugs).

Re:I hate people who are good at handling people

[TheRaven64]

You seem to be equating 'having interpersonal skills' with 'being good at manipulating people', which probably says more about you than about any managers that you've worked with. Interpersonal skills are very important for a manager, because a big part of their job is ensuring that their subordinates are communicating effectively with each other, not working against each other. In any project involving more than half a dozen people, it's very easy for communication between the workers to become the bottleneck. The point of management is to avoid this, to ensure that all of the employees have what they need to maximise their productivity (including things that need to be delivered by other employees).

Re:I hate people who are good at handling people

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, "having interpersonal skills" and "being good at manipulating people" *are* the same thing; one phrasing is just pejorative in tone. A good therapist is good at manipulating people, so is a good dj, a good comedian, a good mom, and a good manager.

Re:I hate people who are good at handling people

[Wrath0fb0b]

The absolutely worst type of boss is one who's always demanding I do something in the most ineffective way because that's the consensus that was reached by everyone in the meeting, a meeting where no one understood what it's all about but a smooth talker convinced everyone that it must be done that way.

Translation: I couldn't convince anyone that my proposal was better but I refuse to acknowledge the possibility it was not, in fact better. Instead, I'm going to blame others for not understanding the brilliance of my suggestion.

Re:I hate people who are good at handling people

[LetterRip]

My suspicion is that it's especially common in managers used to environments where there is always a bit of "flexibility" (if an employee says "it can't be done" it means "it will be hard to do", if an employee says "three weeks" it means "two weeks with less time in the break room") who end up managing developers and IT people and don't understand that when their "The decision has already been made by management, we will [foo]" gets a "That's not possible, not just with the current state of computing but most likely not with our current understanding of the laws of physics" that's generally not negotiable, it really means that it's impossible.

Well sometimes 'that's impossible' just means that they don't know how to do it or misunderstood the request or they track their mind went down when they tried to think of a solution was the wrong track. I've had three or four times where programmers I've been working with have told me something is 'impossible' then I give a few hours thought and provide them with an algorithm for it. (These are highly skilled programmers too, not html monkeys but top 1% C and python programmers).

Re:I hate people who are good at handling people

[artor3]

The best kind of boss is one that was promoted due to his technical skills and hates managing people, so he lets everyone work the way they know how to.

What you just described is the worst type of boss imaginable. He hates his job, so he just doesn't do it. You end up with massive duplication of effort, parts not fitting together, engineers fighting with each other for months because there's no one to make an executive decision, and whoops you just missed your market window, some other company has released first, and your department is getting shut down.

Either you've never actually worked on a team project outside of college, or you just judge management based on how much fun they let you have, paying no attention to how it affects the company as a whole.

Re:I hate people who are good at handling people

[microbox]

I have some sympathy for what you are saying. Bad managers say "We should implement sharepoint to share documents", not knowing the technical details, but knowing something about sharepoint because they chat to their friends and MS sales drones. Good managers say: "Put together a proposal for a document management system that can do XYZ", and then listen to what their more technically gifted and trustworthy staff put together.

I have seen a lot of the "sharepoint"! mentality, and it is disappointing, but understandable.

Re:I hate people who are good at handling people

[florescent_beige]

Maybe, and I don't know for sure, Google is a well-run company. My experience is that most large entities are not, and the manager's job is not primarily to manage people, but to figure out what the hell the group should be doing so that he/she won't get in trouble for going against the poobahs while still producing the vaguely-defined deliverables (those being defined as "that which the director determines you should have done in hindsight" or "that which they needed, not what they asked for"). If Google's managers actually know the requirements and have great people working for them, then they can concentrate of clearing roadblocks, a life most technology managers can only dream of.

That said, another legitimate job for a manager is to represent the capabilities of the group. Realistically. This is hard in engineering, because communicating many technical challenges is hard when the audience has never done that kind of work. It's pretty fun to stand up in front of a group of heavy-hitters and say "I know it seems like it should only take 3 months, but something always goes wrong so we need nine." They scowl and suck air through their teeth and maybe you don't work there any more pretty soon after that.

That's why technology companies need people who came up through the ranks because things that people have never done always seem easy. In 10 years, what will Google's non-tech managers be saying when they all have new hats? They will need people who can sit in a conference room with the owners and say "Larry, that idea you just had? That's just stupid." and not get laser-beamed.

Re:I hate people who are good at handling people

[Thing 1]

Translation: I couldn't convince anyone that my proposal was better but I refuse to acknowledge the possibility it was not, in fact better. Instead, I'm going to blame others for not understanding the brilliance of my suggestion.

Sure, there's an aspect of that, but I agree with GP that often the human method of "compromise" creates horrendous code.

Re:I hate people who are good at handling people

[Anonymous Coward]

This. I completely agree with you. I think the whole "who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions" is entirely contingent on a person having technical expertise - else how would they know how to ask the right questions? Anyone can ask questions, but are they the right questions? A technical mind would know that. Tell me - do you want a "manager" with little to no knowledge of car engines helping a person design a car engine? Or do you want that manager to be someone who use to design car engines himself? Do you want a decorator helping or dictating to an architect how to design a house? Or do you want an elder architect assisting the younger architect?

Both of these examples are directly transferable to programming - non-programmers tend to think programming is "easy" because once you've come up with the concept you just write the program. But that's not the case - a well programmed program is simple, easy to understand, and modular - a difficult problem in any situation, and one where an elder technical person can lend some insight and assistance.

Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anon as I'm currently a Google employee. The main problem in engineering is that many brilliant engineers get promoted to management positions and, while they are very good engineers, they don't know shit about people management and, most of the times, lack the necessary skills. That is the main reason for attrition. Can't comment on the muggle side (sales, hr) as I'm not familiar with that part of the company and nobody in eng cares about them anyway.

Re:Not quite

[TheRaven64]

This is such a well-known phenomenon, it has a name. The Peter Principle (In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence) was first stated in 1969. It's simple to model - in most corporations, employees who do a good job are promoted, but ones who do a bad job are not demoted. Therefore, each employee will keep being promoted until they are in a position where they are no longer doing a good job.

Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[petes_PoV]

Why denigrate people skills, they're much rarer than technical skills. Just look at the number of people with good technical skills - compare with the number of good managers. IME there are plenty of good developers, testers, coders, designers, tech authors, sysadmins, dbas. There are many fewer worthwhile team leaders and managers. Plus, most of the techies who do get promoted into management are pretty terrible at it.

The biggest problem is that you can't test for management skills. Either you have it or you don't. It doesn't appear to be something you can take a class in, or get a qualification in. Even worse: it doesn't show up at interview. It does appear to grow (or sometimes diminish) with experience: a poor manager can grow into a half-decent one, given the right supervision and advice (presuming they're willing to take advice) but you can't measure it or compare two managers to see which one's best - not without extensive and time consuming field trials.

So if you find a good one, keep hold of them.

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you serious? It is rare to find one person with good technical skills at an entire company. I worked at a nameless multinational software company for 4 years recently before I moved on to another company and I wouldn't trust most of my fellow engineers at that company to screw in a light bulb.

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[cultiv8]

My point exactly.

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no surplus of good technical people and there is no surplus of good managers. You can test for both skills (what do you think Google is doing? and both categories have their fair share of posers. Both skills are necessary for success. The only difference is that managers set the salaries of both groups, because people with people skills will always rise above other people. That's also why techs get fired when they screw up and managers get a promotion if their mistakes become evident late enough (or the golden parachute otherwise). THAT's why techs don't like that people skills are so highly valued.

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[mlush]

Are you serious? It is rare to find one person with good technical skills at an entire company. I worked at a nameless multinational software company for 4 years recently before I moved on to another company and I wouldn't trust most of my fellow engineers at that company to screw in a light bulb.

Who was responsible for employing and retaining these less than apt people?

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[Runaway1956]

The US Navy, and the rest of the military, would disagree with you. Uncle Sam taught me that few, if any, people are "born leaders". More, I was taught that "born leaders" seldom fit into a cohesive unit, being more interested in their own goals, than the unit or corporate goals. Leadership and/or management are learned skills, and the military spends a great deal of effort teaching men and women to be effective leaders and managers. And, yes, you can test for leadership skills. Put a person into a real life complex stressful situation, and see how they perform. Oh, wait - you meant a test that you can sit down, and fill in the answers with a pencil? No, not really - but it might be a start if you bother to ask your victim or subject if he can even define leadership or management. I've often found that merely defining a problem or a goal gets me a long way toward solving the problem.

Freebie for you: My leadership training defined leadership as the art of motivating people to do what they should be doing anyway. Does that help you at all?

BTW - my training wasn't strictly military. The courses that I took were jointly developed by the US Navy and Princeton University. Everything that I learned is readily available to people in the corporate and industrial world, if they bother to look for it.

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[Daniel Phillips]

Are you serious? It is rare to find one person with good technical skills at an entire company. I worked at a nameless multinational software company for 4 years recently before I moved on to another company and I wouldn't trust most of my fellow engineers at that company to screw in a light bulb.

Who was responsible for employing and retaining these less than apt people?

Corporate America?

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[Anonymous Coward]

People skills are obviously important, but I don't think they should be top criteria for selecting and promoting a manager. If it were, then Silicon Vally would be hiring people with personalities similar to Regis Philbin and Oprah Winfrey (though with less telegenic presence) to run their companies.

I think the criteria for management boils down to:

• personal values, which are reasonably transparent and socially acceptable
• agreement and alignment with the (mostly business) mission of the company they're in
• dedication, adaptability and resourcefulness in advancing the mission of their company in a way that is consistent with their personal values

Note that this does not prescribe the type of personality or skill set of the manager involved, although in a given situation, some will be better suited than others.

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretty easy to test for both people management skills and people skills.
If someone claims that he has it he obviously don't.

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[benjamindees]

Cool story, bro.

But what does wasting trillions of dollars blowing shit up and killing people have to do with successful technical management?

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[awyeah]

I've often found that merely defining a problem or a goal gets me a long way toward solving the problem.

On a (tangentially) related note... This is one of the tenets of David Allen's Getting Things done. I believe the phrase he uses is "desired outcome."

I'm not a manager, but in meetings, when I've asked the question "What is the desired outcome?" People really seem stunned - as if they simply hadn't thought about it. That's weird to me.

But when you finally answer that question, the steps you need to take to get there seem to reveal themselves.

Then again, I'm the kind of geek who enjoys reading self-help productivity books.

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[budgenator]

If you can train and lead a group of men armed with rifles pistols and hand grenades into a situation that could easily get them and you killed and maimed and they follow you with enthusiasm and preform their tasks with precision, then leading a bunch of tech workers is a piece of cake.

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[budgenator]

You also need to know where you are. Knowing where you are, and where you want to be can be painful, ripping open delusion like half healed scabs.

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point. I guess if there was no military in the US, we would all be speaking German now? Maybe we would all be British and French? There is many questionable things that go down with the military but the stuff most people complain about is not a direct result of having a military or the idea of just having a military that is bad, it is our branches of the government that are leading that military.

So Bro... you can't solve or fix a problem if you don't even realize what the actual problem is. I like your method though, if you always run out of gas, keep installing bigger and bigger gas tanks. Problem solved right?

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[Intron]

It's pretty easy to test for both people management skills and people skills.
If someone claims that he has it he obviously don't.

They also don't if they claim they don't.

When asked about people skills the true manager yells "Foo" and hits you on the head with a stick. And then you are enlightened.

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool story, bro.

But what does wasting trillions of dollars blowing shit up and killing people have to do with successful technical management?

Wow, man, you're like, so wise, and stuff.

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[asliarun]

When asked about people skills the true manager yells "Foo" and hits you on the head with a stick. And then you are enlightened.

Hits him on the head with a Foo bar?

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[Anonymous Coward]

Military 'management' is diffrent thing than civilian.

In military, you have chain of command that is very strict and people are drilled to do simple tasks well.
System is also based on strict discpline and leading is done by example. Subordinates should be able to achieve
what their commanders do by example, but rarely they are encouraged to pass them. If they would, they would pass chain of command, invidual thinking has limits set by organisation. Its also more logistic, leaders are trained to organize resources.

In professional enviroment, people are more autonomous. They are expected to function teams and alone without supervision and sometimes with out clear guidelines too. Not only that, many times they are expected to develop skills and solutions their managers don't know about or cant anticipitate. In such enviroment, management isn't about setting invidual tasks and leading by examples, but to ensure people who take these kind of big tasks that have many aspects, are happy and focused what they do well. If they aren't, company or organisation can't be sure are they aligned with company's goals. Economic effiency, what is lacking in military, also many times requires very light supervision which again makes ensuring motivation of employees top priority.

The military leadership is thus many times unsuitable for very professional enviroment like with programmers. Military drilling and discpline enviroment can't be transferred to more creative areas of life.

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[Daengbo]

Who was responsible for employing and retaining these less than apt people?

A people-skills person, obviously.

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no surplus of good technical people and there is no surplus of good managers. You can test for both skills (what do you think Google is doing? and both categories have their fair share of posers. Both skills are necessary for success. The only difference is that managers set the salaries of both groups, because people with people skills will always rise above other people. That's also why techs get fired when they screw up and managers get a promotion if their mistakes become evident late enough (or the golden parachute otherwise). THAT's why techs don't like that people skills are so highly valued.

So true.

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[mwvdlee]

It all comes down to asking the one question all parents dread and all children are tought to forget; "Why?".

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, except here in the real world all the ex-military bosses I've worked alongside and worked under have been incompetent arseholes. They believe the best way to get things done is to shout at people and belittle them in a soul destroying way which might work fine on a bunch of grunts that have been trained to accept it but doesn't work in civvy street.

The GP was referring to people skills being an important part of management and is spot on, good managers know when to let staff have a bit of leeway if they need to do things like make personal phone calls during work time, or go home early paid to deal with something if someone is going through a tough time. They know that shouting at people is probably the least likely way to get someone to do something and that if someone isn't doing something it's better to sit down with them and find out why and to see what can be done. Your view that a good leader should motivate people to do what they should be doing anyway is flawed, because people change, people end up in the wrong jobs- sometimes the solution isn't to force them to do something but to rearrange you're team so that people are in roles they're better suited to, happier doing, and want to do.

A good manager has respect for his/her staff, understands that they're real people and that all of them need a sympathetic ear sometimes. A good manager helps people progress in their careers even if that means they may lose them from their team, because they recognise that it's better to have staff on your team highly motivated than people who really don't want to be there anymore and hence have low work output.

A good manager is motivating, not demotivating, and military training simply does not teach leadership that works in civvy street. I respect what military personnel do and recognise it's a tough job, but there's a contrast between leading people who are trained to do whatever they are asked even if it puts their own life in danger because that's a necessity in the military and people in civvy street who are not brainwashed with this mindset and expect to be treated with respect.

Sorry, but your military experience is irrelevant in civvy street, whatever you may think, and whatever campaigns say about taking pity on ex-military folk the fact remains that for ex-military folk to be fit for civvy street they need to completely retrain and often completely change their attitude if they want to fit in.

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[Runaway1956]

HUH??? You've never worked for a micromanager? I've worked for them several times in my life, and in fact, I work with one right now. (not my direct supervisor, or we would be butting heads every day) I've found that the military rewarded self initiative far more often than the civilian sector. In fact, quarterly evaluations in the military cover the subject of initiative and self motivation. Many, many management people in the civilian world have no concept of those qualities. In fact, I would say that the manager who understands those qualities and takes full advantage of them is a rare find.

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[Runaway1956]

Your experience with military people is just so - limited - I guess.

Some of the meekest, most respectful people you ever meet will be veterans. Ehh. What can I say? You're probably not even aware that some of your own co-workers are veterans, because they don't flaunt it in your face.

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[hey!]

Freebie for you: My leadership training defined leadership as the art of motivating people to do what they should be doing anyway. Does that help you at all?

That's not just leadership. That's what it takes to be a truly successful person. The humorist Will Rogers once said, "It ain't so much what a man doesn't know that causes him so many problems, but what he knows that ain't so." I'd take it step further and say that the real problem are the things we know but choose to ignore "just this once", over and over again. There's always some compelling reason to cut corners, but heeding those reasons leads to habitual corner cutting. On the other hand, you don't want to see a project fail because you're being too inflexible.

The most important thing you can bring to any project is not specific technical experience (e.g. 5 years experience in the framework the project uses); it's caring about the success of the project. *Sustainable* success is a very different thing than short-term success. If you want sustainable success as a project leader or program manager, you have to care about the people doing the work. Caring about the project *and* the people forces you to confront dilemmas and find solutions you wouldn't have considered otherwise. You've got to want to do the right thing so much that you're willing to struggle with what "doing the right thing" means.

I'm with you about the importance of problem definition. I'd call "management" the application of effective systematic practices in setting goals and directing resources (including people) to achieve those goals. I'd call "leadership" the values, attitudes and personal resources (especially relationships) that you bring to handling challenges that are unpredictable and difficult to address systematically as they unfold in real time [note 1]. What you care about and how much you care about it is an important aspect of leadership. For example, I recognize the value of the occasional marathon hacking session, but I don't permit it to become the normal mode of operation on teams I manage because I think it's bad for the coders and generates poor results in the long term. In that case my values aren't in conflict. But occasionally things have happened that are outside my control that forced me to drive my team harder than is sustainable. In that case my values are in conflict. That requires both serious thought as the situation unfolds and reflection on what happened after the fact.

As to whether leaders are "born" or "made", it's the wrong question altogether. As a leader the experience and values you bring to a situation are important assets. Some of these you bring with you from before you join an organization, and in that sense they look like attributes you were "born" with. But others you can cultivate through training and experience in an organization, which appear "made". And the relationship between management and leadership is a dynamic one. As a leader your values should drive you to become a better manager and as a manager you should see the value of cultivating leadership assets.

I think engineers are very well prepared by training and professional inclination to learn the art of management, but often have difficulty adjusting to dealing with fuzzy, irrational and unpredictable factors that require leadership assets. They are so strong in applying systematic and quantifiable measures to problems they tend to not overlook things that are outside the formal scope of a project definition or formal organization structure. For example, two members of a team having an interpersonal conflict is something an inexperienced manager with an engineering background might not be well prepared for. The team members *should* work it out, but saying that should happen doesn't mean it will. Likewise, an engineer new to management might not realize the importance of building personal networks within the company. He might be inclined to rely upon his ability to develop rigorous analyses of a problem t

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[Rich0]

Yes. And more senior managers ensure that all the incentives are in place to avoid having their subordinate managers pull off those scabs...

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[tehcyder]

It is rare to find one person with good technical skills at an entire company.

But, let me guess, that person is always you?

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[tehcyder]

. That's also why techs get fired when they screw up and managers get a promotion if their mistakes become evident late enough (or the golden parachute otherwise)

You're thinking of directors, not managers.

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[tehcyder]

Yeah, except here in the real world all the ex-military bosses I've worked alongside and worked under have been incompetent arseholes. They believe the best way to get things done is to shout at people

shoot, I think you mean

Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen?

[recharged95]

"most of the techies who do get promoted into management are pretty terrible at it"...

Why? Reason is because most techies thrown into management are not given any training in management. Then again, most techies turn away management classes cause they think their already qualified and smart enough. Then again, management training cost money, and is overhead, and hiring a management costs money too, so a company is inclined to promote within for line management positions. In all, there is zero incentive to train techies for management, so a techie that's willing to switch from daily grunt coding to management is a lost opportunity to benefit everyone.

A little training can go a long way...

Shocking...

[sjbe]

Managing people requires a different skill set than writing code. News at 11...

goatse; ignore

[Anonymous Coward]

Link to goatse

Some had their worst career years at Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting as a coward since I've worked as a full time engineer for a few years. And I've had the worst manager of my career over there. I've had a few managers, some good, some bad but the incredibly horrible one was at Google.

I've seen managers with over 40 direct reports. I do not care how 'good' the manager is there is no way the manager can have a clue what his employees are doing or how much hard work they are putting. Every quarter the manager has to put them on a scale for an 'anonymous committee' to rate the employee (just 'meeting expectations' is quite an accomplishment), which is later used as a base for a potential promotion or raise. I think the average raise was probably less than 1% per year for the average employee. No wonder they had to do the +25% 3 months ago (10% + 15% of bonus converted to raise).

Moving from one team to an other is completely at the whim of your manager, they've even added a rule that you should not even dare to ask until you've spend 18 months in the team. Then you basically have to find your own replacement: you can't leave until you find an other engineer that is as good as you and willing to work in the team you are trying to run away from !!! Managers rarely get the boot because it is very hard to find a manager willing to manage indecent amounts of direct reports.

Complaining to HR is useless and will just antagonize your manager further. You will get managed to quit over a very long time, and once you do quit being honest about why you leave will put you on a black list (say an other team find your resume and wants you in, HR will stop the interviews). I've heard of experienced employees crying in the upper managers offices about how badly they were treated. I have seen several coworkers skipping on vacation and maxing out they vacation allowance and still not taking vacation since. HR does not see any problem with this, if you are sick and dare to take sick days your performance should be lowered because you performed less work. This situation of fear is not good and lead to many resignations for greener, better paid, pastures in the past few years. Add to that a founder (Sergey) saying that employees should pay for the privilege of working at Google, and not as a joke (there at least one internal video about it).

Note that the above is not the 'rule' and plenty of Software Engineers will have had much better experiences. Some have just a reputation of doing amazing work on a project years ago and only need to show up to work once in a while. The aura is not rubbing off and if you criticize them it is bad for your own reputation.

I am very happy where I work nowadays, if you get an offer from Google take it if the salary cut is not too bad, hang on for a year or two. It will be a big plus for your resume, you will learn a lot of technical good practices, but do not expect to have a long good career over there unless you are a very skilled politician.

Re:Some had their worst career years at Google

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what's really funny? If you take that post, and s/Google/Microsoft/ throughout, it remains 100% correct. Every single damn point of it is spot on.

Re:Some had their worst career years at Google

[yuhong]

In fact, I think MS is worse.

Re:Some had their worst career years at Google

[Tablizer]

The problem with a fully democratic system is that the quantities of whines and fusses goes way up and clogs the system. However, if each employee is allowed to select one or two areas that their manager and/or situation can improve in, then it cuts down on the number of the issues to be looked into and monitored. HR etc. can then just focus on the biggies.

Re:Some had their worst career years at Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Larger spans of control are actually better for workers and the company as the manager cannot become micro-focused. They are forced to look at the bigger picture, lead, and plan - forced to have some vision (many think they have it but they don't).

As for the career planning, at the end of the day it's your responsibility. Remember, the manager is trying with all their might to hold down current events and do their own career planning to get themselves promoted. However, Leaders realize they need to sincerely help their people to help themselves,

As I've learned ... "do not confuse hard work with results". Do quality work that provides meaningful results that directly or indirectly contributes to moving the company forward to generate profits and you'll be recognized by more than just your manager... it will soon become too difficult to hide from other managers and coworkers - no matter what the number of reports exist below any manager.

Do be a bit understanding, real Leaders are actually hard to find. If you're lucky enough to get spoiled by working with a real leader (and it's always 'with' not 'for' them) you'll know it and then have no patience for any run-or-the-mill manager ever after that.

Re:Some had their worst career years at Google

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree that a manager cannot handle 40 direct reports. If you limit the manager to doing people work instead of people + technical work, it seems perfectly reasonable. If every employee needs 30 minutes of direct attention every two weeks, that's still only 1/4 of the manager's time.

Your comments about compensation at Google should take into account Google's benefits and perks, along with a comparison of compensation at similar companies in the area.

I have seen several coworkers skipping on vacation and maxing out they vacation allowance and still not taking vacation since. HR does not see any problem with this, if you are sick and dare to take sick days your performance should be lowered because you performed less work.

I also see no problem with this. If you are unable to meet expectations at Google without working long weeks, skipping vacations, or taking any sick days, that suggests to me that you are not qualified to be working at Google.

and once you do quit being honest about why you leave will put you on a black list

Of course, this depends entirely on what you mean by "being honest about why you leave". If you honestly feel that your co-workers need to die in a fire, I probably wouldn't want you to return either. There is more to the story than this.

Add to that a founder (Sergey) saying that employees should pay for the privilege of working at Google, and not as a joke (there at least one internal video about it).

Huh? Employees should pay Google instead of taking a salary? That does not sound like a reasonable interpretation of what Sergey may have said. Or are you suggesting that salaries at Google can afford to be a little lower than market rates? Google has lots of perks, and a reputation for employing smart people. If I had to choose between a salary of $X at Ordinary Corporation or 90% * $X at Google, I'd probably still choose Google, and this effectively amounts to me paying 10% of my salary to Google each year, right?

I don't know, it sounds to me like everything worked out for the best.

The hardest transition

[Anonymous Cowar]

The hardest transition that most techies have to make is being bumped up into management. A good manager will absorb and deflect politics, paperwork, issues, and other items that will get in the way of a tech doing a technical job. When you first get pushed up into management, it's a surprise just how little your technical skills are valued. Even if a "technical" answer is asked by your new bosses, having a big picture view is more important than being able to click your way through aduc. A general technical knowledge is important because managers need to support the needs of those under them, but knowing how long and what it will take to create the right piece of code is more important than being able to do it. If you can get your people the time and resources they need, you are doing a far better job than if you're doing their jobs for them.

You're in luck

[MarkusQ]

most of the time I wish this wasn't true.

You're in luck. This is another case of #statisticsfail.

If all of their managers are selected to have deep technical expertise, it isn't going to correlate with success any more than "having two ears" will. This is a well known phenomenon called "sample bias" and is dearly beloved by everyone who wants to lie with statistics.

-- MarkusQ

Re:You're in luck

[dakameleon]

You're in luck. This is another case of #statisticsfail.

Can we please, please, please leave out the #topic notation from slashdot? It has no relevance here.

If all of their managers are selected to have deep technical expertise, it isn't going to correlate with success any more than "having two ears" will. This is a well known phenomenon called "sample bias" and is dearly beloved by everyone who wants to lie with statistics.

Statistics are data; their interpretation is information, and that information can be spun in many ways, like the fact that you didn't RTFA at all. The tl;dr version is that Google's HR "analytics" team reviewed the data of performance reviews, feedback surveys etc and found that technical expertise in a boss was not ranked highly by the people reporting to them. Given that the manager is one of three key reasons for staff turn-over, according to the article, ensuring that the manager-managed relationship is as positive as possible is a way to reduce turnover and thus improve the effectiveness of the team.

There's nothing about all-managers-are-experts, it's more about what the employee feedback says about what an employee values in a manager.

Re:You're in luck

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we please, please, please leave out the #topic notation from slashdot? It has no relevance here.

[citation needed]

Re:You're in luck

[MarkusQ]

*sigh*

Let me walk you through this:

• Google made a major point of ensuring that managers had technical expertise
• If we assume that they (Google) were honest in reporting this priority, competent in executing it, etc., we can conclude that given an individual who was a manager at Google it's highly likely that they had technical expertise; that is, to a good first approximation, HasTechnicalExpertise(X) is true for all X for which IsManagerAtGoogle(X) is true.
• Google then took a survey of the people being managed, and asked them what was important to them about their manager.
• The resulting list of features was presumably finite, as they completed the survey in a finite amount of time.
• This might at first seem surprising, since there are an infinite number of things that might be said about a manager. However, a little thought shows that the most probable cause is that predicates that were true of (almost) all or (almost) none of the managers did not make a serious contribution to the data. Note that this filtering could have occurred at any part of the process (if it was a "pick the most important" list, neither "drinks water" or "can fly" were likely to be included; if by chance they were, they would be unlikely to be chosen; likewise, if it was a free-form question most respondents would be unlikely to volunteer such observations).
• Therefore we should not expect to see common traits shared by all the managers as a strong component of the data.
• Specifically, we should not expect "has technical expertise" to be a strong component of the data.
• It was not. No story here.

-- MarkusQ

Re:You're in luck

[rta]

You're not addressing GP's point though. If all of the managers were chosen for their technical expertise then it's likely that their employees won't highlight technical expertise as an important feature of their manager because they don't have any managers who DON'T have said expertise. They probably don't know what it's like having non-tech managers.

E.g. i'm sure few employees would say that they really appreciate that the air they breathe at work has adequate oxygen in it. Does that mean you should then cut that in half because it's not important ?

Back to TFA there's this sentence: " What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions..." Well, let me tell you... i've worked with some pretty darned smart / good finance people and CEOs and Product Managers. Very few of them (ok. none of them) could ask relevant questions about technical problems to help me work through technical issues. Why ? because they didn't know anything about the subject. Heck they didn't even understand some of the nouns in what i was saying. Go ahead... go ask your finance guys about how you're trying to figure out why the cache hit rate in your application is 20% lower than you expected or something. About 30 minutes in you'll be 5 steps away from your original point and explaining how the internet is like a series of tubes! (which btw, i actually think is a reasonable first order approximation ).

One problem in TFA is that it looks at "deep technical expertise" as meaning having greater depth and breadth than all the people working for you. That's going to be pretty hard. You may start out that way, but as you get more people, if it's still true then either you're Donald Knuth, or you're not hiring A players OR you're working at a large company where your group has a very narrow focus. e.g. if you're the manager of the Oracle optimization group then yeah, you can be the best at that. If you're the Dir. of Engineering at a small company it's a heck of a lot less likely that you can be "the best" Photoshop guy, DHTML guy, Java guy, Ruby guy, DB guy, sys admin guy, network guy and architect guy all in one. If you are... especially after a year or two in your role then your people are just not good enough. There should be no way you could keep up with 7 guys focused on only 1 or 2 disciplines each when your own main focus is management anyway.

With people who have worked for me and with my peers i could "dominate" the jr guys but with the Principal engineer types I had enough base knowledge and experience to be able to ask intelligent questions and come up to speed quickly enough on the things my guys were struggling with. But the only reason i CAN ask good questions is because i have actually do have strong core knowledge in dev and admin and also, due to experience or nature or whatever, i'm pretty darned good at debugging code and systems. If i didn't have that all i could offer is stuff like "do you best" and "huh, do you need more resources on this project?" and things like that.

Re:You're in luck

[captain_sweatpants]

I'd mod you up if I could. Excellent analysis. Hopefully someone at google notices this before it's too late! I read this headline as: Google has officially decided to turn evil.

Re:You're in luck

[dakameleon]

Again, if you actually read TFA:

• No survey was taken directly asking that question; the data being analysed was the usual performance reviews and management feedback surveys, which Google apparently conducts quarterly
• An attempt was made to quantify statements which were presumably qualitative, in order for it to be usable data
• If you strip away the spin of the summary, what the article reads to me is that while the managers may have gotten to where they were based on their technical expertise, that is not what is valued by those that report to the manager.
• What was valued was the "soft skills" - this is not to remove technical skill as a requirement for success, but that it is not perceived as a key component.
• I agree there's no story here, but for different reasons - the conclusion was that soft skills are perceived as more valuable in a manager than technical expertise. To me, that's something that's stupendously obvious.

Most importantly, I think the following demonstrates a rather mature attitude from Google:

Google executives say they aren't crunching all this data to develop some algorithm of successful management. The point, they say, is to provide the data and to make people aware of it, so that managers can understand what works and, just as important, what doesn't. ...
For now, Bock says he is particularly struck by the simplicity of the rules, and the fact that applying them doesn?t require a personality transplant for a manager.

"You don't actually need to change who the person is," he says. "What it means is, if I'm a manager and I want to get better, and I want more out of my people and I want them to be happier, two of the most important things I can do is just make sure I have some time for them and to be consistent. And that's more important than doing the rest of the stuff."

They're sticking to their policies, but making sure the managers understand what areas need focus.

Re:You're in luck

[dakameleon]

I'm not suggesting that technical expertise is not a component of success, and I don't think TFA is either. It is saying, to my reading, that of the top 8 factors which are a perceived factor in the manager-employee relationship, technical expertise of the manager ranks 8th. That's not to say it's not there, but that the employees do not perceive it to be a high factor in their assessment of their manager.

I've worked with non-technical managers before, and I understand the difficulties in explaining some technical issues to management. Sometimes it helps to be able to explain things in simpler terms to bring management around, and sometimes you get cache hit issues like you're talking about and no amount of analogies are gonna help; that doesn't invalidate this study, which says that, for a tech-focused company which promotes on technical merit, managers should spend time focusing on soft skills in order to make a happy, efficient team. YMMV should be tacked on to the anecdote as a matter of course.

GP's argument was that since every manager has technical ability, the success of teams is independent of that. TFA is making a different point entirely: given an environment where managers have some level of technical backgrounds, what are key areas of difference between good and bad managers? Technical ability ranks 8th on the list.

Re:You're in luck

[Anonymous Coward]

and found that technical expertise in a boss was not ranked highly by the people reporting to them.

Ranking #8 out of a list of thousands of traits sounds pretty damn highly ranked to me.

Re:You're in luck

[mwvdlee]

Basically it's the same as "speaking english".
Assuming Google only hired managers that could speak english, no employer would complain about a lack of english-speaking managers.

Re:You're in luck

[MarkusQ]

soft skills are perceived as more valuable in a manager than technical expertise. To me, that's something that's stupendously obvious.

I agree. Soft skills are perceived as more valuable than technical expertise. Further, your arguments have convinced me that you not only share this perception but do indeed think it is stupendously obvious. If we were having this chat in person I would offer to buy you a drink and suggest we play a diverting little game of chance I happen to know in which soft skills are more valuable that technical expertise.

-- MarkusQ

It depends

[NoSig]

If your boss does not understand what it is that you do, then that can work out fine, but it requires much more of his leadership skills and of your professionalism to make it work well. If either side is lacking, it'll be a disaster. For one thing, it is difficult for him to know what he can reasonably expect of you, or when you have performed better than could be expected. If both sides of that are excellent, then sure you can have a captain of a ship who doesn't know what a sail is, and it can even work great, but it'll be better if he does know what a sail is. Of course, if you've got someone going "the beatings will continue until morale improves" then hell yeah I'll take another captain even if he doesn't know what a sail is. The distinction is not as sharp as an intelligent person will be able to figure out what a sail is in short order.

Re:It depends

[Fastolfe]

There's a difference between valuing technical skills least, and valuing them at zero. An engineering manager needs to understand what his or her team is working on, so that he or she can measure the goals and progress of the members of the team (and the team as a whole). If an employee needs advice, the manager needs to be able to cluefully provide it. But I think for the most part, people at Google rely on their supersmart peers when it comes to technical advice, not their manager.

Re:Thats is awfull.

[pgpalmer]

Warning: above link definitely NSFW.

good managers offer complementary skills

[Anonymous Coward]

... to the default, expected skill set and mindset of the employees of a particular company or location.

If the employees were mostly all pre-screened to have 140+ IQ's and work really hard at creating elegant technical solutions, then you need managers who can enforce business goals and get people to work together. Jerks need not apply.

If the majority of employees are of rather average in terms of intelligence and motivation for college graduates with a career focus in IT and hardware or software (which is common in older companies that are publicly traded), then good managers would be those who can hire and motivate better than the rest, and provide technical coaching where necessary. Some butt-kickers can be effective in these situations, as long as they are given air cover by senior management.

Good Coaching

[Frightened_Turtle]

Essentially what is being described in the article is good coaching. A good coach doesn't necessarily have the skills or abilities of a star athlete, but he knows how to manage his players to get the best performance out of them. The best manager I ever worked for summed it up in one glorious line: "You're the expert, that's why I hired you." He would basically tell us what he needed done, and then would get out of our way so we could do it. He was technically savvy enough to understand the basics of what we were trying to do, so we could discuss a given project with him if we were stuck. He would simply ask questions on various aspects until we began to bring light on why things were stuck. He also had a great attitude that went with "Do what it takes to get the job done." As long as we were getting the work done, he had no problems with us sitting around and shooting the breeze when things were slow. To be quite frank, some of the best ideas that went on to become products came out of those bullshit sessions. For the record, his background was Marketing.

Another company where I was employed, Lechmere, originally had a great management style. The mantra of managers was, "It's my job to manage the environment in which you make money for the company." The company was doing great. So well, that a buyer popped up and bought them. Well, the new management's mantra was, "You are mindless, idiot drones are a bunch of pions who are only good enough for boxing or selling the crap this company sells, and you clearly aren't as qualified as we are—being MBAs—for the pittance we are paying you." That company is now out of business. They went out of business after two years of doing everything they could to get rid of long term employees with expertise whom they thought were overpaid. By the time they were done with the company, it was so worthless it wasn't even worth trying to sell it—not that they could have found any buyers for it. If anyone came to my company and their resume showed they had mid- or upper-level management experience with Lechmere, I would drop their resume into the shredder.

Re:Good Coaching

[yuhong]

Yea, I hope the flaws of the "legacy" MBAs are more well-known now.

Re:Good Coaching

[DerekLyons]

Essentially what is being described in the article is good coaching. A good coach doesn't necessarily have the skills or abilities of a star athlete, but he knows how to manage his players to get the best performance out of them. The best manager I ever worked for summed it up in one glorious line: "You're the expert, that's why I hired you."

Oddly enough, and apropos of the discussion above about leadership/management in the military upthread... That's pretty much exactly what the best CO I ever worked for told me: "I don't know what exactly you do down there, I don't need to - your and your chief are the experts".

Respect

[merlock18]

I thought a major point was made recently in a slashdot post about techie employees. They dont respect ignorant people. This often would be people ignorant in their field. I personally would hate my boss if I couldnt talk to him about my work. Argument: Well, he understands about how to manage people. Drawback: He doesnt understand how to manage the project, though.
Am I right?

Seems about right

[Jagungal]

One of the biggest problems I have ever run into is the Manager who came from a technical background and tries to retain some kind of technical information lead over the staff. Often they can't be across day to day things so they become an information hider or feel threatened by technical staff around them.

In IT, information hiders in a team are pain, when they are the manager they are a nightmare. The best managers I have had were people managers who used to team and what it achieved to make themselves look good. In some ways, they best managers are those that accept that they might not be as technical as some staff, get over it and get on with managing the team.

Re:Seems about right

[Anonymous Coward]

I've run into the converse problem: managers who are not technical, but who are in meetings all day and play the "information game" on their staff, in both directions: only their personal favorite(s) are notified of plum opportunities for select engineers coming down the pike; and work done by their favorite(s) are given fulsome praise in conversations with superiors. Others aren't recognized, except as part of the aggregate team.

Remember that it doesn't take superior intelligence to be adept at politics, of which this two-way "information game" is an example. I think non-technical managers who have been around awhile tend to engage in it more than technical managers, perhaps because they more time to devote to it. This tendency seems to increase as managers get older, perhaps as they see political savvy as a way to make up for diminished interest and agility in technical matters.

In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

Technical expertise ranks eighth among hundreds of variables.

What a ridiculously biased summary!

Did they limit this to techs?

[khasim]

Or did they include things like the HR / Accounting / Sales managers and such?

Doing so will skew the results.

It takes a different skill set to manage a group of coders than it does to manage a group of accountants. Despite what is taught in the MBA classes.

But the same NEGATIVE characteristics have the same negative effect no matter what group you're managing.

I think this research is more about identifying the negative aspects. If you remove/reduce the negative aspects, then people will tend to lose the negative opinions.

Which, unfortunately, is rare enough in business that it will be seen as unusual.

Just a little bit of history repeating

[joebagodonuts]

You could be commenting on the culture change at DEC after Ken Olsen or hp after Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.

In Other Words...

[martin-boundary]

In other words....

Technical expertise ranks among the top ten most important qualities to look for in good Google managers.

Statisticians, eh?

I disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

This study is nonsense.

The study reached its conclusions by reading the feedback from *employees*, not senior management. If I'm an employee, *of course* I want my boss to refrain from second-guessing my technical judgments. And to help my career. And to be interested in my personal life. And to be even-keeled and not yell at me. And bring me coffee in the morning. But does any of this help produce better software? No.

From the company's perspective, what should matter is whether the managers were producing high-quality projects, creatively and on time.

And to do that, a manager needs to be able to assess whether the employee is writing decent code or not. And if not, fix the problem, and if necessary not be very nice about it.

We know for a fact that the best sales managers are frequently jerks. They are demanding and don't put up with poor results. And while creatives need to be handled differently from sales people, it's just as necessary to call bullshit when necessary and discipline or remove the poor performers.

Non-Techie MBA Deems Tech Skills Least Important

[theodp]

Yale School of Management: "Laszlo Bock leads Google's people function globally...Laszlo earned a bachelor's degree in international relations from Pomona College and an MBA from the Yale School of Management."

google ads

[Anonymous Coward]

> who took an interest in employees' lives and careers
via google ads?

Wow. Not amazing at all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Um...no shit?
"What Google employees value most are even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees' lives and careers."

This obvious. Sure managers with technical skills & knowledge are needed, but the things in that quote are no brainers.

Umm... Obvious?

[Anonymous Coward]

Managers need to be good at their own job before yours. They should only have to know just enough to be able to relate to you on a professional level. IE: Know when you actually need help, when you are just dicking around, when you are stressed out and how to deal with it, relieving and working political pressure, understanding how funds and resources should be requisitioned and allotted to reach realistic goals, know when to let you drive in addition to when not to, organizing teams, how to feed it all into the big picture, etc... None of that means being able to do your job for you, nor should it.

I have had supervisors that insist that because they are above me, that they have to be better at my job than myself. For example, it is aggravating when someone that is essentially a filing clerk that was promoted due to hard work and years of service insist that she has to know more about IT than I. I have had to hide my work because she would go nuts if I figured out a way to fix something she wrote off. She would automatically deny proposals I came up with simply just to show and protect her dominance, leave me out of critical projects and then expect me to magically fix the aftermath with no knowledge, resources, contacts, etc...

The two most important of the eight rules

[br00tus]

From the eight rules:

"Empower your team and don't micromanage" and "Don't be a sissy...help the team prioritize work and use seniority to remove roadblocks".

This is all I need. As far as micromanaging - the two best managers I had, one I would talk to twice a day about work-related stuff - at the beginning of the day and the end of the day, the other I would talk to every few weeks about work-related stuff - the latter one was so hands-off that I would pop in of my own accord once a month and tell him what I was up to. Of course, for both of them, if something came up on their end or my end, we would talk about it. They did not micromanage, and they were the two best bosses I've had.

The other rule is more political - help us prioritize work. What, in the office politics of the company (aside from the needs to protect ourselves, and make our stuff stable) is the most important work to do? I expect managers to run interference for me. I don't want them to be insecure, incompetent boobs who get pressure from their manager, and then come in and yell at us to do whatever their manager, or some powerful manager in another group wants. They should not be a sissy. They should be confident of themselves and their abilities, and not get to be a nervous wreck by a little management pressure or small bumps along the road. As there are only 24 hours in a day, a manager's main resource is his team's time - 24 hours times the number of their team members. You can not schedule more time than that, and humans have the need to sleep and the like. A manager who says "yes" to everything his manager, and powerful managers in other groups want, and where every request is a priority, eventually can run into a situation where he has promised more than the 24*x number of hours he has to give away. People will keep asking as long as he keeps saying yes. I myself am unhappy if I'm required to work more than 40 hours a week, unless there is a crunch time or emergency or the like, which is fine from time to time. But if I am consistently working crazy hours, and where emergencies and everything becoming a priority is the norm, I'm soon looking for another job. Bad, weak managers say yes to everything, the good managers who help a company in the long terms are the ones who have the confidence to sometimes say no.

Re:The two most important of the eight rules

[Anonymous Coward]

Hands-off managers are great if you are on a strong team that essentially runs well without management. But if you team has some losers or agitators, as is most commonly the case in large organizations, then hands-off managers are useless.

Re:The two most important of the eight rules

[nine-times]

One of the best bosses I ever had once told me, "A manager's job is to take everything off your desk that isn't your job." And what he meant, if it's not clear enough, was that if you're an engineer, then you should spend your day working as an engineer. If there's politicking and excessive paperwork and stuff like that, and it's not part of your job, then it's your manager's job to make sure you don't have to do that stuff.

Re:The two most important of the eight rules

[Anonymous Coward]

So in other words, never ever ever work for EA!

This worries me a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an old saw that is accepted by professionally trained managers: "A good manager can manage anything." That then becomes an excuse to hire some MBA who knows nothing about the business or industry.

There is a growing body of opinion and evidence that the MBA is Public Enemy #1. http://www.arifanees.com/featured/mbas-public-enemy-no1.html

MBA education rewards aggressive people who can BS better than anyone else in the class. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/83/mbamenace.html

Professional managers are a one way ticket to doom. If Google wants to survive and prosper, it needs to promote clueful people.

Suppose I'm hiring a driver. I could hire someone who is a good driver with an unblemished record, or I could hire someone who actually knows where they're going. I really care more about getting to the right place more than I care about the quality of the ride.

My favorite example of the damage that can be done by professional managers is Toyota. Toyota used to be run by people who cared about the product. Then it was taken over by professional managers. Quality was sacrificed to short term profit and Toyota's good name was shot. The long term damage to its reputation won't soon be undone.

Leads versus managers

[br00tus]

For my first five years or so in IT I had managers, not team leads. So I was not in competition with my boss in any real way, and I was more or less the technical lead for things.

From five years on, I have been under a lot of team leads. As they are the lead, and I am not, it is usually "their way or the highway". They ask me to do something, I spend hours (or days) on it, then I comeback and they want it done in a completely different way. Which makes me wonder why they didn't just say so to begin with and save me all that time. Also, I am in competition with them if there are layoffs or the like, so they hog the most profile, best projects and give others low-profile, less glorious work to do. On top of all of this, for the first five years of work, I could have used a team lead mentor, but five years on, I have no need for it, as I learn nothing more from them than I can learn from another co-worker. When I go on job interviews I ask who will assign my work, if they are a lead or manager or the like, if them team has a lead I am less likely to join.

Re:Leads versus managers

[Kneo24]

As a lead, I find it's a two way street. I will tell you what needs done that day. I may even tell you how to prioritize your responsibilities. If you have questions, that's great. I will answer them so that you can get your shit done in a timely manner. Arguing with me every step of the way or just, or just doing things your own way is when I tell the people to hit the door if they don't like how I'm doing things. I've only ever had to use that line twice. Guess what? Both of those employees stayed. I hate it when people try to create unnecessary power struggles. If you want to be in a leadership position, then show that you have those capabilities. Fighting with your direct superior over every little thing doesn't get you there and then you have the stigma of being difficult to work with.

If you're constantly doing things the wrong way, maybe it's not the leads. Maybe it's you. Maybe things were changed midstream and they forgot to tell you. Maybe they did tell you and you blew them off. Learning how to deal with others around you and playing office politics in general will get you further. I've been in all of those situations and I've had to learn some of those lessons the hard way. Now that I've been through it, I'm doing much better where I'm at. From what you posted, I can't help but feel you have sort of a victim mentality going on. My advice to you is to let it go and take a look at yourself. Maybe, just maybe you aren't perfect.

There are no pointy-haired bosses at Google

[rosciol]

What everyone seems to be forgetting is that this is Google's data. What I mean by that is that the data does not even remotely imply that you do not need technical expertise to be a good manager. All of the managers at Google had good technical expertise, or they wouldn't have gotten there (because, remember, Google valued technical expertise in their managers). There are no pointy-haired bosses at Google.

What the data is really saying is that after you have passed a threshold level of technical competence, how you manage becomes more important than how good you are at coding. In other words, if you're technically competent enough to apprehend what's going on and make informed decisions, it matters more what decisions you make and how you arrive at those decisions, not that you're the best coder in the room.

How is that surprising? As soon as you start hiring hundreds of pointy-haired bosses, then the data will rank technical competence as the first priority. The data is only a reflection of existing conditions. People are saying, "technical competence is good enough, but here's what isn't". Don't take this as a sign that technical competence is not important.

Re:There are no pointy-haired bosses at Google

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree with this. It seemed almost unscientific for the article to not mention that. It ranked 8th in importance because that problem is already solved.

Blatent Copyright Violatiion

[Bamfarooni]

Nice job posting to an article that is 100% (poorly formatted) copy of a NY times article, with 0% attribution.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/business/13hire.html

Leadership != Management

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually know an Academy grad who got canned from the Navy because he just couldn't learn to be a leader. Technically, he is brilliant but he just couldn't get it. The Navy sent him to all those leadership classes you spoke of but when his second promotion came up, he was denied and subsequently booted.

You can teach and even learn the outer actions and speech of a leader, but I've seen too many times folks who did what they were taught and couldn't lead a thirsty crew to a water fountain.

Leadership is a lot more than following recipes taught from an instructor - a lot more.

And I think you're confusing management with leadership.

A manager says,"Men we have to go and take out the machine gun nest. Jones, you go first."

A leader says, "Men, we have to take out that machine gun nest. Follow me!"

That's all there is too it. Anyone tells you there's more, well, they're selling you a "leadership program" for mega-bucks.

Re:Leadership != Management

[magarity]

A manager says,"Men we have to go and take out the machine gun nest. Jones, you go first."

So the ultimate manager is the Hindmost?

Re:Leadership != Management

[lennier1]

Like the good old days where the higher-ups were on horseback behind their troops to shoot anyone who wanted to escape from the enemy?

Re:Leadership != Management

[Gorobei]

A manager says,"Men we have to go and take out the machine gun nest. Jones, you go first."

A leader says, "Men, we have to take out that machine gun nest. Follow me!"

That's all there is too it. Anyone tells you there's more, well, they're selling you a "leadership program" for mega-bucks.

A real leader says "This is how we take out a machine gun nest." Then he does it, training this guys.

By machine nest 4, his guys just say "oh, we took out the machine gun nest on the left flank that was annoying us."

Re:Leadership != Management

[Dr. Spork]

The real leader that I would want says: "Dude, that's a machine gun nest! You better lay low! I called in an airstrike. Here, eat some nachos while we wait."

Re:Leadership != Management

[Thing 1]

This is why I keep coming back.

Re:Leadership != Management

[bipedalhominid]

No need to bring 3 legged critters into the discussion. ;)

Re:Leadership != Management

[Toze]

John Keegan wrote an excellent book on generalship. Alexander the Great led from the front in small-scale battles and provided his men with morale by doing so; his risk demanded that they also risk. Wellington led within gunshot range of the front lines, but spent his time observing and giving instructions. Grant habitually avoided battle lines. By the time you get to the era of nukes and bombers and communications systems, generals direct from bunkers. There's a difference between field leadership and running a war.

You don't want your project manager to roll up his sleeves and start coding when he should be running interference and requisitioning hardware and budget. So yes, the ultimate manager is the hindmost. Your lead dev leads, your dev team follows, and your manager gets the hell out of the way.

Re:Leadership != Management

[tehcyder]

A leader says, "Men, we have to take out that machine gun nest. Follow me!"

Sound advice from the "Exciting But Short Lived Careers In The Army" pamphlet.

FYI a true leader would be able to persuade/manipulate others into volunteering to take out the machine gun nest, while appearing to be reluctant not to lead the charge.

Re:Leadership != Management

[yurtinus]

If he was at the Academy, he'd be an officer... Don't officers usually tell their sergeants "We need to take out that machine gun nest" and the sergeant say "Follow me!"

I spose I technically do agree with what you say about managers and leaders...

Re:Leadership != Management

[Anonymous Coward]

Alexander the Great led from the front in small-scale battles

However correct the rest of your post may be, I must point out that some of Alexander's battles involved more than ten thousand soldiers on each side. That's not small.

Re:Leadership != Management

[Toze]

I'll cop to that, though I think it really depends on perspective; Napoleon put hundreds of thousands of men under arms to invade Russia. The smaller the scale of the army, the greater the impact of leading from the front- and the converse.

You mean you hate bad managers?

[Anonymous Coward]

The ability to synthesize employee opinion with his or her own informed point of view is a part of "having good people skills".

A manager who gets sidetracked or hoodwinked by a smooth talker, or by uninformed consensus, doesn't have good people management skills. A good manager will know when to compromise and when to insist his or her way, but will also know how to get his or her way without needing to reach open consensus.

When you say you prefer to "work the way you know how to", it seems like you don't have the inherent flexibility to know when you're being effectively managed, because, at the end of the day, a good manager will let you think it was your own idea.

headline is disingenuous.

[hobo sapiens]

This headline is disingenuous.

I read what this "story" was probably based on here: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/03/11/business/20110313_sbn_GOOGLE-HIRES-graphic.html?ref=business

This is actually brilliant stuff. I wish all managers would read this.

The website linked in the summary cannot even get character encoding correct for en_US.

Re:headline is disingenuous.

[yuhong]

Well, looks like what is actually happening is they tried to convert to US-ASCII by using question marks to substitute for the 8-bit chars. Best-fit would be better here. BTW, it is easy to check if the encoding is already in UTF-8 before converting to UTF-8.

Misleading Headline

[skywire]

If technical expertise is the 8th most important among a large number of traits, it is hardly "not important". It is, well, one of the most important.

Re:Misleading Headline

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not true. There could be perhaps a top four or five in such a list with the lion's share of percentage support or some other determinant of ranking.

Re:Misleading Headline

[elsurexiste]

It's not important if it's the last of eight traits. It's like that list of software product and process characteristics, like reliability, security, etc.: all of them are important and you would want them at their maximum, but when you prioritise you see which ones are relevant for real.

PageRank

[Anonymous Coward]

Some have just a reputation of doing amazing work on a project years ago and only need to show up to work once in a while. The aura is not rubbing off and if you criticize them it is bad for your own reputation.

That's called Page Rank. What else did you except from Google?

Not surprising

[mewsenews]

I'm a tech guy. The best manager I've ever had was a guy with very limited technical ability -- but he knew it. He won me over by apologizing about an offhand comment he made, some joke about paying me too much if I remember correctly. The fact that he was sensitive enough to realize that he may have hurt my feelings -- and then took steps to make sure he fixed it.. I haven't had a manager since then that cared that much about the people he managed.

I brushed it off at the time but it's obviously stuck with me.

Re:Not surprising

[rudy_wayne]

I'm a tech guy. The best manager I've ever had was a guy with very limited technical ability -- but he knew it. He won me over by apologizing about an offhand comment he made, some joke about paying me too much if I remember correctly. The fact that he was sensitive enough to realize that he may have hurt my feelings -- and then took steps to make sure he fixed it.. >

Those are certainly good qualities and there's no denying that "people skills" are very important and, unfortunately, sadly lacking in many (most?) managers. However, technical ability must come first. You can't lead an organization, solve problems and make important decisions if you aren't an expert in the technology involved.

Regardless of your excellent "people skills", if you aren't smarter than me then you have no business being my boss and probably got the job by being a schmoozer and suckass.

Exactly.

[khasim]

Let's abstract it into a continuum with 0 in the middle.

Now, beating the crew is -5.
Knowing how the sails work is +5.

So having both characteristics put you at 0. Essentially the same as someone who doesn't know anything, but doesn't abuse the crew.

Beating the crew and not knowing the sails gives you a -5. You can move up to 0 without any increase in knowledge just by removing that negative factor.

But that is just for that instance at that time.
It does nothing to address the capabilities of that team when compared to another team with a fully competent captain.

Not to mention that the research was based at Google. They have a history of hiring smart people who are exceptionally qualified in the technology.

Google Rediscovers Managers Need People Skills

[strangeattraction]

And it only took 100 independent variables to do it. Is there anything Google can't engineer?

Re:Google Rediscovers Managers Need People Skills

[Fastolfe]

I think this was more about prioritization, not selection.

No

[Snaller]

He doesn't have people skills, and that makes him sad.

Glad to see this coming to light...

[binaryseraph]

A couple years ago google bought a company that produces software my company uses. They almost over-night fired a vast majority of the mid-level and upper management and replaced them with 'google quality' managers (mostly master degree and doctorate holders who had very little knowledge of the product they were now managing). The absolute downfall in the quality of the support, product and resources was immediately felt. All in all, Google really needs to overhaul who and what they hire. A "strong accademic record" is not an indicator of intelligence or ability to think outside the box. It cirtianly doesn't show off management and technical skills.

Restriction of range

[NoSig]

Probably almost all the leadership at Google has some kind of technical knowledge. So the difference in their technical knowledge is also less, meaning that other attributes become more important. The comparison might have been quite different if Google had a bunch of leaders that were completely ignorant of what a computer is, but those kinds of people aren't in the study.

Selection bias

[ivoras]

I'm not saying the findings are not true, but to verify them they will have to do the same research in another company where tech expertise is completely absent from managers and cannot be relied on by employees. In other words, it may be that at Google it's taken for granted and as such is not noticeable. (even so, it will probably never enter the top 5 characteristics, it just won't be the last one).

Hugh Pickens' writing question

[Canadian Window C'er]

I'm not sure if the words "dead last" are an appropriate match for "eight most important".

Being the best Manager

[Anonymous Coward]

I was lucky to have an Engineer as my boss. He always encouraged me to excel but never micromanaged me. I called him one early morning around 2 AM from my lab and told him that I have accidentally discovered something, he was excited and told me, save it and now I will go back to my sleep. When people complained that I was using a Mainframe for a longer time and he had replied,"I am glad some one is using the valuable resource rather than shutting it". Another time some one complained that I was taking longer vacation and he had replied"he did no ask my permission to work 14-16 hrs a day for seven days a week and never took vacation till finished his project, so it does not matter to me". I miss him all these years after he passed away and never wanted to work for a jerk.

It's pretty bad if you have a bad manager

[alphamikefoxtrot]

I am a release engineer. I was recently bullied into adding new features without going thru QA after I cut the code to RC. The senior web engineer threatened that if I don't do it he will. When I complained that to my manager. He defended that he was under stress and I should let him commit the code. I'm not sure I want to work there anymore. Seriously, have a bad manager can be demoralising

Re:It's pretty bad if you have a bad manager

[mbkennel]

It's possible that the 'bully' may have been right. Nobody's job is the most important in the world.

A good manager would have explained the reasons why bending the rule may be necessary sometimes, and developed a plan to mitigate the problem and deal with it appropriately the next time around.

Good employees help too; you could have suggested that to the manager.

Re:It's pretty bad if you have a bad manager

[alphamikefoxtrot]

Ah but I have made announcement days before feature freeze. Even just hours and mins before the tag. I could delay it long for them for it to be properly QAed before tagging it for release if they informed me earlier. Everytime we delay RC. We shorten the time for bug hunts or we push the release date. Giving the releng enough lead time to decide. If you put someone on the spot, this the most obvious answer is no. I cannot be certain or not it will screw the entire release. If it renders core features useless it would be worse than not making a release at all. The feature is important but not critical. It could have been added to a maintenance release later.

obligatory dilbert comic

[tommeke100]

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-01-15/

Re:obligatory dilbert comic

[drsmack1]

Nice one!

Leaders, managers and clerks.

[khasim]

I wasn't in the Navy. I was in the Army. Same basis, different implementation.

The problem in the corporate world is primarily semantic.
Everyone wants to be called a "leader". Even when the situation requires a competent clerk.

1. Leaders will lead you into new fields.

2. Managers will make manage the people, equipment and time to achieve the goals of the leader (or the manager above them).

3. Clerks process the paperwork needed to acquire the people and equipment requested by the managers.

4. And then you have the individuals (aka "the talent").

A task that requires a competent clerk will be a complete mess when handled by a competent leader with a deficiency in clerk skills.

On the other hand, an extremely capable clerk can perform almost as well as a competent manager.

Too often, corporations claim "leardership" by trying to "manage" through emphasizing paperwork (clerk skills) and records.

Re:Leaders, managers and clerks.

[the_womble]

I think it is commoner for corporations to use "people skills" either as a synonym for popular or, much worse, an excuse for promoting people the current management like.

Re:Leaders, managers and clerks.

[Rich0]

On the other hand, an extremely capable clerk can perform almost as well as a competent manager.

For a lot less pay, and without all the side benefits like getting to pick what they work on, going on junkets, etc. They also don't get to sit in rooms all day talking about work - they have to do work.

For this reason, everybody wants to be a manager.

Corporations have also learned that instead of paying people more you can just call everybody a manager and give them something to manage and they end up being almost as happy. Of course, nothing actually gets done that way, but that only hurts the shareholders - not the executives.

Corporate ladders are upside down

[makubesu]

One thing that baffles me is that we take people who are good at engineering, and as a reward for their skill we put them in a management position which requires a totally different skill set. People want to move up the corporate ladder to feel like they're succeeding at their career, but we need to keep management ladders and engineering ladders separate. Good engineers need to be put in valued positions that require good engineers.

Our managers submit patches...

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a medium/ size multi national tech company. A few days ago I noticed the VP of Engineering was sending out patches for one of our bits of software, and then not long after he was sitting down and schooling one of our senior devs! From what I can tell, every person up the management chain is very technically competent. BTW, best place I've ever worked.

That is how people work

[Anonymous Coward]

*Everyone* tends to see himself as being more important than his peers (this applies to women too).

The workers at the bottom of the ladder think they are more important than their superiors because they are actually producing something of real value, and because they understand their problem-space better than those higher up. Most of them also see themselves as being more competent, and delivering greater value, than their team members (this is true even when there is a clear and obvious skill gap...the person of lesser skill believes he makes up for it in some way).

The people in the middle rung think they make better strategic decisions than the workers below them ever could. They also see workers as basically interchangeable, recognizing only a small amount of specific-to-this-business knowledge that introduces some ramp-up time when new workers are brought on. Far more important than the skills themselves is the wise application and direction of said skills, and that only a manager can provide. Incidentally, managers feel exactly the same way about their own superiors as their workers feel about them.

Then the people at the top KNOW they are at the top, and believe it is solely their own merits that got them there. They see everyone below them as mere functionaries, and their extreme wealth just further reinforces this.

This is just human nature, and it will not change.

Re:That is how people work

[Daniel Phillips]

This is just human nature, and it will not change.

Not if you just throw up your hands and accept it. That sort of attitude can be very costly to shareholders.

Helen

[Anonymous Coward]

most of time i wish it's not appear.http://www.australia-asics.com/asics-mexico-66-c-1298.html

Right brain created Left brain ruled.

[unlocked]

Seems how it goes, right brained people create it to be colorful, and then the left brained people take over and turn it into a black and white thing.

People Skills are not all you need

[gr8_phk]

This is Google we're talking about. All the managers already had technical skills. So the MBAs will take this as another data point indicating that they don't need to understand the details of the business they're running and continue to do a poor job. Other research has shown that the best run companies promote from within - leading to management that knows what the people are doing and can actually help when asked for direction.

You must have both.

a mix of tech and leadership

[metalmaster]

A manager doesnt necessarily need to be involved with technical aspects of day to day business, BUT if i have an issue with my work, my manager should know what im working on and have a basic idea of how it works. Either that, or they should be willing to listen.

Nest?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do machine guns actually mate and build nests?

Re:Nest?

[tehcyder]

Do machine guns actually mate and build nests?

Yes, the bullets are just little machine guns learning to fly. Very fast.

My corporate experiences

[GodfatherofSoul]

I'll probably piss off a lot of management types, but this is what I observed my during years working with corporate IT America. The pure management types are almost viral in corporate culture. Once you get enough of them, they tend to take over because much of the office politicking, style over substance brand of leadership gets you moved up bigger, faster, and longer. As long as a company has enough gearheads in leadership positions to call BS on John "Paradigm for technology change" Doe, you can keep the ship on the right course. But, once a company goes public, you're now dealing with the pressure of PR over performance which behooves CEOs to recruit more slick salesmen in suits than bureaucrats.

It's just like politics. A guy spewing easy-to-digest bumper sticker slogans gets his point across (however inaccurate it might be) faster than a guy trying to explain the issue to you in depth. The slick sales type who knows how to schmooze with the execs at the holiday party puts himself in a better light than Mary Busybee down in networking who actually *knows* how to best upgrade your servers. Look at how many worthless CEOs in the mold of Carly Fiorina there are endless being promoted up regardless of failure (including one recent President, ahem!).

And, it's a stereotype that techies are a bunch of socially-underdeveloped goofballs. Look at all the techie founders who've turned over billion-dollar enterprises to the suits after they cash in. It's a cultural problem. We've somehow lost the patience to listen long enough for the right answer instead of the easiest answer.

Then why is Customer Support so low at Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

They STINK at dealing with humans - why don't they value it so much inside the organization?

Re:Then why is Customer Support so low at Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have some groundbreaking views on how to cost-effectively support millions of low-revenue clients/partners using a staff of hundreds (maybe a few thousands), Google is hiring: http://www.google.com/jobs

In favor of hands-on managers...

[evilviper]

I wonder if all the complaints about "micro-managing" are just because of big egos and perhaps a short-sighted view of things.

I've worked at both extremes. Places where trivial decisions require multiple meetings, and start-ups where it's a complete free-for-all. While both extremes are bad, I'd lean towards the former, not the later.

What do you get with hands-off management? The inmates running the asylum. The best example I can give is finding a single server that was running 4 completely different databases at the same time... Why? Because person 1 likes Postges, person 2 likes Oracle, and person 3 just happened to find a howto to setup syslog/snort/etc. which uses MySQL. Like it or not, this is where managers can and do help. In everyone's short term view, their favorite way is quiker and easier. In the long term, it's a maintenance nightmare.

As an extreme example, how about everyone getting to pick their own programming language? After all, I'll be quicker to do this bit in perl, this other bit in python, this bit in java, etc. If your manager is hands off, who's to stop you, or your coworkers from deciding to do just that?

The company is going to last considerably longer than the employee is going to be there. Each will bring their own biases, and it's management that needs to bring them into the fold, and in-line with how the rest of the company does things, and an eye towards the long term implications of any decision.

Yeah, I hated being micro-managed, but I can see past my own nose and tell that being completely unmanaged has vastly worse side-effects.

Statistics vs. reality

[Anonymous Coward]

To summarize: Statistics have shown that managers with people skills get more praise. Reality has shown that managers picked for their technical skills can build a company with a 185B market cap.

nice

[mshehriyar]

like it .. :

Statistical Artefact

[bap]

People (and even Google) are taking the wrong lesson from this.

The sample used in this study was managers *at Google*. This is a biased sample, in that almost all of them will have high technical competence. So the statistical power of the study in determining how technical competence affects management performance will be low. In some other setting, where managers have much wider variability in technical competence, that factor would very likely show up much higher on the list.

(Analogy: if you conducted a study of how wealth affects cancer survival rates and only admitted millionaires to the study, you might get a very different result than if you also included people with very little money. The classic example of this effect in the statistics literature is a study of wages as a function of height, whose result changes if the sample includes only circus midgets.)

Re:Statistical Artefact

[Fastolfe]

Why is Google taking the wrong lesson from this? You say that Google has managers that have a lot of technical skills. Google says the need for improving technical skills ranks #8. I'd say you and Google are both in complete agreement. It's the headline and summary of this Slashdot article that you probably disagree with.

Well done, Google!

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations to Google for even asking this question. Its an indication of some wisdom to look into what makes effective management, in order to document it and to make the good aspects of what is learned a part of approved policy and SOP. The culture of success is built when people ask smart questions, learn, and spread the wisdom gained through the organization. I'm glad a company so important to technology and looked to as a leader is spending money to improve their people and policy, AND sharing it with everyone else. It isn't happening everywhere, by any stretch.

It has a name

[snookiex]

It's called the Dilbert Principle.

good old boys club

[johncandale]

Doesn't this strike you as good old boys club mentality? I'll explain: Instead of firing bad manger and promoting someone else, they just kept him and give him basic manager training, Something they could have given to anybody, furthermore it's likely he'll slide back after not being watched so closely. By that time he will be too entrenched in ongoing company knowledge to fire.

Proving once again getting into management is about pedigree and class status not merit. Having the right parents and social norms, religious background, accent, thought process that comes from growing up in a white protestant household and going to their schools and churchs, or at least growing up in a house that talks, dresses and looks like a white protestant household