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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."
most of the time I wish this wasn't true.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
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.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
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.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
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!
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
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
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...
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.
Word game?
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
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.
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.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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.
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. 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
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.
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.
Whew! This water sure is cold!
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.
You could be commenting on the culture change at DEC after Ken Olsen or hp after Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
"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.
"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.
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.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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.
blah blah blah
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.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do machine guns actually mate and build nests?
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.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.)