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

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!"

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.

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

[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.

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

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

[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

[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.

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]

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?

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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: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: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...

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.

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

[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."

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.

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.

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.

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: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

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.

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.

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.

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.)