Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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
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.
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.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
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.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
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.
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...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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 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
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.
*sigh*
Let me walk you through this:
-- MarkusQ