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Larry Page Begins Major Google Reorg: Engineers, Not Managers, In Charge

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Re: Larry Page Begins Major Google Reorg: Engineers, Not Managers, In Charge

#111

Post by zach »

dman wrote: post #13
blinkingled wrote: post #7

This got me thinking about role of managers in a modern org (to simplify things let's say it's a Tech company). It certainly needs a CEO/Visionary, it most likely needs HR and front/back office folks, it certainly needs PR and marketing people. But in a world where people communicate rarely in person, have their own management and economics 101 abilities, are smart enough to not work against their own interests (and…

One of my ex managers said that his role was to attend the meetings,shield the developers from the politics of getting projects approved and other institutional overhead so that we could focus on delivering product.

This is a great role for a manager to play for as long they have the power to actually shield the developers from politics.

When things go bad politically for the manager and they lose that power, the politics have a way of suddenly rushing in and catching the developers off-guard.

So developers, inspect your manager for leaks regularly.

Re: Larry Page Begins Major Google Reorg: Engineers, Not Managers, In Charge

#112

Post by arethuza »

al05 wrote: post #104
GoldenMonkey wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has done this all along. Managers are programmers, they divide their time between programming and managing. The feeling within Microsoft, was how can someone who is not a programmer, manage programmers?

I'm pretty sure its illegal for non-lawyers to manage lawyers.

Lots of companies have in-house legal counsel - they can't all be managed by lawyers unless it is lawyers all the way up to and including the CEO.

What it might be is that law firms in most places can't have partners who are non-lawyers, but that's quite different.

Re: Larry Page Begins Major Google Reorg: Engineers, Not Managers, In Charge

#113

Post by tyree732 »

al05 wrote: post #104
GoldenMonkey wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has done this all along. Managers are programmers, they divide their time between programming and managing. The feeling within Microsoft, was how can someone who is not a programmer, manage programmers?

I'm pretty sure its illegal for non-lawyers to manage lawyers.

This is incorrect. The company I work for has a legal department that reports to upper management.

Re: Larry Page Begins Major Google Reorg: Engineers, Not Managers, In Charge

#114

Post by palish »

joebadmo wrote: post #18
dman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my ex managers said that his role was to attend the meetings,shield the developers from the politics of getting projects approved and other institutional overhead so that we could focus on delivering product.

Sounds familiar. As a USMC fire team leader, my job was mostly to protect my Marines from all the shit that rolls downhill. It's generally a very difficult job to do well, because of the way the explicit incentives are set up, but somewhat easier for me as I was basically apolitical and had no career plans in the Corps.

Blog.

Please?

Re: Larry Page Begins Major Google Reorg: Engineers, Not Managers, In Charge

#115

Post by tyree732 »

Silhouette wrote: post #19
kenjackson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the tech industry this isn't really an issue (management being overemphasized). Even at places like IBM and Intel you generally have engineers running the show at every level of the engineering org. I think what Google will see is that the real problem is the board and shareholder accountability. This creates a special type of short-term malfunction in organizations which often looks like a management problem, but…

> In the tech industry this isn't really an issue (management being overemphasized). The thing is, in a lot of larger tech companies, I suspect it's the other way around: management is under-rated because the engineers have taken over the asylum. It's easy to point to huge, successful companies with a very pro-engineering culture like Facebook and connect the culture with the success, but how do we know they succeede…

It's easy to point out Google's mistakes and point to their engineering culture, but look at Microsoft as a counterexample. Microsoft has more or less the same story as Google; one or two wildly successful products supplementing the rest of the business. The other groups at Microsoft leap into new markets to try and expand the core business (Xbox 360 being a fine example). I doubt we would call Microsoft's culture an engineering culture in the same vein as Google.

Re: Larry Page Begins Major Google Reorg: Engineers, Not Managers, In Charge

#116

Post by te_chris »

redthrowaway wrote: post #91
DavidSJ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customers. [Edit: I worked at Amazon Web Services until recently. Now work at Google. Concern for customers drives everything that happens at Amazon, sometimes to a ridiculous degree.]

I'm interested to hear how that professed dedication to customers squares with the experiences of sites like reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/g66f0/why_reddit_was_d...

This was addressed well by someone from Netflix but I can't find the link. Basically he said that Reddit weren't so much the victim of AWS rather than the victim of not understanding the product enough and not spending enough to buy the right instances and thus ensure their constant performance. The guy from Netflix justified this by the way that the different sized instances are split across their respective hosts and, surprise surprise, if you buy the bigger instances you get more of each machine host and less threat of someone taking you out.

Re: Larry Page Begins Major Google Reorg: Engineers, Not Managers, In Charge

#117

Post by argus »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #27

I question the title. It doesn't sound like engineers are in charge, instead, it sounds like smaller operating units will be in charge. That is a very different thing from having the inmates running the asylum. I have yet to see a large company that successfully treats software as a creative endeavor instead of a production line that still manages to be able to focus on solving customer problems. I really hope that L…

I agree that the article does seem a little tabloid, but I think speculating on what will happen to G as a complete outsider is to a very high degree a gamble..

There would be so many issues at play here.. How well can Larry get buy-in from various levels of the organisation? How well will the Google culture evolve around his proposed changes? What will they do to ensure Quality of service goes up?

At the end of the day, Google right now is a one trick pony. General consensus in this thread is that Android is successful within Google right now. I don't buy into that though primarily because it's a business unit that does not make any money...

I think there's a long way to go and a lot of forces at play

Re: Larry Page Begins Major Google Reorg: Engineers, Not Managers, In Charge

#118

Post by gamble »

nostrademons wrote: post #90
tonfa wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But aren't those manager doing engineering work as well?

People managers rarely do engineering work as well - it's very hard to both manage people well and contribute significantly to the code for a project. It also sets up a sort of perverse incentive where you want to look good as a coder by taking on the glamorous, high-profile programming tasks, but this can actually demotivate your teammates because they're left with the drudge work. You don't want to be in competitio…

Very true. I worked for a startup some years back where the technical cofounder had a nasty habit of reserving all the interesting problems for himself and fobbing the scutwork off on employees. It was intensely frustrating. Yet somehow they never understood why they couldn't retain programmers...

Re: Larry Page Begins Major Google Reorg: Engineers, Not Managers, In Charge

#119

Post by brown9-2 »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #81

GOOG is 3% down today (while market overall is about the same). I personally like Larry's change, but average investor seems to be skeptical.

Can you really draw this conclusion based on these two points of data? There is no way to determine cause and effect.

Re: Larry Page Begins Major Google Reorg: Engineers, Not Managers, In Charge

#120

Post by dennisgorelik »

brown9-2 wrote: post #119
dennisgorelik wrote: post #81

GOOG is 3% down today (while market overall is about the same). I personally like Larry's change, but average investor seems to be skeptical.

Can you really draw this conclusion based on these two points of data? There is no way to determine cause and effect.

There is no guarantee of causation, but do you see another explanation of why GOOG dropped 3% today?
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