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How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management

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Re: How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management

#41

Post by judk »

fleitz wrote: post #28
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #4

I keep reading these Google stories that appear flawless examples of exceptional thinking and execution. But heck, at some point, the stories just wash over without effect. Do they have no problem employees? Management feudal battles? Studies and organizational change movements that produce nothing appreciative? I understand that Google is basically a giant marketing company ran by engineers who own the web, so I get…

It's a case study of managers by managers for managers, of course everything went well. It would take an epically shitty manager to not be able to sweep that kind of failure under the rug and not manage to blame some programmers / QA for their failure. One thing I would recommend though is to spread out their 360-degree annual reviews into a daily 1 degree review which will net Google an additional 5 degrees of revie…

Only if you assume availability SLA of approx >98%

With weekends and holidays and sick, that us unlikely.

Re: How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management

#42

Post by huggah »

kevincennis wrote: post #12

> “At first,” he says, “the numbers were not encouraging. Even the low-scoring managers were doing pretty well. How could we find evidence that better management mattered when all managers seemed so similar?” The solution came from applying sophisticated multivariate statistical techniques, which showed that even “the smallest incremental increases in manager quality were quite powerful.” As someone without a strong…

Often data contains structural features that initially aren't observed and without them appear to support a hypothesis only weakly. By exploiting the structure, we can see things much more clearly.

An example: say we want to know how a drug affects cognition. We give a simple test to a bunch of people on and off it, blinded, etc. The control group's average score is 74, and the test group's average score is 72. We can use a t test to see if there's a statistical difference, and find there isn't. We can't conclude anything about the drug.

Now imagine we have exactly that same data, but we were careful to give two tests to each person (in a random order, and different tests, of course). We take another look at the data and find out that every single participant scored lower when they were on the drug. With even a fairly small sample size this provides strong evidence that the drug impairs cognition, and probably tells us quite a bit about how much it does.

The article is probably talking about multivariate regression; the more important number comes a few sentences later---"retention was related more strongly to manager quality than to seniority, performance, tenure, or promotions". So presumably, they did the same sort of analysis, carefully pairing people who were similar in as many ways as possible, and found out that good managers are more important than seniority in terms of employee retention. The more variables you have, the more even large differences can hide in raw group averages.

Re: How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management

#43

Post by k__ »

judk wrote: post #39
plinkplonk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facilitators who (on the average) make a lot more money than and have the ability to review/reward/promote/fire etc the people they 'facilitate'. That makes them "bosses" in my book. What distinguishes real 'facilitators' from bosses is that they don't have any power over the people they facilitate. How are the Google bosses 'more like facilitators' if the power equations are unchanged?

The relationship you describe is not the Google model. Managers can be the same or lower level in the seniority system than people they manage.

Wouldn't it be better (/cheaper) to get a bunch of personal assistants for the engineers?

Re: How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management

#44

Post by rbanffy »

plinkplonk wrote: post #35
nostrademons wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managers at Google generally are much more like "facilitators" than "bosses".

Facilitators who (on the average) make a lot more money than and have the ability to review/reward/promote/fire etc the people they 'facilitate'. That makes them "bosses" in my book. What distinguishes real 'facilitators' from bosses is that they don't have any power over the people they facilitate. How are the Google bosses 'more like facilitators' if the power equations are unchanged?

Have you ever been the manager of 30 incredibly smart people?

I can say from managing 10 very smart developers that no one can be their "boss". You have to make them want to do what needs to be done while convincing your own manager they are doing it. I you order them too frequently to do something they think is bad - for the product, for the company - they'll end up quitting.

It's like herding cats.

Edit: it's also a lot of fun.

Re: How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management

#45

Post by rbanffy »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #4

I keep reading these Google stories that appear flawless examples of exceptional thinking and execution. But heck, at some point, the stories just wash over without effect. Do they have no problem employees? Management feudal battles? Studies and organizational change movements that produce nothing appreciative? I understand that Google is basically a giant marketing company ran by engineers who own the web, so I get…

I believe management feudal battles only expose another type of problem employee. With an adequate model that can measure and predict future problems, it may just be possible to get rid of the problem employees (and managers who engage in feudal disputes are just that too) or even fix them by removing the factors that created the behavior in the first place.

If anyone can turn management into a real science, it's Google.

Re: How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management

#46

Post by momo1 »

'Project Oxygen colead Neal Patel recalls, “We knew the team had to be careful. Google has high standards of proof, even for what, at other places, might be considered obvious truths. Simple correlations weren’t going to be enough. So we actually ended up trying to prove the opposite case—that managers don’t matter. Luckily, we failed.”'

This almost made me laugh out loud. So, what he's saying is, 'We knew we could not prove managers matter, so we went ahead and tried to prove managers don't matter, knowing we would fail."

Re: How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management

#48

Post by dredmorbius »

yuhong wrote: post #11
boomzilla wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the article on that topic: http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/09/20/sex_a...

Notice the mention of Vic Gundotra.

Mention of his EQ surprised me. He's not exactly what I'd call a high EQ kind of a guy.

Cookie-licking -- now that I totally get.

Re: How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management

#49

Post by judk »

k__ wrote: post #43
judk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The relationship you describe is not the Google model. Managers can be the same or lower level in the seniority system than people they manage.

Wouldn't it be better (/cheaper) to get a bunch of personal assistants for the engineers?

Assistans aren't quite the same as managers. People managers manage people, help them get wider perspective on their work, pursue training opportunities, monitor performance, connect with relevant coworkers, and make decisions related to keeping the larger team moving in a common direction. That is a valuable skill, but a level N $x-earning contributor doesn't need to be people-managed by M>N $y > $x

Check out the "skunkworks" model for similar examples.

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