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Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year

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Re: Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year

#141

Post by eigen »

tayo42 wrote: post #63
godelski wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kinda brings up a question I've often thought about. Why is it that we structure growth in a company to be so biased towards moving into management roles? I mean there is the obvious part of the answer in that managers are the ones that are given the power to define that growth ladder, but I'm not sure this fully explains things. If people are transferring from technical positions to managerial positions then sh…

This hasn't been true in a lot of companies for like my entire career. You can move up as an ic. Titles like Staff, senior staff principal. A Staff and Sr manager would be paid the same

> A Staff and Sr manager would be paid the same

do they report to the same level? every place I've seen a "technical track" and "management track" it seems the higher level technical people report to someone on the same or even lower level in management. I.E. a manager can have technical reports that are equal level or higher. that obviously doesn't happen in the management track.

not that these are first level managers but if a principal engineer not reporting to a VP, the it doesnt seem like the tracks are equal.

Re: Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year

#142

Post by moandcompany »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #140
dhx wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a mapping to roles/levels[1], for example: Principal EM - USD$1.3m/yr per https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en... Staff EM - USD$664k/yr per https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en... Staff IC - USD$557k/yr per https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en... Senior IC - USD$410k/yr per https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en…

Hell, I’d happily be Lundberg for $1.3M/year. Shoot, I’d probably even do it for just $1.0M — and the Bobs would be pleased! It also sounds like the 10x developers are underpaid by a factor of 100!

It's been a few years, but from what I recall, a Principal is a Director-equivalent (L8) level.

The prior poster is missing the L7 tier, which is Senior Staff Engineering Manager for the Engineering Manager Ladder.

L8 is a Director on the Engineering Manager Ladder L8 is a Principal on the Software Engineer (SWE) Ladder.

Tech-Lead Managers (TL/M or TLMs) were on the SWE Ladder.

For reference:

Software Engineer Ladder

L8 - Principal Software Engineer

L7 - Senior Staff Software Engineer

L6 - Staff Software Engineer

L5 - Senior Software Engineer

L4 - Software Engineer II

L3 - Software Engineer (new graduates would start here)

----------------------

L2 and below exists in rare occasions.

Engineering Manager Ladder

L8 - Director

L7 - Staff Engineering Manager

L6 - Engineering Manager (M1)

L5 - Engineering Manager (M0 - normally this level does not exist for external hires and is for the rare situation when a SWE is converting to the Engineering Manager ladder)

Re: Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year

#143

Post by tho23i423o4j23 »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #75
nailer wrote: post #59

I met a long time Google employee this week interventions that most of the senior management were ex oracle people. It’s nearly 20 years since Google had a category defining product - they haven’t built or acquired a single thing that dominates in the same way that android, maps, search, docs, etc. has since about 2006. It figures.

Gemini and transformers in general from Google Brain might say "hold my beer"

Google Research/Deepmind is a different thing altogether.

Product wise, Perplexity has them beat by a mile - that said PPLX doesn't quite have the same ads buy-in (or all the Chrome-tricks Google plays to keep tracking alive).

Re: Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year

#144

Post by lovich »

JustExAWS wrote: post #119
xenotux wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original ethos was that you didn't want the company ran by MBAs, so you wanted to build your management team by tapping into talented engineers. Of course, this can backfire in many ways. You end up wasting engineering talent, and as the organization grows, managers spend more time on paper-pushing than on creative work. And there's no shortage of engineers who are just bad at reading, talking to, and managing pe…

> But the huge perk of management is leverage. If you're technically competent and credible, and want something to happen, your team will see it your way. If you're a random "ideas guy" in an IC role, that's not a given. There are three levers of power in an organization - relationship, expertise and role. Role power is by far the least effective. If you can’t get team buy in for your ideas or they believe you’re an…

> Role power is by far the least effective.

Eh, maybe at faangs or at the executive level but at non faangs you might not notice a role having power because most roles with the Manager title are no longer actual managers but supervisors.

I had more agency over where capital was deployed as a teenager deciding how many people were going to be on the shift for closing, then I have making over 200k/yr as a Senior Manager.

Any role that has decision making power over where money goes automatically has a massive amount more power than a role that does not

Re: Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year

#146

Post by ip26 »

JustExAWS wrote: post #119
xenotux wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original ethos was that you didn't want the company ran by MBAs, so you wanted to build your management team by tapping into talented engineers. Of course, this can backfire in many ways. You end up wasting engineering talent, and as the organization grows, managers spend more time on paper-pushing than on creative work. And there's no shortage of engineers who are just bad at reading, talking to, and managing pe…

> But the huge perk of management is leverage. If you're technically competent and credible, and want something to happen, your team will see it your way. If you're a random "ideas guy" in an IC role, that's not a given. There are three levers of power in an organization - relationship, expertise and role. Role power is by far the least effective. If you can’t get team buy in for your ideas or they believe you’re an…

And wielding all three at once is the most effective.

Re: Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year

#147

Post by aix1 »

B-Con wrote: post #82
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #11

This was called the TLM role at google. Technical Lead/Manager. You were expected to code and manage a couple of more junior engineers. It’s part of an effort to have dedicated managers and dedicated engineers instead of hybrid roles. This is being sold as an efficiency win for the sake of the stock price but it’s really just moved a few people around with the TLMs now 100% focused on programming.

GOOG has made a systemic push to eliminate the role starting ~3 years ago. At that time my M was a staff level IC TLM with 4 reports who was forcibly converted to EM. In those last 3 years I've only seen TLMs used to assist an overloaded EM. The pattern I've seen is something like: Principal EM |- Staff EM (7 reports, project A) |- Staff EM (8 reports, project B) |- Staff IC (projects A, B, C) |- Senior IC (projects…

> At that time my M was a staff level IC TLM with 4 reports who was forcibly converted to EM.

I am obviously not disputing your experience, but wanted to mention that this was not the standard pattern. The standard pattern for forced conversion at L6 (Staff) was either 6 or 7 reports (I don't remember exactly).

> Principal EM

I don't want to be overly pedantic, but there's no Principal EM on Google eng ladders and so it's not entirely clear which level you're referring to.

The IC ladder runs Staff SWE (L6) - Senior Staff SWE (L7) - Principal SWE (L8) - Distinguished SWE (L9)

The Eng Manager ladder runs EM II (L6) - EM III (L7) - Director (L8) - Senior Director (L9)

P.S. I hope I got the EM II/III designations right. I think EM I is L5, though almost never seen in practice.

P.P.S. Confusingly, the IC ladder allows a limited number of reports (the limit increases with level).

Re: Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year

#148

Post by nostrademons »

greesil wrote: post #137
nostrademons wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't actually say that, but I would say that the TLM role works at a very specific stage in a company's lifecycle, and many companies that use it (including Google itself from around 2010 onwards) have long since past that point. IMHO, the conditions where a TLM role is appropriate are: 1.) You need to be in the company growth phase where you are still trying to capture share of a competitive market, i.e. it ma…

If you don't mind me asking, why did your team get bigger? Did your scope increase?

I assume you're referring to my other comment, since I didn't mention my team size in this one.

I'd love to say that the answer is "because I'm a good manager", but I think that the real answer is "because there was money=headcount available, the layers of management above me successfully presented our value and inflated our needs enough to convince a VP to give it to us, and my own manager physically did not have enough hours in the day to have 1:1s with all the new incoming headcount without introducing some layers of management under us". If it weren't me, it would've been some other manager. For that matter, I wasn't a manager when I joined the team, but I was interested in managing and of sufficient level that I could pass department policies, so I ended up more than doubling my team size within 6 months of becoming a manager. The team was pretty busy for the first year or two after that - we'd gotten all that headcount by arguing that we were critical to some big strategic initiative, after all - but there were long periods after where we were oversized by a factor of about 2, so I just let everyone work 20 hour weeks and phone it in until the next big project came.

The more time I spend in the corporate world, the more I become convinced that success is a matter of meeting the minimum qualifications, bullshitting, saying yes to opportunities created by people who are themselves bullshitting, and doing the minimum amount of work needed to avoid being called on your bullshit. Businesses don't hire because they actually have work to do. They hire because they have money and money=headcount and headcount is the only way for a manager to get promoted or pad their resume.

Re: Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year

#149

Post by leoh »

kylestlb wrote: post #97
bsenftner wrote: post #47

Next up: super frustrated ex-google PMs complaining "that's not how it's done at Google" at their new jobs.

This has been happening for over a decade

Having worked with said PMs both at Google and after, it is extremely annoying

Re: Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year

#150

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #11

This was called the TLM role at google. Technical Lead/Manager. You were expected to code and manage a couple of more junior engineers. It’s part of an effort to have dedicated managers and dedicated engineers instead of hybrid roles. This is being sold as an efficiency win for the sake of the stock price but it’s really just moved a few people around with the TLMs now 100% focused on programming.

> It’s part of an effort to have dedicated managers and dedicated engineers instead of hybrid roles.

The hybrid role idea has always been ridiculous. It's two different jobs, like being a mechanic and an accountant. Do you need a mechanic? Cool, hire a mechanic. Do you only need a mechanic part-time? Cool, hire a part-time mechanic. But I don't want my mechanic stopping and starting the work on my engine 3 times a day because somebody has tax questions.

The whole point behind the division of labor is to specialize, and get really good at your specialization. Picking up multiple very different jobs and trying to do both is the opposite of efficiency. People knew this 250 years ago.

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