Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 292 posts

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

#281

Post by utyop22 »

duxup wrote: post #263
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.

Lotta folks out there are heavily invested in "process" to the point that they can't see anything outside process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTuLbiIVDpk

Lol I went through a few FAANG Pm interviews for the lols.

Ah trust me - its actually insane how every firm manages to pull this off - the secret sauce that made the company what it was evaporates and the management optimise for process.

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

#282

Post by nailer »

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.

> "I met a long time Google employee this week interventions"

I met a long time Google employee this week that mentioned. Sorry I was using voice recognition.

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

#283

Post by duxup »

utyop22 wrote: post #281
duxup wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lotta folks out there are heavily invested in "process" to the point that they can't see anything outside process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTuLbiIVDpk

Lol I went through a few FAANG Pm interviews for the lols. Ah trust me - its actually insane how every firm manages to pull this off - the secret sauce that made the company what it was evaporates and the management optimise for process.

I kinda get it. Process is something you KNOW you can pull off. Code is ... open for interpretation, anything is posible, lots of unknown.

And it's tempting where you institute processes to prevent "well that won't happen again".

But man process really doesn't really contribute a great deal anyhow.

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

#284

Post by zeroq »

kelnos wrote: post #175
B-Con wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wait, so you have ICs who work on multiple projects, and report to a different manager depending on the project? That sounds like a nightmare. Having one manager to manage is usually enough work...

It's actually quite common and it's called "matrix management". Multiple people to give you orders and no one to take accountability. You'd be surprised how wide spread it is.

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

#285

Post by zhivecraft »

nostrademons wrote: post #21
floren wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any opinion on the success/value of the TLM role?

Former TLM that was involuntarily reclassified as an EM because I had too many reports. I'm from old-line (pre-2011) Google, so was an engineer back when the TLM role was one of our unique competitive advantages. I have a lot of thoughts on this. IMHO, it's appropriate for the state that Google is in now , where it is a large mature conglomerate, basically finance & managerially driven, built around optimizing 10-K r…

+1, L5 IC in google. Your words resonate a lot with what I feel about current org, and it’s great to have this validation besides corporate gaslighting

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

#286

Post by zhivecraft »

fair_enough wrote: post #269

I don't see how Google employees can stomach all the bureaucracy and internal drama of publicly-traded corporate politics for more than about 2 years before taking their "fuck you" money and retiring. I'm under the impression this is not a popular opinion around these parts, but the barrage of internal-use acronyms for job titles and gleeful posts pedantically explaining their meaning makes working there sound like a…

To be honest it is. Google HR brand is nothing common with actual day to day bullshit, at least in Core and Cloud orgs.

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

#287

Post by neya »

DanielHB wrote: post #280
neya wrote: post #151

Good riddance. 7 years too late. I worked as a Google Cloud consultant for a major part of my career. We had this really large client, we were bleeding money because one of our ex-employees promised the client a cost reduction strategy that was impossible and I took over his role - literally a hot seat. We walked into Google's office, it was fantastic, they had something like 12 cuisines in the dining area, multiple…

I have a similar story, many years ago I worked in Brazil as an "IBM consulting partner". Meaning my company implemented IBM solutions on clients, but as a separate company from IBM. Usually as a more of a budget option to IBM internal consulting work. (I didn't actually work with IBM stuff, I did development of our internal product that we sold in conjunction to IBM solutions to our clients) I went to their office i…

Damn, that was just sad to read. Thank you for sharing.

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

#288

Post by jjtheblunt »

cutemonster wrote: post #250
jjtheblunt wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For bigger teams (10+) you either need individuals who are very independent and driven, or have dependable line managers. that described internal Apple hardware teams i was on for years, as having as flat as possible an org was a priority to prevent bureaucracy and fiefdom forming middle manager nonsense

Interesting! How many people were you? There weren't any other informal power structures emerging?

there were 20 to 30 people in a team, but all knew their areas and the nature of the hardware and regulatory and industry standards were such that people could self organize and work away in mass parallel fashion just fine like that.

could be a case of fitting the problem domain really more than fitting human psychologies. early on there was one dude from India (brahmin) who kept complaining that he needed people to be reporting to him, rather than him being one of the workers, and that stuck out like a sore thumb, even with multiple brahmin indians in the group, and more americans, australians, brits, african etc...truly diverse by hiring for specialized talents.

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

#289

Post by frollogaston »

sagarm wrote: post #276
frollogaston wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was how I felt about Google in 2018. It's gotten less bloated and better in some ways, but the CEO is still autopilot.

Frankly autopilot is probably in the top quartile of company leadership. CEO flailing only seems to make things worse.

There were some VPs and SVPs with actual vision, or at the very least would say meaningful things in announcements.

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

#290

Post by fair_enough »

zhivecraft wrote: post #286
fair_enough wrote: post #269

I don't see how Google employees can stomach all the bureaucracy and internal drama of publicly-traded corporate politics for more than about 2 years before taking their "fuck you" money and retiring. I'm under the impression this is not a popular opinion around these parts, but the barrage of internal-use acronyms for job titles and gleeful posts pedantically explaining their meaning makes working there sound like a…

To be honest it is. Google HR brand is nothing common with actual day to day bullshit, at least in Core and Cloud orgs.

I couldn't help noticing you called the day to day stuff "bullshit". Which is worse: the HR bullshit or the day-to-day bullshit in one of the breadwinner teams?

From an outsider's perspective, things seem miserable around there but from the sound of it, they're worse than I thought.

I've heard the stories of the Not Invented Here syndrome, but to me the worst part of working a company like Google or Microsoft is the fact that they hire thousands of people who lack the work ethic or competence to code as "project managers" and then allow them to have a part in your work without helping in any way.

I could not imagine spending 70 hours in a week doing the drudgery of programming, then having to share the credit with someone who was a non-contributor at best and at worst a detriment.

I remember the way things used to work: you start by implementing things yourself, and only when the size and scope of your work grows beyond the capabilities of one person do you get to start telling other people to implement your ideas.

Post reply on HN