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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

#51

Post by Spivak »

greesil wrote: post #46
lanthissa wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we had this in my company it was pretty hit miss. Almost always the 'TLM' was someone who was in the role for a really long time and it warranted a second person, so it ended up being a 1-2 junior reporting in absorbing the knowledge that the tlm had. If you were in a growing domain, and the TLM stayed engaged with the code it worked really well, but as soon as one of those failed it was a bad roi for the company and…

This reads like "get rid of the old experienced people so I can get promoted".

If your position has no upward mobility juniors will change jobs, likely change companies, once they have the experience and all the effort you spent training them will be wasted.

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

#52

Post by lanthissa »

greesil wrote: post #46
lanthissa wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we had this in my company it was pretty hit miss. Almost always the 'TLM' was someone who was in the role for a really long time and it warranted a second person, so it ended up being a 1-2 junior reporting in absorbing the knowledge that the tlm had. If you were in a growing domain, and the TLM stayed engaged with the code it worked really well, but as soon as one of those failed it was a bad roi for the company and…

This reads like "get rid of the old experienced people so I can get promoted".

only if you're cynical, google found a much better solution though, make them IC's again and redistribute the junior talent to places they can grow and offer buyouts for anyone who feels like they're not into it anymore.

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

#53

Post by AIPedant »

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 sounds to me like Google is moving to a more typical "technical lead" model where leads have substantial authority and some mentorship responsibilities, but they're essentially an IC and someone else up the chain actually handles proper management. Informally, tech leads can gently chew out less senior devs, but if someone actually needs to be disciplined then the lead needs to talk to the manager.

TLM is an odd role. I understand big tech companies have their own culture but it does seem like a poor management strategy regardless of efficiency.

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

#54

Post by allknowingfrog »

floren wrote: post #12
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.

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

I'm essentially in a TLM position currently. We're a small company, with a small codebase. I oversee three junior to mid-level developers, and I represent the team in our product/roadmap planning process. I also write a lot of code, review a lot of code, and make a lot of architectural decisions. At our current scale, and with our current resources, I think it works pretty well. Moving fast is one of our biggest priorities, and having a TLM definitely reduces overhead versus a more traditional separation of responsibilities.

I really never intended to have a management position, but this has been an incredible opportunity to experience a portion of it without fully committing. Other replies have described this as a transitional role, and I don't think they're wrong. In the long term, especially if the company grows, I can probably be more valuable by committing to one path or the other. However, for the right person and situation, I could see us minting a TLM again, regardless of size.

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

#55

Post by godelski »

lanthissa wrote: post #27
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.

we had this in my company it was pretty hit miss. Almost always the 'TLM' was someone who was in the role for a really long time and it warranted a second person, so it ended up being a 1-2 junior reporting in absorbing the knowledge that the tlm had. If you were in a growing domain, and the TLM stayed engaged with the code it worked really well, but as soon as one of those failed it was a bad roi for the company and…

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 should they also not be aware that there is a lot of advantages to allowing people to keep climbing the ladder through technical positions? That institutional knowledge can be incredibly valuable. It's often what leads to those people being such wizards. They've been with the code for so long that they know where things will fail and what are the best parts to jump in to make modifications (and where not to!). But every time you transfer one of these people to a non-technical role that knowledge "rots". More in that code just keeps evolving while their knowledge of it remains mostly frozen.

Which what you say sounds like maybe the worse end of that. Taking that person with institutionalized knowledge and hyper focusing their capabilities on one aspect. That doesn't sound like an efficient use of that person. Though the knowledge transfer part sounds important for a company's long term success, but also not helpful if it's narrowly applied.

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

#56

Post by giantg2 »

p1esk wrote: post #24
giantg2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did something like this but called it a different name. It was absolute garbage. Its really no surprise to see those roles move back to a more traditional alignment.

Why was it bad?

It was terrible because the "managers" had very little training which made them mostly useless and a legal liability to the company in regards to employment law cases. In many instances they weren't even on the same direct team but an adjacent team, so rhey hahd very little interaction. This completely invalidated the premise that a technical/coding manager would be a better mentor since there was never any time for it. Of course the company paid them the same rate as the senior devs that weren't managers. I'd say at least 50% of the first year cadre left the company or reverted to a regular senior dev after one year or less. Most divisions of the company don't use this model now. The only real reason they did it was because Google did it.

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

#57

Post by andy_ppp »

I’ve never worked anywhere where managers added value, in fact the best places I’ve worked are where the product people have very little power over what the technical team do and instead of specifying what they often specify why, giving the team the opportunity to suggest much simpler solutions.

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

#58

Post by mpyne »

greesil wrote: post #46
lanthissa wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we had this in my company it was pretty hit miss. Almost always the 'TLM' was someone who was in the role for a really long time and it warranted a second person, so it ended up being a 1-2 junior reporting in absorbing the knowledge that the tlm had. If you were in a growing domain, and the TLM stayed engaged with the code it worked really well, but as soon as one of those failed it was a bad roi for the company and…

This reads like "get rid of the old experienced people so I can get promoted".

The U.S. military actually uses precisely that system for officer promotions. And in practice most of the U.S. military branches do essentially the same thing for their enlisted force too, deliberately allowing high attrition for the sake of frequent promotions.

Given a fixed headcount, you can't have frequent promotions without either personnel turnover or allowing for employees to be routinely demoted.

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

#59

Post by nailer »

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.

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