In my time at Google I never understood on what criteria young PMs were hired. The company would regularly reject engineering candidates who had very successful solo projects because they didn't correctly answer the generic Comp Sci and how-do-you-scale-search questions, but at the same time the <i>vast</i> majority of PMs I encountered were just a year or two out of undergrad, and had never built a product, never launched a product, never <i>demonstrated</i> any aptitude for connecting with users. They were certainly personable, and overall were good communicators, but not --as a rule-- inventive or imaginative.
I feel the "PM as CEO of the product" (aka, Product Owner) paradimng is completely wrong. PMs become very political fast, and often don't have qualms to undermine other parts/products of the company in order to advance their own.<p>Since often they are not the ones doing the hiring of engineers, they really don't care/have no qualms of the long term engineering needs (both personel/morale, and architecture). True company CEOs have to think about engineering personal needs all the time as recruiting is hard. PM/PO just don't care as they don't have to deal with true consequences of their decissions on the people that actually get the work done. I have seen narcistic PMs completely destroy team morales, and have engineers after engineers jus transfer out their teams.<p>Also, Google PMs have earned a 'toxic' reputation in the industry. They are just too political. Might be ok for a large company, but they can be poison to smaller ones.
The difficult thing about talking about project management is that it is so inconsistent at different organizations that makes it impossible to talk about it without having a lot of context.<p>I worked at companies where project managers had very strong technical background and experience, but I also worked at a company where project managers were only a little technical, but had very strong project management skills. Then there is the other end of the spectrum, where project managers are simply incompetence. They got promoted to become a project manager with almost no knowledge about it and also no willingness to learn it properly and become good at it.<p>The latter (incompetence PM) is awful for any type of engineering work. And some companies make it even worse by making engineers report directly to those project managers.<p>The first type (technical project manager) is obviously harder to build, because not many engineers want to become project managers, and not many engineering teams are able to navigate without a good product team in organizations that don't have a solid engineering culture (e.g. traditional companies). So you often find companies with the second type. And even then I think it’s best if there is a clear separation of concerns between product and development teams. A product manager/team that takes care of product concerns but not engineers themselves. While they work with each other, engineers should report directly to a technical lead that understands their efforts and needs.
Page's "perfect search" vision, the idea that you can get everything you could need so that you can work on important problems, is the perfect specimen idea from an engineering mind. The problematization of experience is a great tool, but it is not an end, and of the options available it is a pretty humble one.<p>If you have ever seen a highly automated dairy farm, cows have everything they need to work on important problems too, but they're cows, hooked up to machines that remove every aspect of what makes them cows other than how they serve the machines they are connected to. Maybe we could use a variation of Neuralink to connect all those cows' brains for distributed processing to solve important problems for us, and when they're done, we eat them, or use them for decorative materials. With a sufficiently random drip of seratonin and dopamine, they'd even be happy, if that were meaningful to them.<p>I like that the first incarnation of Google was called "BackRub," and they even had masseuses on-site is a pretty unselfconscious and intimate expression of what actuated him. The only thing that separates those cows from people
in a mind indexed like that is probably not sufficient to prevent it from collapsing them into indifference. If cows had a version of "don't be evil," from our perspective it would be cow-evil and not even register as something we needed to consider. It's just an entertaining article from the perspective of the writer, but I can't help but suspect what Page's vision looks like now is informed by the omniscience of google's data and AI, and the ethics of that perspective are not the same as those cows.<p>We may be into the territory of having a Dr. Manhattan problem.
The value creators (engineering/programming/creative/design/product) people have been pushed aside for the value extractors (finance/managers/marketing/oversight) and now the extractors are creating the product. It is a completely backwards setup that is causing products to suffer.<p>Nothing worse than knowing what a product needs and being overridden by project managers with no experience shipping product or fighting to put in quality or features the users want. Somehow the MBAs and PMs are now seen as product value creators when they are part of the value extraction team, it doesn't and won't work.<p>Most developers know now that adding to a product or putting in time to get to a more polished post-production model rather than pre-production only can cost you perception due to taking longer, it is a major problem with our industry today.<p>Imagine the executives of the movie company telling what directors, technical and creative people should and make. Or a novel written by the publisher. It isn't what anyone wants. The value creation needs to go to the value creators AND they need freedom to control their tasks and flows. What happens is people that are capable of shipping products people want, end up in a tasked system where they are given daily/weekly tasks from people that have never shipped. It is frustrating and destroys value.<p>This is an age old problem highlighted in "How Software Companies Die" but really you could say how creative companies die. Software and technology is closer to art than business in many cases. You can't force creativity into a 3 hour task planned by an outside project manager that doesn't understand what it takes to ship a product themselves. There are some great project managers that do, but they end up just making things or their own company because it is such a unique subset of the overall pool.
There are a lot of comments in here about how project managers get in the way of good engineering and building a commercial enterprise. I suspect many people only read the first few paragraphs of the article, because this misses the point. Page, like many engineers, wasn't able (yet) to do a lot of what was required to turn good engineering into good business. His instict wasn't right - it was wrong. He eventually realsied that, matured, and returned to the helm of the organisation later.<p>I've found there's often a quiet but strident feeling shared amongst engieneers that we are smarter than everyone else. This leads to us being very impatient with opinions and worldviews we don't agree with or understand. There is more to relationships and business than being clever and being a great engineer. Some of the comments even go as far as to classify the engineers as value creators and the non-engineers as value extractors! How patronising can you get. If finance, marketing, leadership, sales, etc wasn't needed then they wouldn't get hired. They could hold a similarly unbalanced view that engineers are just paid to build a thing, and that the thing is pointless until they convince others to finance its real development or buy it.
This article is actually a fabulous account of Larry Page’s development as a CEO and leader at Google.<p>I wasn’t expecting to read the whole thing, but I really enjoyed it.
> Page was convinced that Google could use a CEO after all. But only if that CEO was Steve Jobs.<p>That was in 1999. Steve Jobs had returned to Apple by then, but wow, the valley would be a different place if that had happened.
Discussed at the time:<p><i>The Story Of Larry Page's Comeback</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7641114" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7641114</a> - April 2014 (130 comments)
I think the idea that the project manager of a technical project should be an engineer sounds like a good idea.<p>In my life I have seen project managers getting played for fools over and over. If the project manager can’t asses if something like a time estimate is reasonable people will take advantage. The cost, the timeline and the deliverables will suffer.
> Worse, she reported, “Engineers say they have been encouraged to build fewer new products and focus on building improvements to existing ones.”<p>Sounds like a different Google indeed. Most complaints I hear about nowadays are that Google incentivizes shipping new features too much and ignores buggy existing features.
> Later, at Stanford, he’d peppered his adviser, Terry Winograd, with thesis ideas that sounded as far out there as some of Tesla’s later schemes. One idea involved building a superlong rope that would run from the Earth’s surface all the way into orbit, making it cheaper to put objects in space.<p>Pretty sure Larry Page didn't invent space elevators.