How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management

I'm secretly wondering if Google actually pays for these articles. I spent almost 8 years at Google and decided it was time to go after a rather inconsequential change of four lines of code (excluding tests) took a design document, a few rounds of formal reviews and a number of more or less official meetings with the team manager and two tech leads - more than two weeks overall without any conclusion in sight.

One solution to the tech manager problem is to force managers to rotate back into individual contributor roles every other year (or director to manager, VP to director, etc). That way you remove all the people that are just there to collect money and build power structures that are detrimental to the company. This of course won't go over too well with managers. I've read accounts of Zappos managers physically crying because they are forced to give up their power for "Holacracy." Similarly I read accounts of Microsoft managers physically crying in the workplace when they were forced into IC roles during the recent restructuring. These are not the people you need in your organization. If they don't see the value in IC roles, then soon your organization won't have any good IC's and your corporation becomes irrelevant.

Survivorship bias. The history of Google&#x27;s non-attempt to replace managers is almost comically bad. They announced in an all-hands meeting that going forward, all engineers would report directly to Larry Page and all project managers (present at the meeting) were out of a job. In other words, Google thought that managers were effectively useless, fired them publicly in front of the whole company, and didn&#x27;t try to replace them with any manner of alternative.[1]<p>Long story short, it&#x27;s not difficult to &quot;sell&quot; managers when the alternative is anarchy.<p>I think managers are toxic in an engineering organization, and a disincentive toward expertise; Rational intelligent engineers would be foolish not to abandon their expertise for a more rewarding (financially, politically, effort-wise) management track. That said, I consider it even more foolish to have nothing in their place. Managers serve a variety of roles that will be filled, implicitly or explicitly in any tribe&#x2F;organization. Further, they resolve the matter of hierarchy and eliminate political position jockeying (while exacerbating other forms of politics).<p>If you pay attention, you&#x27;ll see that modern software organizations are straining on the verge of breaking with current management styles. No viable alternative has reached mainstream (except maybe holocracy), but in the coming decade, one will.<p>In my company, we&#x27;re replacing the classic management hierarchy with something closer to a federated republic where the various roles of management are broken into separate roles for separate individuals, with the goal of placing engineers on top with multiple peer-based support roles. Something close to this will be the software organizational hierarchy of the future.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slate.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;business_insider&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;25&#x2F;google_s_larry_page_the_co_founder_s_untold_story.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slate.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;business_insider&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;25&#x2F;googl...</a>

I wonder if these management classes Google implemented are online somewhere. It would be nice to be able to view them.

The rule of thumb for manager:report ratios that&#x27;s considered the ideal (at least according to McKinsey) is 1:4-6.<p>...............#........Ratio<p>VP.............100......10<p>Director.......1000.....5<p>Manager........5000.....6.18<p>Other..........30900<p>That&#x27;s basically what Google is sitting at. It isn&#x27;t all that exceptional. Probably the main difference is that there&#x27;s less sales title inflation vs. some other tech companies.

I am a manager, who also serves as a tech lead, for the record I&#x27;m at Microsoft.<p>My job has a number of facets. One is to help provide mentoring to junior engineers. I have seen entry level engineers who never had any mentoring at all, and they end up stagnating. I have seen, in some cases, the same engineer, moved onto a team with a strong technical lead who believes in a lot of 1 on 1 mentoring, and watched that engineer undergo dramatic growth.<p>I also know a number of engineers who never got that sort of technical mentoring, and I watched as their career stagnated.<p>So that is the first part of my job.<p>Another part is to provide technical direction. I have smart people working for me, problems tend to have more than a single good solution. Put these two facts together and there is, on occasion, some disagreement about how a problem should be solved. At that point I step in and make a decision so that <i>something</i> can be done. Design by consensus does not work. I have seen &quot;democratic&quot; teams spend over two months debating the merits of various solutions that both had about equal, but different, benefits and drawbacks.<p>At some point, someone just has to make a decision.<p>I also am responsible for things like enforcing a coding standard (yes it is arbitrary, but I have long term responsibility for the code), reminding developers to write their unit tests, and worrying about our branching structure.<p>Next up, I am here to be the voice of my team. I represent my team in meetings, presenting the technical aspects of our plan, coordinate our APIs with other teams, and provide technical input to other teams&#x27; discussions.<p>I work with UX, PM, Marketing, and upper management to ensure the product&#x27;s overall success. When technology adoption decisions need to be made, I am the one going around campus meeting with other tech leads to understand what they have to offer. When external companies present respond to an RFP I am the one going over their proposal, emailing them back asking for additional benchmarks or to clarify their measurements.<p>And finally I am the one that shit rolls to. If my guys make a decision, I am the one that goes in front of management and takes responsibility. No one yells at my developers, no one talks down to them, no one hurls insults at them. If one of my engineers makes a mistake, I am the one who stands up in front of our GM, and the first thing out of my mouth is &quot;it is my team, I take responsibility for this happening.&quot;<p>When things get to hot at a meeting, I&#x27;ll get a text message requesting my presence. I tell each one of my employees, &quot;I am the one who is getting paid money to be yelled[0] at, if someone is mad, you direct them to me.&quot;<p>I really don&#x27;t understand how a manager with 50+ reports can manage all of this. The guidelines I&#x27;ve seen is that at more than 7 or 8 reports you just don&#x27;t have time for anything but the most basic of career management advice help.<p>Managers are supposed to meet 1:1 with employees for an hour each week, any less than that and things start to feel sort of distant, I know from first hand experience when I don&#x27;t meet with my manager for several weeks! Combine this with the technical and non-technical roles that managers have to fulfill, and I do not see how 50 DRs could ever work.

Discussion from a while back, when it was last posted: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6762222" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6762222</a>

i wish my current employer would adopt such ideas, i think we have more &#x27;managers&#x27; then actual workers anymore.

Has anyone &quot;written the book&quot; on this yet? It seems like a good article that with more explanation would be a great guide to management for those of us who never get to work at Google (or similar).

Google in 2013 had 37,000 employees and 100 VPs (as per this article).<p>Yahoo, in comparison, around the same timeframe had 16,000 employees and almost 300 VPs.<p>Guess which one has grown, and which one has stagnated?

^managers_dont_matter, is not really the same as managers_cant_easily_do_harm, nor the same as managers &gt; ^managers.

So Google is a relatively &quot;Flatt&quot; organization.

I hope it&#x27;s managers get paid less than the skilled engineers. Engineering takes way more talent and skill than management does.