Tech Expertise Not Important In Google Managers

Hugh Pickens writes "For much of its 13-year history, Google has taken a pretty simple approach to management: Leave people alone but if employees become stuck, they should ask their bosses, whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management in the first place. Now the Economic Times reports that statisticians at Google looking for characteristics that define good managers have gathered more than 10,000 observations about managers — across more than 100 variables, from various performance reviews, feedback surveys and other reports and found that technical expertise ranks dead last among Google's eight most important characteristics of good managers. What Google employees value most are even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees' lives and careers."

Plagiarized

[jbrodkin]

Looks like the article was ripped out (i.e. plagiarized) from the NY Times. original article, with better formatting, is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/business/13hire.html?hp [nytimes.com]

Re:Why don't they just google for an answer?

[Daniel Phillips]

Google is known for hiring very smart, very technical people, then abusing and humiliating them. There are exceptions, if you are one of them then count your blessings, but this is the prevailing climate at Google today. I don't know how many truly awe inspiring, highly educated people I saw stuck in crap jobs there doing things like rebooting servers while their managers are off running around the countryside getting drunk at offsites and stroking each other about what smart people they are.

Re:So people skills win again...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're totally missing the point. Of course, as a first-level manager at a tech company, I've got my own biases here :)

I assume we can agree that in the end, progress is made by individual contributors -- in programming, these would be the people who can code algorithms; in my field (systems engineering) it's the people who can figure out how to, say, manage systems well and efficiently. Basically, really smart individual contributors.

All other things being equal, one could make a pretty convincing case then that, basically, managers don't directly contribute to a company's bottom line. I think so far it sounds like we generally agree.

However, saying that the people who make progress are the code writers doesn't mean that progress is measured purely in your ability to go into your desk/cubicle/office/palace and write code by your lonesome. Your stuff has to work with other people's stuff.

At its most unstructured, then, a reasonably complex environment requires engineers to work with other engineers to figure out how their stuff will work together. In the worst case, this is ad-hoc and tactical; at the best case, this is how SOAs are designed and APIs are agreed upon. You could argue, of course, that this sort of negotiation work should be done by managers -- and I'd then argue you're wrong because this is the core of what being really good technical engineers is all about.

As I see it, my job as a manager is very simple:
1. I get to deal with people problems, so engineers don't have to. Our (internal) customers are sometimes as prone to peopleskill deficiencies as our own engineers are, and this sometimes leads to a situation where an interaction leads one (or, typically, both) sides feeling like something's not quite working. I get to help;
2. When an engineer is stuck on what the best way to solve a given problem is, they may (but don't have to) ask me for an opinion (not directive or decision, unless that's how they want to see it). I can probably express an opinion without knowing the very lowest level technical details of how a particular solution would be implemented (at least, in my experience). If I come up with something useful, they'll use it. Otherwise, they won't;
3. When there's a question about priorities and what direction fits with our overall larger goals, they can ask me.

But it's important to note that:
A) Me having people skills doesn't mean I have a problem working with people who don't have the same level of people skills (I don't agree with the standard logical fallacy that you can either be technically brilliant or socially adept. That's one of the reasons I love working in a company with a "no brilliant jerks" rule);
B) If I hired people whose knowledge was a subset of my own, the smartest we'd be able to be is as smart as I am, and these people would essentially just be extensions of my own capabilities. Pardon the language, but fuck that -- I want to hire people who are way, way, way smarter than I am.

headline is disingenuous.

[hobo sapiens]

This headline is disingenuous.

I read what this "story" was probably based on here: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/03/11/business/20110313_sbn_GOOGLE-HIRES-graphic.html?ref=business [nytimes.com]

This is actually brilliant stuff. I wish all managers would read this.

The website linked in the summary cannot even get character encoding correct for en_US.

Re:Google is maturing

[tweak13]

I think you fail to understand what a differential does. These cars absolutely have a "hardware" differential. What they do not have is a locking differential. Almost no vehicles have locking differentials except vehicles intended for severe off-road conditions or racing vehicles. The reason is, locking differentials are clunky as hell, and most people would never understand how or why they work and complain when they locked up in turns.

I'm not going to go into a full explanation here, because explaining the operation of a differential is beyond this comment. EDL is a completely valid way to transfer torque through a standard differential to whatever wheel is not spinning. If both wheels spin, the wheel with the highest torque gets to apply that torque without being limited by the low torque wheel.

As to your question if engineers would build a car this way, the answer is obviously yes. I am an engineer, and although I don't design cars, I do understand what these systems actually do. The design concept is sound, and it absolutely provides benefits over a non-locking differential without this system. There are various other systems to combat this problem. So called "selectable" systems, that are mechanical lockers with some sort of manual actuator to actually perform the lockup. Limited-slip systems, which are clutch based or fluid based. However most vehicles have none of these. I encourage you to do some more reading about differentials to understand why and how these systems do what they do.

Glad to see this coming to light...

[binaryseraph]

A couple years ago google bought a company that produces software my company uses. They almost over-night fired a vast majority of the mid-level and upper management and replaced them with 'google quality' managers (mostly master degree and doctorate holders who had very little knowledge of the product they were now managing). The absolute downfall in the quality of the support, product and resources was immediately felt. All in all, Google really needs to overhaul who and what they hire. A "strong accademic record" is not an indicator of intelligence or ability to think outside the box. It cirtianly doesn't show off management and technical skills.

Re:I hate people who are good at handling people

[artor3]

The best kind of boss is one that was promoted due to his technical skills and hates managing people, so he lets everyone work the way they know how to.

What you just described is the worst type of boss imaginable. He hates his job, so he just doesn't do it. You end up with massive duplication of effort, parts not fitting together, engineers fighting with each other for months because there's no one to make an executive decision, and whoops you just missed your market window, some other company has released first, and your department is getting shut down.

Either you've never actually worked on a team project outside of college, or you just judge management based on how much fun they let you have, paying no attention to how it affects the company as a whole.

Re:You're in luck

[MarkusQ]

*sigh*

Let me walk you through this:

• Google made a major point of ensuring that managers had technical expertise
• If we assume that they (Google) were honest in reporting this priority, competent in executing it, etc., we can conclude that given an individual who was a manager at Google it's highly likely that they had technical expertise; that is, to a good first approximation, HasTechnicalExpertise(X) is true for all X for which IsManagerAtGoogle(X) is true.
• Google then took a survey of the people being managed, and asked them what was important to them about their manager.
• The resulting list of features was presumably finite, as they completed the survey in a finite amount of time.
• This might at first seem surprising, since there are an infinite number of things that might be said about a manager. However, a little thought shows that the most probable cause is that predicates that were true of (almost) all or (almost) none of the managers did not make a serious contribution to the data. Note that this filtering could have occurred at any part of the process (if it was a "pick the most important" list, neither "drinks water" or "can fly" were likely to be included; if by chance they were, they would be unlikely to be chosen; likewise, if it was a free-form question most respondents would be unlikely to volunteer such observations).
• Therefore we should not expect to see common traits shared by all the managers as a strong component of the data.
• Specifically, we should not expect "has technical expertise" to be a strong component of the data.
• It was not. No story here.

-- MarkusQ

Re:You're in luck

[dakameleon]

Again, if you actually read TFA:

• No survey was taken directly asking that question; the data being analysed was the usual performance reviews and management feedback surveys, which Google apparently conducts quarterly
• An attempt was made to quantify statements which were presumably qualitative, in order for it to be usable data
• If you strip away the spin of the summary, what the article reads to me is that while the managers may have gotten to where they were based on their technical expertise, that is not what is valued by those that report to the manager.
• What was valued was the "soft skills" - this is not to remove technical skill as a requirement for success, but that it is not perceived as a key component.
• I agree there's no story here, but for different reasons - the conclusion was that soft skills are perceived as more valuable in a manager than technical expertise. To me, that's something that's stupendously obvious.

Most importantly, I think the following demonstrates a rather mature attitude from Google:

Google executives say they aren't crunching all this data to develop some algorithm of successful management. The point, they say, is to provide the data and to make people aware of it, so that managers can understand what works and, just as important, what doesn't. ...
For now, Bock says he is particularly struck by the simplicity of the rules, and the fact that applying them doesn?t require a personality transplant for a manager.

"You don't actually need to change who the person is," he says. "What it means is, if I'm a manager and I want to get better, and I want more out of my people and I want them to be happier, two of the most important things I can do is just make sure I have some time for them and to be consistent. And that's more important than doing the rest of the stuff."

They're sticking to their policies, but making sure the managers understand what areas need focus.