Tech Expertise Not Important In Google Managers 298
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."
Google is maturing (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Founded by engineers
2. Rapid growth
3. Founding engineers become wealthy and retire early
4. Sales, marketing and management folks take over
5. Bureaucratic creativity sucking shithole
Some had their worst career years at Google (Score:5, Interesting)
Posting as a coward since I've worked as a full time engineer for a few years. And I've had the worst manager of my career over there. I've had a few managers, some good, some bad but the incredibly horrible one was at Google.
I've seen managers with over 40 direct reports. I do not care how 'good' the manager is there is no way the manager can have a clue what his employees are doing or how much hard work they are putting. Every quarter the manager has to put them on a scale for an 'anonymous committee' to rate the employee (just 'meeting expectations' is quite an accomplishment), which is later used as a base for a potential promotion or raise. I think the average raise was probably less than 1% per year for the average employee. No wonder they had to do the +25% 3 months ago (10% + 15% of bonus converted to raise).
Moving from one team to an other is completely at the whim of your manager, they've even added a rule that you should not even dare to ask until you've spend 18 months in the team. Then you basically have to find your own replacement: you can't leave until you find an other engineer that is as good as you and willing to work in the team you are trying to run away from !!! Managers rarely get the boot because it is very hard to find a manager willing to manage indecent amounts of direct reports.
Complaining to HR is useless and will just antagonize your manager further. You will get managed to quit over a very long time, and once you do quit being honest about why you leave will put you on a black list (say an other team find your resume and wants you in, HR will stop the interviews). I've heard of experienced employees crying in the upper managers offices about how badly they were treated. I have seen several coworkers skipping on vacation and maxing out they vacation allowance and still not taking vacation since. HR does not see any problem with this, if you are sick and dare to take sick days your performance should be lowered because you performed less work. This situation of fear is not good and lead to many resignations for greener, better paid, pastures in the past few years. Add to that a founder (Sergey) saying that employees should pay for the privilege of working at Google, and not as a joke (there at least one internal video about it).
Note that the above is not the 'rule' and plenty of Software Engineers will have had much better experiences. Some have just a reputation of doing amazing work on a project years ago and only need to show up to work once in a while. The aura is not rubbing off and if you criticize them it is bad for your own reputation.
I am very happy where I work nowadays, if you get an offer from Google take it if the salary cut is not too bad, hang on for a year or two. It will be a big plus for your resume, you will learn a lot of technical good practices, but do not expect to have a long good career over there unless you are a very skilled politician.
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Interesting)
And I can tell you that the general quality of Google managers is very poor in spite of supposed systems for filtering, training and guiding them. This is in fact the worst thing about working at Google: self important, self absorbed managers who only care about milking their own situation for everything they can get. Often nonexistent or weak technical skills just pours salt on this bleeding wound.
The few guidelines that Google puts in place tend to be unmonitored by anyone who matters and are widely and cynically ignored. Peer review is very much one of those. There are of course good managers at Google, I know a few. But they are badly outnumbered by facetimers and soulless climbers.
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Interesting)
Another thing: managers at Google widely believe that they are better than engineers simply because they are managers, in spite of a supposed explicit ban on this attitude. For that matter, so do the sysops, because they are in control of the facilities engineers need to do their work, and because they get first dibs on any shiny new equipment that arrives. I got the distinct impression that Google sysops think of themselves as managers, or at least, very important people, and in particular, more important than engineers. By the way, I was a Google sysop before I moved to engineering so I saw this from the inside.
Re:I hate people who are good at handling people (Score:4, Interesting)
There's no reason why a manager needs to understand the industry, provided he's smart enough to recognize when subordinates are more informed and can focus on getting things coordinated so that things run smoothly.
Well, this is generally the thing that people who manage IT or development teams fail at.
My suspicion is that it's especially common in managers used to environments where there is always a bit of "flexibility" (if an employee says "it can't be done" it means "it will be hard to do", if an employee says "three weeks" it means "two weeks with less time in the break room") who end up managing developers and IT people and don't understand that when their "The decision has already been made by management, we will [foo]" gets a "That's not possible, not just with the current state of computing but most likely not with our current understanding of the laws of physics" that's generally not negotiable, it really means that it's impossible.
I've heard outright demands that developers figure out a way to write code that computed things that can't be computed, that they somehow invent a report for a backend system that can't be generated because there's no way to get the data without involving actual magic and of course the order to build a website that could do XSS by exploiting browser bugs in IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome (no, that last one never got completed, and this was a perfectly legit company, it was just that management had decided they wanted things to work a certain way and they just couldn't work that way without exploiting XSS bugs).
Re:Huh? you think successful teams just happen? (Score:5, Interesting)
The US Navy, and the rest of the military, would disagree with you. Uncle Sam taught me that few, if any, people are "born leaders". More, I was taught that "born leaders" seldom fit into a cohesive unit, being more interested in their own goals, than the unit or corporate goals. Leadership and/or management are learned skills, and the military spends a great deal of effort teaching men and women to be effective leaders and managers. And, yes, you can test for leadership skills. Put a person into a real life complex stressful situation, and see how they perform. Oh, wait - you meant a test that you can sit down, and fill in the answers with a pencil? No, not really - but it might be a start if you bother to ask your victim or subject if he can even define leadership or management. I've often found that merely defining a problem or a goal gets me a long way toward solving the problem.
Freebie for you: My leadership training defined leadership as the art of motivating people to do what they should be doing anyway. Does that help you at all?
BTW - my training wasn't strictly military. The courses that I took were jointly developed by the US Navy and Princeton University. Everything that I learned is readily available to people in the corporate and industrial world, if they bother to look for it.
Re:So people skills win again... (Score:4, Interesting)
Laszlo just demonstrates that by selling the value of technical expertise short, he is part of the problem. But I already knew that. In all fairness, Laszlo is really the reason for the majority of management dysfunctionality at Google because he spent way too many years looking the other way as frontline managers make a mockery of the systems that were put in place. Eric having his head in the clouds didn't help.
The two most important of the eight rules (Score:5, Interesting)
"Empower your team and don't micromanage" and "Don't be a sissy...help the team prioritize work and use seniority to remove roadblocks".
This is all I need. As far as micromanaging - the two best managers I had, one I would talk to twice a day about work-related stuff - at the beginning of the day and the end of the day, the other I would talk to every few weeks about work-related stuff - the latter one was so hands-off that I would pop in of my own accord once a month and tell him what I was up to. Of course, for both of them, if something came up on their end or my end, we would talk about it. They did not micromanage, and they were the two best bosses I've had.
The other rule is more political - help us prioritize work. What, in the office politics of the company (aside from the needs to protect ourselves, and make our stuff stable) is the most important work to do? I expect managers to run interference for me. I don't want them to be insecure, incompetent boobs who get pressure from their manager, and then come in and yell at us to do whatever their manager, or some powerful manager in another group wants. They should not be a sissy. They should be confident of themselves and their abilities, and not get to be a nervous wreck by a little management pressure or small bumps along the road. As there are only 24 hours in a day, a manager's main resource is his team's time - 24 hours times the number of their team members. You can not schedule more time than that, and humans have the need to sleep and the like. A manager who says "yes" to everything his manager, and powerful managers in other groups want, and where every request is a priority, eventually can run into a situation where he has promised more than the 24*x number of hours he has to give away. People will keep asking as long as he keeps saying yes. I myself am unhappy if I'm required to work more than 40 hours a week, unless there is a crunch time or emergency or the like, which is fine from time to time. But if I am consistently working crazy hours, and where emergencies and everything becoming a priority is the norm, I'm soon looking for another job. Bad, weak managers say yes to everything, the good managers who help a company in the long terms are the ones who have the confidence to sometimes say no.
Leadership != Management (Score:3, Interesting)
I actually know an Academy grad who got canned from the Navy because he just couldn't learn to be a leader. Technically, he is brilliant but he just couldn't get it. The Navy sent him to all those leadership classes you spoke of but when his second promotion came up, he was denied and subsequently booted.
You can teach and even learn the outer actions and speech of a leader, but I've seen too many times folks who did what they were taught and couldn't lead a thirsty crew to a water fountain.
Leadership is a lot more than following recipes taught from an instructor - a lot more.
And I think you're confusing management with leadership.
A manager says,"Men we have to go and take out the machine gun nest. Jones, you go first."
A leader says, "Men, we have to take out that machine gun nest. Follow me!"
That's all there is too it. Anyone tells you there's more, well, they're selling you a "leadership program" for mega-bucks.
Re:Leadership != Management (Score:5, Interesting)
A manager says,"Men we have to go and take out the machine gun nest. Jones, you go first."
A leader says, "Men, we have to take out that machine gun nest. Follow me!"
That's all there is too it. Anyone tells you there's more, well, they're selling you a "leadership program" for mega-bucks.
A real leader says "This is how we take out a machine gun nest." Then he does it, training this guys.
By machine nest 4, his guys just say "oh, we took out the machine gun nest on the left flank that was annoying us."
In favor of hands-on managers... (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if all the complaints about "micro-managing" are just because of big egos and perhaps a short-sighted view of things.
I've worked at both extremes. Places where trivial decisions require multiple meetings, and start-ups where it's a complete free-for-all. While both extremes are bad, I'd lean towards the former, not the later.
What do you get with hands-off management? The inmates running the asylum. The best example I can give is finding a single server that was running 4 completely different databases at the same time... Why? Because person 1 likes Postges, person 2 likes Oracle, and person 3 just happened to find a howto to setup syslog/snort/etc. which uses MySQL. Like it or not, this is where managers can and do help. In everyone's short term view, their favorite way is quiker and easier. In the long term, it's a maintenance nightmare.
As an extreme example, how about everyone getting to pick their own programming language? After all, I'll be quicker to do this bit in perl, this other bit in python, this bit in java, etc. If your manager is hands off, who's to stop you, or your coworkers from deciding to do just that?
The company is going to last considerably longer than the employee is going to be there. Each will bring their own biases, and it's management that needs to bring them into the fold, and in-line with how the rest of the company does things, and an eye towards the long term implications of any decision.
Yeah, I hated being micro-managed, but I can see past my own nose and tell that being completely unmanaged has vastly worse side-effects.
Statistical Artefact (Score:4, Interesting)
People (and even Google) are taking the wrong lesson from this.
The sample used in this study was managers *at Google*. This is a biased sample, in that almost all of them will have high technical competence. So the statistical power of the study in determining how technical competence affects management performance will be low. In some other setting, where managers have much wider variability in technical competence, that factor would very likely show up much higher on the list.
(Analogy: if you conducted a study of how wealth affects cancer survival rates and only admitted millionaires to the study, you might get a very different result than if you also included people with very little money. The classic example of this effect in the statistics literature is a study of wages as a function of height, whose result changes if the sample includes only circus midgets.)