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It's awesome to see a fundamentally engineer-driven company like Google and a fundamentally designer-driven company like Apple become so successful. It has alwa

It's awesome to see a fundamentally engineer-driven company like Google and a fundamentally designer-driven company like Apple become so successful. It has always seemed to me that management is an important but overemphasized skill (as a fundamental trait of the way large organizations work) and it's really refreshing to see this happening.

kenjackson 16y ago
In the tech industry this isn't really an issue (management being overemphasized). Even at places like IBM and Intel you generally have engineers running the show at every level of the engineering org. I think what Google will see is that the real problem is the board and shareholder accountability. This creates a special type of short-term malfunction in organizations which often looks like a management problem, but really isn't.
- sachinag 16y ago
  Hell, Exxon is run by an engineer.
  - al05 16y ago
    People on HN have this weird distinction where if your an engineer you stay an engineer. In the real world, most career structures involve coming in a engineer and then progressing into management. A lot the skills used for management such as negation skills just come with age anyway.
    - bluedanieru 16y ago
      A lot the skills used for management such as negation skills just come with age anyway. Well you get older and fear change a bit more, and you tend to say "no" to more things, but that's not really a management skill.
      - Silhouette 16y ago
        I respectfully disagree. I believe that knowing when and how to say "no" is one of the most important management skills, and I suspect that understanding the need to say "no" a lot more than "yes" in the early days of a project (or a whole business) is quite strongly correlated with success.
        bluedanieru 16y ago
        I think he meant to type "negotiation" rather than "negation", which makes little sense even if he was trying to convey the point you just made. So I was making a little fun of that. I agree with you.
        Silhouette 16y ago
        Sorry, I missed the original (presumed) typo. My sense of humour has now been rebooted. :-)
- Silhouette 16y ago
  > In the tech industry this isn't really an issue (management being overemphasized). The thing is, in a lot of larger tech companies, I suspect it's the other way around: management is under-rated because the engineers have taken over the asylum. It's easy to point to huge, successful companies with a very pro-engineering culture like Facebook and connect the culture with the success, but how do we know they succeeded because of the culture and not in spite of it? Certainly Google has produced a string of flops in recent years that would have killed most companies without the core search engine and arguably now mail and Android groups to prop them up. Facebook succeeds because they got a couple of basic things right in the early days and the networking effect is a massive barrier to entry for any potential competitor, not because all their engineers keep coming up with great ideas that lure people away from the competition. I wonder how robust these companies really are, and how much their management structure (or relative lack thereof) will influence that robustness if in future they meet heavyweight competition or, more likely, disruptive competition that moves the market.
  - dman 16y ago
    Management is great at extracting maximum value from a problem whose structure is known. For new problem spaces where the product is ill defined, management might just slow things down. It might be worth noting that as the world is moving into more uncharted territory (of shorter product cycles) industry is beginning to resemble academia to a greater extent.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - sgwooduk 16y ago
      In what way do you mean industry is becoming more like academia as product cycles become shorter. I (a student in academia) find my superiors amazed by the speed of the try it fast and in the wild product development of software - compared to long cycles for academic publication for instance?
  - joebadmo 16y ago
    You point to recent Google failures, but isn't their culture of allowing (even high profile) failures not only to get implemented, but then to get shut down part of why Google's successful? Which (the culture of allowing failure) seems like an engineering approach, and not a managerial (which to me has always struck me as fear-of-failure/CYA) one.
random42 16y ago
Apple focuses on design/usability but its not designer driven. It is more of "product" driven sort.
webwright 16y ago
"It's awesome to see a fundamentally engineer-driven company like Google and a fundamentally designer-driven company like Apple become so successful." Out of curiosity, what do you think Amazon is driven by, fundamentally? I'd put them right up there with Apple on the product innovation front.
- qq66 16y ago
  Data.
- DavidSJ 16y ago
  Customers. [Edit: I worked at Amazon Web Services until recently. Now work at Google. Concern for customers drives everything that happens at Amazon, sometimes to a ridiculous degree.]
  - redthrowaway 16y ago
    I'm interested to hear how that professed dedication to customers squares with the experiences of sites like reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/g66f0/why_reddit_was_down_for_6_of_the_last_24_hours/c1l6ykx http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/g66f0/why_reddit_was_d...
    - te_chris 16y ago
      This was addressed well by someone from Netflix but I can't find the link. Basically he said that Reddit weren't so much the victim of AWS rather than the victim of not understanding the product enough and not spending enough to buy the right instances and thus ensure their constant performance. The guy from Netflix justified this by the way that the different sized instances are split across their respective hosts and, surprise surprise, if you buy the bigger instances you get more of each machine host and less threat of someone taking you out.
      - redthrowaway 16y ago
        If that were true, you'd think that would be the first thing they were told when they started complaining about crashes a year ago. Certainly, you'd think by the time they had talked to the CIO, somebody would have said, "you guys need to buy bigger instances". We know money isn't a problem for reddit anymore, and all current and former employees have said the problems with EBS just aren't something they can fix by throwing money at. I would suggest the guy from netflix simply doesn't know enough about reddit's particulars to offer an informed opinion. Either that, or he knows better than everyone at reddit, every support person at amazon, and even the CIO of amazzon how best to solve reddit's problems. I strongly suspect the former.

kenjackson 16y ago

In the tech industry this isn't really an issue (management being overemphasized). Even at places like IBM and Intel you generally have engineers running the show at every level of the engineering org. I think what Google will see is that the real problem is the board and shareholder accountability. This creates a special type of short-term malfunction in organizations which often looks like a management problem, but really isn't.

sachinag 16y ago
Hell, Exxon is run by an engineer.
- al05 16y ago
  People on HN have this weird distinction where if your an engineer you stay an engineer. In the real world, most career structures involve coming in a engineer and then progressing into management. A lot the skills used for management such as negation skills just come with age anyway.
  - bluedanieru 16y ago
    A lot the skills used for management such as negation skills just come with age anyway. Well you get older and fear change a bit more, and you tend to say "no" to more things, but that's not really a management skill.
    - Silhouette 16y ago
      I respectfully disagree. I believe that knowing when and how to say "no" is one of the most important management skills, and I suspect that understanding the need to say "no" a lot more than "yes" in the early days of a project (or a whole business) is quite strongly correlated with success.
      - bluedanieru 16y ago
        I think he meant to type "negotiation" rather than "negation", which makes little sense even if he was trying to convey the point you just made. So I was making a little fun of that. I agree with you.
        Silhouette 16y ago
        Sorry, I missed the original (presumed) typo. My sense of humour has now been rebooted. :-)
Silhouette 16y ago
> In the tech industry this isn't really an issue (management being overemphasized). The thing is, in a lot of larger tech companies, I suspect it's the other way around: management is under-rated because the engineers have taken over the asylum. It's easy to point to huge, successful companies with a very pro-engineering culture like Facebook and connect the culture with the success, but how do we know they succeeded because of the culture and not in spite of it? Certainly Google has produced a string of flops in recent years that would have killed most companies without the core search engine and arguably now mail and Android groups to prop them up. Facebook succeeds because they got a couple of basic things right in the early days and the networking effect is a massive barrier to entry for any potential competitor, not because all their engineers keep coming up with great ideas that lure people away from the competition. I wonder how robust these companies really are, and how much their management structure (or relative lack thereof) will influence that robustness if in future they meet heavyweight competition or, more likely, disruptive competition that moves the market.
- dman 16y ago
  Management is great at extracting maximum value from a problem whose structure is known. For new problem spaces where the product is ill defined, management might just slow things down. It might be worth noting that as the world is moving into more uncharted territory (of shorter product cycles) industry is beginning to resemble academia to a greater extent.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - sgwooduk 16y ago
    In what way do you mean industry is becoming more like academia as product cycles become shorter. I (a student in academia) find my superiors amazed by the speed of the try it fast and in the wild product development of software - compared to long cycles for academic publication for instance?
- joebadmo 16y ago
  You point to recent Google failures, but isn't their culture of allowing (even high profile) failures not only to get implemented, but then to get shut down part of why Google's successful? Which (the culture of allowing failure) seems like an engineering approach, and not a managerial (which to me has always struck me as fear-of-failure/CYA) one.

random42 16y ago

Apple focuses on design/usability but its not designer driven. It is more of "product" driven sort.

webwright 16y ago

"It's awesome to see a fundamentally engineer-driven company like Google and a fundamentally designer-driven company like Apple become so successful." Out of curiosity, what do you think Amazon is driven by, fundamentally? I'd put them right up there with Apple on the product innovation front.

qq66 16y ago
Data.
DavidSJ 16y ago
Customers. [Edit: I worked at Amazon Web Services until recently. Now work at Google. Concern for customers drives everything that happens at Amazon, sometimes to a ridiculous degree.]
- redthrowaway 16y ago
  I'm interested to hear how that professed dedication to customers squares with the experiences of sites like reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/g66f0/why_reddit_was_down_for_6_of_the_last_24_hours/c1l6ykx http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/g66f0/why_reddit_was_d...
  - te_chris 16y ago
    This was addressed well by someone from Netflix but I can't find the link. Basically he said that Reddit weren't so much the victim of AWS rather than the victim of not understanding the product enough and not spending enough to buy the right instances and thus ensure their constant performance. The guy from Netflix justified this by the way that the different sized instances are split across their respective hosts and, surprise surprise, if you buy the bigger instances you get more of each machine host and less threat of someone taking you out.
    - redthrowaway 16y ago
      If that were true, you'd think that would be the first thing they were told when they started complaining about crashes a year ago. Certainly, you'd think by the time they had talked to the CIO, somebody would have said, "you guys need to buy bigger instances". We know money isn't a problem for reddit anymore, and all current and former employees have said the problems with EBS just aren't something they can fix by throwing money at. I would suggest the guy from netflix simply doesn't know enough about reddit's particulars to offer an informed opinion. Either that, or he knows better than everyone at reddit, every support person at amazon, and even the CIO of amazzon how best to solve reddit's problems. I strongly suspect the former.