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> One of the primary metrics for leadership success at Google is how many people you have under you. Yeah this is definitely one of those things that sounds go

• leosanchez 3y ago
  > So that was about 10-20 people in total. The project took over a year. All completely unnecessary. What are the bosses above your boss are doing if resources are allocated on useless projects ?
  • rebolek 3y ago
    drinking Champagne while bathing in the blood of young virgins, mostly
  • adrianmsmith 3y ago
    I can only speculate. But I think that beyond a certain level management probably doesn't have a clear idea of how long things should take. If they've worked in a company for 20 years, and have always been told that creating a corporate website requires a team of 20 people for 2 years, they'll just assume that's the way it is? I mean you may argue it is their job to know such things, and that might be right, but maybe they're just not competent and their managers aren't competent either? Or maybe they don't really care as it's not their money? Or maybe it really doesn't matter and there is higher-impact stuff for that level of manager to focus on? I mean if the company is making $100m a year and they can do something that will drive a 10% increase in that, would foregoing that activity to reduce spending on a website down from $1m be the right call?
    • RugnirViking 3y ago
      > have always been told that creating a corporate website requires a team of 20 people for 2 years, they'll just assume that's the way it is. I think the older and more experienced I get the more I realise that the suits giving overly large estimates are generally just correct. They're a lot better than the suits that want unrealistically short deadlines, at least! In academia it's very easy to wander into a field adjacent, see a bunch of maths you feel like you ought to understand but don't, spend a bit of time trying to understand and failing, and then making the leap to thinking that everyone in the field is overcomplicating things and wasting their time. Often in actuality there are a bunch of subtleties to the problem you just don't see without spending time working through it. It's clearly in principle possible to waste time doing unproductive reinventing, but when people set up complicated projects, you really gotta be sure you understand the self-professed reasons people felt like they had to do it that way before being at all convincing in arguing for another course of action. This will require patience and humility.
  • enriquto 3y ago
    > What are the bosses above your boss are doing if resources are allocated on useless projects You're very clever, young man, very clever. But it's bosses all the way up!
    • TeMPOraL 3y ago
      You jest, but once a company goes public, the hierarchy of bosses loops on itself - the company bosses answer to shareholders, many of whom answer to, or themselves are, regular people with regular jobs and regular bosses...
      • eru 3y ago
        That's not a proper loop, because those the regular people who are shareholders don't answer to their work-bosses about any vote they might do as a shareholder. (Of course, in practice regular people by and large don't vote their shares.)
        • ElevenLathe 3y ago
          I've in fact always been afraid to vote my shares against the recommendations of the board. What if someone finds out and takes it personally? I need the job much more than I need any potential upside of the shares I own, so even if all the proposals amount to "let the executives steal whatever isn't nailed down", I figure I'm better off going along with it or just throwing my proxy card away.
          • IggleSniggle 3y ago
            Because of the implication. Yes. It's always better in aggregate if people fight back, in order to prevent the inevitable slide towards power consolidation, but it really requires leadership because it's frequently good for the group but bad for the individual, and it's the first through the wall who gets bloodied.
          • eru 3y ago
            Are you talking about shares of the company you work for, or shares of random companies you have stocks of? For the former, if at all possible, you should sell those, and invest in the general market: your job already gives you plenty of excess exposure to the fortunes of your employer, and your career gives you excess exposure to the general industry you are in. No need to concentrate your effective investments even more. Diversify. For the latter: don't bother picking stocks as an individual investor. Just go with a low cost index fund (and they can vote the shares for you).
  • pjmlp 3y ago
    Most of those bosses have zero technical knowledge, straight out of pure business school, probably the only software they used during their degree was Office or similar. Then there are those from other backgrounds that somehow landed a position in management as well. It is like politics, as long as the boat is going forward and not letting them do a bad figure in whatever evaluation meetings are taking place, all is fine.
    • jSully24 3y ago
      Worse still, the bosses brought in from the outside who appear to have technical knowledge from their previous political victories at other employers. And they know someone at your company, thus they are “trusted”.
  • ponector 3y ago
    They are also working hard to grow their unit's headcount and budget.
    • the_gipsy 3y ago
      It's turtles all the way up
  • oytis 3y ago
    Financial and HR management is more often than not decoupled from engineering management. So on one hand, yes, you need to allocate your resources to deliver important projects most of all. But also in good times it might be easier to justify your need for more resources to finance, and increase the total number of your subordinates. And don't forget that in the times of plenty public companies might be rewarded for increasing their headcount too.
  • numpad0 3y ago
    It's much more lucrative to fake/fail upwards and try to suck the company dry. After all you're working to get paid. Making meaningful contributions to the society at large is at very best secondary. Then comes the disruption, the catharsis, the big revenge, the complete destruction of old systems and arrival of techno-utopia where everything is done and done right and done correct, we're all told, or...the "young man" comment is quite apt here.
    • IggleSniggle 3y ago
      You work to get paid so that you can use the money to make the world a more pleasant place to live in. The pay is really the secondary thing once the scales fall from your eyes. This holds true at all levels of society. "Sucking the company dry" is a really shortsighted way to optimize for your own best life. You're going to have a better life if you use your resources to actually accomplish something that contributes.
    • JohnFen 3y ago
      > After all you're working to get paid. Making meaningful contributions to the society at large is at very best secondary. I think how true this is varies from person to person.
• toldyouso2022 3y ago
  The managerial class is the cancer of our time Edit: I regret using the word cancer, but they are still bad
  • miroljub 3y ago
    You call a person who brought work and salaries to 20 people for the whole year a cancer? Would those 20 people have enough to do and feed their families if not for that man? If he did it differently, the shareholders would be a bit richer, those (or other 20) hard-working people without income, and their families would be starving. And your and my taxes would rise to support those people not to die homeless and hungry. Do you still want to call that manager cancer, or you may reconsider and call him a hero he really is?
    • logicchains 3y ago
      >You call a person who brought work and salaries to 20 people for the whole year a cancer? The entrepreneur did that. Entrepreneurs create jobs. Managers just manage, and shuffle around value, they don't create it like entrepreneurs do.
      • throwoutway 3y ago
        I've worked with plenty of managers who are entrepreneurial within large companies. Every year we have to propose new ideas and then (when approved) go deliver on them. That's not "just manage, and shuffle around value" I have also worked with those "just manage" managers too. But one shoe does not fit all
      • _heimdall 3y ago
        There are some good managers out there. The problem is that the system of most large companies isn't designed for entrepreneurial or innovative managers, both the culture and incentive system means those managers are always swimming up stream and risk burnout and even being punished for making waves.
      • nativeit 3y ago
• miroljub 3y ago
  Like in every organization, "what you measure is what you get".
  • chromakode 3y ago
    Goodhart's Law
  • fnordpiglet 3y ago
    * unless it’s productivity
    • TheCoelacanth 3y ago
      You can't measure productivity; only rough proxies for it. You'll get the proxy that you measure but often not the actual productivity that you were hoping for.
      • coffeebeqn 3y ago
        Exactly - what would you measure for engineers? Lines of code, number of PRs, number of closed bugs, time to ship… everything can be gamed. For some of them you get tech debt, others just bring bloat that kind of looks like work but isn’t
        • rileymat2 3y ago
          I guess I have not worked at organizational scale, but it is unclear why managers can't have their own secret metrics that are flags for qualitative review. Lines of code is a terrible public metric, but that does not mean you can't quietly monitor it, see outliers and then look at it qualitatively without ever mentioning the triggering metric is lines of code?
          • fnordpiglet 3y ago
            Managers can and should watch whatever metrics they can collect passively, and they should absolutely talk to their teams and assess productivity. But it’s not an organizational metric that can be measured without crushing the life out of the team. An example is the folks that generate enormous lift by enabling others to produce better faster delivery in the code base. They work relentlessly but never change code. They’re the most valuable engineer you have, and are frankly in my experience what a 10x engineer must be. Are they unproductive? How do you measure their contribution? The only answer is by watching them work and understanding the team dynamic and just letting them do what magic they do. But this is actually hard work for managers and requires introspection and empathy most managers lack. Most managers are there to monitor widget production, promote people along the level guidance by the metrics, report status to their managers, and give delivery timelines based on all this. These managers strangle engineering by their attempts to measure. I call this the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of software engineering.
• ChicagoBoy11 3y ago
  But it doesn't sound even good on paper, though! People under you ~= cost of whatever it is you are providing. Equating that to some sort of "value" you create is an insane proposition; the only thing that communicates, at first glance, is that you/your division/what you work on is EXPENSIVE.
  • joshspankit 3y ago
    Under the rules of the tradition economy, yes. In tech, however, any company is ~1 good (implemented) idea away from >100X ROI. From the top that looks like bringing in as many good people as possible in order to maximize your chances of one of them having that idea while on your clock. Once a company is big enough it’s the multiple management layers that make that simple equation almost impossibly complicated.
  • projektfu 3y ago
    If you have one leader with a team of two, and another with a team of forty, which one gets promoted to manage five teams with 2-40 people on each team? Answer: the one that's most familiar to the person making the decision.
    • ChicagoBoy11 3y ago
      Ha - I love this!
    • HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
      Well, we are herd animals...
  • chubot 3y ago
    Wait until you hear about the incentives to use more computing resources By and large the team doing the work are the technical experts Nobody higher up really knows more If you use more resources, then your project looks more impressive This is a problem in many fields including academia. They need some way to judge work, but the only people qualified are your peers
• bee_rider 3y ago
  In terms of bad side effects of dumb systems, maybe this is not the worst in the world. 20 people got to keep their paychecks and the company retained them, which means the company held on to their capacity to do work, in case a new project came up. It turns out they didn’t need that capacity, but we all pay a lot for insurance that we hopefully and typically don’t use.
  • bee_rider 3y ago
    Actually this has made me wonder what other apparently pathological management tendencies (from the engineer’s point of view) are just inefficiencies introduced via unused “insurance policies”/capacity maintenance/margin for error. Of course, thinking critically about the error margins is one of the things that engineers are explicitly trained in, so it is somewhat surprising that we get upset about this sort of thing.
  • neerajsi 3y ago
    This is a really great point! The big tech companies are partly banks of human capital that can be deployed when an investment opportunity arises. Unlike money, the human capital actually cares about whether it's sitting idle or is efficiently deployed.
• castlecrasher2 3y ago
  >Yeah this is definitely one of those things that sounds good on paper but has unintended "consequences" shall we say. Definitely Goodhart's Law in action.
• BurningFrog 3y ago
  Google has Search and Ads, which generate vastly more money than they need to operate. Google Search is one of the Great Inventions in human history, so I think the money is well deserved. But this creates an environment where the natural empire building among managers isn't tempered by the need for their units to produce revenue covering their costs. So the organization tends to grow to where it consumes all the billions raining from the sky. Disclaimer: Just a loose thought from a cynical ex Googler.
  • yterdy 3y ago
    Google could give it to schools with no heat or AC and outdated textbooks. Or help solve homelessness. Or fund fixing the country's bridges. "Sorry we really don't have the funds for more heads or ridiculous raises we're busy not being evil."
    • _Algernon_ 3y ago
      Google is a public company. The money either goes to shareholders or to employing people. There is no conceivable world in which this money would have gone to any of those causes.
      • naet 3y ago
        There's a conceivable world where we restructure incentives around our current form of capitalism and tax codes to encourage extra money going into humanitarian causes, instead of being spent on arbitrary capital maneuvers like stock buybacks. Conceivable, but we probably won't get there anytime soon.
        • fsargent 3y ago
          It’s very simple, that’s what the government should fund. That’s what our tax should pay for. If you really want to manifesto, then just read about land value taxes, don’t tax anything except what we want to disincentivize and land, which doesn’t distort the market. But this is entirely off-topic for this thread.
• omoikane 3y ago
  This person asserts that headcount is a measure of success, but I suspect they are confused about headcount being a proxy for production volume, which would be a closer measure for success. Every healthy team has more work than they have people available, they all want more people because they wanted to get more work done. Teams that would allow engineers to idle should be the exception and not the norm. I am not sure extrapolating the experience from such a team would produce an accurate image of a large company.
• eitally 3y ago
  I saw this happen at Google, too, but in a slightly different (and arguably better... maybe? ... way), where a senior manager (in the cases I saw, a director and an MD) promoted people in their org explicitly so they could become managers of people their own level, which is almost a prerequisite for promotion to more senior levels of management (MD, VP). It worked, too. Doesn't matter that none of the people they promoted to director & managing director are still in their roles, and only one is still at Google, those two people got theirs!
• ren_engineer 3y ago
  hardest part of managing groups of people at any scale is aligning incentives. Larger organizations have a harder time with it and the amount of money/power they have makes it a prime target for bad actors looking to exploit them for their own game The fundamental issue for Google/tech in general is that their culture was designed to work for nerds with good intentions but now it has been taken over by the types of money chasing psychopaths who would have been working for Wall Street or McKinsey 30 years ago. When you have a money printer like Search it attracts these types of people to try and skim some of the money in various ways by climbing the power structure. Politicians take over while the builders who create value are forced out. Culturally Google is pretty similar to corrupt 3rd world countries with oil money, lots of cash spent on leadership's vanity projects and in deep trouble if the cash cow gets disrupted
• nenadg 3y ago
  > One of the primary metrics for leadership success at Google is how many people you have under you. that's how bankers used to measure companies (some still do), a sad metric in a wrong place
• ulizzle 3y ago
  I wish I had ever worked for a company like that. Keeping people employed, and thus their families alive, is a worthwhile goal. Instead, in my experience, it’s more based on ego and politics whether you or anyone else keeps their job.
• tylerdurden91 3y ago
  This problem is widespread in FAANG. At the core, organizations want to align individual growth with organizational & business growth. Because most of these companies run many businesses with wide varying nature of revenue impact, they've decided to use size of organization as a proxy for business impact. From my experience at Amazon, there's a process to acquire additional headcount where business leaders will assess your proposal and approve additional headcount. However, most mid level managers now purely optimize for headcount with complete disregard for customer value or business impact. I think we're missing 2 things: - Leaders who can discern whether some work requires X people or 2X people. The margins are not off by 10-20%, they are off by 200-500%. - Feedback loops. I havent seen this talked about much in the tech circles yet. Once headcount is assigned, there's no further checks on whether original goals have been met. Leaders, managers & teams move on to find even more land to grab. If we had feedback loops around what that additional headcount has achieved, a lot of the empire building behavior could be curtailed.