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According to Fiona Cicconi, Google’s chief people officer, Google employed 30,000 managers before the recent layoffs. The hard truth is Google needs a Twitter s
by fullsend 3y ago
According to Fiona Cicconi, Google’s chief people officer, Google employed 30,000 managers before the recent layoffs. The hard truth is Google needs a Twitter style culling. Take all those billions you're burning and give it to people with a builder mentality, not career sheeple. Unfortunately the same executives who would oversee this are the ones who need to be culled first.
- fooker 3y agoFrom what I understand, Google has a unusually large number of engineers who are happy to coast, and would actively avoid taking on anything important. That seems more of an issue to me compared to middle management bloat.
- bmoxb 3y agoI've seen this claim thrown around a few times but haven't really seen any evidence that it's true, beyond a few unconvincing anecdotes.
- johnfn 3y agoHow come you're readily willing to accept that managers will coast, but not that engineers will coast?
- kossTKR 3y agoPersonally i've found engineering / designer types, including myself, often a bit on various adhd/autism like spectrums with tendencies to overwork, hyperfocus and in general "attach themselves very much to some domain", not that this is always a good thing. I've met many from the managerial class without these traits that seem to have no problem coasting and trancending actual meticulous work because their game is all about personal career management, not the hyperfocus a lot of us here engage in daily.
- fooker 3y agoWhat kind of evidence would this involve? Would you have agreed this was the case at Twitter for a while?
- throwaway390487 3y agoReally? how many engineers do you know who work at Google? Do they say they are working hard or coasting? A big selling point of working at Google is that it's a known place you can coast and get a big paycheck.
- refulgentis 3y agoIt's true, was there through 2016-2023. People just have different definitions of what coasting means. In general don't think "doing nothing" or "avoiding work" think "add certainty to process + decision making like everyone else does", and much more importantly "avoiding friction because as soon as there's even a little bit, people leverage it" More detail on what causes this: - processes become elongated through what Steve Yegge called cookie-licking, more specifically, anyone above line level doing "I am the 10th person who needs to give a green light for this to happen" - the elongated process taking so long with that many people that some people lose interest or move on or forget they already approved it - business disruptions (ex. now Sundar told VP told VP told VP who told director to add GenAI goals) - bad managers are __really__ bad at BigCo, there's so much insulation from reality due to the money printer, and cultural bias towards "meh everythings good!" - managers trying to get stuff done rely on people who slavishly overwork to do the minimum possible for their _direct manager_ to be happy - only needing to keep your manager happy, and your manager being focused on deploying limited resources, creates a suspicious untrusting atmosphere. The amount of othering and trash-talking is incredibly disturbing. - _someone_ has to slavishly overwork on any given project because there's very little planning. due to the "meh everythings good!" inclination, coupled to software being pretty hard to plan accurately anyway. so what's the point of planning it all? - newly minted middle managers are used to clinging onto anything their manager cares about and overworking, so they end up being a massive bottleneck for their reports. New middle manager on my team's profile page looked like a military dictator's medals, 6 projects they were "leading", 1 of which they were actually working on and actually got done. - The "coaster" realizes "if I go outside the remit of what my manager asked for, they A) won't care because they didn't ask for it B) which exposes me to non-zero friction because they'll constantly be wondering why I'm doing it at all C) I'll have to overwork because they won't help plan or distribute work because it was my idea to go beyond the bare minimum D) its very very hard to get promoted, especially based on work my manager didn't explicitly ask for E) the cultural bias here is strongly towards everything is okay all the time no matter what, so any visible friction will be attributed to me personally being difficult And that's _before_ you account for the genuine sociopathy you see increasingly as you move up the ladder. Anecdote: I waited _3 years_ to launch work I had done and 3 VPs asked for. Year 3, it came to a head b/c one of the 3 was like "wtf is going on!?" My team's product manager outright pretended our org's VP didn't want it, had 0 interest in it, after first pretending it didn't _come up at all_ in a meeting arranged to talk about it. Within a couple weeks this was corrected by yet another VP meeting where they called in the PM's boss' boss' boss and the VP was like "fuck yeah I want this yesterday", but engineering middle manager and PM closed ranks to blame it on me. Engineering went with "Where's the plan / doc!?!?" (I won't even try to explain this, trust me, after 3 yrs they knew and there were docs), and both pretended I was interrupting meetings regularly (I was the only one who ever wrote anything on the agenda, and once we hit year 2.5, I was very careful to only speak when called upon because it was clear it was going to build up to this, as they were assigned the new shiny year-long project to rush a half-assed version of Cupertino's latest, as they were every year).
- airstrike 3y agoBoth may be true. Culture isn't really necessarily that siloed between engineering and management.
- kaoD 3y agoMiddle managers' job is to get the best out of engineers. If your direct manager does not set up an ambitious team with ambitious goals, what are you supposed to do? Ambition trickles downwards and is killed upwards.
- jefftk 3y agoI worked at Google from 2012 to 2022 and this didn't match my experience, for what it's worth. There were some people who coasted, but it was not common. There were a lot of people who got much less done than you might expect due to bureaucratic friction, but my coworkers were generally very enthusiastic to take on important things.
- hot_gril 3y agoThere are plenty of ICs who coast there, but what's far worse are the groups of ICs who are all pushing hard in different directions because their leadership isn't taking charge. IDK if middle management bloat exactly is the problem either, but there's some kind of ineffectiveness, maybe even at the top. One low-level issue is how long everything has to take because of tooling. Engineers have way too much patience for overcomplicated garbage and tend to obsess over pointless details. Kind of in the opposite direction of coasting, but still a real problem.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- CobrastanJorji 3y agoHow did the Twitter-style culling work out for Twitter?
- mrtksn 3y agoAFAIK it worked out well. Works more-less the same as before, shipped quite a bit of stuff and drastically reduced costs.
- CobrastanJorji 3y agoShipped stuff? Like what? Threads? Its usage is down 90% since its launch six months ago, presumably because they kept the people who could launch stuff and got rid of the people who had some idea of what should be launched. The "Blue Checkmark" system? Released with no thought at all, absolute disaster. Steven King had to publicly announce that, despite indications to the contrary, he was not a paid user, and he felt it was important to tell people because he didn't want the idea that he was a paid subscriber to harm his reputation. Same underlying problem: the people who could ship things were still shipping things, but the people who could figure out what to make were gone. And yes, they did drastically reduce cost...and much more drastically reduce revenue.
- mrtksn 3y agoThe issues with Twitter are currently about Musk buying it at ridiculous price and his personal antics. Other than that, it works fine as always. They shipped quite a bit of stuff, like the blue tick or revenue sharing. Other than Musk courting fascist and other kind of undesirables, twitter as a product is doing fine. It might go under though, but if that happens isn't going to happen because lack of employees.
- astrange 3y agoIt's absolutely full of spam, and the only ads left are crypto airdrops coming from what look like hacked accounts.
- TulliusCicero 3y ago> Google employed 30,000 managers before the recent layoffs. I'm guessing that number included product/program managers, not just "people managers".
- rlt 3y agoThat’s still pretty insane.
- gerash 3y agoor ask most of the people managers to become ICs and start actually doing something technical