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Not trying to create a conspiracy theory, but I wonder whether this has any relation to Ian Hickson's departure from Google/Flutter team [1], where he specifica

Not trying to create a conspiracy theory, but I wonder whether this has any relation to Ian Hickson's departure from Google/Flutter team [1], where he specifically called out some names: > Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this new reality depressing. [1]: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373 https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373

glimshe 2y ago
Thanks for sharing. One of my greatest fears for our industry is that we'll never have a company like early Google again. The company should have changed names when Pichai took the reins because it metamorphised into something unrecognizable. Most people you'll meet who worked for Google worked under his regime.
- armitron 2y ago
  Let's not pretend that Google pre Pichai was anything special, the rot was already instilled long before he came along. Other than very early days, Google has mostly been a force that corrupts, commoditizes and destroys. Sundar Pichai just made it explicit, a bagman-beancounter far removed from any engineering ethos.
- ralferoo 2y ago
  The company was restructured and become a subsidiary of the newly created Alphabet Inc. just after this, so the company did, in fact, change names at that point!
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  > One of my greatest fears for our industry is that we'll never have a company like early Google again. That was mostly an artifact of the free money that gets thrown off as tech advancements are integrated into society.
  - glimshe 2y ago
    Microsoft was an amazing place to work for 10-15 years (in the late 90s and early 2000s) despite higher interest rates. I was there so I know it.
    - tbrownaw 2y ago
      The other kind of free money, that goes to people of the fun side of the unevenly-distributed future by nature of their having a tech advantage.
nine_k 2y ago
As they say, people join companies, but people but people leave (because of) their managers.
- osigurdson 2y ago
  >> people leave (because of) their managers I've often wondered, when people say this, do they mean their direct managers or the management hierarchy in general? If direct manager only, this only makes sense if they have a lot of leeway to run things how they want. For instance, if a company decides to cut 30% of the workforce and more people (naturally) leave afterward, is it really the direct manager that caused them to leave? I think people leave "the situation" for all kinds of reasons. If you have a really horrible direct manager, that might be why you leave but it certainly isn't universal.
  - rincebrain 2y ago
    The intent of the statement, at least every time I heard it, was to reflect how the difference between a bad workplace and a good workplace can often be how effective your direct manager is - at shielding their reports from bullshit they shouldn't have to deal with, at not micromanaging while still consistently delivering results, so on and so forth. Yes, people leave jobs for all sorts of reasons, but your direct manager is the one who can most influence your workplace experience while also having a fundamental power imbalance by definition, and so is often the thing people are fleeing if they leave.
    - osigurdson 2y ago
      I think this is true in some circumstances but I think people are usually leaving the "situation" (like 90% of the time in my experience). I don't think the statement should be used anymore for this reason.
      - rincebrain 2y ago
        People are, indeed, almost always leaving the situation. But at least in my experience, it's still the case in the past few years that every time someone has told me they were "quitting this job", versus "excited about this new job", it was specifically about their direct manager's effects on the situation. (Sample sizes for any individual small, of course.) Either way, I still think the saying is useful for intentionally reminding people of how much influence your direct manager can have on your work experience, because I've found a lot of people, particularly new hires, don't appreciate how much your experience can vary across managers.
klabb3 2y ago
> Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. This was my experience with upper-middle management to VP (sometimes SvP) level at Google. The way they communicate is incomprehensible, it says everything and nothing at the same time – announcements with simultaneous dramatic change and all remains the same – it’s very disorienting. My theory is that its not meant to set direction, or describe a vision, or even goals – rather it converges towards something intended to impress and socially posture against other managers. It’s used as fodder for taking credit during performance review. One meme I remember is ”you might be a Googler if you cant answer which team you are on in 5 seconds”. The engineers are extremely good (impostor syndrome is widespread), but it feels like they are blindfolded, wandering in different directions. I certainly don’t know how to run a large company. But a good start would be to use plain descriptive language. Evidently, even the corp-speech-whisperers can’t establish a shared reality.
- pphysch 2y ago
  > My theory is that its not meant to set direction, or describe a vision, or even goals – rather it converges towards something intended to impress and socially posture against other managers. Yes, it's self-preservation behavior. It's a strong indicator that the manager knows they are in a position that provides little to no value, so they need to aggressively preserve it. Why does a single, non-technical middle manager need authority over multiple PL development teams? It makes no sense. The bare minimum of that position must be to connect technical expertise of the ICs to strategic vision of the C-suite. That is a full-time job, and if it's not being done, there needs to be accountability.
  - nicce 2y ago
    Could it be possible, that overall impact of the decisions is clear to the upper management (but the language that is being used, masks the exploitative behavior/profit maximization). But that feels unlikely, if they just assign people to positions were they are not good fit.
- akudha 2y ago
grg0 2y ago
Ah, yes, assigning "resources".
bsimpson 2y ago
> She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set She's not alone. Another exec fired the entire Python team (many of whom were core contributors to the language) to replace them with the lower salaried TypeScript team, which was then restaffed by a new team in an even lower salaried locale.
- slantedview 2y ago
  This is shocking.
  - spacemadness 2y ago
    Why is it shocking? Big tech has thoroughly embraced layoffs and offshoring as a means to cut costs. Execs don’t care if it causes issues at the lower levels of the company. To them it’s just noise from the rabble. If it does cause an issue they’ll just call their buddies at the other Big Corp and work someplace else.
    - yard2010 2y ago
      This is a symptom of seeing the whole world through the small narrow lens of "money is everything".
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Welcome to big corp with Excel driven decisions, sorry, Google Sheets.
    - metaltyphoon 2y ago
      This is sickening
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        Exactly why one should be loyal to the team, not the employer. The team members, we might bump into them in another situation. The company, it is all about numbers and meeting projections.
AdrianB1 2y ago
Not at Google, but in a different American company of similar size (not capitalization): the quote about the strategy applies exactly the same, the criticism of middle management is the same. Internally we have an official name for the politics that brought us to that situation, but I cannot write it here because it would be immediately downvoted and flagged; in any case, it is an official policy not to have a strategy, not even to measure results of the projects and, lately, to eliminate the idea of roles and responsibilities and replacing it with "we all need to contribute and jump in as needed".
- kridsdale1 2y ago
  If you’re talking about a 100,000 person company that sounds like a complete nightmare.
  - AdrianB1 2y ago
    We used to be a bit bigger than that, with contractors included probably more than double that number.

glimshe 2y ago

Thanks for sharing. One of my greatest fears for our industry is that we'll never have a company like early Google again. The company should have changed names when Pichai took the reins because it metamorphised into something unrecognizable. Most people you'll meet who worked for Google worked under his regime.

armitron 2y ago
Let's not pretend that Google pre Pichai was anything special, the rot was already instilled long before he came along. Other than very early days, Google has mostly been a force that corrupts, commoditizes and destroys. Sundar Pichai just made it explicit, a bagman-beancounter far removed from any engineering ethos.
ralferoo 2y ago
The company was restructured and become a subsidiary of the newly created Alphabet Inc. just after this, so the company did, in fact, change names at that point!
tbrownaw 2y ago
> One of my greatest fears for our industry is that we'll never have a company like early Google again. That was mostly an artifact of the free money that gets thrown off as tech advancements are integrated into society.
- glimshe 2y ago
  Microsoft was an amazing place to work for 10-15 years (in the late 90s and early 2000s) despite higher interest rates. I was there so I know it.
  - tbrownaw 2y ago
    The other kind of free money, that goes to people of the fun side of the unevenly-distributed future by nature of their having a tech advantage.

nine_k 2y ago

As they say, people join companies, but people but people leave (because of) their managers.

osigurdson 2y ago
>> people leave (because of) their managers I've often wondered, when people say this, do they mean their direct managers or the management hierarchy in general? If direct manager only, this only makes sense if they have a lot of leeway to run things how they want. For instance, if a company decides to cut 30% of the workforce and more people (naturally) leave afterward, is it really the direct manager that caused them to leave? I think people leave "the situation" for all kinds of reasons. If you have a really horrible direct manager, that might be why you leave but it certainly isn't universal.
- rincebrain 2y ago
  The intent of the statement, at least every time I heard it, was to reflect how the difference between a bad workplace and a good workplace can often be how effective your direct manager is - at shielding their reports from bullshit they shouldn't have to deal with, at not micromanaging while still consistently delivering results, so on and so forth. Yes, people leave jobs for all sorts of reasons, but your direct manager is the one who can most influence your workplace experience while also having a fundamental power imbalance by definition, and so is often the thing people are fleeing if they leave.
  - osigurdson 2y ago
    I think this is true in some circumstances but I think people are usually leaving the "situation" (like 90% of the time in my experience). I don't think the statement should be used anymore for this reason.
    - rincebrain 2y ago
      People are, indeed, almost always leaving the situation. But at least in my experience, it's still the case in the past few years that every time someone has told me they were "quitting this job", versus "excited about this new job", it was specifically about their direct manager's effects on the situation. (Sample sizes for any individual small, of course.) Either way, I still think the saying is useful for intentionally reminding people of how much influence your direct manager can have on your work experience, because I've found a lot of people, particularly new hires, don't appreciate how much your experience can vary across managers.

klabb3 2y ago

> Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. This was my experience with upper-middle management to VP (sometimes SvP) level at Google. The way they communicate is incomprehensible, it says everything and nothing at the same time – announcements with simultaneous dramatic change and all remains the same – it’s very disorienting. My theory is that its not meant to set direction, or describe a vision, or even goals – rather it converges towards something intended to impress and socially posture against other managers. It’s used as fodder for taking credit during performance review. One meme I remember is ”you might be a Googler if you cant answer which team you are on in 5 seconds”. The engineers are extremely good (impostor syndrome is widespread), but it feels like they are blindfolded, wandering in different directions. I certainly don’t know how to run a large company. But a good start would be to use plain descriptive language. Evidently, even the corp-speech-whisperers can’t establish a shared reality.

pphysch 2y ago
> My theory is that its not meant to set direction, or describe a vision, or even goals – rather it converges towards something intended to impress and socially posture against other managers. Yes, it's self-preservation behavior. It's a strong indicator that the manager knows they are in a position that provides little to no value, so they need to aggressively preserve it. Why does a single, non-technical middle manager need authority over multiple PL development teams? It makes no sense. The bare minimum of that position must be to connect technical expertise of the ICs to strategic vision of the C-suite. That is a full-time job, and if it's not being done, there needs to be accountability.
- nicce 2y ago
  Could it be possible, that overall impact of the decisions is clear to the upper management (but the language that is being used, masks the exploitative behavior/profit maximization). But that feels unlikely, if they just assign people to positions were they are not good fit.
akudha 2y ago

grg0 2y ago

Ah, yes, assigning "resources".

bsimpson 2y ago

> She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set She's not alone. Another exec fired the entire Python team (many of whom were core contributors to the language) to replace them with the lower salaried TypeScript team, which was then restaffed by a new team in an even lower salaried locale.

slantedview 2y ago
This is shocking.
- spacemadness 2y ago
  Why is it shocking? Big tech has thoroughly embraced layoffs and offshoring as a means to cut costs. Execs don’t care if it causes issues at the lower levels of the company. To them it’s just noise from the rabble. If it does cause an issue they’ll just call their buddies at the other Big Corp and work someplace else.
  - yard2010 2y ago
    This is a symptom of seeing the whole world through the small narrow lens of "money is everything".
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Welcome to big corp with Excel driven decisions, sorry, Google Sheets.
  - metaltyphoon 2y ago
    This is sickening
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Exactly why one should be loyal to the team, not the employer. The team members, we might bump into them in another situation. The company, it is all about numbers and meeting projections.

AdrianB1 2y ago

Not at Google, but in a different American company of similar size (not capitalization): the quote about the strategy applies exactly the same, the criticism of middle management is the same. Internally we have an official name for the politics that brought us to that situation, but I cannot write it here because it would be immediately downvoted and flagged; in any case, it is an official policy not to have a strategy, not even to measure results of the projects and, lately, to eliminate the idea of roles and responsibilities and replacing it with "we all need to contribute and jump in as needed".

kridsdale1 2y ago
If you’re talking about a 100,000 person company that sounds like a complete nightmare.
- AdrianB1 2y ago
  We used to be a bit bigger than that, with contractors included probably more than double that number.