11 ms·

Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year

578 points by frays 1y ago

mikestew 1y ago
The 35% reduction refers to the number of managers who oversee fewer than three people, according to a person familiar with the matter. If you oversee 0-2 people, in most cases that’s probably not an efficient ratio. How did Google get so many folks in that position in the first place? And I assume the other 65% take up the slack to fluff their teams? Or what? Leave the other 65% managing 0-2 people?
- andreimackenzie 1y ago
  From my experience: re-orgs and limiting backfills for attrition can lead to these awkward states. Someone starts off with a sensible number of directs, but it can devolve over time.
- TheBigSalad 1y ago
  How is it not efficient?
  - n1b0m 1y ago
    I guess it depends on what other responsibilities the manager has. If a manager has too little to do, they might over-manage their small team, constantly checking in on their work, which is inefficient and demoralising.
  - Etheryte 1y ago
    If managers oversee 0-2 people in a company, that means it's roughly just one person managing one person managing one etc.
    - LudwigNagasena 1y ago
      Imagine you have a cohesive system that has 10 services, each service requires 1-3 people. The head of the system can assign 10 tech leads responsible for the overall quality of the services or they may have over 20 direct reports, most of whom have nothing of interest to report to the higher-up.
  - michaelt 1y ago
    In certain types of company, it's workers without management responsibilities who do the work that brings in the money. Think of a delivery company, for example, where drivers make deliveries, which is what the company gets paid for. Too many managers - AKA too few employees per manager - will sink the company, because managers draw a salary but don't make deliveries. Of course, this analysis might not work as well for a company like Google. I'm pretty sure I can publish an ad without any human intervention on Google's end, so maybe they have no equivalent to the drivers, making the ratio incalculable.
- bayindirh 1y ago
  By plucking employees from larger teams until said teams have 0-2 people.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  The article says they were converted to ICs so these were TLMs or similar people. It sounds like the headline is clickbait and what's really been eliminated is small teams.
- tibbar 1y ago
  For a team that size, you would assume the manager is only spending around half of their time on people management and probably around half their time working directly on whatever the team does. It can be a good arrangement if the goal is just to give a little more leverage to the manager, but it's also equally possible that the manager doesn't have time to do anything particularly well. Also, a lot of time a part-time line manager like that won't have enough organizational clout to look out properly for the team. Having tried that arrangement a few times, I think it's better to have small pods where everyone is an engineer and then all the pods report up to a dedicated people manager.
- jldugger 1y ago
  Not a Goolger but my experience is that this is usually an optimistic promotion where someone is made a manager with the expectation of growing headcount later. But later never happens, or coincides with turnover to the degree that they never bubble up to a decent span of control.
- toast0 1y ago
  IMO, overseeing 0 people is great. I'm not likely to take any position where I have to oversee more or less than that; although I'm willing to compromise and oversee one person where they're actually independent and I don't have to do much overseeing.
  - LambdaComplex 1y ago
    > overseeing 0 people is great. I'm not likely to take any position where I have to oversee more or less than that; I would have so many questions if I got an offer for a position where I had to oversee less than 0 people
    - fuzzy_biscuit 1y ago
      Would that mean you have to undersee one or more people? cue rimshot
      - shoo 1y ago
        Up on the shore they work all day Out in the sun they slave away While we devotin' Full time to floatin' Under the sea
  - omoikane 1y ago
    Overseeing 0 people is great if your role is an individual contributor. If your role is a manager and there is no one for you to manage, it would seem that your role is redundant.
  - pmontra 1y ago
    I'm sure that some company has managers overseeing imaginary and complex people.
- JCM9 1y ago
  Fewer than 3 people? That almost never makes sense. Right on Google to sort that out but I’d have a lot of questions for whatever leaders allowed such nonsense to develop on their watch in the first place. Also 35% is way too low if it’s really less than three. Should be more like eliminating 95% of those scenarios.
- QuadmasterXLII 1y ago
  In some circumstances it can be an effective way to lose efficiency in exchange for velocity- basically there are large tasks that can’t be developed by a team any faster than by an individual ( mythical man month) because they are fundamentally sequential not parallel. In these cases there are often parallel subtasks, so you can buy some speed by having one individual forging ahead as if they are the only one on the project, and then rope in the team for parallelizable subtasks. Instead of any amount of decision-making or communication overhead, everyone jumps when the team lead says jump – this is the step that bounds performance to not be slower than a solo project. Being the team lead in this sort of structure is grand fun, of course, but being a team member is brutal on the ego, and requires enormous skill to be a boost to velocity instead of a drag. Thus, it requires ridiculous compensation, even if you’re mostly sitting idle when the project is in a serial phase. it’s the sort of play that I could believe 2012 google could profitably execute and 2025 Google can’t.
- mkoubaa 1y ago
  It's only inefficient if the manager only had management responsibilities, which I doubt is the case in most of these situations.
- deltaburnt 1y ago
  When I started, I was told that one of the easier ways to get promo at L5 was to become a manager. I don't know how true that was at the time, but I think this could be a consequence of that sort of local optimizing. I think now they don't even allow you to be a manager at L5 unless you're grandfathered in?
  - pfannkuchen 1y ago
    Search and ads, at least, had the L6 requirement for manager going back as long as I’m aware. I was under the impression that the requirement was relaxed at some point in some of the less revenue critical orgs, but that the L6 restriction actually goes back a long way.
    - aix1 1y ago
      FWIW I was L5 manager (on the SWE ladder) in two PAs. The L6 requirement did exist but in my experience was quite soft. All that my management had to do was justify to the VP that I was capable of doing the job and would soon be ready for promo to L6 (though the first org got nuked and the promo took a long time).
      - pfannkuchen 1y ago
        Interesting. Where I was I never saw an exception to the L6 rule.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- dyauspitr 1y ago
  It’s that semi role of being a “manager” while still writing code. They’re just doing away with that role and having dedicated people managers and dedicated engineers.
- lmm 1y ago
  Sometimes there are products where 1-3 people is the right size of team for that product; letting a team that size exist can be better than trying to smush together two or three unrelated products to fit a bigger team. Per other comments these are TLM positions where the manager is also expected to contribute technically.
- ddoolin 1y ago
  I am on a team of 2 people with a dedicated manager. That is, the manager does not write code and is not even really technical. It is awful, send help.
- abustamam 1y ago
  I work for a startup with an engineering team size of about 6, and I manage one person. I agree it's not an efficient ratio but it works for now. I don't think mature enterprise companies should have managers of 0-2 people though.
whatever1 1y ago
Around 5 is the correct number for a first line manager of a technical team. Go to 10 and it’s impossible to keep track of things. The day has only so many hours. Managing takes time. For bigger teams (10+) you either need individuals who are very independent and driven, or have dependable line managers.
- para_parolu 1y ago
  Every time I see manager with 5 people I know it will be daily 30m standups, friday “summary” meeting, weekly 1:1 and other nok work related activities. If team of 5 people need a babysitter fulltime it means there are no adults on that group.
  - siva7 1y ago
    Matches also my experience if they were overseeing only one small team.
  - starky 1y ago
    No, 5 is about ideal. If you are micromanaging with that many people on your team then you are neglecting other aspects of being a manager. More than about 7 and you start being unavailable to your team when they need you, and won't have time to do the planning and process tasks.
    - brainzap 1y ago
      both can be true
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > Go to 10 and it’s impossible to keep track of things. The day has only so many hours. Managing takes time. I've actually had better experiences with higher employee:manager ratios for this reason. When the manager can't possibly be involved in everything they're forced to let go, delegate, and skip the management busywork. My worst experiences have been at companies with one manager per 2-3 employees and skip-level managers who were expected to be involved as well. It was a never-ending stream of meetings, weekly hour-long 1:1s with multiple people, goal setting, personal development exercises, and a growing list of scheduled distractions. The managers felt like they needed to make work to justify their managerial roles, so our time got filled with meetings and activities that didn't contribute to anything other than making the manager feel good about doing things they heard about in podcasts and books.
AnotherGoodName 1y ago
This was called the TLM role at google. Technical Lead/Manager. You were expected to code and manage a couple of more junior engineers. It’s part of an effort to have dedicated managers and dedicated engineers instead of hybrid roles. This is being sold as an efficiency win for the sake of the stock price but it’s really just moved a few people around with the TLMs now 100% focused on programming.
- floren 1y ago
  Do you have any opinion on the success/value of the TLM role?
  - tibbar 1y ago
    Not OP, but I think TLM works best when it's a transitional role. You have someone you want to groom into a full-time manager, and you have a team that you plan to grow over time. TLM itself is not that efficient, but can lead to strong full-time managers who understand the team really well and had time to grow into the role.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - kelnos 1y ago
      I was thinking this too. Tech lead/developer and manager are two completely different jobs. I can see TLM as a useful transitional thing, while the person is being trained or mentored at being a manager (and hopefully not just thrown into the deep end). But 6 months, max 12, I think. Otherwise it just becomes a role where someone has two jobs and ends up overworked.
  - chris_va 1y ago
    (personal opinion) I thought it was a nice stepping stone for people to learn management without having 10 people dumped on them. But it looked bad on paper.
raincom 1y ago
Just increase headcount under oneself in order to protect oneself. Isn't it what bureaucracy have been doing all along?
trhway 1y ago
And all the managers working remotely were replaced with their Gemini versions, and so far nobody has noticed it :).
bsenftner 1y ago
Next up: super frustrated ex-google PMs complaining "that's not how it's done at Google" at their new jobs.
- kylestlb 1y ago
  This has been happening for over a decade
  - leoh 1y ago
    Having worked with said PMs both at Google and after, it is extremely annoying
- ddoolin 1y ago
  Working with one of those right now, on my two-person team, ironically.
- duxup 1y ago
  Lotta folks out there are heavily invested in "process" to the point that they can't see anything outside process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTuLbiIVDpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTuLbiIVDpk
  - utyop22 1y ago
    Lol I went through a few FAANG Pm interviews for the lols. Ah trust me - its actually insane how every firm manages to pull this off - the secret sauce that made the company what it was evaporates and the management optimise for process.
    - duxup 1y ago
      I kinda get it. Process is something you KNOW you can pull off. Code is ... open for interpretation, anything is posible, lots of unknown. And it's tempting where you institute processes to prevent "well that won't happen again". But man process really doesn't really contribute a great deal anyhow.
andy_ppp 1y ago
I’ve never worked anywhere where managers added value, in fact the best places I’ve worked are where the product people have very little power over what the technical team do and instead of specifying what they often specify why, giving the team the opportunity to suggest much simpler solutions.
nailer 1y ago
I met a long time Google employee this week interventions that most of the senior management were ex oracle people. It’s nearly 20 years since Google had a category defining product - they haven’t built or acquired a single thing that dominates in the same way that android, maps, search, docs, etc. has since about 2006. It figures.
- jjtheblunt 1y ago
  Gemini and transformers in general from Google Brain might say "hold my beer"
  - tho23i423o4j23 1y ago
    Google Research/Deepmind is a different thing altogether. Product wise, Perplexity has them beat by a mile - that said PPLX doesn't quite have the same ads buy-in (or all the Chrome-tricks Google plays to keep tracking alive).
    - bitpush 1y ago
      If "beating" is just bleeding money then yes. This is the same playbook that Uber had. Offer an exceptionally good service, until you have to make money. Then it becomes shitty. So nope, it isnt hard to do what Perplexity is doing. The question is, when the music stops will Perplexity be around.
  - nailer 1y ago
    Gemini is absolutely not a category defining product. ChatGPT is. That’s why people talk about looking something up on ChatGPT but not on Gemini. I will hold your beer while you go outside, talk to people outside tech and confirm this.
- nailer 1y ago
  > "I met a long time Google employee this week interventions" I met a long time Google employee this week that mentioned. Sorry I was using voice recognition.
hustwindmaple 1y ago
It's not just for engineers. There are some non-engineering managers who have been demoted into ICs because they don't have enough ppl to manage.
gedy 1y ago
I feel like units need Sergeants, and tech leads are closer to that than managers/officers.
borg16 1y ago
I never really understood the concept of small teams. Managing a small team really does not provide the scale and benefit that a medium to large team does. Lost bandwidth of manager of said small team or extra salary of the same manager seem like something the company could use in other places. But often such teams in faang come up as a by product of someone’s empire building and that is unfortunate for others involved in it.
- frollogaston 1y ago
  The lead is also doing a lot of the regular dev work. Their work is small and self-contained enough that it doesn't need more headcount but also doesn't make sense to merge into another team. I could even see there being a 1-person team, but their slow tooling and red tape creates the need for extra headcount.
hbarka 1y ago
I wonder what Google will do about TVCs now. TLMs usually also had a squad of TVCs.
- frollogaston 1y ago
  TVCs got nerfed so hard
- bitpush 1y ago
  What is TVC?
reilly3000 1y ago
Note to the publisher: when I was about 2/3 through the article the article disappeared and I was scrolled to the footer. When I scrolled back to the top there was only the title, key takeaways, and about 3000px of Taboola. Bad form.
hankchinaski 1y ago
can someone with experience doing this shine some light? i have been offered this type of role from engineer to 50/50 (as i feel it) or 80/20 (as they say) IC and managing. in a series C startup. i feel like it’s never good to context switch. i never seen a tech lead or manager who did well both roles at once. am i crazy to think that the tech lead or manager role should be 100%? either go the IC track or the manager track. but i lack evidence to substantiate this idea of mine.
- c4wrd 1y ago
  I’m in this position now. The longer I’ve been in it, I’ve come to realize can be summarized as: You experience some the benefits of being a manager but bear all the responsibilities of managing others. It becomes challenging to make sound judgments when you must consider two different perspectives of a problem. Essentially, you’re taking on the duties of two jobs. I’ve found it incredibly difficult to step back and allow the team to make decisions without my input. My technical bias compels me to intervene when I perceive a decision as clearly incorrect. However, this approach hinders growth and may be perceived as micromanagement. While it’s a challenging position, it’s an excellent opportunity to explore management and determine if it’s a long-term career path you’re interested in.
- icedchai 1y ago
  At early startups where people are focused on building and you have self motivated, mostly senior+ engineers or hands-on founder types, the 80/20 thing can work. The problems happen when you bring in a lot of other roles, less experienced folks, and more and more distractions build up. The 80% will become more like 30%.
utyop22 1y ago
Im convinced the big tech firms are so overly bloated simply because they do not possess high-quality leadership at the top who are able to clearly distill a vision of where they want their sub-ordinates to go. That's not to say it's easy - its absolutely not. But Apple is living off of Steve Job's visionary prowess and continues to do so.
- frollogaston 1y ago
  This was how I felt about Google in 2018. It's gotten less bloated and better in some ways, but the CEO is still autopilot.
  - sagarm 1y ago
    Frankly autopilot is probably in the top quartile of company leadership. CEO flailing only seems to make things worse.
    - frollogaston 1y ago
      There were some VPs and SVPs with actual vision, or at the very least would say meaningful things in announcements.
- brainzap 1y ago
  high-quality leadership is actually so rare in general
  - utyop22 1y ago
    I agree. What's worse is, the upper layer and middle layers of management are filled with bozo's looking out for their own interests and have no desire to find those with potential and hone them. Business school is a terrible proxy for future business leaders. It boggles the mind how these firms have bloated to the size they have - it's the cost of ill-disciplined management from the top.
gttalbot 1y ago
The way the execs talk down to employees now is really depressing to read about. That's a really unfortunate culture change since I was there.
- de6u99er 1y ago
  The fish rots from the head down.
- BobbyJo 1y ago
  I was there 2013 to 2017 and it was a pretty big shift start to finish just in that window.
  - nextworddev 1y ago
    Google was actually cool to work at pre 2011
  - culi 1y ago
    Not too far off the timeline of when Google employees started trying to unionize and when Google started hiring union busters
Aeolun 1y ago
Fewer managers with fewer direct reports seems impossible. If you eliminate managers, then the remaining ones will naturally absorb the direct reports. So one of these cannot be true. Unless people don't report to anyone.
- decimalenough 1y ago
  The stat refers only to managers with less than 3 reports. > The 35% reduction refers to the number of managers who oversee fewer than three people, according to a person familiar with the matter.
shmerl 1y ago
So what does it mean exactly, they merged a bunch of teams?
- aix1 1y ago
  Managers with fewer than three direct reports were either let go or forced to find new roles (typically as individual contributors, given the overall push to have fewer layers of management).
ilikeatari 1y ago
What impact did it have on project Oxygen?
hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
I'm curious, what did the management part of the TLM role entail? As someone who used to be an engineering manager, I was always surprised at how inefficient the division of responsibilities seemed to me. I mean, when I was an eng. manager, a substantial portion of my time was just taken up by logistics - like when we did a move to a new office building, a huge time sink was stuff like seating charts. Perhaps a company as big as Google has more folks taking care of stuff like this, but I still think the following breakdown makes sense: 1. A "technical mentorship" role: someone who codes, but is also explicitly responsible for skills growth and technical feedback of ~5 junior engineers. This person would not be responsible for stuff like salary/raise negotiations, promotion decisions (but would obviously feed into that, more on that below), logistics questions, etc. 2. A "directing manager" (obviously that name kind of sucks, but I didn't want to confuse this with other "director" or "manager" terms). This person explicitly does not need any technical skills. They are responsible for all logistics/salary negotiations, etc. They would be responsible for around ~5 technical mentors, so then up to 25 people under that. Promotion decisions, for example, would be made amongst the 5 technical mentors, deciding who on the team is most deserving to move up. But then the actual salary decision would be made by this "directing manager". I'm sure this could be tweaked, but the overall idea is to separate technical vs. non-technical skill sets more efficiently.
yalogin 1y ago
> The 35% reduction refers to the number of managers who oversee fewer than three people, according to a person familiar with the matter. I wonder why these people are made managers in the first place. That too this kind of title seems quite prevalent in the company given they found 35% of all managers are like this. Either the statistic is just plain false or google is really dysfunctional
daft_pink 1y ago
I for one welcome our new AI overlords. Not that I'm trying to gain favor or hoping my future AI managers will remember my kind words and promote me when they take over my company.
neya 1y ago
Good riddance. 7 years too late. I worked as a Google Cloud consultant for a major part of my career. We had this really large client, we were bleeding money because one of our ex-employees promised the client a cost reduction strategy that was impossible and I took over his role - literally a hot seat. We walked into Google's office, it was fantastic, they had something like 12 cuisines in the dining area, multiple game rooms with Table tennis and all. Sleeping rooms, you name it. It was more of a 5 star luxury resort experience than anything. We walk into the meeting room, past the employee desks, over 50% of it was empty. I asked one of the colleagues showing us around where they all were - "they just work when they like!". Wow, what a dream! Google has/had? this rule where you can take some 20% of your time in a given day for yourself. But, mostly people used something like 40% of it in reality. I thought this was the perfect working culture with great work-life balance. I had very high expectations for the employee quality until I met the TLM and his team we were supposed to meet. What a bunch of clowns. They suggested we use Cloud Spanner - one of the most expensive offerings at the time and our bottleneck (and bleeding) came from legacy MySql. He didn't even know that Spanner was more expensive than their Cloud SQL offerings, not to mention completely different offerings (it's No-SQL). None of them even knew when to use Spanner for and when to stick with SQL for. It was their own product line-up and we had more knowledge than them! I didn't pass any GCP exams even, at the time. That was the funniest part. We just needed help with some re-architecting of the client's application on a legacy PHP-MySQL combo. They didn't even have suggestions on what stack to migrate to! No idea whatsoever and they tried to talk their way out of it. In the middle of the meeting, my boss leaned over to me and told me "Neya, I think you probably know more than these guys, let's leave" and we wasted no time. To Google's credit, they did offer us some credits to use, but it was far too less than what were bleeding. I went back to office and out of curiosity searched for how much these guys make - It was easily 120k - 250k (back then) depending on their experience. That's when I literally stopped trusting Google with anything at all. I could never be that laxed when I take that much money from anyone. Later, I learned a lot of these people were just there because depending on the country, you had to maintain a quota (ratio) of certain demographics within Google, most of the TLMs and their teams just conveniently fit into that. Why fix something that's not broke, right? The Google we knew with the original startup culture was long dead and this story is atleast 7 years old now. For over 5 years since then, they did nothing but make money by simply increasing prices for GCP offerings. I remember our costs rising up suddenly after they just pulled the rug on us with Cloud storage price increase at random. No innovation, nothing. The AI mode they launched now after ChatGPT took the market by storm was what should've been 5 years ago. They are following the pattern exactly as described in the book we learned in our Masters' - "How the mighty fall" (really good book) and well deserved. You reap what you sow. /endrant (thanks for reading!)
lokar 1y ago
It goes in cycles. I remember the last time G did this (2006?) they had the 7 rule: No manager with more then 7 reports No IC with more then 7 managers between them and CEO
- skylurk 1y ago
  How is that number picked? 7 people with one manager seems fine. It could go up to 10 maybe, but that's just my own vibes. 7 layers thick of management feels like too much to me. You'll get a company full of professional middle management who's jockeying define the company culture and strategy. Is that the point? Vibes seem off though. Is there a more scientific approach?
  - Jensson 1y ago
    > 7 layers thick of management feels like too much to me Yeah, so having more than that was banned. They didn't say you need 7 people between employee and CEO, just that there shouldn't be more than 7 people between them. When you ban something you want to allow reasonable levels so you take a reasonable level, pad a bit, and ban that unreasonable level, so you agree. But, also note for large companies, like 100k people, you need around that many layers or managers will have too many people to manage each.
    - lokar 1y ago
      yeah, max 7 layers. And I don't think it applied to interns :) And the company was much much smaller.
- fuckaj 1y ago
  They shpule make it 16 reports and 8 between them and ceo. Then they can use IP addresses for staff.
h4kunamata 1y ago
This is one thing that should become a thing. There are way too many managers micromanaging teams causing more problems than solving them.
phendrenad2 1y ago
First they laid off the non-technical employees. As a big tech company, Google needs to focus on coding. But that wasn't enough, so they laid off the middle managers in charge of coders. As a big tech company, Google needs to focus on coding. But that wasn't enough, so they laid off the low-level managers who were the domain experts on each product. As a big tech company, Google needs to focus on pure coding, and anyone who isn't doing 100% coding is extraneous. But, that won't be good enough, so next they'll lay off the senior engineers. As a big tech company, Google needs to focus on coding, and senior engineers spend too much time doing "architecture" (whatever that means). But that won't be enough, either. So they'll lay off the regular engineers, too. As a big tech company, Google needs to focus on only the purest coders, meaning junior engineers who don't actually understand the product (understanding the product considered harmful). But that won't be enough. So they'll lay off all of the juniors and only keep one guy named Greg who will adopt the title "webmaster of google dot com" and rewrite the whole thing in PHP. Then this big tech company can really prosper!
- samsonradu 1y ago
  Isn't it already prospering?
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    Pretty much. Except Greg here is actually Gemini and they hope he can work 24/7 perfectly under the executives' convoluted, contradictory prompts.
- fuckaj 1y ago
  Kudos for getting that fat without mentioning AI
chickenzzzzu 1y ago
I currently am an "individual contributor" on a very large (15+) "game team". It is hilariously inefficient to have one manager supporting that many people, as the manager just makes decisions based on heuristics and buzz words. They almost always make the wrong decision, and we just silently ignore those decisions. Since they're so busy, they don't notice. I have advocated many times and been told no for a situation like, "hey I know a major core problem we need to solve, give me one extra engineer in addition to myself and maybe a part time tech artist and we can deliver this to you." It is repulsive how many large corporations follow such outdated and rigid processes, and follow the logic of "more engineerer betterer"
- fuckaj 1y ago
  Managers of 15 shouldn't make lots of decisions. The team should come together and use decision processes to make good decisions. Manager makes sure individuals are growing and are able to contribute at that level.
  - chickenzzzzu 1y ago
    I agree with you. Based on what others have said about this article, it sounds like Google doesn't agree with us. If anything, I would go further than the "two pizza" team sizing. Teams should be no larger than 4 people, one of whom is a lead who is extremely well compensated and is held to extremely high standards, else they are shitcanned ASAP.
thrown-0825 1y ago
Listening to googlers drone on about their byzantine corporate structure and acronyms is always so bizarre. Reminds me of severance and the polite little drones reciting their eigan lore. Google is a blight on our society.
- usrusr 1y ago
  > Google is a blight on our society. Will be worse when they "scale up" to funnel a larger fraction of revenue to shareholders (directly or indirectly by accumulating a larger hoard) by paying less people to provide the same service.
johnnienaked 1y ago
Recouping some of their data center capex money
shermantanktop 1y ago
Managing dev teams is a tough job and I respect the ones who find a way to add value. The good managers I know have been good in spite of all the incentives that surround them. The rest have mostly been going with the flow and responding to the environment they are in, and the result is usually a whole lot of upward management and little real value—just more TPS reports delivered on time.
fuckaj 1y ago
Small team management is dead. Long live small team management. Yes. You fire them then your senior engineers fill that gap. Its just not formally part of the process. The cost didnt disappear. Either borne by employees working longer hours or lost velocity.
Garlef 1y ago
> "We have to be more efficient as we scale up" ... google is a 27 year old company ... google is one of the most valuable and influential companies currently operating i don't think the phrase "scaling up" makes much sense in this category
- deprave 1y ago
  I thought the same thing. Some of the commenters said this move might be related to stock price or appeasing shareholders, so I wonder if that, too, was directed at them, as in “we’re big and we plan on getting even bigger”
MilyMason2 1y ago
[flagged]
paulbjensen 1y ago
Having worked in organisations of various sizes, my observation is that the network effects issue rings true, and large companies feel horrendously bureaucratic. I had one Engineering Manager joke that his year at Volvo Cars had been one long meeting. Even the then-CEO at the time complained about the number of meetings the company held. I also remember a tale from a colleague in a startup that had come from a much bigger company talking about how colleagues in India were asking for promotions or pay raises every year. Why? It turned out the colleagues in India had strong expectations from their parents to consistently be progressing in their career, hence they had to show progress in the form of being promoted or having increased salary. What did the company do? They started creating job titles to essentially create the impression of being promoted without much changing in terms of the day to day job. It seems like a kind of inflationary effect on organisation structures, where you solve one issue but potentially create other issues, namely bureaucracy.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
brnt 1y ago
What's a small team at Google?
seanhunter 1y ago
Honestly as an outsider this is the not the most important role for them to have eliminated. I have interacted with google a couple of times in the last few years and the company I work for are considered a priority account that they want to do more business with. In every meeting, they put forward one engineer (who is usually quite capable) and 6 or 7 spreadsheet-trackers who all come from McKinsey or straight out of MBA school and seem to have no function other than to consume the oxygen in the room. Every meeting another one shows up and introduces themselves as being the person in charge of the relationship (this has become a running joke between me and the CTO). At one stage I stopped going to one of the weekly meetings that these people put on my calendar so the guy called me up to ask why. I explained I got no value from the meeting as all the meeting was for was so he could read through a spreadsheet that everyone already had shared so if I was interested (which spoiler I wasn’t) I could just read it for myself and didn’t need a 45min meeting. He was most offended and disappeared soon after to be replaced by some other person who introduced themselves as the head of the relationship. So in short if they get rid of everyone on the client-facing side who describes themselves as head of some relationship they would cut a lot more dead wood than TLMs.
- utyop22 1y ago
  "seem to have no function other than to consume the oxygen in the room" I have a nice phrase for these people - oxygen thiefs.
amai 1y ago
...and has them replaced by AI?
StopDisinfo910 1y ago
Google is probably doing what everyone else is doing. The entry level managerial positions are being eliminated by pretending the people doing the work are not actually manager and are therefore paid less. It’s reached ridiculous proportions in some companies I have worked for. I have seen transversal project managers and delivery leads in charge of up to 80 persons sometimes with an intermediate level of management actually reporting to them but not directly attached to them be paid as IC. It gets even more funny because some positions in said companies doing a lot less management but occupied by people who suck up a lot are actually considered managerial. Most modern big companies are completely f* up. The only reason we don’t see more disruption is regulatory capture.
iamleppert 1y ago
“I don’t think they have a VEP at Meta by the way,” Cicconi said. This was said in response to having a month sabbatical at Facebook after 5 years. The Google exec seems to think having a "voluntary buyout" program is good enough and makes them competitive. At this point, what is the purpose of Google hosting these town halls? It's a waste of time, just send the employees an email with whatever updated policies have been decided and dispense with the pleasantries.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
> The 35% reduction refers to the number of managers who oversee fewer than three people, according to a person familiar with the matter. Many of those managers stayed with the company as individual contributors So a lot of these people weren't actually managers, but engineers without a manager. But if you do have a "manager" who only oversees one or two other people, that does seem like an unnecessary layer -- unless that "manager" is actually a full-time dev who just happens to have a "manager" title tacked on. The unanswered question is whether they eliminated the _people_ or just eliminated the "manager" _titles_.
fair_enough 1y ago
I don't see how Google employees can stomach all the bureaucracy and internal drama of publicly-traded corporate politics for more than about 2 years before taking their "fuck you" money and retiring. I'm under the impression this is not a popular opinion around these parts, but the barrage of internal-use acronyms for job titles and gleeful posts pedantically explaining their meaning makes working there sound like absolute hell.
- zhivecraft 1y ago
  To be honest it is. Google HR brand is nothing common with actual day to day bullshit, at least in Core and Cloud orgs.
  - fair_enough 1y ago
    I couldn't help noticing you called the day to day stuff "bullshit". Which is worse: the HR bullshit or the day-to-day bullshit in one of the breadwinner teams? From an outsider's perspective, things seem miserable around there but from the sound of it, they're worse than I thought. I've heard the stories of the Not Invented Here syndrome, but to me the worst part of working a company like Google or Microsoft is the fact that they hire thousands of people who lack the work ethic or competence to code as "project managers" and then allow them to have a part in your work without helping in any way. I could not imagine spending 70 hours in a week doing the drudgery of programming, then having to share the credit with someone who was a non-contributor at best and at worst a detriment. I remember the way things used to work: you start by implementing things yourself, and only when the size and scope of your work grows beyond the capabilities of one person do you get to start telling other people to implement your ideas.
    - zhivecraft 1y ago
      Right :) Peers say things degraded after 2022-2023 layoffs+RTOs. Older folks say "google you wanted to work in ended 15 years ago". The org optimizes for control surfaces (calibration, headcount empires, acronym liturgy), not craft. Micromanagement is the product. YMMV
486sx33 1y ago
[dead]
UltraSane 1y ago
Google's job titles feels like military ranks.
selinkocalar 1y ago
Interesting to see Google flattening their org structure. Management overhead is real, especially in engineering organizations. At early-stage companies, every manager hire needs to be justified. Can this person actually multiply the productivity of their team, or are they just adding coordination overhead? The best managers I've worked with were former ICs who understood the technical work deeply. Generic "people managers" rarely add value in technical organizations.

578 points by frays 1y ago

The 35% reduction refers to the number of managers who oversee fewer than three people, according to a person familiar with the matter. If you oversee 0-2 people, in most cases that’s probably not an efficient ratio. How did Google get so many folks in that position in the first place? And I assume the other 65% take up the slack to fluff their teams? Or what? Leave the other 65% managing 0-2 people?

andreimackenzie 1y ago
From my experience: re-orgs and limiting backfills for attrition can lead to these awkward states. Someone starts off with a sensible number of directs, but it can devolve over time.
TheBigSalad 1y ago
How is it not efficient?
- n1b0m 1y ago
  I guess it depends on what other responsibilities the manager has. If a manager has too little to do, they might over-manage their small team, constantly checking in on their work, which is inefficient and demoralising.
- Etheryte 1y ago
  If managers oversee 0-2 people in a company, that means it's roughly just one person managing one person managing one etc.
  - LudwigNagasena 1y ago
    Imagine you have a cohesive system that has 10 services, each service requires 1-3 people. The head of the system can assign 10 tech leads responsible for the overall quality of the services or they may have over 20 direct reports, most of whom have nothing of interest to report to the higher-up.
- michaelt 1y ago
  In certain types of company, it's workers without management responsibilities who do the work that brings in the money. Think of a delivery company, for example, where drivers make deliveries, which is what the company gets paid for. Too many managers - AKA too few employees per manager - will sink the company, because managers draw a salary but don't make deliveries. Of course, this analysis might not work as well for a company like Google. I'm pretty sure I can publish an ad without any human intervention on Google's end, so maybe they have no equivalent to the drivers, making the ratio incalculable.
bayindirh 1y ago
By plucking employees from larger teams until said teams have 0-2 people.
jeffbee 1y ago
The article says they were converted to ICs so these were TLMs or similar people. It sounds like the headline is clickbait and what's really been eliminated is small teams.
tibbar 1y ago
For a team that size, you would assume the manager is only spending around half of their time on people management and probably around half their time working directly on whatever the team does. It can be a good arrangement if the goal is just to give a little more leverage to the manager, but it's also equally possible that the manager doesn't have time to do anything particularly well. Also, a lot of time a part-time line manager like that won't have enough organizational clout to look out properly for the team. Having tried that arrangement a few times, I think it's better to have small pods where everyone is an engineer and then all the pods report up to a dedicated people manager.
jldugger 1y ago
Not a Goolger but my experience is that this is usually an optimistic promotion where someone is made a manager with the expectation of growing headcount later. But later never happens, or coincides with turnover to the degree that they never bubble up to a decent span of control.
toast0 1y ago
IMO, overseeing 0 people is great. I'm not likely to take any position where I have to oversee more or less than that; although I'm willing to compromise and oversee one person where they're actually independent and I don't have to do much overseeing.
- LambdaComplex 1y ago
  > overseeing 0 people is great. I'm not likely to take any position where I have to oversee more or less than that; I would have so many questions if I got an offer for a position where I had to oversee less than 0 people
  - fuzzy_biscuit 1y ago
    Would that mean you have to undersee one or more people? cue rimshot
    - shoo 1y ago
      Up on the shore they work all day Out in the sun they slave away While we devotin' Full time to floatin' Under the sea
- omoikane 1y ago
  Overseeing 0 people is great if your role is an individual contributor. If your role is a manager and there is no one for you to manage, it would seem that your role is redundant.
- pmontra 1y ago
  I'm sure that some company has managers overseeing imaginary and complex people.
JCM9 1y ago
Fewer than 3 people? That almost never makes sense. Right on Google to sort that out but I’d have a lot of questions for whatever leaders allowed such nonsense to develop on their watch in the first place. Also 35% is way too low if it’s really less than three. Should be more like eliminating 95% of those scenarios.
QuadmasterXLII 1y ago
In some circumstances it can be an effective way to lose efficiency in exchange for velocity- basically there are large tasks that can’t be developed by a team any faster than by an individual ( mythical man month) because they are fundamentally sequential not parallel. In these cases there are often parallel subtasks, so you can buy some speed by having one individual forging ahead as if they are the only one on the project, and then rope in the team for parallelizable subtasks. Instead of any amount of decision-making or communication overhead, everyone jumps when the team lead says jump – this is the step that bounds performance to not be slower than a solo project. Being the team lead in this sort of structure is grand fun, of course, but being a team member is brutal on the ego, and requires enormous skill to be a boost to velocity instead of a drag. Thus, it requires ridiculous compensation, even if you’re mostly sitting idle when the project is in a serial phase. it’s the sort of play that I could believe 2012 google could profitably execute and 2025 Google can’t.
mkoubaa 1y ago
It's only inefficient if the manager only had management responsibilities, which I doubt is the case in most of these situations.
deltaburnt 1y ago
When I started, I was told that one of the easier ways to get promo at L5 was to become a manager. I don't know how true that was at the time, but I think this could be a consequence of that sort of local optimizing. I think now they don't even allow you to be a manager at L5 unless you're grandfathered in?
- pfannkuchen 1y ago
  Search and ads, at least, had the L6 requirement for manager going back as long as I’m aware. I was under the impression that the requirement was relaxed at some point in some of the less revenue critical orgs, but that the L6 restriction actually goes back a long way.
  - aix1 1y ago
    FWIW I was L5 manager (on the SWE ladder) in two PAs. The L6 requirement did exist but in my experience was quite soft. All that my management had to do was justify to the VP that I was capable of doing the job and would soon be ready for promo to L6 (though the first org got nuked and the promo took a long time).
    - pfannkuchen 1y ago
      Interesting. Where I was I never saw an exception to the L6 rule.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
dyauspitr 1y ago
It’s that semi role of being a “manager” while still writing code. They’re just doing away with that role and having dedicated people managers and dedicated engineers.
lmm 1y ago
Sometimes there are products where 1-3 people is the right size of team for that product; letting a team that size exist can be better than trying to smush together two or three unrelated products to fit a bigger team. Per other comments these are TLM positions where the manager is also expected to contribute technically.
ddoolin 1y ago
I am on a team of 2 people with a dedicated manager. That is, the manager does not write code and is not even really technical. It is awful, send help.
abustamam 1y ago
I work for a startup with an engineering team size of about 6, and I manage one person. I agree it's not an efficient ratio but it works for now. I don't think mature enterprise companies should have managers of 0-2 people though.

whatever1 1y ago

Around 5 is the correct number for a first line manager of a technical team. Go to 10 and it’s impossible to keep track of things. The day has only so many hours. Managing takes time. For bigger teams (10+) you either need individuals who are very independent and driven, or have dependable line managers.

para_parolu 1y ago
Every time I see manager with 5 people I know it will be daily 30m standups, friday “summary” meeting, weekly 1:1 and other nok work related activities. If team of 5 people need a babysitter fulltime it means there are no adults on that group.
- siva7 1y ago
  Matches also my experience if they were overseeing only one small team.
- starky 1y ago
  No, 5 is about ideal. If you are micromanaging with that many people on your team then you are neglecting other aspects of being a manager. More than about 7 and you start being unavailable to your team when they need you, and won't have time to do the planning and process tasks.
  - brainzap 1y ago
    both can be true
Aurornis 1y ago
> Go to 10 and it’s impossible to keep track of things. The day has only so many hours. Managing takes time. I've actually had better experiences with higher employee:manager ratios for this reason. When the manager can't possibly be involved in everything they're forced to let go, delegate, and skip the management busywork. My worst experiences have been at companies with one manager per 2-3 employees and skip-level managers who were expected to be involved as well. It was a never-ending stream of meetings, weekly hour-long 1:1s with multiple people, goal setting, personal development exercises, and a growing list of scheduled distractions. The managers felt like they needed to make work to justify their managerial roles, so our time got filled with meetings and activities that didn't contribute to anything other than making the manager feel good about doing things they heard about in podcasts and books.

AnotherGoodName 1y ago

This was called the TLM role at google. Technical Lead/Manager. You were expected to code and manage a couple of more junior engineers. It’s part of an effort to have dedicated managers and dedicated engineers instead of hybrid roles. This is being sold as an efficiency win for the sake of the stock price but it’s really just moved a few people around with the TLMs now 100% focused on programming.

floren 1y ago
Do you have any opinion on the success/value of the TLM role?
- tibbar 1y ago
  Not OP, but I think TLM works best when it's a transitional role. You have someone you want to groom into a full-time manager, and you have a team that you plan to grow over time. TLM itself is not that efficient, but can lead to strong full-time managers who understand the team really well and had time to grow into the role.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - kelnos 1y ago
    I was thinking this too. Tech lead/developer and manager are two completely different jobs. I can see TLM as a useful transitional thing, while the person is being trained or mentored at being a manager (and hopefully not just thrown into the deep end). But 6 months, max 12, I think. Otherwise it just becomes a role where someone has two jobs and ends up overworked.
- chris_va 1y ago
  (personal opinion) I thought it was a nice stepping stone for people to learn management without having 10 people dumped on them. But it looked bad on paper.

raincom 1y ago

Just increase headcount under oneself in order to protect oneself. Isn't it what bureaucracy have been doing all along?

trhway 1y ago

And all the managers working remotely were replaced with their Gemini versions, and so far nobody has noticed it :).

bsenftner 1y ago

Next up: super frustrated ex-google PMs complaining "that's not how it's done at Google" at their new jobs.

kylestlb 1y ago
This has been happening for over a decade
- leoh 1y ago
  Having worked with said PMs both at Google and after, it is extremely annoying
ddoolin 1y ago
Working with one of those right now, on my two-person team, ironically.
duxup 1y ago
Lotta folks out there are heavily invested in "process" to the point that they can't see anything outside process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTuLbiIVDpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTuLbiIVDpk
- utyop22 1y ago
  Lol I went through a few FAANG Pm interviews for the lols. Ah trust me - its actually insane how every firm manages to pull this off - the secret sauce that made the company what it was evaporates and the management optimise for process.
  - duxup 1y ago
    I kinda get it. Process is something you KNOW you can pull off. Code is ... open for interpretation, anything is posible, lots of unknown. And it's tempting where you institute processes to prevent "well that won't happen again". But man process really doesn't really contribute a great deal anyhow.

andy_ppp 1y ago

I’ve never worked anywhere where managers added value, in fact the best places I’ve worked are where the product people have very little power over what the technical team do and instead of specifying what they often specify why, giving the team the opportunity to suggest much simpler solutions.

nailer 1y ago

I met a long time Google employee this week interventions that most of the senior management were ex oracle people. It’s nearly 20 years since Google had a category defining product - they haven’t built or acquired a single thing that dominates in the same way that android, maps, search, docs, etc. has since about 2006. It figures.

jjtheblunt 1y ago
Gemini and transformers in general from Google Brain might say "hold my beer"
- tho23i423o4j23 1y ago
  Google Research/Deepmind is a different thing altogether. Product wise, Perplexity has them beat by a mile - that said PPLX doesn't quite have the same ads buy-in (or all the Chrome-tricks Google plays to keep tracking alive).
  - bitpush 1y ago
    If "beating" is just bleeding money then yes. This is the same playbook that Uber had. Offer an exceptionally good service, until you have to make money. Then it becomes shitty. So nope, it isnt hard to do what Perplexity is doing. The question is, when the music stops will Perplexity be around.
- nailer 1y ago
  Gemini is absolutely not a category defining product. ChatGPT is. That’s why people talk about looking something up on ChatGPT but not on Gemini. I will hold your beer while you go outside, talk to people outside tech and confirm this.
nailer 1y ago
> "I met a long time Google employee this week interventions" I met a long time Google employee this week that mentioned. Sorry I was using voice recognition.

hustwindmaple 1y ago

It's not just for engineers. There are some non-engineering managers who have been demoted into ICs because they don't have enough ppl to manage.

gedy 1y ago

I feel like units need Sergeants, and tech leads are closer to that than managers/officers.

borg16 1y ago

I never really understood the concept of small teams. Managing a small team really does not provide the scale and benefit that a medium to large team does. Lost bandwidth of manager of said small team or extra salary of the same manager seem like something the company could use in other places. But often such teams in faang come up as a by product of someone’s empire building and that is unfortunate for others involved in it.

frollogaston 1y ago
The lead is also doing a lot of the regular dev work. Their work is small and self-contained enough that it doesn't need more headcount but also doesn't make sense to merge into another team. I could even see there being a 1-person team, but their slow tooling and red tape creates the need for extra headcount.

hbarka 1y ago

I wonder what Google will do about TVCs now. TLMs usually also had a squad of TVCs.

frollogaston 1y ago
TVCs got nerfed so hard
bitpush 1y ago
What is TVC?

reilly3000 1y ago

Note to the publisher: when I was about 2/3 through the article the article disappeared and I was scrolled to the footer. When I scrolled back to the top there was only the title, key takeaways, and about 3000px of Taboola. Bad form.

hankchinaski 1y ago

can someone with experience doing this shine some light? i have been offered this type of role from engineer to 50/50 (as i feel it) or 80/20 (as they say) IC and managing. in a series C startup. i feel like it’s never good to context switch. i never seen a tech lead or manager who did well both roles at once. am i crazy to think that the tech lead or manager role should be 100%? either go the IC track or the manager track. but i lack evidence to substantiate this idea of mine.

c4wrd 1y ago
I’m in this position now. The longer I’ve been in it, I’ve come to realize can be summarized as: You experience some the benefits of being a manager but bear all the responsibilities of managing others. It becomes challenging to make sound judgments when you must consider two different perspectives of a problem. Essentially, you’re taking on the duties of two jobs. I’ve found it incredibly difficult to step back and allow the team to make decisions without my input. My technical bias compels me to intervene when I perceive a decision as clearly incorrect. However, this approach hinders growth and may be perceived as micromanagement. While it’s a challenging position, it’s an excellent opportunity to explore management and determine if it’s a long-term career path you’re interested in.
icedchai 1y ago
At early startups where people are focused on building and you have self motivated, mostly senior+ engineers or hands-on founder types, the 80/20 thing can work. The problems happen when you bring in a lot of other roles, less experienced folks, and more and more distractions build up. The 80% will become more like 30%.

utyop22 1y ago

Im convinced the big tech firms are so overly bloated simply because they do not possess high-quality leadership at the top who are able to clearly distill a vision of where they want their sub-ordinates to go. That's not to say it's easy - its absolutely not. But Apple is living off of Steve Job's visionary prowess and continues to do so.

frollogaston 1y ago
This was how I felt about Google in 2018. It's gotten less bloated and better in some ways, but the CEO is still autopilot.
- sagarm 1y ago
  Frankly autopilot is probably in the top quartile of company leadership. CEO flailing only seems to make things worse.
  - frollogaston 1y ago
    There were some VPs and SVPs with actual vision, or at the very least would say meaningful things in announcements.
brainzap 1y ago
high-quality leadership is actually so rare in general
- utyop22 1y ago
  I agree. What's worse is, the upper layer and middle layers of management are filled with bozo's looking out for their own interests and have no desire to find those with potential and hone them. Business school is a terrible proxy for future business leaders. It boggles the mind how these firms have bloated to the size they have - it's the cost of ill-disciplined management from the top.

gttalbot 1y ago

The way the execs talk down to employees now is really depressing to read about. That's a really unfortunate culture change since I was there.

de6u99er 1y ago
The fish rots from the head down.
BobbyJo 1y ago
I was there 2013 to 2017 and it was a pretty big shift start to finish just in that window.
- nextworddev 1y ago
  Google was actually cool to work at pre 2011
- culi 1y ago
  Not too far off the timeline of when Google employees started trying to unionize and when Google started hiring union busters

Aeolun 1y ago

Fewer managers with fewer direct reports seems impossible. If you eliminate managers, then the remaining ones will naturally absorb the direct reports. So one of these cannot be true. Unless people don't report to anyone.

decimalenough 1y ago
The stat refers only to managers with less than 3 reports. > The 35% reduction refers to the number of managers who oversee fewer than three people, according to a person familiar with the matter.

shmerl 1y ago

So what does it mean exactly, they merged a bunch of teams?

aix1 1y ago
Managers with fewer than three direct reports were either let go or forced to find new roles (typically as individual contributors, given the overall push to have fewer layers of management).

ilikeatari 1y ago

What impact did it have on project Oxygen?

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago

I'm curious, what did the management part of the TLM role entail? As someone who used to be an engineering manager, I was always surprised at how inefficient the division of responsibilities seemed to me. I mean, when I was an eng. manager, a substantial portion of my time was just taken up by logistics - like when we did a move to a new office building, a huge time sink was stuff like seating charts. Perhaps a company as big as Google has more folks taking care of stuff like this, but I still think the following breakdown makes sense: 1. A "technical mentorship" role: someone who codes, but is also explicitly responsible for skills growth and technical feedback of ~5 junior engineers. This person would not be responsible for stuff like salary/raise negotiations, promotion decisions (but would obviously feed into that, more on that below), logistics questions, etc. 2. A "directing manager" (obviously that name kind of sucks, but I didn't want to confuse this with other "director" or "manager" terms). This person explicitly does not need any technical skills. They are responsible for all logistics/salary negotiations, etc. They would be responsible for around ~5 technical mentors, so then up to 25 people under that. Promotion decisions, for example, would be made amongst the 5 technical mentors, deciding who on the team is most deserving to move up. But then the actual salary decision would be made by this "directing manager". I'm sure this could be tweaked, but the overall idea is to separate technical vs. non-technical skill sets more efficiently.

yalogin 1y ago

> The 35% reduction refers to the number of managers who oversee fewer than three people, according to a person familiar with the matter. I wonder why these people are made managers in the first place. That too this kind of title seems quite prevalent in the company given they found 35% of all managers are like this. Either the statistic is just plain false or google is really dysfunctional

daft_pink 1y ago

I for one welcome our new AI overlords. Not that I'm trying to gain favor or hoping my future AI managers will remember my kind words and promote me when they take over my company.

neya 1y ago

Good riddance. 7 years too late. I worked as a Google Cloud consultant for a major part of my career. We had this really large client, we were bleeding money because one of our ex-employees promised the client a cost reduction strategy that was impossible and I took over his role - literally a hot seat. We walked into Google's office, it was fantastic, they had something like 12 cuisines in the dining area, multiple game rooms with Table tennis and all. Sleeping rooms, you name it. It was more of a 5 star luxury resort experience than anything. We walk into the meeting room, past the employee desks, over 50% of it was empty. I asked one of the colleagues showing us around where they all were - "they just work when they like!". Wow, what a dream! Google has/had? this rule where you can take some 20% of your time in a given day for yourself. But, mostly people used something like 40% of it in reality. I thought this was the perfect working culture with great work-life balance. I had very high expectations for the employee quality until I met the TLM and his team we were supposed to meet. What a bunch of clowns. They suggested we use Cloud Spanner - one of the most expensive offerings at the time and our bottleneck (and bleeding) came from legacy MySql. He didn't even know that Spanner was more expensive than their Cloud SQL offerings, not to mention completely different offerings (it's No-SQL). None of them even knew when to use Spanner for and when to stick with SQL for. It was their own product line-up and we had more knowledge than them! I didn't pass any GCP exams even, at the time. That was the funniest part. We just needed help with some re-architecting of the client's application on a legacy PHP-MySQL combo. They didn't even have suggestions on what stack to migrate to! No idea whatsoever and they tried to talk their way out of it. In the middle of the meeting, my boss leaned over to me and told me "Neya, I think you probably know more than these guys, let's leave" and we wasted no time. To Google's credit, they did offer us some credits to use, but it was far too less than what were bleeding. I went back to office and out of curiosity searched for how much these guys make - It was easily 120k - 250k (back then) depending on their experience. That's when I literally stopped trusting Google with anything at all. I could never be that laxed when I take that much money from anyone. Later, I learned a lot of these people were just there because depending on the country, you had to maintain a quota (ratio) of certain demographics within Google, most of the TLMs and their teams just conveniently fit into that. Why fix something that's not broke, right? The Google we knew with the original startup culture was long dead and this story is atleast 7 years old now. For over 5 years since then, they did nothing but make money by simply increasing prices for GCP offerings. I remember our costs rising up suddenly after they just pulled the rug on us with Cloud storage price increase at random. No innovation, nothing. The AI mode they launched now after ChatGPT took the market by storm was what should've been 5 years ago. They are following the pattern exactly as described in the book we learned in our Masters' - "How the mighty fall" (really good book) and well deserved. You reap what you sow. /endrant (thanks for reading!)

lokar 1y ago

It goes in cycles. I remember the last time G did this (2006?) they had the 7 rule: No manager with more then 7 reports No IC with more then 7 managers between them and CEO

skylurk 1y ago
How is that number picked? 7 people with one manager seems fine. It could go up to 10 maybe, but that's just my own vibes. 7 layers thick of management feels like too much to me. You'll get a company full of professional middle management who's jockeying define the company culture and strategy. Is that the point? Vibes seem off though. Is there a more scientific approach?
- Jensson 1y ago
  > 7 layers thick of management feels like too much to me Yeah, so having more than that was banned. They didn't say you need 7 people between employee and CEO, just that there shouldn't be more than 7 people between them. When you ban something you want to allow reasonable levels so you take a reasonable level, pad a bit, and ban that unreasonable level, so you agree. But, also note for large companies, like 100k people, you need around that many layers or managers will have too many people to manage each.
  - lokar 1y ago
    yeah, max 7 layers. And I don't think it applied to interns :) And the company was much much smaller.
fuckaj 1y ago
They shpule make it 16 reports and 8 between them and ceo. Then they can use IP addresses for staff.

h4kunamata 1y ago

This is one thing that should become a thing. There are way too many managers micromanaging teams causing more problems than solving them.

phendrenad2 1y ago

First they laid off the non-technical employees. As a big tech company, Google needs to focus on coding. But that wasn't enough, so they laid off the middle managers in charge of coders. As a big tech company, Google needs to focus on coding. But that wasn't enough, so they laid off the low-level managers who were the domain experts on each product. As a big tech company, Google needs to focus on pure coding, and anyone who isn't doing 100% coding is extraneous. But, that won't be good enough, so next they'll lay off the senior engineers. As a big tech company, Google needs to focus on coding, and senior engineers spend too much time doing "architecture" (whatever that means). But that won't be enough, either. So they'll lay off the regular engineers, too. As a big tech company, Google needs to focus on only the purest coders, meaning junior engineers who don't actually understand the product (understanding the product considered harmful). But that won't be enough. So they'll lay off all of the juniors and only keep one guy named Greg who will adopt the title "webmaster of google dot com" and rewrite the whole thing in PHP. Then this big tech company can really prosper!

samsonradu 1y ago
Isn't it already prospering?
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  Pretty much. Except Greg here is actually Gemini and they hope he can work 24/7 perfectly under the executives' convoluted, contradictory prompts.
fuckaj 1y ago
Kudos for getting that fat without mentioning AI

chickenzzzzu 1y ago

I currently am an "individual contributor" on a very large (15+) "game team". It is hilariously inefficient to have one manager supporting that many people, as the manager just makes decisions based on heuristics and buzz words. They almost always make the wrong decision, and we just silently ignore those decisions. Since they're so busy, they don't notice. I have advocated many times and been told no for a situation like, "hey I know a major core problem we need to solve, give me one extra engineer in addition to myself and maybe a part time tech artist and we can deliver this to you." It is repulsive how many large corporations follow such outdated and rigid processes, and follow the logic of "more engineerer betterer"

fuckaj 1y ago
Managers of 15 shouldn't make lots of decisions. The team should come together and use decision processes to make good decisions. Manager makes sure individuals are growing and are able to contribute at that level.
- chickenzzzzu 1y ago
  I agree with you. Based on what others have said about this article, it sounds like Google doesn't agree with us. If anything, I would go further than the "two pizza" team sizing. Teams should be no larger than 4 people, one of whom is a lead who is extremely well compensated and is held to extremely high standards, else they are shitcanned ASAP.

thrown-0825 1y ago

Listening to googlers drone on about their byzantine corporate structure and acronyms is always so bizarre. Reminds me of severance and the polite little drones reciting their eigan lore. Google is a blight on our society.

usrusr 1y ago
> Google is a blight on our society. Will be worse when they "scale up" to funnel a larger fraction of revenue to shareholders (directly or indirectly by accumulating a larger hoard) by paying less people to provide the same service.

johnnienaked 1y ago

Recouping some of their data center capex money

shermantanktop 1y ago

Managing dev teams is a tough job and I respect the ones who find a way to add value. The good managers I know have been good in spite of all the incentives that surround them. The rest have mostly been going with the flow and responding to the environment they are in, and the result is usually a whole lot of upward management and little real value—just more TPS reports delivered on time.

fuckaj 1y ago

Small team management is dead. Long live small team management. Yes. You fire them then your senior engineers fill that gap. Its just not formally part of the process. The cost didnt disappear. Either borne by employees working longer hours or lost velocity.

Garlef 1y ago

> "We have to be more efficient as we scale up" ... google is a 27 year old company ... google is one of the most valuable and influential companies currently operating i don't think the phrase "scaling up" makes much sense in this category

deprave 1y ago
I thought the same thing. Some of the commenters said this move might be related to stock price or appeasing shareholders, so I wonder if that, too, was directed at them, as in “we’re big and we plan on getting even bigger”

MilyMason2 1y ago

[flagged]

paulbjensen 1y ago

Having worked in organisations of various sizes, my observation is that the network effects issue rings true, and large companies feel horrendously bureaucratic. I had one Engineering Manager joke that his year at Volvo Cars had been one long meeting. Even the then-CEO at the time complained about the number of meetings the company held. I also remember a tale from a colleague in a startup that had come from a much bigger company talking about how colleagues in India were asking for promotions or pay raises every year. Why? It turned out the colleagues in India had strong expectations from their parents to consistently be progressing in their career, hence they had to show progress in the form of being promoted or having increased salary. What did the company do? They started creating job titles to essentially create the impression of being promoted without much changing in terms of the day to day job. It seems like a kind of inflationary effect on organisation structures, where you solve one issue but potentially create other issues, namely bureaucracy.

deleted 1y ago

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brnt 1y ago

What's a small team at Google?

seanhunter 1y ago

Honestly as an outsider this is the not the most important role for them to have eliminated. I have interacted with google a couple of times in the last few years and the company I work for are considered a priority account that they want to do more business with. In every meeting, they put forward one engineer (who is usually quite capable) and 6 or 7 spreadsheet-trackers who all come from McKinsey or straight out of MBA school and seem to have no function other than to consume the oxygen in the room. Every meeting another one shows up and introduces themselves as being the person in charge of the relationship (this has become a running joke between me and the CTO). At one stage I stopped going to one of the weekly meetings that these people put on my calendar so the guy called me up to ask why. I explained I got no value from the meeting as all the meeting was for was so he could read through a spreadsheet that everyone already had shared so if I was interested (which spoiler I wasn’t) I could just read it for myself and didn’t need a 45min meeting. He was most offended and disappeared soon after to be replaced by some other person who introduced themselves as the head of the relationship. So in short if they get rid of everyone on the client-facing side who describes themselves as head of some relationship they would cut a lot more dead wood than TLMs.

utyop22 1y ago
"seem to have no function other than to consume the oxygen in the room" I have a nice phrase for these people - oxygen thiefs.

amai 1y ago

...and has them replaced by AI?

StopDisinfo910 1y ago

Google is probably doing what everyone else is doing. The entry level managerial positions are being eliminated by pretending the people doing the work are not actually manager and are therefore paid less. It’s reached ridiculous proportions in some companies I have worked for. I have seen transversal project managers and delivery leads in charge of up to 80 persons sometimes with an intermediate level of management actually reporting to them but not directly attached to them be paid as IC. It gets even more funny because some positions in said companies doing a lot less management but occupied by people who suck up a lot are actually considered managerial. Most modern big companies are completely f* up. The only reason we don’t see more disruption is regulatory capture.

iamleppert 1y ago

“I don’t think they have a VEP at Meta by the way,” Cicconi said. This was said in response to having a month sabbatical at Facebook after 5 years. The Google exec seems to think having a "voluntary buyout" program is good enough and makes them competitive. At this point, what is the purpose of Google hosting these town halls? It's a waste of time, just send the employees an email with whatever updated policies have been decided and dispense with the pleasantries.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

> The 35% reduction refers to the number of managers who oversee fewer than three people, according to a person familiar with the matter. Many of those managers stayed with the company as individual contributors So a lot of these people weren't actually managers, but engineers without a manager. But if you do have a "manager" who only oversees one or two other people, that does seem like an unnecessary layer -- unless that "manager" is actually a full-time dev who just happens to have a "manager" title tacked on. The unanswered question is whether they eliminated the _people_ or just eliminated the "manager" _titles_.

fair_enough 1y ago

I don't see how Google employees can stomach all the bureaucracy and internal drama of publicly-traded corporate politics for more than about 2 years before taking their "fuck you" money and retiring. I'm under the impression this is not a popular opinion around these parts, but the barrage of internal-use acronyms for job titles and gleeful posts pedantically explaining their meaning makes working there sound like absolute hell.

zhivecraft 1y ago
To be honest it is. Google HR brand is nothing common with actual day to day bullshit, at least in Core and Cloud orgs.
- fair_enough 1y ago
  I couldn't help noticing you called the day to day stuff "bullshit". Which is worse: the HR bullshit or the day-to-day bullshit in one of the breadwinner teams? From an outsider's perspective, things seem miserable around there but from the sound of it, they're worse than I thought. I've heard the stories of the Not Invented Here syndrome, but to me the worst part of working a company like Google or Microsoft is the fact that they hire thousands of people who lack the work ethic or competence to code as "project managers" and then allow them to have a part in your work without helping in any way. I could not imagine spending 70 hours in a week doing the drudgery of programming, then having to share the credit with someone who was a non-contributor at best and at worst a detriment. I remember the way things used to work: you start by implementing things yourself, and only when the size and scope of your work grows beyond the capabilities of one person do you get to start telling other people to implement your ideas.
  - zhivecraft 1y ago
    Right :) Peers say things degraded after 2022-2023 layoffs+RTOs. Older folks say "google you wanted to work in ended 15 years ago". The org optimizes for control surfaces (calibration, headcount empires, acronym liturgy), not craft. Micromanagement is the product. YMMV

486sx33 1y ago

[dead]

UltraSane 1y ago

Google's job titles feels like military ranks.

selinkocalar 1y ago

Interesting to see Google flattening their org structure. Management overhead is real, especially in engineering organizations. At early-stage companies, every manager hire needs to be justified. Can this person actually multiply the productivity of their team, or are they just adding coordination overhead? The best managers I've worked with were former ICs who understood the technical work deeply. Generic "people managers" rarely add value in technical organizations.