
How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management - toby
http://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-management/ar/1
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kevincennis
> “At first,” he says, “the numbers were not encouraging. Even the low-scoring
> managers were doing pretty well. How could we find evidence that better
> management mattered when all managers seemed so similar?” The solution came
> from applying sophisticated multivariate statistical techniques, which
> showed that even “the smallest incremental increases in manager quality were
> quite powerful.”

As someone without a strong statistical background, this really sounds like
"we got data that didn't agree with the point we were trying to make, so we
tried a bunch of different ways to look at it until we found the one that
matched our hypothesis".

Can someone explain to my why my reaction is wrong? I'm sure it probably is.

~~~
asdfologist
What does "I'm sure it probably is" even mean?

~~~
judk
Bayesian credible interval's min value is greater than 50%

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DanielBMarkham
I keep reading these Google stories that appear flawless examples of
exceptional thinking and execution. But heck, at some point, the stories just
wash over without effect. Do they have no problem employees? Management feudal
battles? Studies and organizational change movements that produce nothing
appreciative?

I understand that Google is basically a giant marketing company ran by
engineers who own the web, so I get the fact that there's a lot of creative
spin that goes with anything you're going to see published on the web about
them. But hell, it sure would be interesting to poke around behind the scenes
and see how things really work.

I'm not saying that to disparage this article or work, it's actually quite
impressive. I simply wanted to point out that at some point, a company that
does no evil and always is inventing things along the lines of time machines
and faster-than-light travel every month starts to be a bit much for a reader
to consume. Surely with 40K+ employees and that much money there is some other
story here.

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anoncow
There was a story about Google and sex at the workplace, recently. So we are
seeing both positive and negative articles about Google. While Google would
like to portray itself as something akin to what Toyota was, naysayers would
try to do the opposite.

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boomzilla
This is the article on that topic:

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/09/20/sex_a...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/09/20/sex_and_politics_at_google_it_s_a_game_of_thrones_in_mountain_view.html)

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yuhong
Notice the mention of Vic Gundotra.

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dredmorbius
Mention of his EQ surprised me. He's not exactly what I'd call a high EQ kind
of a guy.

Cookie-licking -- now that I totally get.

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abraxasz
"And as the company grew, the founders soon realized that managers contributed
in many other, important ways—for instance, by communicating strategy, helping
employees prioritize projects, facilitating collaboration, supporting career
development, and ensuring that processes and systems aligned with company
goals"

That's right, but this describes a "support" function. If they were truly
filling the roles in the quotes, managers would not be "bosses", but simply
"colleagues". A better term than manager would be "facilitator". I don't think
anyone would argue that "facilitators" are useless. What engineers tend to
disagree with is the notion of "managers" as "bosses", with significantly
higher salaries, etc..

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nostrademons
Managers at Google generally are much more like "facilitators" than "bosses".

~~~
plinkplonk
Facilitators who (on the average) make a lot more money than and have the
ability to review/reward/promote/fire etc the people they 'facilitate'. That
makes them "bosses" in my book. What distinguishes real 'facilitators' from
bosses is that they don't have any power over the people they facilitate.

How are the Google bosses 'more like facilitators' if the power equations are
unchanged?

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nostrademons
Does this mean that because I don't care about getting promoted or fired, my
manager is not actually my boss? Does it mean that I don't actually (and have
never actually) _have_ a "boss"?

(This is a serious question - I think that there is a solid argument that your
boss has no power over you if you don't actually care about having a job. But
I'm not sure that the majority of HN - most of whom believe you need to have
sold a startup to reach that point - would agree with me.)

~~~
plinkplonk
well that dodges the point made. If you don't care about what your boss thinks
or whether you have a boss or not, you don't have to work at Google where the
bosses are "more like facilitators" .

This is like saying "If I am not afraid of torture or starvation and don't
fear death, what does it matter if I am in a concentration camp? They have no
(real) power over me". This is technically true, but somewhat unimportant in a
discussion over whether concentration camps and torture are evil or not, and
whether "Arbeit macht frei" is a genuine slogan or hypocrisy.

The point made is that "bosses are facilitators" is a bunch of HRSpeak and has
no real meaning, even at Google.At best it is a vague ideal layered over real
differences in power and compensation.

Which is fine of course, thats just the way the world is structured these
days. In the olden days, I suppose the feudal lords said the same things to
the peasants, "we are just here to do the nasty things that you don't want to
do. Please ignore our castles and silks and focus on working your fields, we
are just facilitating your efforts. We are all the Children of God after all"
;-)

What really makes somebody a boss is that they have power to affect your
career and otherwise exert power over you (and a genuine facilitator doesn't
-they have to persuade you to act a certain way). You may have a temperament
to not care about the effects of such power being exerted over you (you may be
indifferent to being promoted or fired for e.g) but then you can be just as
happy at any BigCo,and don't have to bother with Google HR blather about
'bosses being facilitators' etc.

That said (and I don't want to drag this too long, so signing off with this
response), your attitude is a healthy one to adopt, as long as you have(or are
working towards acquiring) the chops to always have choices of jobs etc. I am
sure Peter Norvig, Guido Van Rossum etc don't spend bandwidth worrying about
the points they score in some arbitrary HR metric. Having or acquiring real
power (or choices, which is often the same thing) is always a good strategy.

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jwilliams
My summary of what Google did:

1\. Ask what makes a good manager (the behaviors) 2\. Correlate this with an
outcome (turnover). 3\. Move the needle on other managers. 4\. See result.

This is a decent enough model, but you're working on the predicate that #1 is
actually building a comprehensive model.

These things may be important, but the chance of them being confounded with
other variables is high. For example, you'll find that people that floss are
healthier. Getting people to floss, however, isn't the solution. It's that
people that care enough to floss embody numerous healthy behaviors (and
future/intended behaviors).

This is not to detract from what was done, but an exercise like this needs
multiple loops to normalize. I'd be interested to compare this approach with
just rolling out sound management training that is based on the last 10-20
years of literature.

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mathattack
We've seen a lot of articles on Google about the product side. This is the
first I've seen in a while on their internal management. This is important for
them to nail to avoid becoming the next IBM or Microsoft. (Both did well in
their own ways, but Google aspires to be neither.)

Are there any GOOG alums who would like to comment on the article?

My impression is that data driven HR is a good start, but that it can leave
outliers. I have heard anecdotal stories that things are generally well run,
but you have to please a lot of people to be promoted as a result of the 360
degree feedback loop and general flat structure. Again purely anecdotally I've
heard that there is a lot of email communication required of management, but
this is true of most large tech firms. (Oracle, IBM and HP to name a few)

As an outsider my impression is that it's a great place to hire engineers from
because they're learned the right things. The salespeople aren't as reliably
solid, as they may not have needed to be scrappy.

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csense
The study contains "examples and descriptions of best practices...details
[that] make overarching principles, such as "empowers the team and does not
micromanage," more concrete..."

Their "concrete" example is given by an employee who says, "Early on in my
role, [my manager] asked me to pull together a cross-functional team to
develop a goal-setting process."

I can't think of anything more illustrative of why engineers to be dismissive
of management than strings of abstract buzzwords that conveys little
information, such as "Pull together a cross-functional team to develop a goal-
setting process."

That's where I stopped reading.

~~~
ojbyrne
Every profession has jargon. I'd translate that into plain english as "stick a
product manager and a designer in the same room with a couple of engineers and
make sure that priorities are clearly managed at all times (as opposed to
trying to enforce rigid deadlines from above).

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momo1
'Project Oxygen colead Neal Patel recalls, “We knew the team had to be
careful. Google has high standards of proof, even for what, at other places,
might be considered obvious truths. Simple correlations weren’t going to be
enough. So we actually ended up trying to prove the opposite case—that
managers don’t matter. Luckily, we failed.”'

This almost made me laugh out loud. So, what he's saying is, 'We knew we could
not prove managers matter, so we went ahead and tried to prove managers don't
matter, knowing we would fail."

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Yhippa
I'm sure there's more detailed data for this in Google's implementation of
this but largely this reads to me that this program is more of a way of HR
showing management how effective or ineffective they are. I didn't see a part
where there was large scale opposition to management by engineers and then a
reversal of that thought, proven with data.

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Meltdown
... a lot of googledygook

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mayureshpep
nice

