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Do you work for one of those companies that hire only 22-year-olds who can answer irrelevant computer science questions on a whiteboard, and then you wonder why it's hard to get engineers excited about business goals rather than endless tinkering with algorithms and languages...?



Age has little to do with it, it's more a combination of maturity, professionalism, intellect and talent. These things are correlated with age, but not as strongly as one might think. I've worked with 22-year old developers who had all of these qualities, and developers with 22 years of professional experience who didn't. It does tend to go the other way though.

Even the best ones probably wouldn't flourish in a flat org though- that's not a knock against the developers, more the unsuitability of most software tasks to such a structure (or lack of it).

On the other hand, I think there's a very strong correlation between people who think they would flourish in a flat org and people who wouldn't do well in one. The only people who might do all right are those who would join a flat org with great skepticism and trepidation, because they would be paranoid enough about things going off the rails that they would obsess over making sure that their own goals are set appropriately as well as the people around them.

If you get rid of managers, essentially everyone becomes a manager of sorts and they need to really embrace the role to make it work.


> If you get rid of managers, essentially everyone becomes a manager of sorts and they need to really embrace the role to make it work.

This. In my years of working in Software, I've dealt with managers, both good and bad. The best ones have without a doubt been those who took care that I had to attend as few meetings as possible, that my requirements for work were met, who were open to genuine conversation about my performance.


In the corporate world, I've worked in both accounting and software development, and what you wrote describes good manager in both fields.

Although I don't have much evidence (yet, but I'm doing some research), I suspect that the qualities that make up good managers (and bad ones) is fairly similar from one field to the next.


Actually my current company is pretty large and it's not like that at all. The technical people are by and large extremely good.

And to your first question I have been through a few interviews with those 22-year-olds who asked about irrelevant CS questions. That's a good sign to avoid the company.


I run my own companies so no, but I know what you mean. I however suspect that this runs deeper than just Google's hiring process:

We're all (technical folk) steeped since we were 12 years old in a culture that says that solving tricky problems in the most elegant way is what gets you love. This way of thinking predates computers by thousands of years. I think this is the root of why you see everything slant towards cool trickery rather than solid engineering and working stuff. There is something of an age factor but only insofar as the more experienced people end up having this way of thinking partially beaten out of them by real life experiences and the benefit of a long time observing the "nons" in the world.




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