Comment by elblanco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elblanco | Hacker News Reader

>Some had already been irritated when “professional” managers had been hired over their teams with reportedly more stock than the early engineers had.

I'd say this was the main reason. The original employees had already proven they could manage and grow the organization from 0->even, and hadn't slowed down expecting to move the company from even->profit.

Now they have "supervisors" who don't know anything about the business or technology, shoved in on top of them, who's only role is to act as liaison between them and the corporate officers.

Bristling at the lack of corporate loyalty shown to the people that made the company happen, those people leave. The calculus is really very simple.

I've seen this pattern happen a number of times, and the usual result is that these new managers show up, make poor decisions (because they don't understand the business) cycle out (taking their stock with them), repeat 4-5 times until a manager shows up who is so inoffensive that the remaining engineers simply end up running the show in the end anyways and the manager just shows up to weekly meetings so she/he can liaise with corporate.

In the meantime, the company stock has diluted as it fled out the door to the past managers, the company lost most of its senior engineering staff, forcing them to promote lower level, less capable staff to senior positions or to hire externally (again people who don't understand the business further exacerbating the vicious cycle).

You are taking the story further then it really needs to go.

There is really no reason to assume that these managers are not a net gain for the company. I dislike the fact that a storyline where managers/business guys are the root of all evil can always find some takers. It's silly.

Changing from a 5 person team to a 50 person team is tricky. Adding hierarchies & middle managers is potentially problematic. Moving from an engineer only company to a company that also has a CFO and an HR guy and such is also tricky.

This is all part of the story. The simple story is dumb. Just as dumb as the spoiled silicon valley rockstar story.

Agreed. It is my understanding that the best companies are led by their original founders (cf. Apple, Google, Oracle) or by people nurtured for years to become their leaders (Microsoft, IBM).

I would put Microsoft in the former group. It was one of the best companies when led by its original founder. Now, not so much.

It was one of the best companies when led by its original founders.

Fixed it for you.:-)

That Paul Allen didn't liked to show up on newspapers doesn't mean he did nothing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Allen says he didn't return to the company after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's in 1983. Surely you and gp didn't mean that MS stopped being one of the best companies in 1983?

I mean it is not only one man who makes the company, specially after 1983.

Depends how you define "best". For a company holding 90% of the world's desktop OS market, it's not doing so bad at all.

I don't think it would be in that position if it had to rely on Ballmer's leadership, without Gates, from the beginning.

And this was precisely my point. Ballmer would never be able to keep Microsoft's position if he wasn't groomed for the position internally, for years.

I think Google (and companies like Google) has learned this lesson well.

As an organization, it appears to be focusing on keeping as flat of an organization as possible. In addition they just simply cut to the chase, and hire middle-managers purely to act as liaisons rather than drivers, and save themselves the couple years of failure they are bound to endure while a new division gets organized "properly" (as in the old way).

This has bad sides too, I've heard from numerous people that, when compared to other organizations, most of the engineers in Google have a very hard time understanding what their managers actually do. Additionally, it also can prevent unified visions from flowing down from the top in as structured a process as you might see in a traditional organization.

But we now have more than a decade to observe companies like Google applying this sort of obvious management philosophy and now have lots of lessons learned we can apply going forward.

I don't know enough about the internal organizational structure at Apple and Oracle, but I'd wager they are much more like the traditional management model than Google's semi-flat structure. Apple in particular is likely a very hierarchical organization (just a guess) due to the necessity in carrying out Jobs' vision.

My favorite corporate structure is that of the Virgin Group. Instead of a single gigantic company with a single figure at the top, there is a plethora of small companies -- startups indeed -- each focusing on its own business and market. I like to think of it as the open source version of corporate culture, with Richard Branson playing the role of a BDFL.

It's a shame more companies don't operate this way. There is such a lure toward empire building in the corporate world that it's difficult for people to see the downsides of the maga-corporation model of organization.

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