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Comment by CoffeeDregs | Hacker News Reader

This is a big story. I'm both an engineer and a manager (to which engineers will say "management!" and managers will say "developer!"), and I haven't seen this pendulum swing back and forth so much as be ripped in half and pulled in opposite directions. Google's obviously got very smart folks in both engineering and management, so it's going to be very interesting to see how this is handled.

I can't imagine a Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, etc going through this exercise, so I'm seriously rooting for Google. It'd be lovely for this change to produce some real knowledge on how to run a modern, big, high-speed tech company without getting trapped in the argument over engineering-vs-management.

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Actually AFAIK Microsoft is organized in business units (Windows, XBox, etc.)

Right, but even the Windows unit itself is probably at least 7 or 8 layers deep, due to the sheer number of people working on it. With such a massive product, I'm amazed they release it as often as they do, let alone at all.

Many companies are organized in this manner. I don't see what the big deal is, personally.

I think both have their merits, but I think engineers should be the ones building projects/companies, and management should be the ones who run it. I don't think non-technical management should fundamentally be involved in development unless it's a manager who is also an engineer. In a sense, a traditional non-technical manager should be in charge of the monotonous, boring stuff and that only... stuff like QA, ops, marketing, etc... Basically maintenance-mode autopilots.

I'm a big fan of engineers turned manager though, after working with several different projects at my last company. The only problem with that is when their manager isn't an engineer and you end up with the same disconnect that you would normally get at the dev/manager level. It sounds like Google is, in reality, trying to eliminate that disconnect entirely, with managerial engineers the entire way up to CEO.

The problem with this approach is that engineers are going to build things that other engineers like. Add up all the engineers in the world and it's not that much compared with the rest of the global population. A good comment on the original post stated that what Google really needs is to diversify it's workforce. This is the reason Google fails at social.

Sun went through major re-orgs pretty frequently.

I could see something happening like at Yahoo where different groups of people end up developing the same thing, both with different benefits, and have to kill one off.

Doesn't Microsoft do a major reorganization every few years? I thought moving people around was part of their business philosophy.

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