Comment by rgavuliak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rgavuliak | Hacker News Reader

Google tried to remove Engineering Managers and decided they were a net positive

(https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-man...)

I am an Engineering Manager/Director and my life is quite hectic and not because of busywork. You work with some very brilliant people, but they often fail in conflict resolution. Even if you don't have EMs, you still have upper management and more often then not they're out of touch, here the EM acts as a translation layer that understands both the business and the tech enough to balance these tensions well to make sure the team works well while delivering value for the company. Sometimes you need to deal with other teams with their own agendas.

In essence - if things go well, there's less need for an EM. I had a well running team last year, so much so that my life was quite calm. Then the leadership forced product domain and technology change on us and we lost our tech lead. Even if 90 % of the team stayed the same the dynamics were completely new and I had to help the team navigate an uncertain environment. Things went to normal and suddenly we became responsible for the core of a cross-team project and I am busy pushing against leadership, getting other teams to commit to take the burden off of our core team and other much needed activites. My tech lead couldn't do that while also designing the tech solution so in a way I am helping them do better work.

Interestingly, your article seems to support the CEO's "no managers" policy:

> It’s not uncommon to find engineering managers with 30 direct reports. Flatt says that’s by design, to prevent micromanaging. “There is only so much you can meddle when you have 30 people on your team, so you have to focus on creating the best environment for engineers to make things happen,” he notes. Google gives its rank and file room to make decisions and innovate

OP:

> I recently joined a startup to run an engineering org of about 40 engineers. My title is VP Engineering. However, I have been having lots of ongoing conflict with the CEO (a former engineer) around whether or not I am allowed to have or hire any dedicated engineering managers

So Google, by design, had some managers with 30 direct reports. And they thought that went well. Meanwhile the above CEO wants the VP-engineering to manage 40 direct reports. The numbers are slightly different but they are in the same ballpark.

I find the OP's response not very convincing. The above CEO isn't trying to build a no-hierarchy org. He wants his tech-leads to also double-up as mini-managers, with dedicated managers only at the VP/director level. I personally know of at least 1 other very successful company with a similar policy.

The great thing with startups is that they are a low-risk avenue for experimenting with new ideas. Including new organizational-cultures. If Google and other early pioneers hadn't experimented with cultural changes, we would still be working in suits and drab gray offices. The CEO could have done a better job of explaining his vision to the VP before they joined the company. But besides that, I'm glad there are startups out there experimenting with radically new ways of working.

I'm not sure why you think having 30 direct reports at Google and 40 direct reports at a startup are "slightly different". They are very different. An organization as large and mature as 2013 Google has far more support resources and informal management available to employees than a startup does. And adding ten people to your reporting chain is a lot.

The greatest value an engineering manager can provide is to run interference with the other managers; to protect their team from outside interruptions, changes and demands.

The best engineering managers can push back against changes with specific estimates of how much the changes will increase the budget and delay the deadline.

Of course, some changes are inevitable. But core business doesn't change that fast. It is the vanity of other managers that often introduces demands with no underlying benefit to the business.

The book Trillion Dollar Coach ( written by Eric Schmidt and other ex-Google leadership) has a first hand account of how they went from a philosophy of few managers to more. Surprisingly the debate was settled by impromptu interviews with ICs who said they wanted more managers to help make decisions.

Managers can bring value from multiple aspects, one being faster decision making by shifting away from decisions through consensus. What Amazon calls disagree and commit.

If you go back even further, the no manager philosophy traces to Steve Jobs and his "It's better to be a pirate than in the Navy" quote. With the idea that pirates self organize and are a stronger team. Works great in a skunkworks department, where Jobs personally selected pirates. Falls apart at scale.

As part of non-IT management I'm culpable of last-minute changes in business strategy / tactics. Easy to disparage (How can strategy change last-minute? It's like starting with soccer, but ending with rugby.), but market circumstances can change in an instant. A few key customers expecting new and custom specs and possibly an entrant willing to offer those specs, and whoops there goes predictable management based on strategy / tactics / operations.

The thing EM adds for me is agility (small a). Our engineers work Agile (quite happy with it), but they are human. They (as a group) have an overarching goal in mind (to reach X now, Y later, to keep Z in check, but replace O around then and then). Management can undermine that medium term feeling of being in control. That leads to losses in confidence and commitment. EM helps bridge that gap. In the end it all comes down to getting the Why across emphatically.

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