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Comment by telltruth | Hacker News Reader

This guy is an exec and like all execs he is good for shallow view from 35,000 ft. He isn’t in the field and no one I know who is in the field seem to know even his name. I have zero clue on what is his contribution to the field let alone what kind of actual technical details he knows. As far as I have known these sort of people, they wear suits, memorize buzz words that their reports talk about and take credit of work done by their reports. Such “AI exec” hire is no-op in my book and it isn’t a surprise that Apple has to run PR articles to justify their purchase of a suit.

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Some people on HN seem to constantly despise any manager in a company that is not a technical person. Whether it's a majority or not is hard to tell, but it's a conspicuous group of people for sure looking at upvoted comments of the sort.

The theory seems to be that all these companies work only because of their engineers. Management is just useless. They are just "people with suits, that memorize buzz words take credit for the work of others".

With all such incompetent people in high position, one has to wonder how these companies seem to survive for so long.

Maybe, just maybe, they are not so incompetent and raise to those positions because of merits. Maybe engineering skils are not the only needed ones.

It seems to me that this culture is just based on resentment for the people that are higher in a hierarchy. From this point of view, the only way to feel good is to disparage them and assume they are there only because of the "corruption of the system".

No, my friend. I have lived under and interacted with enough suits at big 5 that I can tell you that if 80% of those people disappear you will see absolutely no change in the bits shipped by that group. How do I know this? Well, I have seen one suit getting replaced by another random suit all the time. There have been suits who never actually tried out the product they supposedly owned and preached to outside world. I am not kidding you. They literally had no account in the system. Most suits had no clue where source code existed for their product and even never had read documentation that their customers had to suffer through.

Their known contribution included setting up exec retreats were people are supposed to tell them about what needs to be done and then they go away with “blessing” the plan that got surfaced after their reports fought it out. Another of their contribution was to do meetings with other suits at customers/partners. Another was to do budgets and when things go red (or pressured to show profits), do hard decisions, aka, throwing 10% of team under the bus in form of layoffs. Their next contribution was to present works of their teams when it got done and credit it to their leadership and vision. I am talking about CVP+ levels, BTW.

It’s easy to identify these suits. Go to the leaf level employees in their group and ask them about actual contributions of their CVPs in their product that made a difference. If they cannot mention anything concrete other than blanket buzz words like “leadership”, “vision” etc (in case they cannot honestly answer) then you know you have a suit at the top.

These people are very different from Jobs, Musk, Zuke, Jenson Huang etc who are absolutely down and dirty at every level, knew more details then any individual employee and had real technical contributions in their product that made significant difference.

> I can tell you that if 80% of those people disappear you will see absolutely no change in the bits shipped by that group. How do I know this? Well, I have seen one suit getting replaced by another random suit all the time

This is a feature of a well run business, you want to be able to change your executive teams without negatively impacting on the rest of the business in the short term.

> These people are very different from Jobs, Musk, Zuke, Jenson Huang etc who are absolutely down and dirty at every level, knew more details then any individual employee and had real technical contributions in their product that made significant difference.

Sure in the early days of the product this is the case, but these are exceptional individuals who have transitioned into executive roles over time. They have spent the time since building up a management culture and organization capable of running a billion dollar company, which is not easy to do, and is more than a full time job.

I think you grossly misunderstand what executives do, both long term and day-to-day. At the end of the day a company is mostly just a group of people, with a set of assets. To grow and evolve beyond the current products you need to cultivate this group into a team that can consistently bring success.

Ok, so if team can work without suit then it was because suit was doing great job. So you are saying we need to pay suit 20 times an engineers salary so he doesn’t have to be there and team keeps producing. I get it now.

Right on - although most execs don't get 20x the comp as an engineer these days.

> if 80% of those people disappear you will see absolutely no change in the bits shipped by that group

For a short to medium time, sure (and I think the better the exec is the longer his team will be able to work successfully without him). In my experience most successful execs build teams that build good products.

Remove the exec and the good team still builds good products, but it usually starts rotting (e.g., good technical people are frequently not good at handling people issues), then snaps as good people leave and what is left cannot build anything anymore.

Most good exec contributions are not visible at the technical level (there are some exceptions as you cite), but they still create an environment where smart engineers find it fun to work productively. It feels like some magic is involved in this -- I do not have this skill, but I have seen it in action a few times. Just my 2c.

Jobs isn't a great example to make because he wasn't an engineer either and he very much "took the credit for the work of others" (as you put it earlier).

However Jobs is a great example of the value of "suits" when you have an exec who is actually bloody good at what they do. I've worked with project managers and CEOs who have been excellent at their job. I've also worked with some who haven't. And some of those who didn't work out was more down wider company politics than their own ability to perform.

You see, you cannot make accusations that all execs are the same pedigree of worthless cannon fodder. In fact many of them are developers and engineers, like ourselves, who have risen through the ranks (either via successful startups like Musk or through the more traditional "hard grafting"). Some are project managers et al who have proven themselves. And yes, some are just useless - but you get good eggs and bad eggs in all industries.

Jobs was a GREAT engineer. He was hired to do electrical circuit work for Nintendo and despite the fact he smelled horribly (because he rarely showered) and wore flip flops, he was still called on by customers to solve their problems reliably. All great managers are deep down in details and know their products inside and out, probably better than any individual engineer. My definition of suits are managers who feels knowing details of their products should be left to engineers and their job is, you know, “managing”. Scully was a classic suit. Jobs wasn’t.

Jobs was hired for a Breakout game for Atari and got Woz to do most of the technical work on that job for him.

"Steve didn't ever code," writes Wozniak. "He wasn't an engineer and he didn't do any original design, but he was technical enough to alter and change and add to other designs."

You're providing the perfect type specimen for what OP was describing...

To try another avenue to convince you: Presumably, Jobs(?), Musk, Page, and Brin were, once upon a time, technologists just like you. It's somewhat certain that at least some of them shared the mindset you're showing.

Considering they ended up hiring lots of managers, it stands to reason they changed their opinion at some point.

I tend to value the opinion of people who have shown the ability to change their mind over those that never have. Add the credentials these people bring, and I'm tempted to accept the idea that managers have something to add to the success of software companies.

I am not against having managers and hierarchy. I am against the idea that one can hire a random suit and that suit doesn’t have to know much about either the sausage or how the sausage is being produced. And all the credit of producing sausage will still be attributed to the suits for their “leadership” and “vision” along with salary worth 20 people who actually put in the work.

You are clearly an example of what I was talking about.

You judge the utility (or lack thereof) of these positions while never having had one yourself. Luckily, it's the top management of a company that choses who these are and not engineers.

It's clear from claims like "if 80% of those people disappeared you would see absolutely no change" that you have no idea what their role is.

When you say "most suits had no clue where source code existed" you just fail to realize that that's good. It's not their job to know this, it's an engineer's job.

You talk about their "known contribution" as if it's a general sentiment, but show no proof of it being other than your personal opinion.

In fact, it's clear from statements like " Another of their contribution was to do meetings with other suits at customers/partners" that you have no idea about how valuable talking to customers is for a company.

And tell me, in case you had to "make hard decisions" like "throwing 10% of team under the bus in form of layoffs" what would you do instead? That's exactly one of the cases where the skills of an engineer are the last a company needs.

DeusExMachina speaks the truth.

Bad leaders can ruin great teams and great leaders can turn around weak teams. I've seen/done it myself. Without fail, when I switch out a weak manager for a better one, the team improves. When groups have no manager they might produce, but usually not well or as well as they could.

Management isn't around because some conspiracy made by managers to perpetuate themselves, but because it works. No effective group of people is truly leaderless.

Pure managers (ie non technical managers) tend to hire other pure managers. They tend to over-amplify role of management vs technical problem solving. They often believe later is just “commodity” while projecting management skills as rare mysterious abilities. It is not an accident that pure managers at CVP+ levels are able to command more compensation than entire team of 20 people. This phenomenon is purely because pure managers keep projecting management as some sacred priesthood. In all teams I have worked I have known people who can easily do CVP job at quarter of the cost and twice the efficiency and technical chops. Despite this you see these inefficient people taking away massive funds. Why do you think there is no conspiracy?

That's bad managers hiring other bad managers. It's not a conspiracy; it's incompetence.

The problem likely goes all the way to the board of directors who should hold the CEO accountable to build a culture that doesn't let bad managers exist in the org (by coaching or removing them).

A lot of companies have this problem, and it's a major dysfunction, but make no mistake, it's :bad: managers you have a problem with, not "pure" ones. I know a ton of great non-tech leaders who do amazing work of leading technical teams because they build the team around that. You get the lead engineer(s) to run the tech leadership while empowering them with autonomy / resources / support and holding them constantly accountable to well defined goals.

Management isn't rocket science, it's just a lot of hard work and discipline. It is its own craft and a very challenging and rewarding one if it suits you.

You are exactly the type I am talking about. For some reason these management types think of themselves as worth 10 engineers bestowed with some mystical powers called “managing” while having little clue about what was supposed to be produced. This is typical MBA culture and interestingly you also fail to enlighten all of us low links about what your role was supposed to be. Also, noticed that I talked about meeting other suits at customers/partners. This is not same as actual customers. Suits typically only meet other suits. Have you seen how badly designed and almost unusable some websites like banks and Fortune 500 are? That’s typical example of suit never using his/her own product, let alone meeting actual customers.

BTW, knowing where your code is and how to build it is important. It tells you basic health about your engineering process. A good technical manager instinctively knows that anyone should be able to build a product or there is something very wrong. A suit will delegate and hope everything is workings out. If you managed sausage factory and if you had no clue where your factory was, that would be odd. Right?

About the “hard decisions”, suits needs to hold them accountable for those results. This could be done either by getting mega salary cuts or even just resigning for producing a massive failure. I have rarely seen suits getting affected when they had to make “hard decisions”.

> And tell me, in case you had to "make hard decisions" like "throwing 10% of team under the bus in form of layoffs" what would you do instead? That's exactly one of the cases where the skills of an engineer are the last a company needs.

Layoffs are an effect of organizational dysfunction. In which case, the responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of management. It’s just that there is a perverse incentive structure in most corporations, so 10% of the team gets laid off to continue to pay for the exorbitant bonuses and lifestyles of management.

Well, most software engineers don't despise managers. Engineers despise suits who don't understand software engineering. Sadly, most suits fall into this category and to make matters worse they turn out to be control freaks. They want to control something that they don't understand and this pisses engineers off. Managing a team of talented software engineers is more art than science. Good luck trying to win the hearts of engineers while being a control freak who doesn't understand what the team is doing.

All the prominent CEOs and execs who stand out are exceptions to this case. They foster strong team building and give complete freedom for the team to execute. They own up to their mistakes. Most of them are not control freaks, but they are detail oriented (Jobs). It's a joy to work with such managers.

That's funny to see the whole range of opinion about management on HN. It varies from this one, the very bottom, the leech living of his team of engineers, to Elon Musk, the engineering genius whose team(s) is acknowledged at best as an afterthought.

The irony being that Musk pushed the original engineers out of Tesla and took credit for their work.

I'm not in "the field" but this article certainly makes him sound like he is involved with machine learning / smart assistants / etc. Is this really a "shallow view from 35,000ft"?

http://fortune.com/2015/10/27/john-giannandrea-google-artifi...

This is classic PR release. If you are a suit (CVP+ levels) at big company, you are entitled to 2-4 PR releases like this. Lowly VPs typically get only 1 PR release per year. Typically the job of PR release is to portray as leader and for that purpose all work done by their underlings including past successes gets attributed to them. Journalists have neck for amplifying such portrayals. Now that you know this, hopefully you can point out such hit jobs in future.

Ok but you haven't answered my question - does he really have a "shallow view from 35,000ft"?

You said "He isn’t in the field and no one I know who is in the field seem to know even his name" but the article I linked to seems to clearly indicate he is in the field - can you reconcile the two?

You also said "I have zero clue on what is his contribution to the field" but the linked article does seem to cover this. Is it wrong?

What contribution are you talking about that is in the article? In the article, he talks about StarTrek and HAL5000. Anyone can do that talk, especially the posers. It’s typical zero-information PR article written by suit, written for suits. People in the field can intelligently talk about details of recent advances, exactly what techniques enabled them, what are the disadvantages, what can be realistically done etc. People in the field typically have written a paper or been part of at least failed experiments with technical contributions. He happened to be suit managing smart speaker project. That’s an administrative job and doesn’t count as being in the field, let alone “AI chief”.

How is this the top comment?

To begin with, it shouldn’t be hard to see that this article is written by Apple PR and then handed over to journalists. This guy was never Google’s AI chief, that person - if there is one - is Jeff Dean. It’s strange to see Apple parading around a suit who basically managed hodge podge of projects at Google and calling him Google’s AI chief. Go ask around anyone who has anything to do with AI and drop his name and you will get blank stares.

Yep PR release, help keep shareholders happy.

However I would argue hiring a 'suit' who was CTO for a reputable knowledge based AI company 8 years ago, and since been in a strategic position during Googles recent progress is more valuable to Apple at this time than a well published researcher.

The mods were asleep.

Agreed but there's also nothing better than good management -- makes a huge difference

Define “good management” as relavent to products requiring creative work. Most frequent definitions I have came across included “good listeners” and “delegators”. Much of these can also be accomplished by a statue of a monkey god.

So find me a company with a statue of a monkey god as its leader?

Even religions have (human) leaders.

My impression is that he's very technical, but his background seems to be in search, not AI.

Perhaps there's AI work in his background that isn't evident just looking at his LinkedIn page.

Perhaps he doesn't have a long-term AI background but has come up to speed since getting AI put on his plate at Google. Or, at least come up to speed sufficiently to be able to distinguish between bullshit and non-bullshit.

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