Larry Page's Comeback (2014)
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Bluetooth has traditionally been another disaster zone. The low level APIs for interfacing with hardware shows a distinct lack of care for how the developer experiences things.
And on a meta level, either I'm improving way more than I give myself credit for, but whenever I dive under the hood these days of certain Android libraries, the underlying quality and elegance of design seems to be decreasing over time and questioning how certain PMs let some instances of kludges past their review process that I, who will never, ever pass a Google interview process, would reject completely out of hand if someone put them in a PR to a codebase I managed. I'm noticing a certain amount of increasing Reflection usage bleeding into libraries these days that you would expect at a widget factory who lost the original source code, not a FAANG company inside their own core platform. It betrays either a loss of control of the situation by product managers, or, more likely, teams are increasingly not able to interact across project departments and collaboration is being replaced with increasing inter-team hostility/indifference.
If, for example, finishing projects on the original projected timeline is heavily weighted...you get the ruthless scope cutting you mention. Or, if compensation is tied to team size, you get empire building.
I guess the charitable interpretation is that she wanted to listen to a podcast (or equivalent). The less charitable interpretation is that she didn't value her own contributions.
She may simply have offered to do the task out of kindness to you--not out of a belief in her own inferiority.
Alternatively, perhaps she thinks you wouldn't pay attention to the task and she would.
They did not understand the basics of project management (who does what when and who does need what when) but made pretty slides.
It completely deillusioned me of what kind of company Google must be.
Since often they are not the ones doing the hiring of engineers, they really don't care/have no qualms of the long term engineering needs (both personel/morale, and architecture). True company CEOs have to think about engineering personal needs all the time as recruiting is hard. PM/PO just don't care as they don't have to deal with true consequences of their decissions on the people that actually get the work done. I have seen narcistic PMs completely destroy team morales, and have engineers after engineers jus transfer out their teams.
Also, Google PMs have earned a 'toxic' reputation in the industry. They are just too political. Might be ok for a large company, but they can be poison to smaller ones.
Occasionally I've seen a "product research" role where individuals focus on characterizing the problems customer's face, running user studies, or other analysis. This role provided immense value as it's easily a full-time job just talking to customers and bucketing their pain points.
They can also do incident investigation/reporting, evaluate metrics and other useful responsibilities.
It's an important job and when done well makes a huge difference.
PM's have to have incredibly good 'EI' as they like to call it, it's a skill that is basically unrecognized by 1-dimensional engineers who are (sometimes) apparently so brilliant they cannot even have the self awareness to recognize their toxically inefficient communication abilities, as exemplified over and over in the article.
(Edit: FYI this is a far too common theme in tech, wherein you find people that are legitimately great thinkers, and are recognized as such, but have incredibly poor communications skills and I feel that that the confidence derived from their legitimate brilliance, combined with a hint of power, makes them even more unwilling to grasp the fact.)
I wonder what Google would have been with great organizational leadership?
I guess we can be thankful that their style worked well enough to make Google good at what it is, and that I guess we're all a series of 'peaks and valleys' in terms of skills, but I'll never understand how bizarrely bad some folks are at not being able to grasp organizational, social, systems, leadership, abstract problems that don't map well to engineering style problems. Edit: Though it's a different domain of skills, and often harder to recognize material talent, great marketing teams are worth as least as much as great engineering teams in most situations.
This thread is littered with examples lack of understanding of PM's (and other) roles, to the point wherein it's almost bigotry.
It's understandable that many people don't know what 'marketing' or 'finance' is, but to project their ignorance, and couple it with with moralizing suggests exactly the kind of insufferable arrogance I'm pointing out.
From this thread:
"The value creators (engineering/programming/creative/design/product) people have been pushed aside for the value extractors (finance/managers/marketing/oversight) and now the extractors are creating the product. It is a completely backwards setup that is causing products to suffer."
(This one is wrong well past the point of being offensive)
"After certain critical mass of PMs were achieved, things went only downhill. I"
" I really haven't seen a tech company with a PM role which provided real value."
I started out as an Engineer and often felt this way as well, but having now played a variety of roles, I'm basically embarrassed at my own organizational illiteracy.
It's common in tech and it's embarrassing for the 'job family'.
I worked at companies where project managers had very strong technical background and experience, but I also worked at a company where project managers were only a little technical, but had very strong project management skills. Then there is the other end of the spectrum, where project managers are simply incompetence. They got promoted to become a project manager with almost no knowledge about it and also no willingness to learn it properly and become good at it.
The latter (incompetence PM) is awful for any type of engineering work. And some companies make it even worse by making engineers report directly to those project managers.
The first type (technical project manager) is obviously harder to build, because not many engineers want to become project managers, and not many engineering teams are able to navigate without a good product team in organizations that don't have a solid engineering culture (e.g. traditional companies). So you often find companies with the second type. And even then I think it’s best if there is a clear separation of concerns between product and development teams. A product manager/team that takes care of product concerns but not engineers themselves. While they work with each other, engineers should report directly to a technical lead that understands their efforts and needs.
How do you define those skills?
I would tweak your description and convert the PM role to QC / Support.
If you have ever seen a highly automated dairy farm, cows have everything they need to work on important problems too, but they're cows, hooked up to machines that remove every aspect of what makes them cows other than how they serve the machines they are connected to. Maybe we could use a variation of Neuralink to connect all those cows' brains for distributed processing to solve important problems for us, and when they're done, we eat them, or use them for decorative materials. With a sufficiently random drip of seratonin and dopamine, they'd even be happy, if that were meaningful to them.
I like that the first incarnation of Google was called "BackRub," and they even had masseuses on-site is a pretty unselfconscious and intimate expression of what actuated him. The only thing that separates those cows from people in a mind indexed like that is probably not sufficient to prevent it from collapsing them into indifference. If cows had a version of "don't be evil," from our perspective it would be cow-evil and not even register as something we needed to consider. It's just an entertaining article from the perspective of the writer, but I can't help but suspect what Page's vision looks like now is informed by the omniscience of google's data and AI, and the ethics of that perspective are not the same as those cows.
We may be into the territory of having a Dr. Manhattan problem.
Nothing worse than knowing what a product needs and being overridden by project managers with no experience shipping product or fighting to put in quality or features the users want. Somehow the MBAs and PMs are now seen as product value creators when they are part of the value extraction team, it doesn't and won't work.
Most developers know now that adding to a product or putting in time to get to a more polished post-production model rather than pre-production only can cost you perception due to taking longer, it is a major problem with our industry today.
Imagine the executives of the movie company telling what directors, technical and creative people should and make. Or a novel written by the publisher. It isn't what anyone wants. The value creation needs to go to the value creators AND they need freedom to control their tasks and flows. What happens is people that are capable of shipping products people want, end up in a tasked system where they are given daily/weekly tasks from people that have never shipped. It is frustrating and destroys value.
This is an age old problem highlighted in "How Software Companies Die" but really you could say how creative companies die. Software and technology is closer to art than business in many cases. You can't force creativity into a 3 hour task planned by an outside project manager that doesn't understand what it takes to ship a product themselves. There are some great project managers that do, but they end up just making things or their own company because it is such a unique subset of the overall pool.
> Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.
> “It’s ok! I have great advisors standing on the shore telling me what to do!” they say, and then fall off the board, again and again. The standard cry of the MBA who believes that management is a generic function. Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
Andy Jassy at AWS is a good counter to John Sculley at Apple if we are focusing on outliers and MBAs.
I've found there's often a quiet but strident feeling shared amongst engieneers that we are smarter than everyone else. This leads to us being very impatient with opinions and worldviews we don't agree with or understand. There is more to relationships and business than being clever and being a great engineer. Some of the comments even go as far as to classify the engineers as value creators and the non-engineers as value extractors! How patronising can you get. If finance, marketing, leadership, sales, etc wasn't needed then they wouldn't get hired. They could hold a similarly unbalanced view that engineers are just paid to build a thing, and that the thing is pointless until they convince others to finance its real development or buy it.
I wasn’t expecting to read the whole thing, but I really enjoyed it.
"It was just five years since Page, then a 22-year-old graduate student at Stanford, was struck in the middle of the night with a vision. In it, he somehow managed to download the entire Web and by examining the links between the pages he saw the world’s information in an entirely new way."
Agile happened because using the standard set of pre-Agile tools was inflexible. Replanning happened way too often, and was way too much work. Or, worse, teams tried to stick to a clearly obsolete schedule. This is not to say that Agile, especially as it has morphed into something that is too often a jargon-laden dogma, it an unalloyed good. But it was a relatively primitive time for software project management.
The article says very little about what responsibilities were organized onder project managers. Was it the wrong approach to project management? Was the job description inappropriate? The wrong tools?
That was in 1999. Steve Jobs had returned to Apple by then, but wow, the valley would be a different place if that had happened.
The Story Of Larry Page's Comeback - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7641114 - April 2014 (130 comments)
In my life I have seen project managers getting played for fools over and over. If the project manager can’t asses if something like a time estimate is reasonable people will take advantage. The cost, the timeline and the deliverables will suffer.
Sounds like a different Google indeed. Most complaints I hear about nowadays are that Google incentivizes shipping new features too much and ignores buggy existing features.
Not many companies would be able to survive so much organisational expetimentation.
Pretty sure Larry Page didn't invent space elevators.
One of his rare failure might be Google Plus
He is more of a TechNogging though.
Source: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/11/17227036/flight-spacex-gwynne-...
They haven't walked it back.
> Page set up Android as a separate entity, one that was only nominally a part of Google, and allowed Rubin wide latitude to run it without interference from the parent company.
Ring: a group of people drawn together due to a shared interest or goal, especially one involving illegal or unscrupulous activity. "the police had been investigating the drug ring"
could we maybe be a bit more specific? Is the claim that this was a “prostitution” ring, which would be illegal, though possibly not immoral unless there was coercion? Or was this just a group of people having “sex”, which I believe is still legal in the United States?