> PMs made all the decisions. Engineers (at least at my level) had very little influence.
This is interesting given Google used to have a reputation for being an "engineer led" organization, I guess that's slowly changing over time.
This is interesting given Google used to have a reputation for being an "engineer led" organization, I guess that's slowly changing over time.
One of the very first requirements for a man who is fit
to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he
shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more
nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than
any other type. The man who is mentally alert and
intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to
what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work
of this character.
Most knowledge workers who have the mental capacity to grasp deep technical topics will find the "cross functional relationships and strategies" discussed in garden variety business books a light stroll in the park.
Actually understanding science and manipulating the world is hard. Try to explain to a non techie how a car moves, or how a web request happens. They can never understand it on the required level to fix things.
Now try to explain to an engineer how a bond works, or how industrial strategy works. He can do both his own work and the manager's work.
I sound pretty bitter for a guy who's managed to dodge most of the BS things in large corporations his while career, but that's because I really think this aspect of the world needs fixing.
It seems like just about every human endeavour is encumbered by MBA people who pretend to understand something hard, who get paid at least as well as those people who can both solve the technical and the strategic problems.
This might be more of a problem in the Anglo world. Engineers getting promoted is more common in Europe according to rumor.
The issue I have with bad PMs is the same issue with bad engineers. They can cause so much damage to a product or codebase, especially when they have free reign and an ear from higher management.
I'm pretty sure that being a car mechanic is one of those trades jobs that people are discouraged from pursuing if they're seen as having alternatives.
Also a lot of what comes up on a search for "redneck engineering" is I think not consistent with this assertion.
I always love a classic hacker news take where software engineers are the only people who can understand how things work. It's not like high school dropouts are ever car mechanics.
> Now try to explain to an engineer how a bond works, or how industrial strategy works.
> We were expected to hit precise deadlines on multi-quarter projects (within two weeks), and when that inevitably didn't happen, we had to track all the time we spent on anything in 30 minute increments. It felt very cog-in-the-machine.
It's inertia-led.
I bet most googlers hate ads so it's a big state of cognitive dissonance too.
They lack real-world experience and ability to grasp non-technical concepts.
As a founder, and having worked in multiple startups is hard for me to communicate with their relative worldview. Despite how brilliant they are.
For checkboxes one needs to be constantly in touch with customers, sales, pre-sales, need to be full time demo giver, etc. These are not the job of engineers and even if it is made so, it is setting them and the team/org/company up for failure on both fronts - frontend and backend.
In enterprise applications (which solves for workflows - business, IT etc.) one needs lot of PM thinking for feature identifications, what to prioritize, gathering requirements etc.
In Search defined Google one did not need PMs as requirement is pretty straight forward from feature perspective, but one needs deep engineering and computing science knowledge for making the best search algorithm. Whereas in Cloud IT world the focus shifts more towards product & roadmap planning.
If you're a software or hardware company, ultimately the people who design and build the software / hardware have to design and build the thing, everything else is ancillary to those tasks.
I wonder if there's any "big, established" company where IC engineers have more weight than the PHB types. I'd be genuinely curious if anyone knows of some good examples, I suppose HN would be the place where people might.
It seems like that's one of the natural equilibrating factors that offer some small amount of competitive grace to Davids competing against Goliaths. Google hasn't been David for a long time now, I think.
This isn't a future engineers want either -- I hear complaints about meetings from nearly every engineer I know. The idea that you should have low level knowledge of the system you're working on and high level knowledge of all the cross functional team's responsibilities along with the responsibility for cultivating those relationships is ridiculous.
People say this without having any idea what PMs do.
Do you think the engineer who leads a 1000 man org is not talking to people? I talked to the engineer leading our 500 man org, he talked to a lot of people and wanted their input and tried to understand the whole to make decisions. He had technical expertise so he could talk to low level engineers as well, but also to business people etc.
So it is easy to evaluate companies like this. Did technical people hire business people to do those tasks for them? Or did business people hire technical people to create a product for them? The first is engineering lead, the second is the standard enterprise.
The most common reporting line I've seen (working at tech companies that you would know and recognize immediately) is director -> { sdm, pm-t } where the director is typically promoted from one of those roles. There is an insulation layer between product and engineering, and as levels progress the line between pm-t and sdm blurs significantly.
They no longer code, but they still take part in technical discussions, so being an engineer is absolutely a part of their job.
The idea that (good) engineers are somehow not able to understand cross-functional relationships, business strategies, or don’t know what PMs do, is absurd. You’re digging your own grave there.