Day in the Life of a Google Manager | Hacker News Reader

Day in the Life of a Google Manager

matt-welsh.blogspot.com

179 pointsNimi87 comments

My first manager at Google (and the first in my career) had 2 young kids, around 5 and 7 respectively.

He left the office every day at 6:30 sharp and, like clockwork, would answer emails and code reviews starting at 10. Eventually we learned to time our emails and code reviews according to this clock.

The consistency of the timing was remarkable; our favorite theory was that was his kid's bedtime. I guess in effect, he was putting two sets of kids to bed each night :).

If they're like my kids (6, 2, and 2): 10 isn't their bedtime...it's when I've finished dinner cleanup after their bedtime and can get on my computer to finish up tasks for the day.

My 2 year old is usually sound asleep by 9, and after some cleanup I have some free hours to catch up on work. Sometimes I can't help it if it's something interesting, and makes me feel better about only spending some 7-8 hours at the office. I escaped from academia too, where I got to having anxiety about every single minute not spent working, and now am still feeling the aftereffects.

I have a similar schedule (except I leave earlier to pick up my son). My team also knows my "time window" well :)

Kind of an interesting full circle. I remember reading his "why I'm leaving Harvard for Google" post a while back and If memory serves it was because he was doing to many managerial type things that he wasn't thrilled about yet he finds himself in a similar position again a few years later. It would be interesting to hear what he thinks of his current responsibilities compared to the teaching job he left.

It's probably the case that he could've stuck with being an individual contributor. I don't know about Google but the tech shop I work for has paths explicitly for the introverted engineer types who don't care for the drudgery of managing people. This is invariably a lot harder in academia, as getting to tenure pretty much requires one to act as a startup founder-- do all the business dealing, run a team, get funding, etc.

Given that Matt did get tenure he clearly is really good at such managerial roles, and probably couldn't help but step up. I bet Google leadership try very hard to get people to do management--it's not easy, on the contrary engineers don't like it and it's a fight to get the good ones to step up. I would bet too that the managerial type things at Google are a lot more fun than the academic ones.

I don't think it was a teaching job...really low teaching loads at Harvard. More of a research job.

That's a fair point. It's true my job has shifted much more towards being like a professor than being an individual contributor SWE. Still, lots of differences with academic life: Far lower overhead, far less administrative work, much greater assurance of success (not being subject to peer review for everything), etc. So overall more satisfying although the day-to-day schedule might look roughly the same.

> Despite this, I still do not have the faintest clue how Bitcoin works.

Oh thank god. Not about bitcoin specifically but it feels the whole world has managed to find the time to do a course on FRP, brush up on SEO, configure a Hadoop cluster, grok Haskell monads and still work out what a Mocachino is.

Glad to know mortals still exist.

"8:00pm - Freedom! I usually spend some time in the evenings catching up on email" - I guess Google managers have a slightly different view of freedom from work than I do.

Sometimes just reading mindless things at the end of the day is the perfect way to end it.

I find myself using the evenings to catch up on email, because I can take my time and do it in between other things. I'm sure once family life becomes more prevelant I'll change my tune.

I do this too, some nights (and I have young children). It's a good time to reflect on trickier emails with no time pressure. Of course sometimes I blow work off completely and hang out with the mrs, or get some gaming time. I'm very cautious about burnout, having ridden that line for the last few years pretty hard.

Freedom from your job, commute and sorting out your kids by 8pm seems like a good deal for most working dads

Is catching up on your work email after 8pm really freedom from your job?

The text starts "Freedom!", meaning that he can do whatever it is that he wants. That he chooses to engage in work emails doesn't make it any less free, IMO.

I love my (non-Google) job and love my family. So, I'm happy on Fridays when focus changes to family, but I also often love Sunday evenings when focus turns back towards work.

Not everyone has a dreadful, barely tolerable job...

Having boundaries does not mean your job is barely tolerable. Nor does a lack of boundaries mean you are better at your job or appreciate it more.

> I guess Google managers have a slightly different view of freedom from work than I do

After an evening of chasing kids around the house to get them to eat, wash and sleep, email does feel like freedom. Especially if you like your job. Also, not all email is alike. Usually no one expects you to answer important email in the evening, so you can quietly catch up on stuff you decided to leave out during the day, some mailing lists, etc. It's kinda like reading HN, just more productive.

SWE in MTV: I get up early (~6am) and try to get to the office by 6:30am, as the time before 9am is the only time my severely over-crowded open office is quiet enough to code. Most days I have 1-2 meetings. I generally leave around 4pm, pick my son up from school, make dinner & then catch up on email after 8:30, when my son goes to bed.

All in all, it is very relaxing compared to my last job. I was full time remote, and probably worked 80 hours a week. I have a much better work/life balance now, as I generally leave my work at the office.

9.5hrs per day in office, plus evening at home?

spending 9.5 hours at work doesn't mean they were actually working for the whole 9.5 hours. There are onsite gyms, cafes, author appearances, clubs for various interests, running errands, etc. Going to the gym in particular is a big part of a lot of people's workday.

The evening stuff is nearly always just minimal email check that seldom takes more than 10 minutes. At my last job (where I was full time remote), my schedule was working 6am-4pm working, taking a break to spend time with my family, then real work from 8pm-midnight. This is a huge improvement.

Not all that 9.5 hours on campus is working time. I generally take a break for breakfast & lunch, hit the gym a few times a week, and try to spend an hour or two a week on fun, non work related things (like author talks).

While that doesn't seem like a lot of hours, the thing that struck me was I didn't see a single thing in his actual day (other than maybe a 10 minute bike ride, or reading a book at night) that I'd personally enjoy doing. Yet, he seems perfectly happy -- good for him.

People really have totally different preferences. It's more striking when laid out like that.

Yes, I felt much the same. The positive reactions to this are really surprising to me, but as you say, different strokes.

I really enjoyed this article. The grass is always greener, and I get that, but man that sounds like a great way to spend your day! Personally, my daily grind is aimed at one day having a daily grind like this.

I loved the emphasis on family and balance. Timely article for me, I guess.

I worked at the Google office in London as an SRE. I arrived their via acquisition. Google was a leisurely existence in comparison to the startup world. I could easily achieve nothing if only by just enjoying the endless perks. In the early days I had a lot to prove and pulled double duty by trying to stay awake in multiple time zones to get things done quickly. In the end being in my 20s I felt like I was losing my edge being there and had to go back to the startup world. Maybe one day I'll return when I have a wife and kids.

So why does Google need a PhD to be a manager? Or is everyone there a PhD? Seems like a waste of all that education.

OP here. Lots of people at Google have PhDs. Most do not. My role is actually a Tech Lead Manager, which is far more technical than a typical manager position, and indeed I am on the Software Engineer ladder. I would say about 80% of my time is spent on technical things (writing code, design docs, evaluating designs, etc.) and only about 20% on "manager" activities like doing performance reviews, hiring, and the like. More here: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2013/04/running-software-team...

As far as "wasting education" is concerned, I've blogged extensively about the differences between doing applied research in industry and doing that kind of work in academia or in a more pure research setting, see for example http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvar...

I find that applying my skills as a systems and networking researcher in an industry setting, where I have the chance to develop and launch real products, is far more satisfying than just writing academic papers. But this is of course not for everyone.

Reminds me of http://strikemag.org/fuck-your-hard-work/

It reminded me of the Puritan/Protestant work ethic. Mostly found in North America, the idea is that only by working hard and diligently will a person achieve the status of Good Person and get good things in this life (and if you were religious, the next life). One can compare and contrast this cultural idea about work with ideas about work in other countries, especially other Christian ones.

I'm amazed at the number of people in this thread who consistently work overtime, but even more amazed by the people who seem to think that working 9-to-5 is a bad thing, and who wants to work more.

I work for an "extremely" progressive company in the valley, and I have three whole weeks of paid vacation per year, and I'm chafing at that, because I'm used to having six weeks of paid vacation per year.

I will never understand the american work ethic.

Is it common where you're from for people to take all six weeks? That's almost one week out of every eight spent on vacation. (Don't get me wrong, that sounds amazing...)

It's common in Western Europe.I get 5 weeks holiday plus 8 public holidays. I sometimes don't take a day or two but will then take a day or two extra the next year..

Yes, of course! Why wouldn't you take your vacation? It's in your employment contract! Not taking your vacation is exatly like not taking all of your salary.

In addition, you have the legal right to take four consecutive weeks of vacation in the summer, but you might not get to choose exactly when if you insist on four weeks, depending on scheduling for your work. If you're a blue-collar worker, you typically get July off, so the entire manufacturing industry shuts down simultaneously.

From the fringes - how typical is a 8:45am - 4pm (3 days a week anyways) schedule for HN googlers?

I'd really love to get an answer to this too. That work-life balance is pretty incredible. I honestly thought it didn't exist in a major tech company.

Matt, your schedule looks so much better than mine! :-)

Yup, that's my experience. My role has more travel/entertaining so there are some late nights but they usually have steaks in them :D

Depends on what you do and also where you are. I'm in a European office, and due to the fact I deal mainly with US-based folks, I usually start my day at 12pm and end at 6-8pm depending on workload.

Virtually everything about your experience at Google will depend on your manager.

I'm another Googler out of the Seattle office (individual contributor on Compute Engine) -- I work roughly a 9am - 5pm schedule, sticking to the ~40 hours/week pretty religiously. I will occasionally triage email outside the office from my phone, but I almost never respond to it. My laptop by and large doesn't leave the bag it came home in. I cannot for the life of me ditch the habit of actually taking it home most days, though.

How does your team scope out and schedule work? For us, we do two week sprints and then have a few hard launch dates a year. It's often hard for us to finish all work we commit to without working a bit of OT.

I've always wondered how google manages this process.

Varies a lot between teams, even between individual teams in the same organization. Though the teams I was on were pretty good about cutting things if it was clear work wasn't going to all get done.

Google is such a big company you will find huge variety between teams. I have not personally worked on a team at Google that expected overtime (all of mine chose to cut or scale back features rather than increase hours when things got tight), but I have heard of others who have.

But how do you manage scope and deliverables on a team that doesn't occasionally require overtime?

You ship later or you scale back the scope to something manageable.

Do you work at google?

Yes. As I mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8938244, I'm an engineer on Google Compute Engine.

I talked about how my team at Google, specifically, handles this in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8941915

Thank you for taking the time to write that up. Now I have so many questions :)

Make more accurate (lower) commitments.

Others have answered this reasonably (namely that Google has no one way to manage this process and it's really up to individual teams to self organize as works best for them), but here's probably more text than you wanted about specifically how my team handles it.

We have more or less a rolling set of goals/projects and individuals who own those. As projects move from in progress to something we're willing to attach the word 'done' to, the folks working on them either pick up the next best thing on the list (that is, the next thing on the list for which they're the best suited person to own it) or they find another project where the owner is looking for some help and pitch in. Engineers are mostly expected to self-allocate based on what we understand to be really super important rather than simply really important.

The projects are sometimes defined internally ("Hey guys, wouldn't it be neat if...") and sometimes externally; rarely do they have hard ship dates associated with them[0]. Additionally, individual components have moderately well defined ownership, although this can shift over time as people's interests change (for example, I currently own the virtual NIC presented to GCE guests, so I tend to end up on networking projects).

My experience is that (for us) this works fairly well. From time to time someone puts on their manager hat (someone who actually has direct reports, that is) and asks people to shuffle around a bit. My experience with this workflow has been uniformly happier than my time (prior to Google) working with sprints, story points, and rigid deadlines that always slipped anyway.

Again, this is not necessarily indicative of how Google works in general, and your mileage may vary. Also, we're hiring :D

[0]: There are targets to help with prioritization and dependency tracking, though.

SRE here. If you can handle your work nobody cares how much you are in the office. At all. However, unless you are insanely organized you won't be able to do this every single week--most successful googlers have several projects going on at once and there will be some times when you need to work hard on more than one.

I seem to have more than one project going at once and assume I am doing something wrong - lack of focus or some such.

It's interesting to hear this - can you expand?

It's common at Google to have a few projects cooking that you move between. One reason for this (though I doubt it's the sole reason) probably has to do with the mandatory peer review process for all code, which can cause delays in getting your code submitted if your reviewer's schedule doesn't line up well with your own. Instead of introducing a bubble into your pipeline when that happens, it's nice to have a side project you can hack on for a little while until you get your code review feedback.

How are deadlines managed in that environment? Sprint ends or release dates or just "we will do it by Tuesday" all conspire against peer review delays.

Is the frustration level a constant problem if reviews can take ... X longer than thought?

Well, you can always assign a different reviewer if your initial choice is taking too long. I usually try to check with my teammates to see who has time for a review before sending them my code, at least if it's something that I want to get submitted quickly. That ensures that I pick someone who will look at it sooner rather than later. Sometimes the specifics of the process require someone who is not on your immediate team to give their approval, in which case delays are more likely.

I'm an SRE, which means most of the code I write isn't directly user-facing, and thus isn't normally subject to hard external launch deadlines. That means I'm rarely rushing to push my changes through on a tight schedule. If there's a production emergency and I need to make an urgent change to avoid or mitigate an outage, there are escape hatches at our disposal to temporarily circumvent the code review system when no one is immediately available to do a review, but the need for that is pretty infrequent.

I rarely find it frustrating. On the contrary, I really appreciate Google's emphasis on code quality, even though it does come at the cost of some agility. I used to work at a company where the implementation of code reviews was generally resisted, and though we did get new code out the door faster, we ended up with some real maintenance nightmares as a result.

Artificial deadlines are not compatible with quality assurance, so the solution is... drop the artificial deadlines.

Yes :-) agreed!

You can self-review. That's how people solve the problem.

You mean TBR? It's never been more than an emergency thing where I used to work. I'd be curious to know which part of Google you are/were in.

No, not TBR. I was referring to the fact that you can +2 your own CL, which allows it to be merged. Officially this is an "emergency" feature, as you say, but a dirty secret is that it's used routinely. I encountered it in both Android and Chrome.

I've seen lots of self-+2s under the following circumstances:

1. You are the only engineer on your team, or all other engineers on your team are out for an extended period of time.

2. All other engineers have very different skillsets, and are not capable of doing effective review. Think Rails engineer attempting to review a touchpad firmware fix.

3. You have a hard deadline (e.g. product demo or factory build) and you're desperately trying to get as much working as you can. You may even be in a location where coordination is difficult and Internet access is poor.

For SWEs working on, say, web services, you probably have at least a medium-sized team (4+ engineers) and a week's slip is no big deal. But not all software is like that at Google.

I'm not actually sure this works in... well, not Android and Chrome. I can TBR, but as far as I know I can't self-LGTM (and certainly not self-Approve).

Why not start working on the next feature while the previous one is in review?

I'm up by 6a, in the office by 7:30a, leave the office by ~5p and home by ~6p most days. I'm an SRE Manager.

Google Product Manager here. I get on the bus about 8:30 and start working. In Mountain View (where meetings commence) by 10a. Usually pretty solid w/ meetings from 10-4. Get on a 4 or 4:30 bus and work again (email, etc) until I get off at 5:30 or 6.

Probably 2-3 days a week I put in an hour (or two, rarely 3) after the kids are in bed.

SWE in MTV - I'm in at 9:00am, out at 4:00pm 3 days a week. 2 hours on the bus, I might get an hour of work done. Once a week I do 10:30am to 7:00pm (team meeting and game night - dinner on campus). About once a week I do 10:30am to 4:00pm. I agree with the post author - by 4pm I'm pretty fried and useless anyways.

I'm a software engineer at Google in Seattle. I try to get in by 8:30 but sometimes it's closer to 8:00. I leave between 5:30 and 6:00 depending on when I got in. The office empties out pretty quickly in the evenings.

I almost never work longer than that. (I honestly wish I could sometimes. I end up having to interrupt myself in the middle of things to leave on time, but such is life when you have kids.)

If he's also doing a bit of email in the evenings, leaving at 4:00 doesn't seem unreasonable. I've never seen or heard anyone fret about work hours at the office. My experience has been that the company is very results oriented.

(This is still hard for me to adjust to coming from EA where I worked a lot of hours and company culture, unintentionally or not, placed a lot of emphasis on how long you kept your seat warm.)

> I almost never work longer than that. (I honestly wish I could sometimes.

But why? You won't produce more, you won't earn more, you won't learn more?

All three of those statements are false.

If you're "in the groove" so to speak with coding, continuing work could be much more productive. At the times he wishes to work later, his additional work could be dozens of times better than a typical day. In contrast, coming back to code you were in the middle of a day later can have an hour of delays as you work just to get back to the state of understanding you had before.

In this way he will produce more. Producing more sometimes leads to earn more (that one's not as definite). Learning more... well, the more projects you complete the more you get to do; the more chances to learn.

This isn't to say that having a fixed end time is bad, just that your statement is false.

The statement isn't necessarily false. You didn't show how the statement is false.

More time spent staring at a text editor (or even spent pounding on a keyboard) does not mean that you produce more. Maybe if your production metric is characters typed you produce more, but in terms of usable features there is going to be a point of negative returns on time spent.

I think he means that when you are in a really good groove, you can be way more productive (and happy to keep working). I don't know about anyone else, but I can definitely relate. This is 100% about your state of mind. Happy code comes from a happy coder :)

I'm definitely more productive if I can park tasks when I reach a natural stopping point and not have to abort right when I'm in the middle of my flow.

I don't at all think my long term productivity increases if I work more than 40 hours a week, but I think it would increase if I could be more flexible (just +/- an hour or two a day) about when those 40 hours happen.

I get in between 7-8 and leave between 3-7 depending how productive I am feeling.

I'm nowhere close, roughly 10:30 to 7:45. But judging from e-mail and other activity, I think half my team is shifted about two hours earlier.

Ex-Googler here, formerly a SWE in Mountain View. My hours were highly irregular - the shortest day I worked involved getting in at 4:30, out at 7:30 (to be fair, I was stuck at the DMV) and the longest involved getting in around 10:00 AM and out at 2:00 AM the next morning. Average was probably about 10:45 - 7:30, sometimes time-shifted to be more like 1:30 - 10:00. 8-9 hour days were fairly typical, and it was only at crunch times that it would go up to 14 hour days and weekends.

My role was also one that was pretty amenable to sprints of intensive working followed by periods of rest. I did a bunch of prototyping and working on high-profile, tight-deadline projects, and there was naturally a bunch of downtime in between them.

I'm a manager (for ~50 people), and my schedule is close to Matt's, without the kids.

I don't always go in "that early" (normal people would slap me if i didn't put that in quotes), but i'm completely responsive on email/IM/etc by about 8:30.

The main difference from Matt is that when I drive (i bring my dog in, and it's not safe to bike with her on shoreline), if I don't get in before 9, IMHO, it's essentially not worth driving in until ~10am.

You'll just waste the time sitting on shoreline.

Biking, yeah, it's always 10 minute for me.

Left Google about a year and a half ago; leaving at 4pm is pretty unusual from the folks I worked with, though I had a couple of team members who would have 'pick up kids from school' blocked out on their calendar, and taking a longish break midday or in the afternoon was totally fine if you didn't have any meetings. Most people I know tended to come in to get the tail end of breakfast, so 9/9:30, and often stay for dinner (6:30). I had a colleague who did 6am-4pm or so to avoid traffic, though, and another who wouldn't come in until about 4pm for the same reason.

It's difficult to work with folks with 'unconventional' schedules if they are involved in cross-functional or managerial stuff. Fine if you're an individual contributor, but if you need to get a few folks in a room together frequently (project leads, etc) and their working hours have zero overlap, someone's going to get grumpy. I appreciate flexibility in schedule, don't get me wrong, but I also appreciate a bit of self-awareness :)

You could consider people with "unconventional" schedules to be similar to people in different timezone :)

Yeah, you basically end up treating them that way, but with a low-level amount of annoyance since they should be more available during standard hours. Depending on the person and the role, it can be ok to deal with though -- I'm not totally against the idea of working whenever is most convenient for you, it's just caused me personal frustration when trying to PM a team with multiple folks with differing offbeat schedules.

reading the comments of some of the Googlers here really makes me regret declining my offer :/ When the hell did Google become some 9-5 gig?

You're only hearing from the 9-5ers. The rest are still at their desks working :-) It's only 7:30PM in the Bay Area.

Most HN comments are written from work.

Once a company has more than a thousand employees, it automatically becomes a company where most employees work from 9-5. Google is no exception.

Working consistently longer hours has been shown to be counter productive, in every study I'm aware of. This has also been born out in my role as an engineer and technical team lead managing other engineers and coders numerous times. I doubt Google needs to be informed of this!

You'll note that there's approximately zero 'goofing off' time in his schedule, he's either working productively, or not present at work. This is a good way to be productive and maintain sanity.

So, maybe a naive question, why does a manager need a pager?

He's a Tech Lead Manager, or TLM, which means he's an engineer who also manages the team he's a part of. In some cases, dev teams have SRE counterparts who take the pager responsibilities, among other things. But not all services at Google have SRE support, and for those that don't, the developers themselves are usually on call. That includes the dev team's TL, or TLM, as the case may be.

Well, I wrote a large chunk of the system and am still on the pager rotation along with the rest of the eng team. At some point we'll hand off pager duty to the SRE team.

That's not a lot of hours!

Oh wow, Mark Zuckerberg is his student.

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