Not trying to create a conspiracy theory, but I wonder whether this has any relation to Ian Hickson's departure from Google/Flutter team [1], where he specifically called out some names:
> Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this new reality depressing.
> She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set
She's not alone.
Another exec fired the entire Python team (many of whom were core contributors to the language) to replace them with the lower salaried TypeScript team, which was then restaffed by a new team in an even lower salaried locale.
The lower salaried locale for the python team is Germany no? Which isn't exactly like your tradional outsourcing. I find it hard to believe we won't see more of it in the coming years with how much cheaper engineers are in Europe especially when they are english speaking and go to good universities like Cambridge/Oxford/EPFL/ETH etc...
Yes. This was a weird case and I suspect that there was some internal politicking to enable Munich as the location to rebuild the team. I don't have any inside baseball on this, but pretty much every other case of "blow up the team and rebuild it elsewhere" I've seen in the past three years has been a move to a much lower cost region (India, Mexico, and Poland are big ones). The languages group has a bunch of people in Munich and several leaders there, which I suspect played a role in getting the team to be built in a mid cost region rather than a low cost region.
Still a mess and my understanding is that the AI portions of the company were none too happy given that the bulk of their development is done in python.
Why is it shocking? Big tech has thoroughly embraced layoffs and offshoring as a means to cut costs. Execs don’t care if it causes issues at the lower levels of the company. To them it’s just noise from the rabble. If it does cause an issue they’ll just call their buddies at the other Big Corp and work someplace else.
> Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it.
This was my experience with upper-middle management to VP (sometimes SvP) level at Google. The way they communicate is incomprehensible, it says everything and nothing at the same time – announcements with simultaneous dramatic change and all remains the same – it’s very disorienting. My theory is that its not meant to set direction, or describe a vision, or even goals – rather it converges towards something intended to impress and socially posture against other managers. It’s used as fodder for taking credit during performance review.
One meme I remember is ”you might be a Googler if you cant answer which team you are on in 5 seconds”. The engineers are extremely good (impostor syndrome is widespread), but it feels like they are blindfolded, wandering in different directions. I certainly don’t know how to run a large company. But a good start would be to use plain descriptive language. Evidently, even the corp-speech-whisperers can’t establish a shared reality.
> My theory is that its not meant to set direction, or describe a vision, or even goals – rather it converges towards something intended to impress and socially posture against other managers.
Yes, it's self-preservation behavior. It's a strong indicator that the manager knows they are in a position that provides little to no value, so they need to aggressively preserve it.
Why does a single, non-technical middle manager need authority over multiple PL development teams? It makes no sense. The bare minimum of that position must be to connect technical expertise of the ICs to strategic vision of the C-suite. That is a full-time job, and if it's not being done, there needs to be accountability.
Could it be possible, that overall impact of the decisions is clear to the upper management (but the language that is being used, masks the exploitative behavior/profit maximization). But that feels unlikely, if they just assign people to positions were they are not good fit.
I don’t know about Google but many places I have worked had people who say a lot of things but those words don’t actually mean anything. You listen to them for half hour but you can’t summarize why they said in those 30 minutes, no matter how hard you try. Lots of buzzwords and word salads. It isn’t unique to Google. Reminds me of politicians
People sometimes know where they want to get, often that place can be described with buzzwords. They don't always know how to get there. Clueless managers often don't know how to get there, they might only have an inkling as to what are some of the properties of their desired state.
They will talk about that subset of things, they cannot do anything else for they are not aware of the how, much less the whole picture. Once the teams deliver a state with the desired and the unspecified and undesired properties, the team and the manager get angry.
Thanks for sharing. One of my greatest fears for our industry is that we'll never have a company like early Google again. The company should have changed names when Pichai took the reins because it metamorphised into something unrecognizable. Most people you'll meet who worked for Google worked under his regime.
The company was restructured and become a subsidiary of the newly created Alphabet Inc. just after this, so the company did, in fact, change names at that point!
Let's not pretend that Google pre Pichai was anything special, the rot was already instilled long before he came along. Other than very early days, Google has mostly been a force that corrupts, commoditizes and destroys. Sundar Pichai just made it explicit, a bagman-beancounter far removed from any engineering ethos.
I've often wondered, when people say this, do they mean their direct managers or the management hierarchy in general? If direct manager only, this only makes sense if they have a lot of leeway to run things how they want. For instance, if a company decides to cut 30% of the workforce and more people (naturally) leave afterward, is it really the direct manager that caused them to leave?
I think people leave "the situation" for all kinds of reasons. If you have a really horrible direct manager, that might be why you leave but it certainly isn't universal.
The intent of the statement, at least every time I heard it, was to reflect how the difference between a bad workplace and a good workplace can often be how effective your direct manager is - at shielding their reports from bullshit they shouldn't have to deal with, at not micromanaging while still consistently delivering results, so on and so forth.
Yes, people leave jobs for all sorts of reasons, but your direct manager is the one who can most influence your workplace experience while also having a fundamental power imbalance by definition, and so is often the thing people are fleeing if they leave.
I think this is true in some circumstances but I think people are usually leaving the "situation" (like 90% of the time in my experience). I don't think the statement should be used anymore for this reason.
People are, indeed, almost always leaving the situation.
But at least in my experience, it's still the case in the past few years that every time someone has told me they were "quitting this job", versus "excited about this new job", it was specifically about their direct manager's effects on the situation.
(Sample sizes for any individual small, of course.)
Either way, I still think the saying is useful for intentionally reminding people of how much influence your direct manager can have on your work experience, because I've found a lot of people, particularly new hires, don't appreciate how much your experience can vary across managers.
I don’t understand why this aphorism appeals to people.
I’ve most definitely left bad companies where I’ve had good managers and I know my experience is not unique.
When it gets to the point where people are pointing at executives as the “managers” that they’re leaving, do people just not realize that companies are run by high-level managers?
It’s a vacuous statement that holds some strange appeal for some people, but it’s not particularly insightful nor accurate.
Not at Google, but in a different American company of similar size (not capitalization): the quote about the strategy applies exactly the same, the criticism of middle management is the same. Internally we have an official name for the politics that brought us to that situation, but I cannot write it here because it would be immediately downvoted and flagged; in any case, it is an official policy not to have a strategy, not even to measure results of the projects and, lately, to eliminate the idea of roles and responsibilities and replacing it with "we all need to contribute and jump in as needed".
> Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this new reality depressing.
[1]: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373