Google's five mistakes in engineering management
Michael Schroepfer (Michael Schroepfer, vice president of Facebook development, in the past, vice president of development of Mozilla) read tips on the survival of a programmer at Google and decided to briefly express his opinion on the main mistakes of this engineering management company.
First of all, he says, important points should be noted. Google is an incredibly successful company. She invented and launched into production many important computer science concepts.
With 1,500 employees, Google had more flexibility and less bureaucracy than most startups with 200 people. With any size, Google was the best place to work among companies in its class. With the current size, Google is still a more attractive place to work than Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and many other well-known companies. This is what makes management mistakes more visible.
This list of errors does not claim to be complete, comprehensive, and even to highlight the main errors.
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1. Training of leading programmers (Tech Lead) and managers.
Team building trainings in the form of meetings with colleagues do not develop leadership skills at all. Lead programmers and managers need to establish contacts with subordinates (for example, have lunch with them at least once a week), contact each 1: 1 at least once every two weeks. It happens that employees have not seen their direct management for three months. Some well-known leading programmers only work at night and never meet with their team.
It is necessary to separate team building from management training and conduct the latter within the company, rather than use the services of third-party companies. Management trainings should be conducted by top-level managers, not people from HR. Costly training is not required.
2. Incentives for leading programmers.
Leading programmers still regard themselves as ordinary employees, this leads to vicious practice: they take away the most interesting work for themselves; provide a negative view for team members to look at themselves in comparison with them; do not pay attention to the needs and needs of employees; in extreme cases, it leads to confrontation between team members and leading programmers.
Good lead programmers (who take ungrateful areas of work for themselves and give important projects to the team to help them develop) clearly stand out when analyzing the quality of the teams and choosing the best employees suitable for promotion.
A reward system for leading programmers is actively provoking bad behavior.
3. Approval, recognition.
Approval and recognition of employee actions is quite rare, although it is even more important than monetary compensation. Employees want their work to be approved by colleagues, and secondly they are taking care of the bonus. Sometimes the bonus is so small that people say: it would be better for the manager to meet and talk to me about what a good job I have done, and then the amount of the promotion would not be important.
4. Recruitment.
At the level of top management is considered a critical task. Until 2005, it was not tied to the employee reward system. After that, they began to register who and how many conducted interviews about hiring, but only this one parameter, nothing else is being tracked.
The status of “active interviewer” is received by an employee with a score of 0.1 (on a scale from -1 to 4), and he can receive additional bonuses of up to $ 10,000 or more. This status is a mistake.
Since the goals of a specific group of developers do not coincide with the goals of senior management recruitment, all managers ignore this status, which causes even more cynicism than if it had not existed at all.
Here it must be said that interviewing is a separate skill, and not everyone has it. If active interviewing negatively affects someone's productivity, then you need to take measures: either to reduce the number of interviews, or to include them in the list of immediate duties of the employee.
It is necessary to provide statistics on the average number of interviews. It is necessary to calculate employees who do not have to do this at all: either conduct trainings with them, or directly release from this work.
5. Enhancement.
Raises involved a special committee, not directly related to the work. As a result, they evaluate the brightest, loudest projects and underestimate the routine hard work, and the employee’s “cultural” contribution is ignored.
They refuse to promote employees who constantly "exceed expectations." Theoretically, this is a competent technique, but everyone - leading programmers, managers and ordinary employees - have already learned how to deceive the system.
Those who have not learned can suffer from it. One very effective and hardworking programmer quit after being held for six years in a position where he is so effective.
Recommendations from higher-level employees are revalued. Recommendations from lower-level employees are often ignored or underestimated. As a result, many seek to work with developers of the highest rank. There are projects that are not bright enough on their own, so that you never get an opportunity to improve, no matter how well you do it.
At the same time, top-level programmers see that everyone wants to work with them and everyone wants to receive recommendations from them.
Findings.
Promotions are very important. They greatly affect the work of the company. But in many cases, no better than too little encouragement.
It is necessary to carefully avoid conflicts between rewards and goals. If it is impossible to avoid conflicts, you should at least make sure that the correct behavior is not penalized, and the antisocial is not encouraged.
Many important things are clearly visible on the lower levels of the company, but invisible to management. Managers must manage personally and physically be close to employees, and not rely only on polls. A survey of programmers in 2003–2004 showed that they called the “lack of managers” the main problem. Ironically, they considered a solution to this problem undesirable.
First of all, he says, important points should be noted. Google is an incredibly successful company. She invented and launched into production many important computer science concepts.
With 1,500 employees, Google had more flexibility and less bureaucracy than most startups with 200 people. With any size, Google was the best place to work among companies in its class. With the current size, Google is still a more attractive place to work than Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and many other well-known companies. This is what makes management mistakes more visible.
This list of errors does not claim to be complete, comprehensive, and even to highlight the main errors.
')
1. Training of leading programmers (Tech Lead) and managers.
Team building trainings in the form of meetings with colleagues do not develop leadership skills at all. Lead programmers and managers need to establish contacts with subordinates (for example, have lunch with them at least once a week), contact each 1: 1 at least once every two weeks. It happens that employees have not seen their direct management for three months. Some well-known leading programmers only work at night and never meet with their team.
It is necessary to separate team building from management training and conduct the latter within the company, rather than use the services of third-party companies. Management trainings should be conducted by top-level managers, not people from HR. Costly training is not required.
2. Incentives for leading programmers.
Leading programmers still regard themselves as ordinary employees, this leads to vicious practice: they take away the most interesting work for themselves; provide a negative view for team members to look at themselves in comparison with them; do not pay attention to the needs and needs of employees; in extreme cases, it leads to confrontation between team members and leading programmers.
Good lead programmers (who take ungrateful areas of work for themselves and give important projects to the team to help them develop) clearly stand out when analyzing the quality of the teams and choosing the best employees suitable for promotion.
A reward system for leading programmers is actively provoking bad behavior.
3. Approval, recognition.
Approval and recognition of employee actions is quite rare, although it is even more important than monetary compensation. Employees want their work to be approved by colleagues, and secondly they are taking care of the bonus. Sometimes the bonus is so small that people say: it would be better for the manager to meet and talk to me about what a good job I have done, and then the amount of the promotion would not be important.
4. Recruitment.
At the level of top management is considered a critical task. Until 2005, it was not tied to the employee reward system. After that, they began to register who and how many conducted interviews about hiring, but only this one parameter, nothing else is being tracked.
The status of “active interviewer” is received by an employee with a score of 0.1 (on a scale from -1 to 4), and he can receive additional bonuses of up to $ 10,000 or more. This status is a mistake.
Since the goals of a specific group of developers do not coincide with the goals of senior management recruitment, all managers ignore this status, which causes even more cynicism than if it had not existed at all.
Here it must be said that interviewing is a separate skill, and not everyone has it. If active interviewing negatively affects someone's productivity, then you need to take measures: either to reduce the number of interviews, or to include them in the list of immediate duties of the employee.
It is necessary to provide statistics on the average number of interviews. It is necessary to calculate employees who do not have to do this at all: either conduct trainings with them, or directly release from this work.
5. Enhancement.
Raises involved a special committee, not directly related to the work. As a result, they evaluate the brightest, loudest projects and underestimate the routine hard work, and the employee’s “cultural” contribution is ignored.
They refuse to promote employees who constantly "exceed expectations." Theoretically, this is a competent technique, but everyone - leading programmers, managers and ordinary employees - have already learned how to deceive the system.
Those who have not learned can suffer from it. One very effective and hardworking programmer quit after being held for six years in a position where he is so effective.
Recommendations from higher-level employees are revalued. Recommendations from lower-level employees are often ignored or underestimated. As a result, many seek to work with developers of the highest rank. There are projects that are not bright enough on their own, so that you never get an opportunity to improve, no matter how well you do it.
At the same time, top-level programmers see that everyone wants to work with them and everyone wants to receive recommendations from them.
Findings.
Promotions are very important. They greatly affect the work of the company. But in many cases, no better than too little encouragement.
It is necessary to carefully avoid conflicts between rewards and goals. If it is impossible to avoid conflicts, you should at least make sure that the correct behavior is not penalized, and the antisocial is not encouraged.
Many important things are clearly visible on the lower levels of the company, but invisible to management. Managers must manage personally and physically be close to employees, and not rely only on polls. A survey of programmers in 2003–2004 showed that they called the “lack of managers” the main problem. Ironically, they considered a solution to this problem undesirable.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/107532/
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