[fullsend]

According to Fiona Cicconi, Google’s chief people officer, Google employed 30,000 managers before the recent layoffs. The hard truth is Google needs a Twitter style culling. Take all those billions you're burning and give it to people with a builder mentality, not career sheeple. Unfortunately the same executives who would oversee this are the ones who need to be culled first.

[fooker]

From what I understand, Google has a unusually large number of engineers who are happy to coast, and would actively avoid taking on anything important. That seems more of an issue to me compared to middle management bloat.

[jefftk]

I worked at Google from 2012 to 2022 and this didn't match my experience, for what it's worth. There were some people who coasted, but it was not common. There were a lot of people who got much less done than you might expect due to bureaucratic friction, but my coworkers were generally very enthusiastic to take on important things.

[hot_gril]

There are plenty of ICs who coast there, but what's far worse are the groups of ICs who are all pushing hard in different directions because their leadership isn't taking charge. IDK if middle management bloat exactly is the problem either, but there's some kind of ineffectiveness, maybe even at the top.

One low-level issue is how long everything has to take because of tooling. Engineers have way too much patience for overcomplicated garbage and tend to obsess over pointless details. Kind of in the opposite direction of coasting, but still a real problem.

[bmoxb]

I've seen this claim thrown around a few times but haven't really seen any evidence that it's true, beyond a few unconvincing anecdotes.

[kaoD]

Middle managers' job is to get the best out of engineers. If your direct manager does not set up an ambitious team with ambitious goals, what are you supposed to do?

Ambition trickles downwards and is killed upwards.

[airstrike]

Both may be true. Culture isn't really necessarily that siloed between engineering and management.

[TulliusCicero]

> Google employed 30,000 managers before the recent layoffs.

I'm guessing that number included product/program managers, not just "people managers".

[rlt]

That’s still pretty insane.

[gerash]

or ask most of the people managers to become ICs and start actually doing something technical

[CobrastanJorji]

How did the Twitter-style culling work out for Twitter?

[mrtksn]

AFAIK it worked out well. Works more-less the same as before, shipped quite a bit of stuff and drastically reduced costs.