Google as an example of the new human enterprise?

An old article by net standards (way back in the year 2006), but nonetheless an interesting article on what it’s like to work for Google as a developer. Does this sound much like how your organization works??

I’m going to talk a little about Google’s software development process. It’s not the whole picture, of course, but it should suffice for today…

From a high level, Google’s process probably does look like chaos to someone from a more traditional software development company. As a newcomer, some of the things that leap out at you include:

– there are managers, sort of, but most of them code at least half-time, making them more like tech leads.

– developers can switch teams and/or projects any time they want, no questions asked; just say the word and the movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team.

– Google has a philosophy of not ever telling developers what to work on, and they take it pretty seriously.

– developers are strongly encouraged to spend 20% of their time (and I mean their M-F, 8-5 time, not weekends or personal time) working on whatever they want, as long as it’s not their main project.

– there aren’t very many meetings. I’d say an average developer attends perhaps 3 meetings a week, including their 1:1 with their lead.

– it’s quiet. Engineers are quietly focused on their work, as individuals or sometimes in little groups or 2 to 5.

– there aren’t Gantt charts or date-task-owner spreadsheets or any other visible project-management artifacts in evidence, not that I’ve ever seen.

– even during the relatively rare crunch periods, people still go get lunch and dinner, which are (famously) always free and tasty, and they don’t work insane hours unless they want to.

These are generalizations, sure. Old-timers will no doubt have a slightly different view, just as my view of Amazon is slightly biased by having been there in 1998 when it was a pretty crazy place. But I think most Googlers would agree that my generalizations here are pretty accurate.

How could this ever work? I get that question a lot …

First, and arguably most importantly, Google drives behavior through incentives. Engineers working on important projects are, on average, rewarded more than those on less-important projects…”
read more: Good Agile, Bad Agile by Stevey

At Firestoker and with the idea of this organizations like Consulting2.0, an idea we talk about what a flatter, more fluid, more individual-empowered workplace could and should be able to look like. It seems that Google, an organization that breathes innovation in so many ways, may not surprisingly already be leaders in this area.

Any Googlers out there able/willing to comment?

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2 Responses to Google as an example of the new human enterprise?

  1. I’m not a Googler (though I probably wouldn’t mind being one), but I was an IPSAn. That is, an employee of I.P. Sharp Associates, a Canadian multinational that was acquired by Reuters in 1987. IPSA was so far ahead of its time that CBC’s “Ideas” radio program did a one-hour show about the company. For a 600-person company (at its peak) it was remarkably flat, with essentially three levels: the CEO, the branch/department managers, and everyone else. I believe that this was possible only because the company was email-based from the early 1970s: there is no need for hierarchy to move things around when you can just CC the appropriate people. (Note also that the “new technologies” of voicemail and faxes arrived only later. I believe that the pre-existing email culture largely removed the need for them to be adopted within IPSA, while some other companies remain buried under voicemails even today.) Another characteristic was the lack of targets; the philosophy was to do the best that could be done, not to achieve some arbitrary numbers decreed by “management”. CEO Ian Sharp wasn’t exactly a shy person, yet disliked leading when people didn’t need to be led, and was quoted in a magazine interview as saying that “horrendous decisions tend to make themselves”. When I was a department manager there, my focus was not to manage my development teams (except to deal with problems that sometimes arose), but to take care of the things that would take them away from their work, like finding new hires.

    Like Google, IPSA avoided excessive planning, but that was because as it grew it was largely customer-driven. It started to develop big products only when the existing business was faltering, and the resulting sense of panic caused behaviour more typical of an ordinary company. I believe Google gets away with its laissez-faire approach only because it’s making enough money that its management has no need to panic.

  2. I’m not a Googler (though I probably wouldn’t mind being one), but I was an IPSAn. That is, an employee of I.P. Sharp Associates, a Canadian multinational that was acquired by Reuters in 1987. IPSA was so far ahead of its time that CBC’s “Ideas” radio program did a one-hour show about the company. For a 600-person company (at its peak) it was remarkably flat, with essentially three levels: the CEO, the branch/department managers, and everyone else. I believe that this was possible only because the company was email-based from the early 1970s: there is no need for hierarchy to move things around when you can just CC the appropriate people. (Note also that the “new technologies” of voicemail and faxes arrived only later. I believe that the pre-existing email culture largely removed the need for them to be adopted within IPSA, while some other companies remain buried under voicemails even today.) Another characteristic was the lack of targets; the philosophy was to do the best that could be done, not to achieve some arbitrary numbers decreed by “management”. CEO Ian Sharp wasn’t exactly a shy person, yet disliked leading when people didn’t need to be led, and was quoted in a magazine interview as saying that “horrendous decisions tend to make themselves”. When I was a department manager there, my focus was not to manage my development teams (except to deal with problems that sometimes arose), but to take care of the things that would take them away from their work, like finding new hires.

    Like Google, IPSA avoided excessive planning, but that was because as it grew it was largely customer-driven. It started to develop big products only when the existing business was faltering, and the resulting sense of panic caused behaviour more typical of an ordinary company. I believe Google gets away with its laissez-faire approach only because it’s making enough money that its management has no need to panic.

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