management

Unstable company of Skype

While reading this article at GigaOm about the latest adventures of Skype, I came across this quote by Yee Lee, a former employee of Skype:

You can agree or disagree with the practice of re-organization, but I personally had never been part of a restructuring that ran so deep in a company. During the year I was at Skype, the company:

lost a CEO

hired and fired a CTO

hired and fired a CFO

gained a CEO, CMO, CIO, and CDO

created an entirely new product development org structure

eliminated every Project Manager role

fired, re-interviewed, and re-hired Product Managers

created a two new business units

combined two business units into one

dissolved one business unit

opened a new office and hired several hundred people

the list goes on…

I mean, these are crazy changes for any company to go through over the course of years. To have that all happen within a short number of months was staggering.

Staggering indeed.

Google is building a better boss

Here is an interesting New York Times article about Google’s Project Oxygen, which is, in essence, an initiative by the company to improve management.

In Project Oxygen, the statisticians gathered more than 10,000 observations about managers — across more than 100 variables, from various performance reviews, feedback surveys and other reports. Then they spent time coding the comments in order to look for patterns.

Like in many other technical companies, team and project leaders are assigned from the best of technical people. It turns out that being good at programming does not necessarily mean being good at managing people. That’s something that some of us knew for years.

For much of its 13-year history, particularly the early years, Google has taken a pretty simple approach to management: Leave people alone. Let the engineers do their stuff. If they become stuck, they’ll ask their bosses, whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management in the first place.

But Mr. Bock’s group found that technical expertise — the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep — ranked dead last among Google’s big eight. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.

But just knowing that technical skills aren’t at the top of the list for a manager is not enough. One needs to know what is important. And that’s what Project Oxygen is all about.

Things like this make me appreciate and respect Google. Even if they don’t publish the results of the studies and use it internally only. One thing that should be kept in mind is that Google employs a lot of people. And those people come and go. So even if they get a glimpse of a better way while at Google, that knowledge will eventually get out, will get applied to other companies, and will make the (office) world a better place.

Best vacation policy is a no policy

Read this:

At Netflix, the vacation policy is audaciously simple and simply audacious. Salaried employees can take as much time off as they’d like, whenever they want to take it. Nobody – not employees themselves, not managers – tracks vacation days.

That’s an example to follow. After all, it’s the work that matters. If you work is taken care of, what difference does it make how many hours you spent doing it, or how many hours you spent not doing it? More companies should adopt this approach.

You don’t have to do everything your boss tells you to

I have worked in a number of companies so far, both big and small. And one thing that always annoys me are those people who think that they should … no, that they must do everything their boss tells them. Like their boss is this ultimate human being, an absolute control freak, who will demolish the whole world if he ever hears a word “no”. And he will sure as hell go a long way to make employee’s life miserable if he discovers that something he asked for hadn’t been done.

While you should do most of the things you boss tells you to do, that’s far away from everything. And there are different ways of you can avoid doing something. Here are just a few from the top of my head.

“Thou shall not pass!” shouted Gandalf, the wizard, fighting on the bridge with the Barlog of Moria (watch some “Lord of the Rings”movies). You can do something along the same lines. When asked to do something obviously stupid, or illegal, you can tell your boss straight back that you won’t do it. You don’t have to shout, of course. Be polite, but insist on not doing it and provide the reason. There are silly bosses who would fire you for that, but most won’t. They will either give in on your not doing it, or will find a compromise, or will pass this specific job to some other employee. A lot of bosses will actually appreciate your honesty and will respect your opinion.
Boring routine that nobody cares about, can be skipped, sometimes, if nobody really cares about it. Every job has a part where employee has to perform routine functions. Usually these are automated at some stage, but before that happens, there is some poor soul somewhere in the corner of the office doing things manually. Often, these routine operations are performed because the procedure says they should be performed, not because they actually should be performed. When responsible for some of such routines, you can skip them once in a while. You should know the routine well first, and understand all the implications of you not doing it. And you should also remember that even if it is totally unimportant and your boss finds out that you skipped it, you’ll most probably be punished for skipping it.
Cutting corners, doing things your way, the better way. What most bosses out there want is to have the job done. Most of them don’t really care how it is done, as long as it is done in time and with the resources that were allocated for the job. If you know of a better or simpler way to do the given job, you can go for it without asking the permission or explaining the details of the implementation. The thing to be careful about here is the full picture. Do you really have all the information about the job at hand or were you given only the few details? Sometimes there are reasons outside of the job specification to the job in a specific way (client request, cross-team or cross-project coordination, etc). If you are not aware of all the factors and you choose a different implementation, you might end up in the crossfire, with you butt kicked, and the “redo urgently as discussed” order upon yourself.
Silent strike or bureaucratic nightmare. This one is not usually on my menu, but once in a while things can lead to this approach. If asked to do something you can “forget” to do it a few times, until the problem goes away. Or you can simply ignore the request, hoping that it goes away. Or you can bury the request in bureaucratic nightmare. Just keep asking for more details, for answers to tricky questions, and so on and so forth, until the cost of the job to be performed becomes prohibitive and the request is cancelled or postponed. This is one of those “last resort” methods, because every time you apply it, it greatly decreases your value as a useful employee. You’ll probably have to work on something extra hard to counter-effect this approach. But still, it gives you an option of not doing something that your boss told you to.

As I said before, you should most of the times do what your boss is asking you to do. The above are only for those times when it makes a great difference for you whether you do the job or not. Use them with care. And if you know of any other ways of not doing things that your boss told you, please share in the comments.

On organizational structures

The company that I work for is going through an amazing growth period right now. As a result, quite a few things change, re-shape, appear and disappear. Starting to lose the grasp in some areas, I decided to read more about organizational structures. Before reading, I thought about it for a bit. I tried to summarize everything that I know about the subject – both from personal experience and from the long forgotten textbook paragraphs. Once I started reading, I realized how little I actually know about this stuff.

It’s actually a fun little exercise. Pause for a minute and try to list as many different organizational structures that you can think about. Think. Think. Think. List. Hierarchical is the first one on the list. Right? It was for me. Then I spent some time thinking about all possible modifications to a hierarchy. And than my mind went empty.

That was too early to give up. Suddenly I remembered Google and that I read in quite a few places that they actually use a matrix organization. I knew that I read about it before, but couldn’t remember what it was and how it worked. Just in case, I added matrix organizational structure as number two on my list.

At that point, all clear thoughts stopped. As the last resort I remembered a well-known book “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” that I read a few years ago (the book is free and I strongly recommend you read it, especially if you have anything to do with Open Source Software). The cathedral is something very similar to a hierarchy that I thought of first. But the bazaar seemed like something that I didn’t have on my list. Even though the “organizational” part of this structure is questionable. I added it anyway. So my list got to three items.

And then I gave up. It was too much of an effort for too late of an evening. How many did you get? Did you get the same ones or different? Are you a business administration major? And if you are, what the heck are doing on this blog? Oh, no, you are welcome to stay – I am just surprised that you are here.

Anyway. It’s time to educate ourselves on this fascinating subject. And when it comes to quick education, Wikipedia is at the top of my list. Together with Google. There is a page on Organization, which provides a useful overview, with few more structures that I haven’t thought about. Of course I knew about committees and juries. It just didn’t come to my mind. And once I read about ecologies, I understood what they are and even remembered a few examples. So, I sort of knew about them too. Then, for even more details and examples I read the Wikipedia page, which is dedicated to the subject of Organizational Structures. That’s a bit difficult to process if you are sleepy, late in the day.

While I’ve definitely learned something today, the biggest benefit of the above Wikipedia pages is that they will provide me with me enough confidence to argue with my friends for hours upon hours over pints and pints of beer. Hopefully, that was as useful for you too.