I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [121]
The company grapevine soon grew heavy with rumors that big organizational changes were coming, fermenting the staff, who whispered nervously about layoffs and what that would signify at a company not yet out of its infancy. Still, when Wayne called an all-engineering meeting in July 2001 and announced a reorganization, most of the engineers were caught by surprise. So were the project managers, who learned in public that their jobs no longer existed.
When the announcement was made, there was audible grumbling among the assembled engineers. They generally respected the project managers and felt they had a real role to play. And they objected to the idea of anyone's dismissal by public firing squad.
To stave off open revolt, Larry stood at the front of the room and laid out all the things he wasn't happy about in the engineering management system, starting with the idea that non-engineers were supervising those who knew more about the technology than they did. The remarks stung the project managers, some of whom felt it was a personal repudiation, especially since Larry had not raised the issues with them individually in advance of the meeting.
"It sucked," one of the project managers told me later. "I felt humiliated by it. Larry said in front of the company that we didn't need managers, and he talked about what he didn't like about us. He said things that hurt a lot of people."
The grumbling got much louder. "I yelled at Larry," engineer Ron Dolin admitted, "because he said that the managers they were planning to lay off weren't doing a good job. And I said that this was no place to give a performance evaluation. Laying these people off was completely ridiculous, and the nature of the announcement was totally unprofessional."
"I did my best to advise that there is true value in management," Stacy Sullivan recalls, "and you can set a tone by how you manage this. And Eric said, 'Let them try this.' Wayne said, 'Let them try it, it's their company.' It bothered me. We tried to give input—me, Omid, Urs. But in the end, hopefully it was a lesson learned for Larry and Sergey."
The solution that Larry wanted was to have all the engineers report directly to Wayne. While it was positioned as a way of streamlining the engineering structure, most of those I talked with thought it was really about Larry's priorities not being addressed.
"Larry and Sergey had certain things they wanted worked on," Gmail creator Paul Bucheit explained, "and there were these standing groups that were making up their own things and not doing whatever it was Larry and Sergey wanted." For example, Larry wanted to scan books. Many, many books. Every book in the Library of Congress. But no one seemed interested in undertaking such a wildly ambitious project. With the engineers operating as autonomous units under the protection of their project managers, Larry found himself increasingly frustrated.
Howard Gobioff was convinced that "this was about people getting between Larry and Sergey and the engineers. At a time when the organization was small enough that the founders still wanted to be very hands on. It was very badly handled. Most of the engineers were pissed because we liked our managers. They were non-technical, so they lacked delusions that they knew better than we did."
Urs, characteristically, blamed himself. "What caused it was my inexperience at managing," he told me, "and Larry being very good at recognizing the long-term conflict that created." Urs had believed his engineers would cover Google's coding needs, so he probed potential project managers for organizational ability and tested their people skills instead of their technical knowledge.
"So ... what I underestimated,"