I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [122]
Larry recognized the problem sooner than Urs did, but neither had the experience to make the transition graceful and painless. Instead, Larry just did what came naturally. The system didn't work, so he rebooted it.
"I can't think of anything that people at Google were ever so upset about—at least in engineering," Paul Bucheit recalled years later. "people had some sense of ownership of the company, that it was this big happy family. And all of a sudden, some of your friends were kicked off the island. You're like, 'This isn't what I thought it was. I thought we were all in it together, and we just decided to get rid of these people.'"
At most companies, the notion of an engineering head having hundreds of direct reports would be ludicrous, but because he believed Google engineers were self-directed, Wayne just did away with the management layer between him and them. He divided the engineers into teams of three, with each team having a technical lead who was an engineer, not someone hired to manage.
The catch was that each team would also have a manager assigned from Larry's new product organization. It was a not-so-subtle introduction of a true product-management system. The project managers who had covered the engineers' backs had been replaced by Larry's trusted lieutenants, who would be looking over their shoulders.
"You could do a lot of stuff with tech leads," search quality expert Ben Gomes explained to me, "because of the people we hired. Anywhere else, having three or four hundred people report to one person would have been insane. Yet it worked reasonably well—for a while. And then at some point it didn't work."
Ultimately, the project managers were spared. Urs absorbed most of them into his operations area. But the angst unleashed by the reorg did not fade quickly.
When the dust settled, all hundred and thirty engineers reported directly to Wayne. The bureaucracy was dead. There was no hierarchy. There were no in-depth performance reviews. Engineers were on their own, independent entities, connected only to the other members of their teams and tenuously tethered by PMs to the central organization. Their direct interaction with Larry happened mainly at product review. Wayne took to holding weekly meetings and to walking through the cube farms on a regular basis to ensure that he had face time with individual engineers and that they were able to approach him with issues that concerned them.
It was an engineer's dream come true or a bit of a nightmare, depending on whom you asked. No clueless pointy-haired boss could get in the way and screw things up, but there were no clear signals from above about what was important and what was urgent and what was both. Groups struggled for resources and fought redundancy. Some engineers wanted more feedback on what they were doing and how well they were doing it, and others wondered about opportunities for advancement.
The true significance of the reorg would not be immediately apparent, because shortly after we began rebuilding our world, the rest of the world fell apart.
Chapter 16
Is New York Alive?
AS I DROVE to work on September 11, 2001, my mind was on Ask Jeeves. Late the night before, Larry had sent around a Wall Street Journal article announcing that our competitor was buying Teoma, a promising new search engine. That worried me. The Jeeves brand was strong, though their search technology couldn't compare to Google's. If they actually improved it, they might become a formidable player in the industry.
On the car radio, I heard something about a plane crash in New York City. I envisioned a Piper Cub that had been sightseeing and gotten too close to a skyscraper. And then they were talking about another plane.