I question the title. It doesn't sound like engineers are in charge, instead, it sounds like smaller operating units will be in charge. That is a very different thing from having the inmates running the asylum.

I have yet to see a large company that successfully treats software as a creative endeavor instead of a production line that still manages to be able to focus on solving customer problems. I really hope that Larry figures this out because, if he does, that will (IMO) be his greatest legacy.

What I think will happen, though, is Google will focus even more on technology and care even less about actual users.

This is a big story. I'm both an engineer and a manager (to which engineers will say "management!" and managers will say "developer!"), and I haven't seen this pendulum swing back and forth so much as be ripped in half and pulled in opposite directions. Google's obviously got very smart folks in both engineering and management, so it's going to be very interesting to see how this is handled.

I can't imagine a Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, etc going through this exercise, so I'm seriously rooting for Google. It'd be lovely for this change to produce some real knowledge on how to run a modern, big, high-speed tech company without getting trapped in the argument over engineering-vs-management.

It's awesome to see a fundamentally engineer-driven company like Google and a fundamentally designer-driven company like Apple become so successful. It has always seemed to me that management is an important but overemphasized skill (as a fundamental trait of the way large organizations work) and it's really refreshing to see this happening.

Can someone who works at Google chime in with what the organizational temperature is like at Google? Does this whole 'party time's over for the managers' thing we're hearing about have any real weight to it?

It's also similar to how Berkshire Hathaway is run; and how Christensen advocates nurturing disruptive businesses - smaller units can get excited about smaller sales that are a rounding error to Big Google (new markets start small); independent units are free to customize their business model and how they do things to what fits the opportunity (instead of fitting in with the parent's model and processes - which has compelling economies, but only early).

e.g. it seems highly unlikely that advertising is the ideal revenue model for every business Google is in. The appropriate fit might be sales, renting, monthly charge, pay-per-use, royalty, per-developer, per-other-metric. It's not necessarily about extracting more money from customers, but revenue that makes sense for customers - that they prefer, that makes sense in the competitive set, that motivates the business to improve along the right dimensions.

Ever since "management" and the dedicated "manager" were invented, we have been told, increasingly in recent decades, that they, rather than talents in other roles, are the key to business success. With the increasing importance and accelerating pace of innovations in our time, it's time to test if to what degree such doctrine would still hold true. Good job Larry. That's some risk worth taking.

This got me thinking about role of managers in a modern org (to simplify things let's say it's a Tech company).

It certainly needs a CEO/Visionary, it most likely needs HR and front/back office folks, it certainly needs PR and marketing people. But in a world where people communicate rarely in person, have their own management and economics 101 abilities, are smart enough to not work against their own interests (and look after the org's interests) - what's the role of the future manager?

It sounds inevitable that senior Engineers will double up as managers for their group as and when required (working with marketing etc.) instead of it being a dedicated managerial position.

The reality of a large corporation like Google is nowhere near as simple an engineer-vs-manager dichotomy as many of the comments on this thread would make it. Products need to be developed, but they need to be supported and sold too. Which of these functions is most important depends on your world view and your tolerance for angels-on-a-pinhead debate, but it's undoubted that each of them are crucial.

An engineering mindset of automation and solution-by-algorithm gives us the miserable customer service that Google is famous for; a realisation that people are tricky and messy gives us something more like Zappos. The people who are good at support and managing support teams are not like engineers, and the people running sales are an entirely different breed. Rare is it to find someone who can successfully manage all three. Indeed, I would go out on a limb and say - as an engineer myself - that it's easier to find a non-technical person who can make a positive impact in product development than it is to find an engineering who can significantly improve sales or support.

Seems to work pretty well for Honda. They innovate and everyone still copies their designs and products, but they also have great financial results magically with innovative products. http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/0904/112.html [2006]

I hope this is a trend in America, Google can set a great example (as all companies early on do) on keeping innovators in charge with a startup culture/meritocracy.

Before the recent change in CEO, I felt Google was getting too suits focused and simply competing on a byline/reactionary technique. Bring it back Google.

This may finally lead to outright combat between the ChromeOS and Android groups.

Chrome the browser itself is fairly successful, as are Android phones. But Chrome OS vs. Android...that is a huge showdown. ChromeOS is a minimalist OS, whereas Android is a fat client. Philosophies are totally different.

Attitude within Google right now is "let the market decide". Only a company with the free cash flow of Google could build two operating systems intended for mobile devices and take that kind of approach.

I'll get my popcorn.

This is such a good move! It gives Google the nimbleness, hunger, and guerilla mentality of a start-up in new areas it wants to explore through these small mostly-autonomous teams, while simultaneously allowing it to defend the already captured beachheads (search, gmail etc.) - all funded by the deep, deep, Google pockets.

In any innovation-oriented org, curious engineers and inventors need to be able to play and push the boundaries, but even large organizations with strong financial backs are so defensive when it comes to innovation, so afraid to fail, or waste resources on experimenting. Google has always been okay with this "waste". If you go back before year 2k and try pitching to a goliath sw company to let 20% of dev time be spent on employees’ projects of choice you'd get assaulted by the CFO. Google was okay with this "waste", because they knew if you let the right players roll the dice, every now and then you’d hit jackpot. And they did! Many of their most successful products came out of the 20% project.

Organizations today have split the vision and execution aspects of building something. The vision comes from management and the execution from engineers – this is straight from the defensive playbook - ‘engineers can execute with minimum risk, and managers are close to the customer therefore know what will sell for sure’. This kind of thinking will work when you want to improve marginally (like Henry Ford said something along the lines of 'If I asked my customers what they wanted they’d say a faster horse'), or if you are the market leader, but it will never cause disruption or let you make headway in uncharted territory. It is very important to know when to play offence and when to play defense.

GOOG is 3% down today (while market overall is about the same). I personally like Larry's change, but average investor seems to be skeptical.

No, I don't think this will solve anything.

The problem with Google is that it is sized to deliver big brands, big scale and big projects.

First. Google today cannot deliver small brands because failure is very expensive. Every Wave, Buzz, Knol costs Google because future enterprises are less likely to want to try their products.

Startup culture could no longer exist in Google, because the salary means that the people will be taking risk with other people's money, and it doesn't work for early stage projects.

Secondly, Google cannot deliver small projects. I can relate this to my past history working at a large mining company, there are some mineral deposits that they may not develop but sell off because it is too small for a company their concern. The management overhead is simply too big.

Finally, to deliver large projects require specialist departments. The functional structure is there to deliver this. The alternative would be a matrix structure where there will be a lot of confusion as to who reports to whom, or serious duplication.

I hope this doesn't create a Microsoft like situation where its very difficult for departments to work together.

This brings to a head the interesting situation of the modern tech company. Unlike companies in almost all other industries, the average developer at Google (and a lot of other companies) needs to be much smarter to do the job than the manager.

So the skill pyramid is actually inverse compared the "military corporation" model. It's also true that many, perhaps even a majority, of the deveopers would be "even better" at management, marketing and strategy etc, than those normally filling these roles.

This situation really does beg for a solution beyond what the typical corporation/MBA paradigm has come up with so far. Kudos to Mr. Page for taking a shot at it.

So here's a question for potential HN entrepreneurs:

If your company got as big as Microsoft or Google, would you split it up, spinning off subdivisions as separate companies?

And (in the case of MSFT/Google) why haven't they done that?

I don't think they should be letting Managers or Engineers run things. I think they need to have... I'm not sure of the title... lets call them Vision Carriers. In the video game industry we call these people Creative Directors.

These vision carriers need to understand the product they are building and the people who will use it.

They don't need to be good a managing people or budgets, they don't need to write code. They need to understand what is good and what is bad and they need to be able to clearly communicate it to the team.

I'm really interested in seeing how companies grow; I hadn't realized quite how large of a role non-engineers played in Google's structure.

Glad to see it's moving in the right direction.

I love when companies move back to their purer roots. I don't know where this puts Google's progress as a company over the next few years, but it definitely means we won't be seeing the innovation slowdown that Microsoft experienced after their years of explosion. As long as our tech superstars arn't just turning into company gobbling monsters, but rather are constantly iterating, innovating, and developing their product line like a company should.

I'm beginning to worry about Google. Companies don't make these types of changes when everything is going great.

Seems to fit the playbook at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2369445 a teensy bit, but not the one at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2405198.

I wonder if part of this is the result of growing competition from the engineer-driven Facebook.

There is a big difference between a manager and a leader. A manager takes the credit for things that go well and looks for people to blame when they don't. A leader understands that they are only successful if their team succeeds. A manager worries about how the team might screw things up. A leader thinks about how the team can exceed their goals. A manager tries to consolidate their power and protect their turf at all costs. A leader knows that the team follows them out of a sense of mutual respect and understands that if they can no longer effectively lead the team than it may be time to step aside. Leaders are not just found at the top of an organization.

Like I've stated before, this would be the perfect time for Microsoft to take Gundotra back and make him CEO. They desperately need the same type of change at the executive level.

I mistakenly thought Larry Wall was the new Google CEO. It seemed a little odd at first, but then I thought it was very cool. Now it doesn't seem quite as interesting.

I wonder if this change will result in Google focusing and releasing more hard core technology products or more social products.

Certainly, Rosenberg has been crucial to Google’s success, so his exit has come as a shock to pretty much everyone to whom I’ve spoken.

That said, its timing seems quite convenient, particularly in relationship to what looks very much like a significant reorg that is currently underway at Google, said sources familiar with the situation.

Note first that Rosenberg’s replacement wasn’t immediately named and it’s not clear whether Page even feels one is needed.

Maybe Rosenburg helped Google do great things. Maybe I'm about to over-simplify. But weren't the things that made Google a true powerhouse created long before guys like this were hired -- back when the company was more engineer-driven?

It seems to me that Larry Page's frustration has been growing as he watched MBAs take credit for the success the engineers had created years before. If that's the case then I wish him success in changing the company's structure.

I think this is a great direction for Google, but it certainly is not a direction most other companies with equivalent growth can pursue. I think one of the unique aspects of Google, is the type of engineer they pursue.

If Google wants to put engineers completely in charge, more power to them, but they need to change the interview process. Fewer questions about Red/Black and Splay Trees, and more questions along the lines of "How do you make a web store that your mother would want to use?"

The search business makes money through purely engineering talent, but Google's next big opportunity may not. When we achieve a degree of success, we tend to think our path to success is the one that works the best in the general case.

It will be interesting to see how the less bureaucratic and more autonomous engineering units will function. I hope some great products and businesses are made, but it could just end up fostering lots of technical masturbation like Google Wave.

Wrong...you must hire MORE MANAGERS...ask Honeywell, because they have more managers than I've ever seen anywhere else. They could cut 3/4 of the managers and it would NOT hurt anything being shipped.

FTA:

  That jibes well with Page’s push to whittle down Google’s
  manager bureaucracy, eliminate politicking and rekindle its
  start-up spirit.