Some Google Stuff (and) Should Internal Job Transfers Be More Common, And Easier?
Part profile on Google's endlessly dissected internal culture, and part profile of CEO Eric
Schmidt, the Forbes feature,Google Thinks Small, uncovers an interesting organizational factoid:
...This ideas-and-data approach lets Google use fewer managers--one for every 20 line employees, compared with one for as few as 7 industrywide. "It has been as high as one to 40," Mayer says...
A romantic ideal. I wonder what the role of the manager is, exactly, in that context.
The feature also talks about the Google hiring process, a topic I've been thinking a lot about lately. As technologies and waves of related activities come and go, the need for specific niches of talent can rise and fall dramatically. What should a company do with this talent? Constantly hire and lay off people? Let people stay even after major milestones have been met, and needs have subsided?
Google of Director of Consumer Products:
"We need generalists," she says. "Lots of projects and companies grow without doing new things; they just get bigger teams. We want projects to end." ... Once deemed Google-worthy, new hires get bid on by managers across the company.
The article doesn't really go into it with much more detail, but it sounds like they're committing more to a person and the accompanying talent, than to a role for that person. This seems like a much less disruptive and wasteful strategy than team "bloat" or painful layoffs. If employees and their employers can assume a flexibility and willingness to develop new operational roles, depending on the shifting needs of an organization, companies should be willing to make long-term commitments to their employees. With both parties feeling more comfortably invested in eachother, neither party's interests should be at odds with eachother, and everybody could save a bit of time and pain. This hiring/ employment approach isn't a cure-all, and if an industry change happened quickly enough, there'd always be the need to hire new talent, and displace existing staff, but the dominant current set of 1person:1title assumptions could use some shaking up.
