Day in the Life of a Google Manager

http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2015/01/day-in-life-of-google-manager.html

by Nimi • 12 years ago

179 87 12 years ago

matt-welsh.blogspot.com

tdicola2• 12 years ago

"8:00pm - Freedom! I usually spend some time in the evenings catching up on email" - I guess Google managers have a slightly different view of freedom from work than I do.

TheSwordsman• 12 years ago

Sometimes just reading mindless things at the end of the day is the perfect way to end it.

I find myself using the evenings to catch up on email, because I can take my time and do it in between other things. I'm sure once family life becomes more prevelant I'll change my tune.

dsuth2• 11 years ago

I do this too, some nights (and I have young children). It's a good time to reflect on trickier emails with no time pressure. Of course sometimes I blow work off completely and hang out with the mrs, or get some gaming time. I'm very cautious about burnout, having ridden that line for the last few years pretty hard.

ajessup• 12 years ago

Freedom from your job, commute and sorting out your kids by 8pm seems like a good deal for most working dads

tdicola2• 12 years ago

Is catching up on your work email after 8pm really freedom from your job?

eliben• 12 years ago

I guess Google managers have a slightly different view of freedom from work than I do

After an evening of chasing kids around the house to get them to eat, wash and sleep, email does feel like freedom. Especially if you like your job. Also, not all email is alike. Usually no one expects you to answer important email in the evening, so you can quietly catch up on stuff you decided to leave out during the day, some mailing lists, etc. It's kinda like reading HN, just more productive.

aresant• 12 years ago

From the fringes - how typical is a 8:45am - 4pm (3 days a week anyways) schedule for HN googlers?

kenjackson• 12 years ago

I'd really love to get an answer to this too. That work-life balance is pretty incredible. I honestly thought it didn't exist in a major tech company.

Matt, your schedule looks so much better than mine! :-)

miles932• 12 years ago

Yup, that's my experience. My role has more travel/entertaining so there are some late nights but they usually have steaks in them :D

MHordecki• 12 years ago

Depends on what you do and also where you are. I'm in a European office, and due to the fact I deal mainly with US-based folks, I usually start my day at 12pm and end at 6-8pm depending on workload.

Blackthorn• 12 years ago

Virtually everything about your experience at Google will depend on your manager.

jsolson5• 12 years ago

I'm another Googler out of the Seattle office (individual contributor on Compute Engine) -- I work roughly a 9am - 5pm schedule, sticking to the ~40 hours/week pretty religiously. I will occasionally triage email outside the office from my phone, but I almost never respond to it. My laptop by and large doesn't leave the bag it came home in. I cannot for the life of me ditch the habit of actually taking it home most days, though.

jshen4• 12 years ago

How does your team scope out and schedule work? For us, we do two week sprints and then have a few hard launch dates a year. It's often hard for us to finish all work we commit to without working a bit of OT.

I've always wondered how google manages this process.

coops• 12 years ago

SRE here. If you can handle your work nobody cares how much you are in the office. At all. However, unless you are insanely organized you won't be able to do this every single week--most successful googlers have several projects going on at once and there will be some times when you need to work hard on more than one.

lifeisstillgood4• 12 years ago

I seem to have more than one project going at once and assume I am doing something wrong - lack of focus or some such.

It's interesting to hear this - can you expand?

notarobot• 12 years ago

I'm up by 6a, in the office by 7:30a, leave the office by ~5p and home by ~6p most days. I'm an SRE Manager.

oaktowner2• 12 years ago

Google Product Manager here. I get on the bus about 8:30 and start working. In Mountain View (where meetings commence) by 10a. Usually pretty solid w/ meetings from 10-4. Get on a 4 or 4:30 bus and work again (email, etc) until I get off at 5:30 or 6.

Probably 2-3 days a week I put in an hour (or two, rarely 3) after the kids are in bed.

etherealmachine• 12 years ago

SWE in MTV - I'm in at 9:00am, out at 4:00pm 3 days a week. 2 hours on the bus, I might get an hour of work done. Once a week I do 10:30am to 7:00pm (team meeting and game night - dinner on campus). About once a week I do 10:30am to 4:00pm. I agree with the post author - by 4pm I'm pretty fried and useless anyways.

munificent2• 12 years ago

I'm a software engineer at Google in Seattle. I try to get in by 8:30 but sometimes it's closer to 8:00. I leave between 5:30 and 6:00 depending on when I got in. The office empties out pretty quickly in the evenings.

I almost never work longer than that. (I honestly wish I could sometimes. I end up having to interrupt myself in the middle of things to leave on time, but such is life when you have kids.)

If he's also doing a bit of email in the evenings, leaving at 4:00 doesn't seem unreasonable. I've never seen or heard anyone fret about work hours at the office. My experience has been that the company is very results oriented.

(This is still hard for me to adjust to coming from EA where I worked a lot of hours and company culture, unintentionally or not, placed a lot of emphasis on how long you kept your seat warm.)

henrikschroder3• 12 years ago

I almost never work longer than that. (I honestly wish I could sometimes.

But why? You won't produce more, you won't earn more, you won't learn more?

enneff• 12 years ago

I get in between 7-8 and leave between 3-7 depending how productive I am feeling.

B-Con• 12 years ago

I'm nowhere close, roughly 10:30 to 7:45. But judging from e-mail and other activity, I think half my team is shifted about two hours earlier.

nostrademons• 12 years ago

Ex-Googler here, formerly a SWE in Mountain View. My hours were highly irregular - the shortest day I worked involved getting in at 4:30, out at 7:30 (to be fair, I was stuck at the DMV) and the longest involved getting in around 10:00 AM and out at 2:00 AM the next morning. Average was probably about 10:45 - 7:30, sometimes time-shifted to be more like 1:30 - 10:00. 8-9 hour days were fairly typical, and it was only at crunch times that it would go up to 14 hour days and weekends.

My role was also one that was pretty amenable to sprints of intensive working followed by periods of rest. I did a bunch of prototyping and working on high-profile, tight-deadline projects, and there was naturally a bunch of downtime in between them.

DannyBee• 12 years ago

I'm a manager (for ~50 people), and my schedule is close to Matt's, without the kids.

I don't always go in "that early" (normal people would slap me if i didn't put that in quotes), but i'm completely responsive on email/IM/etc by about 8:30.

The main difference from Matt is that when I drive (i bring my dog in, and it's not safe to bike with her on shoreline), if I don't get in before 9, IMHO, it's essentially not worth driving in until ~10am.

You'll just waste the time sitting on shoreline.

Biking, yeah, it's always 10 minute for me.

jlees3• 12 years ago

Left Google about a year and a half ago; leaving at 4pm is pretty unusual from the folks I worked with, though I had a couple of team members who would have 'pick up kids from school' blocked out on their calendar, and taking a longish break midday or in the afternoon was totally fine if you didn't have any meetings. Most people I know tended to come in to get the tail end of breakfast, so 9/9:30, and often stay for dinner (6:30). I had a colleague who did 6am-4pm or so to avoid traffic, though, and another who wouldn't come in until about 4pm for the same reason.

It's difficult to work with folks with 'unconventional' schedules if they are involved in cross-functional or managerial stuff. Fine if you're an individual contributor, but if you need to get a few folks in a room together frequently (project leads, etc) and their working hours have zero overlap, someone's going to get grumpy. I appreciate flexibility in schedule, don't get me wrong, but I also appreciate a bit of self-awareness :)

tonfa• 12 years ago

You could consider people with "unconventional" schedules to be similar to people in different timezone :)

vidoc• 12 years ago

That's not a lot of hours!

lchengify• 12 years ago

My first manager at Google (and the first in my career) had 2 young kids, around 5 and 7 respectively.

He left the office every day at 6:30 sharp and, like clockwork, would answer emails and code reviews starting at 10. Eventually we learned to time our emails and code reviews according to this clock.

The consistency of the timing was remarkable; our favorite theory was that was his kid's bedtime. I guess in effect, he was putting two sets of kids to bed each night :).

oaktowner2• 12 years ago

If they're like my kids (6, 2, and 2): 10 isn't their bedtime...it's when I've finished dinner cleanup after their bedtime and can get on my computer to finish up tasks for the day.

foobarian2• 12 years ago

My 2 year old is usually sound asleep by 9, and after some cleanup I have some free hours to catch up on work. Sometimes I can't help it if it's something interesting, and makes me feel better about only spending some 7-8 hours at the office. I escaped from academia too, where I got to having anxiety about every single minute not spent working, and now am still feeling the aftereffects.

bbgm• 12 years ago

I have a similar schedule (except I leave earlier to pick up my son). My team also knows my "time window" well :)

brosky1172• 12 years ago

I really enjoyed this article. The grass is always greener, and I get that, but man that sounds like a great way to spend your day! Personally, my daily grind is aimed at one day having a daily grind like this.

I loved the emphasis on family and balance. Timely article for me, I guess.

pmorici• 12 years ago

Kind of an interesting full circle. I remember reading his "why I'm leaving Harvard for Google" post a while back and If memory serves it was because he was doing to many managerial type things that he wasn't thrilled about yet he finds himself in a similar position again a few years later. It would be interesting to hear what he thinks of his current responsibilities compared to the teaching job he left.

foobarian2• 12 years ago

It's probably the case that he could've stuck with being an individual contributor. I don't know about Google but the tech shop I work for has paths explicitly for the introverted engineer types who don't care for the drudgery of managing people. This is invariably a lot harder in academia, as getting to tenure pretty much requires one to act as a startup founder-- do all the business dealing, run a team, get funding, etc.

Given that Matt did get tenure he clearly is really good at such managerial roles, and probably couldn't help but step up. I bet Google leadership try very hard to get people to do management--it's not easy, on the contrary engineers don't like it and it's a fight to get the good ones to step up. I would bet too that the managerial type things at Google are a lot more fun than the academic ones.

induscreep• 12 years ago

I don't think it was a teaching job...really low teaching loads at Harvard. More of a research job.

mdwelsh3• 11 years ago

That's a fair point. It's true my job has shifted much more towards being like a professor than being an individual contributor SWE. Still, lots of differences with academic life: Far lower overhead, far less administrative work, much greater assurance of success (not being subject to peer review for everything), etc. So overall more satisfying although the day-to-day schedule might look roughly the same.

lifeisstillgood4• 12 years ago

Despite this, I still do not have the faintest clue how Bitcoin works.

Oh thank god. Not about bitcoin specifically but it feels the whole world has managed to find the time to do a course on FRP, brush up on SEO, configure a Hadoop cluster, grok Haskell monads and still work out what a Mocachino is.

Glad to know mortals still exist.

Wonnk13• 12 years ago

reading the comments of some of the Googlers here really makes me regret declining my offer :/ When the hell did Google become some 9-5 gig?

ryandrake• 12 years ago

You're only hearing from the 9-5ers. The rest are still at their desks working :-) It's only 7:30PM in the Bay Area.

sukilot4• 12 years ago

Most HN comments are written from work.

zak_mc_kracken• 12 years ago

Once a company has more than a thousand employees, it automatically becomes a company where most employees work from 9-5. Google is no exception.

dsuth2• 11 years ago

Working consistently longer hours has been shown to be counter productive, in every study I'm aware of. This has also been born out in my role as an engineer and technical team lead managing other engineers and coders numerous times. I doubt Google needs to be informed of this!

You'll note that there's approximately zero 'goofing off' time in his schedule, he's either working productively, or not present at work. This is a good way to be productive and maintain sanity.

spydum• 12 years ago

So, maybe a naive question, why does a manager need a pager?

tmhedberg3• 12 years ago

He's a Tech Lead Manager, or TLM, which means he's an engineer who also manages the team he's a part of. In some cases, dev teams have SRE counterparts who take the pager responsibilities, among other things. But not all services at Google have SRE support, and for those that don't, the developers themselves are usually on call. That includes the dev team's TL, or TLM, as the case may be.

mdwelsh3• 12 years ago

Well, I wrote a large chunk of the system and am still on the pager rotation along with the rest of the eng team. At some point we'll hand off pager duty to the SRE team.

marban• 12 years ago

Reminds me of http://strikemag.org/fuck-your-hard-work/

chippy• 12 years ago

It reminded me of the Puritan/Protestant work ethic. Mostly found in North America, the idea is that only by working hard and diligently will a person achieve the status of Good Person and get good things in this life (and if you were religious, the next life). One can compare and contrast this cultural idea about work with ideas about work in other countries, especially other Christian ones.

henrikschroder3• 12 years ago

I'm amazed at the number of people in this thread who consistently work overtime, but even more amazed by the people who seem to think that working 9-to-5 is a bad thing, and who wants to work more.

I work for an "extremely" progressive company in the valley, and I have three whole weeks of paid vacation per year, and I'm chafing at that, because I'm used to having six weeks of paid vacation per year.

I will never understand the american work ethic.

rdl• 12 years ago

While that doesn't seem like a lot of hours, the thing that struck me was I didn't see a single thing in his actual day (other than maybe a 10 minute bike ride, or reading a book at night) that I'd personally enjoy doing. Yet, he seems perfectly happy -- good for him.

People really have totally different preferences. It's more striking when laid out like that.

serve_yay• 12 years ago

Yes, I felt much the same. The positive reactions to this are really surprising to me, but as you say, different strokes.

drewg1232• 12 years ago

SWE in MTV: I get up early (~6am) and try to get to the office by 6:30am, as the time before 9am is the only time my severely over-crowded open office is quiet enough to code. Most days I have 1-2 meetings. I generally leave around 4pm, pick my son up from school, make dinner & then catch up on email after 8:30, when my son goes to bed.

All in all, it is very relaxing compared to my last job. I was full time remote, and probably worked 80 hours a week. I have a much better work/life balance now, as I generally leave my work at the office.

sukilot4• 12 years ago

9.5hrs per day in office, plus evening at home?

Shebanator• 12 years ago

spending 9.5 hours at work doesn't mean they were actually working for the whole 9.5 hours. There are onsite gyms, cafes, author appearances, clubs for various interests, running errands, etc. Going to the gym in particular is a big part of a lot of people's workday.

drewg1232• 11 years ago

The evening stuff is nearly always just minimal email check that seldom takes more than 10 minutes. At my last job (where I was full time remote), my schedule was working 6am-4pm working, taking a break to spend time with my family, then real work from 8pm-midnight. This is a huge improvement.

Not all that 9.5 hours on campus is working time. I generally take a break for breakfast & lunch, hit the gym a few times a week, and try to spend an hour or two a week on fun, non work related things (like author talks).

spocklivelong• 12 years ago

Oh wow, Mark Zuckerberg is his student.

chuhnk• 12 years ago

I worked at the Google office in London as an SRE. I arrived their via acquisition. Google was a leisurely existence in comparison to the startup world. I could easily achieve nothing if only by just enjoying the endless perks. In the early days I had a lot to prove and pulled double duty by trying to stay awake in multiple time zones to get things done quickly. In the end being in my 20s I felt like I was losing my edge being there and had to go back to the startup world. Maybe one day I'll return when I have a wife and kids.

coldcode• 12 years ago

So why does Google need a PhD to be a manager? Or is everyone there a PhD? Seems like a waste of all that education.

mdwelsh3• 11 years ago

OP here. Lots of people at Google have PhDs. Most do not. My role is actually a Tech Lead Manager, which is far more technical than a typical manager position, and indeed I am on the Software Engineer ladder. I would say about 80% of my time is spent on technical things (writing code, design docs, evaluating designs, etc.) and only about 20% on "manager" activities like doing performance reviews, hiring, and the like. More here: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2013/04/running-software-team...

As far as "wasting education" is concerned, I've blogged extensively about the differences between doing applied research in industry and doing that kind of work in academia or in a more pure research setting, see for example http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvar...

I find that applying my skills as a systems and networking researcher in an industry setting, where I have the chance to develop and launch real products, is far more satisfying than just writing academic papers. But this is of course not for everyone.

Day in the Life of a Google Manager

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