06.23.07
Management hierarchy in Silicon Valley
Terry Chay made an interesting point about Yahoo management. It appears the Yahoo techie has it bad. But the Yahoo engineer looks down on the Ebay manager. The Ebay manager only belittles the Ebay engineer, but that’s the end of the line. There is nothing lower than an Ebay engineer. I’m not talking talent. That’s just the way the world is.
Ebay makes gobs of money. God bless them. Making money covers up all sorts of engineering and managerial problems. Google is a good example. Internally Google is a mess, but they have two products that work. That raises its managers’ score.
This is all too confusing. The whole process of superiority needs to be formalized. Here is an accurate hierarchy of who pecks whom in Silicon Valley. It has little to do with grunt engineering talent, only grisly managerial cluelessness.
This SBU chart is inspired by Luke.
As you can see clearly by the chart, Facebook engineers are managed by superior beings. Yahoo is in the middle of the pack, only because there are much stranger places to work. Ebay (excluding Paypal) is unfortunately the butt of all jokes. Just say “train”, and the Valley engineer will chuckle. Train you ask?
A train contains a fixed number of seats. An engineer has the privilege to sit in one of these seats. At some point, the eBay train will leave the station. Your train might leave at 3 am. You as an eBay engineer must stay up until 3 am to check in your working code to CVS. But the 2 am engineer already broke your libraries, so you must stay up until dawn to fix his problems. The train is so efficient that toolies must throw their bodies under the cogs of the Juggernaut to please the managerial gods.
Apple could not make the list due to secrecy. I only met one Apple employee who would divulge what he did. He works for Safari, which means, if you look in the upper-right-hand corner of your browser, he works for Google.