That doesn't provide a perfect answer. Sanjay and Jeff (and a lot of other senior Googlers) were all at DEC. Why didn't DEC succeed to the degree that Google has?
And Softdisk had John Carmack and basically the entire original Id software team on their payroll. And Fairchild Semiconductors had the entire executive founding team of Intel, and Xeroc PARC had not only several key people but essentially the entire IP portfolio of modern computers, including some working prototypes...
"Success" is the result of a very large equation with many variables, and having (some of) the right people is only a few of them.
Because they didn’t have Craig Silverstein and many many others. Lets not pretend Jeff and Sanjay, as much talented and prolific as they are, are singlehandedly responsible for Googles success.
I don't know if Sanjay and Jeff worked directly on DEC's AltaVista search engine but that project was treated as a low-priority "demo showcase" for DEC Alpha servers instead of being seen by DEC management as a new multibillion dollar internet business to pursue. DEC could have had a "Bezos-hey-we-can-sell-computing-as-AWS" moment with AltaVista but they missed it and let Google surpass it.
They didn't - AltaVista was done by Louis Monier and Mike Burrows, both of whom also worked at Google and both of whom also made significant contributions to the codebase.
I do agree that management was the critical ingredient - my former VP at Google (employee #48) credited Urs Hoelzle (employee #9, and Google's first VP) as a key ingredient to Google's success. Ironically, though, Google hired Western Digital's management as well - SVP Alan Eustace came from there - and yet the team under Eustace at Google was much more effective than the team under Eustace at Western Digital.
I suspect that management has sort of a "gatekeeping" effect - if all of your management is good, the whole department does great things, but if a single link in the org chart is a dufus, the whole organization will fail. When I joined Google in 2009, my whole management chain (6 levels, up to Eric Schmidt) were all engineers, and it showed.
> I suspect that management has sort of a "gatekeeping" effect - if all of your management is good, the whole department does great things, but if a single link in the org chart is a dufus, the whole organization will fail. When I joined Google in 2009, my whole management chain (6 levels, up to Eric Schmidt) were all engineers, and it showed.
So true. As an engineer, the most direct impact on my productivity has been the team and manager. But the manager is a SPOF: if he/she is bad, then my productivity suffers.
I have yet to work in an organization where there was a good chain as you mention though. Maybe that's what sets Google apart. Smaller companies tend to have shorter management chains and I prefer them for that reason.
Mike Burrows was a coauthor on the algorithm behind bz2 [1]. It's the most mindblowing algorithm I ever encountered and so I have utmost respect for that couple of guys :)
