You are missing the point that Eric Schmidt's book is making.
I think successful software developers can generally be put in these categories:
1. People who gets assigned work done.
2. People who figures out what their assigned work should be and gets it done.
3. People who absorbs everything that is going around in team, figures out the biggest problem they are facing and gets it done.
4. People who absorbs everything within their teams + outside and anticipates the biggest problem future holds and gets it done today.
In short, being great coder just puts you at Category 1. For higher ups you need lots of ambition, vision, sense of mission, independence, intrinsic motivation and persistence. Most companies just want their employees to be able to "get work done" and they usually believe that management chain aka "leadership" would bring other qualities to the table. It's considered as management's job to figure out what the big problems are, break it down to tasks, make schedules, monitor progress and so on. if ads had a problem at Yahoo, for example, CEO might go to VP and ask him to fix it and then VP rolls this down the chain. The book says that Google breaks the mold here. Instead of CEO going to VP and management eventually assigning tasks to someone, he expected employees to just get up and take an action out of disgust and violation of sense of their mission.
One "issue" is that these kind of people don't like to be "managed". They generally don't want someone telling what they should be doing, track their status and so on. This was the reason Google used to had managers with 30-100 reports. One intended effect was that managers would be forced to interfere less with their reports and not be able to look over engineers shoulders or decide for them what exactly they should be doing. At most other companies it is unimaginable to have that many reports because the very first question people would ask is how would one manager can keep track of what everyone is doing? These companies inherently are designed to attract category 1. There is exponential difference in outcomes between each of above listed categories.
I think successful software developers can generally be put in these categories:
1. People who gets assigned work done.
2. People who figures out what their assigned work should be and gets it done.
3. People who absorbs everything that is going around in team, figures out the biggest problem they are facing and gets it done.
4. People who absorbs everything within their teams + outside and anticipates the biggest problem future holds and gets it done today.
In short, being great coder just puts you at Category 1. For higher ups you need lots of ambition, vision, sense of mission, independence, intrinsic motivation and persistence. Most companies just want their employees to be able to "get work done" and they usually believe that management chain aka "leadership" would bring other qualities to the table. It's considered as management's job to figure out what the big problems are, break it down to tasks, make schedules, monitor progress and so on. if ads had a problem at Yahoo, for example, CEO might go to VP and ask him to fix it and then VP rolls this down the chain. The book says that Google breaks the mold here. Instead of CEO going to VP and management eventually assigning tasks to someone, he expected employees to just get up and take an action out of disgust and violation of sense of their mission.
One "issue" is that these kind of people don't like to be "managed". They generally don't want someone telling what they should be doing, track their status and so on. This was the reason Google used to had managers with 30-100 reports. One intended effect was that managers would be forced to interfere less with their reports and not be able to look over engineers shoulders or decide for them what exactly they should be doing. At most other companies it is unimaginable to have that many reports because the very first question people would ask is how would one manager can keep track of what everyone is doing? These companies inherently are designed to attract category 1. There is exponential difference in outcomes between each of above listed categories.