Interlude - Index of

104 | Turbulent Adolescence
orgasm is when a manager says, “I set up this team and coached
the leader on how to hire good people and manage them effectively,
and now he’s matured to the point that he can start other
teams and coach their managers, so I have more time to focus
on the annual budget and planning process. . . . Whee!” Management-centric
thinking is about resources and processes—the
people, dollars, labs, schedules, procedures, and action items
required to complete a product on budget and on time.
Helen designed an organization that paired managers with
senior engineers. The manager of a ten-person group would have
a senior engineer to guide the technical direction of the group.
More senior managers would have more senior engineers in a
parallel structure all the way up to the top—the VP of engineering
was paired with the CTO. Some people can do both styles
of thinking, but they are rare. What’s more, both roles are fulltime
jobs. Steve was always very skeptical of people who wanted
to be managers but also keep doing hands-on engineering.
Here is an example of how good engineers think. Tape
drives used to be much cheaper than disk drives, which is why
people used tapes for backups—copies made in case something
bad happens to the original. Every year disks and tapes were
both getting less expensive, but Steve noticed that disk prices
were dropping much faster. He predicted that disks would eventually
become cheaper than tapes—or so close that it didn’t
matter. This was years ago, and today NetApp makes hundreds
of millions of dollars a year helping customers do backups with
disk instead of tape. Steve is always on the lookout for this sort
of change, where something that has been true for years (tapes
are way cheaper) becomes false. In technology as in business,
change creates opportunity.