> Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it.
This was my experience with upper-middle management to VP (sometimes SvP) level at Google. The way they communicate is incomprehensible, it says everything and nothing at the same time – announcements with simultaneous dramatic change and all remains the same – it’s very disorienting. My theory is that its not meant to set direction, or describe a vision, or even goals – rather it converges towards something intended to impress and socially posture against other managers. It’s used as fodder for taking credit during performance review.
One meme I remember is ”you might be a Googler if you cant answer which team you are on in 5 seconds”. The engineers are extremely good (impostor syndrome is widespread), but it feels like they are blindfolded, wandering in different directions. I certainly don’t know how to run a large company. But a good start would be to use plain descriptive language. Evidently, even the corp-speech-whisperers can’t establish a shared reality.
> My theory is that its not meant to set direction, or describe a vision, or even goals – rather it converges towards something intended to impress and socially posture against other managers.
Yes, it's self-preservation behavior. It's a strong indicator that the manager knows they are in a position that provides little to no value, so they need to aggressively preserve it.
Why does a single, non-technical middle manager need authority over multiple PL development teams? It makes no sense. The bare minimum of that position must be to connect technical expertise of the ICs to strategic vision of the C-suite. That is a full-time job, and if it's not being done, there needs to be accountability.
Could it be possible, that overall impact of the decisions is clear to the upper management (but the language that is being used, masks the exploitative behavior/profit maximization). But that feels unlikely, if they just assign people to positions were they are not good fit.
I don’t know about Google but many places I have worked had people who say a lot of things but those words don’t actually mean anything. You listen to them for half hour but you can’t summarize why they said in those 30 minutes, no matter how hard you try. Lots of buzzwords and word salads. It isn’t unique to Google. Reminds me of politicians
People sometimes know where they want to get, often that place can be described with buzzwords. They don't always know how to get there. Clueless managers often don't know how to get there, they might only have an inkling as to what are some of the properties of their desired state.
They will talk about that subset of things, they cannot do anything else for they are not aware of the how, much less the whole picture. Once the teams deliver a state with the desired and the unspecified and undesired properties, the team and the manager get angry.
This was my experience with upper-middle management to VP (sometimes SvP) level at Google. The way they communicate is incomprehensible, it says everything and nothing at the same time – announcements with simultaneous dramatic change and all remains the same – it’s very disorienting. My theory is that its not meant to set direction, or describe a vision, or even goals – rather it converges towards something intended to impress and socially posture against other managers. It’s used as fodder for taking credit during performance review.
One meme I remember is ”you might be a Googler if you cant answer which team you are on in 5 seconds”. The engineers are extremely good (impostor syndrome is widespread), but it feels like they are blindfolded, wandering in different directions. I certainly don’t know how to run a large company. But a good start would be to use plain descriptive language. Evidently, even the corp-speech-whisperers can’t establish a shared reality.