Tonite at Baypiggies, Alex Martelli from Google gave a talk on “Tech Management.”
Largely the talk pertained to leadership in traditional tech companies, rather than FOSS projects.
A high-level summary would be that, in tech companies, there has to be balance between oversight and micro-management, and managers must be willing to pitch in when needed. Employees need to be told what is expected of them.
Management in tech companies is different than in a factory for a few reasons:
1) knowledge workers are well-educated and are hopefully self-motivated professionals
2) customer-facing employees get customer feedback long before top management does.
3) specialist employees may know more than managers.
So the more organizational layers between top mgmt. and employees, the slower communications and innovation gets.
Alex used 3M as an example of a formerly innovative company that allowed process (in this case 6 Sigma) to shackle urgency and creativity.
Regarding employee motivation, although there are ways to classify and prioritize what motivates people, again different situations and individuals weight motivations differently. The single most important thing is to define what is expected of employees.
As to methodology, Alex favors something agile, where requirements and feedback are close enough together to iterate over in a reasonable amount of time, unlike waterfall, which doesn’t produce a result until rather far into the future.
