> The only metric that most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be.
I suspect this is pretty universal at large companies. And especially managers seeking to make their way up the hierarchy are always looking to grow the size of their teams.
Team size seems to have become the new "corner office" in terms of managers self measurement. When the iPhone was still super secret, having a locked hallway was Apple's "corner office". A manager was on track to get their Tesla Roadster if they could get their team working on iOS and get their hallways locked behind an extra set of badge readers. This continued for a few years after the iPhone's release as the Mac and iOS software teams were still not fully integrated.
Team size is an easily quantifiable metric of a managers influence/budget etc. It's also something that's almost never confidential as opposed to other business metrics. "Impact" and "scope" are hard to measure and can be debated about.
Very true! When the first Apple Park designs were shown, I was wondering how those grand, sweeping hallways could be reconciled with our quotidian experience of more and more lockdown areas popping up daily…
In practice, I get the impression that the move to Apple Park stopped and maybe somewhat reversed that trend. Areas can be, and mostly are, locked down by sector and floor, but rarely finer grained than that. And maybe that was a subtle design goal to begin with.
Yeah I think Apple Park's design only worked (such as it does) because iOS and macOS software orgs had merged long before moving in. In Infinite Loop they closed off hallways as lockdown areas and generally cut up the buildings, that would never have worked at Apple Park. Geez I remember being able to bring guests to my office in Infinite Loop.
I suspect this is pretty universal at large companies. And especially managers seeking to make their way up the hierarchy are always looking to grow the size of their teams.