Typical Google Manager Day
Matt Welsh has been with Google since 2010. His current position is called “tech lead manager” (TLM): Welch is responsible for both the technical side of projects and the management of a team of people. You can read more about his role in the company here , if there is such a desire.
The other day, Welsh laid out a detailed routine of his day, which, I think, will be interesting to most readers of both Megamind and Habr with Geeks. According to the author, every day he differs from the previous ones, so he did something like an average routine, which can be found in the sequel.
6:45 Get up, prepare the kids, make breakfast for them and yourself, showers.
8:30 A trip to work by bicycle (approximately 10 minutes), breakfast, workplace.
8:45 Checking various parameters of corporate projects - traffic, network operation, status of data centers.
9:00 Check email. Welsh has to be constantly distracted by email, but working with Inbox has partially fixed this problem.
9:30 Work on a description of a new feature that the Welch team is developing for Chrome.
10:00 Chat with one of the team members, proceedings with a bug report. Log analysis, bug report update.
10:30 Morning is not filled with meetings, so Matt has an hour to do what he loves to do - code creation. He understands MapReduce in Go, adding new features, and trying to make it all more convenient. Matt does not have time to finish - there are other duties, more urgent.
11:30 Video chat with a colleague from Google headquarters, discussion of a new project.
12:00 Hiking in a cafe for lunch, reading the Hacker News.
12:30 Communication with the team, discussion of the agenda for one intra-corporate conference.
13:00 Meeting with the team responsible for recruiting new staff for the project. Sometimes it’s easy to choose a candidate, sometimes it’s very difficult.
14:00 Weekly team meeting. At such meetings, usually one or more people represent the entire team so that others can continue to work on the project. Discussion of the results, discussion of the progress of the project. Quarterly goals are sometimes discussed at such meetings. Sometimes meetings are not held at all.
15:00 Individual meetings with employees. The goal is to discuss the technical details of the work, clarify some psychological aspects, and discuss career plans of employees.
16:00 Three days a week, Matt an hour earlier leaves work to ride an hour on a bicycle.
17:00 Return home, shower, cooking dinner with the family, chatting with the kids.
19:00 Preparing children for bed, reading books.
20:00 Work with e-mail, if something is missed in the morning. “Take work home,” Welch avoids. Then - a movie or a book, communication with his wife.
Matt notes that he is now involved in a much larger number of projects than at the beginning of his work at the corporation. He has a lot more meetings with people now, and almost all of his technical work, programming, etc. performed by team members.