Looking through the fortune 500 companies list, some companies really caught my eye, such as The Cheesecake Factory, Adobe, and NVIDIA. I chose The Cheesecake Factory because I absolutely love the food there, and I did not want top chose 3 tech companies. One thing that really stuck out to me about them was the awards they received a few years ago, specifically awards for best places to work as a millennial. This intrigued me because the service industry brings a variety of people into one place, and a company known to be a great place for a specific age of people means that the managers are trained to work and cooperate with a range of personalities.
The dessert display tempts as customers wait to be seated at the Cheesecake Factory restaurant in Marina del Rey.
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
Next up is NVIDIA. I think management within the tech industry is very unique, because we all hear of how these companies have great benefits, employees work little hours, and that they have great working environments. After reading the article “How Google Sold its Engineers on Management” By David A Garvin, I discovered that it was actually very difficult for tech giants like Google to manage their engineers like they do now. In 2002, Google actually tried to run their company with zero managers, but unfortunately that didn’t work. Google found that an effective manager in the tech world needs a large amount of employees to run. “It’s not uncommon to find engineering managers with 30 direct reports… that’s by design, to prevent micromanaging. ‘ There is only so much you can meddle when you have 30 people on your team, so you have to focus on creating the best environment for engineers to make things happen.’ ” (Garvin 2013). With this in mind, let’s look at NVIDIA to see what makes them successful. NVIDIA struck out immediately to me, as some of their top comments were “Management is honest and ethical in its business practices” and “I believe management would lay people off only as a last resort.” Clearly the employees at NVIDIA believe in their management. They have also been ranked as a top 5 best tech company to work at for the past several years.
The biggest HR theme I’ve noticed with the tech companies are two ideas. The first is downplaying hierarchy through the company, and the other is having an extensive recruitment process. Tech giants try and recruit those who are self sufficient, goal oriented, and don’t need micro managed by a manager. What they need from a manager is someone who can successfully lead them in the right direction and help them achieve their goals.
As for the type of manager I want to be, I want to be someone who has a strategic plan for a problem we are trying to solve by utilizing a mission and the values that we are all aligned with by our company. In lecture 2, it was dic
