[mailshanx]

Something that always bothered me when I read posts on Google's blogs: why is it that it's always authored by a PM? Why can't perhaps a senior engineer also write an announcement post occasionally?

Yes, the names of the engineers on the team are present in the acknowledgement section: but, this is a single line at the bottom of the post, whereas the name of the PM and the fact that he is the author is featured prominently below the title. This pattern is common across many product/OSS library announcements.

Sure, one could argue that the PM has a holistic view of the product or library being announced, and that developing this perspective is in fact their job. But surely a sufficiently senior engineer can (and often does) have an equally holistic, or perhaps even more insightful overview. At least sometimes. Even if this were not the case, why not acknowledge everyone's contributions at the same place in the article?

I think this is symptomatic of the ubiquitous class divide between the "suits" and "nerds" in the corporate world.

[summerlight]

In my observation, it's mostly because engineers usually don't want to write this kind of articles which needs to be reviewed by multiple stakeholders. If they want to write its themselves, I believe it's possible and there's some instances as well.

[bt848]

"Always" seems like a stretch. I just selected a random month of the google.ai blog archive and 5 of 5 were written by non-PMs.