I’d say this is about accurate:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/14/key-to-gmail/

Today at the Gmail Behind The Scenes panel at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, key team members of the Gmail team revealed the true secret of the service: Shit umbrellas.

Product manager Todd Jackson made the humorous revelation when explaining how the Gmail team works as a group of about 100 people, the vast majority of which are engineers. “You can either be a shit funnel or a shit umbrella,” Jackson says.

What he means by that is that as a product with hundreds of millions of users (and a company with thousands of employees) there’s a lot of stuff constantly being hurled at the team — as a shit umbrella, the product managers protect the engineers from getting distracted. It’s not enough to be a “shit funnel” where they would pass some of the junk down to engineers, they need to fully protect the engineers.

Some of the best managers I had at Sun were people whom I was actively scared-of-having as a manager, but who turned out to be excellent at keeping the organisation off my back and letting me get on with my job; conversely some of the nicest folk turned out to be… not terribly good at that.

Occasionally you got someone who was both nice *and* a good umbrella; and for those seemingly all-too-brief periods, life was good, productivity could be high, and you could roll out a massive project with what seemed like no effort at all.

Alas for the bad times.