What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team (2016) • Hacker News Board

Re: What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team (2016)

#111

Post by 0xbear » Sun, Nov 05, 2017, 5:10 AM UTC

itronitron wrote: post #110

0xbear wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I’m saying is that at no point in my rather lengthy stint at Google were my feelings even a passing consideration to anybody in my chain of command. A couple of peers cared, but even there the environment is much more impersonal than in other companies I’ve worked at. And that’s _good_ for things like code quality etc, because your design won’t gain approval if it sucks no matter how chummy you are with your pee…

>> with code reviews, you will regularly get mercilessly savaged with the most pedantic nitpicking you’ve ever seen That is interesting and I would not have expected that as I keep hearing that google's hiring process is focused on only hiring the best.

Obviously it’s not possible to hire just “the best”, but I can confirm one thing: the quality of their engineering talent is very high, and a lot of the best people in their respective fields work there.

Re: What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team (2016)

#112

Post by indubitable » Sun, Nov 05, 2017, 5:56 AM UTC

perl4ever wrote: post #106

dageshi wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google and Psychological Science play a key role in this article. Opinions of both have shifted sharply in the past couple of years. I would note perhaps that as someone outside the US, it appears like opinions of people in the US about large tech companies appears to have shifted very recently, within the past 6 months so it seems to me. Personally I feel the same about Google/Amazon/Facebook as I ever did.

As someone inside the US, I feel like there was a theme of opposition to fracking not long ago, and it switched to opposition to tech, almost as if it was orchestrated. This could be just my paranoid tendencies speaking, but if the anti-silicon valley sentiment is largely genuine, why does it seem to me like the anti-fracking sentiment has disappeared from the forums I read? It's as though some astroturfing campaign…

That is an interesting observation that does seem true. However, I also think there's a very benign explanation for it. Something we forget is that news agencies are not benevolent. The themes a news organization publishes are not going to be based upon what is most valuable to society, but what is most valuable to them.

Right now all traditional media (mostly as opposed to social media) is seriously struggling. Traditional media has been experiencing constant downsizing/layoffs and other consequences. And this includes big names like the New York Times. Cable news networks are likely only continuing along since they're owned by huge, profitable, corporations that can subsidize their operation in exchange for the valuable ability to use them to push agenda.

So what I'm getting at here is that if public reception and 'excitement' towards anti-fracking started to decline, news agencies would begin to cover it less and move to more exciting things that bring in the clicks which bring in the revenue. Blaming Silicon Valley is something that will likely continue to bring in hits since we live in this really paradoxical economy. By most of all measures, our economy is doing terrifically - yet simultaneously we're seeing things like real wages remaining stagnant for decades. So people want things to blame. And Silicon Valley is an easy target as it's seen as a realm of excess and increasingly societal apathy on part of the big players. This [1] single [phenomenally well framed] image is likely an embodiment of how many see the increasing divide. Makes for good clicks in any case!

[1] - https://i.imgur.com/hCK2OiS.jpg

Re: What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team (2016)

#113

Post by antonvs » Sun, Nov 05, 2017, 8:41 AM UTC

tajen wrote: post #107

dinoleif wrote: post #6

Ridiculous puff piece & PR job. There is not a single piece of data in that entire article. The way this works is: 1/ Google crunches some data 2/ The company leadership looks at that data, twists it to leave out "inconvenient" facts, and tells whatever narratives they want to tell (internally and to the NYT) 3/ No data or any empirical results are ever released (even internally)

Is there a relationship between NYT and Google? I’m surprised how they are (politically) aligned to display a coherent message.

Google has a big office in NYC, so that could have something to do with it.

Re: What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team (2016)

#114

Post by bobby_the_whale » Sun, Nov 05, 2017, 10:08 AM UTC

andrewflnr wrote: post #90

golemotron wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. What isn't mentioned is that the 'Mind in the Eyes' test is used to ass…

Where do you think teamwork is not important? Such circumstances are vanishingly rare at best, mostly debatable, and will get rarer as humanity's ambition increasingly exceeds the capabilities of individuals. Meanwhile, having the ability to work with others will always be better than not.

What's your definition of teamwork? If it is that in order to complete a large task (e.g. building an iPhone) that it is beneficial to work together with others, it's obvious, because even the best engineer in the world doesn't live long enough to fix everything currently.

If however you are saying that there exist many tasks for which you actually work together to come up for a solution for a known problem, I doubt that.

Case in point: Perelman.

To make it more concrete: if one is using cloud services, is one working together with that could service people? Is that teamwork? I don't think so. Yet, it is cooperation.

In jobs where you need to hold a heavy object in place such that someone else can put a nail somewhere is only teamwork, because of technological limitations. Robots that can do this already exist, but they are too expensive. As such, I also don't count those classes of work as teamwork.

Taking the above into consideration, what remains of your "teamwork"?

Re: What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team (2016)

#115

Post by andrewflnr » Sun, Nov 05, 2017, 7:19 PM UTC

bobby_the_whale wrote: post #114

andrewflnr wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you think teamwork is not important? Such circumstances are vanishingly rare at best, mostly debatable, and will get rarer as humanity's ambition increasingly exceeds the capabilities of individuals. Meanwhile, having the ability to work with others will always be better than not.

What's your definition of teamwork? If it is that in order to complete a large task (e.g. building an iPhone) that it is beneficial to work together with others, it's obvious, because even the best engineer in the world doesn't live long enough to fix everything currently . If however you are saying that there exist many tasks for which you actually work together to come up for a solution for a known problem, I doubt…

Perhaps "teamwork" is not the best term, if it invites such a narrow interpretation. But even for mere "cooperation" as you put it, empathy is needed. In your cloud service example, if a client ever needs tech support, at least the support person is trying to read the client's mind, or they're not doing their job. Even in the case of holding up heavy objects, don't underestimate the value of sensitivity to the other person's needs; I've been on both sides of screwups in that area.

GP asked about hiring at companies, so solo projects are either not germane, or an illusion. Are you the only dev on a project that serves larger business goals? You're on a team! You need to understand how your work fits in with others' efforts, and either adjust or explain how others should adjust instead, most likely both. Oh, and don't forget to document everything, another empathy-heavy task. I think we all know this; it's just another way of discovering the meme that devs who understand the business go farther.

Part of the point I was trying to make is that those "large projects" you were talking about are going to become more common and more important, out-competing smaller teams that are almost by definition less capable in terms of feature output. If a solo dev outcompetes a team, it's because they were better at empathizing with customers. If that's not exactly teamwork, it doesn't avoid the problem, either.