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An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

bradfitz.com

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Re: An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

#141

Post by rurban »

bradknowles wrote: post #110
markstos wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notable that the word "Perl" appears nowhere in his write up of technical legacy. He was once Chief Architect at Six Apart, developers of the Perl-based Movable Type blogging platform which once rivaled Wordpress.

I remember Six Apart and Movable Type. I always wondered what happened to them. Thanks for helping make that connection for me!

It died when it had that huge, exploitable serialization bug, similar to those other platform serialization bugs those times.

Other than it was fine, but personally I preferred my PHP frameworks, which were just better. Not WordPress, WordPress survived it unfortunately.

Re: An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

#142

Post by dmix »

VRay wrote: post #114
SamWhited wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When can this fad end It's not a fad, businesses aren't doing this just because it's trendy and cool and they think people will like it, they're doing it because it saves them a fortune and they care more about their bottom line than their employees well being.

It saves a fortune, but the companies are spending a fortune on their employees' salary and benefits too I think we're talking the difference between $300/month on open desk space vs $1000/month on an office. It's a lot of money and it adds up, but these people are costing the company a total of $10k-$40k a month My theory is that open space is extremely helpful to certain types of people, and those traits coincident…

Even sharing an office with 2-4 people isn't that bad compared to open floor. You get used to each other's quirks pretty fast and keep the door closed when serious work is going on... it doesn't have to be solo offices for every person which would dramatically increase costs.

Re: An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

#143

Post by falcolas »

SamWhited wrote: post #107
crystaldev wrote: post #28

Good luck to Brad. It sounds like the last twelve years of his life were pure Google, it's a big change. > I don't want to get stuck in a comfortable rut. (And Google certainly is comfortable, except for open floor plans.) It's oddly comforting that even programmers of Brad's caliber are forced to cope with open offices. When can this fad end.

> When can this fad end It's not a fad, businesses aren't doing this just because it's trendy and cool and they think people will like it, they're doing it because it saves them a fortune and they care more about their bottom line than their employees well being.

That fortune's pretty small, really. About $5,100 per employee, per year. It would take a lot of employees for that to even be a noticeable line item for a company with profits in the billions.

It saves an average of 40 square feet (65 for open office, 100 for an individual office), plus a couple of thousand in construction costs.

So, at around $100 per square foot per year (figures vary wildly, but I saw a couple of concrete values in the $75 range for the bay area), plus a one time cost of $25 per square feet for construction, that's less than $5,000 a year per employee, plus an additional one-time $1,000 amortized over about 10 years.

Re: An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

#144

Post by raphlinus »

Congrats, and best of luck on the new adventure.

One of my favorite bradfitz moments (and there were a number) was when I was on the spam and abuse team, and the two of us were talking about chat protocols, likely in the context of preventing spam, and he brought up XMPP. I asked what that was (I had known it simply as "Jabber") and he looked at me in wonderment that I didn't know that.

Livejournal, memcached, go, those are three hugely impactful things. Let the number continue to increase!

Re: An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

#145

Post by chrisseaton »

bovermyer wrote: post #137
chrisseaton wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what?

It matters in this case because the discussion took a turn towards comparing the compensation of staff to the provisioning of the office environment. In that context, companies' consideration of expenditures will take into account capital versus operational categories.

Why does it matter? It's all the same money no matter which budget it comes out of.

Re: An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

#146

Post by musicale »

crystaldev wrote: post #28

Good luck to Brad. It sounds like the last twelve years of his life were pure Google, it's a big change. > I don't want to get stuck in a comfortable rut. (And Google certainly is comfortable, except for open floor plans.) It's oddly comforting that even programmers of Brad's caliber are forced to cope with open offices. When can this fad end.

> When can this fad end.

When the monetary and other incentives change.

Open plan offices are currently the cheapest way to cram bodies into office space, and the loss in productivity, quality of life, privacy and sanity doesn't factor into the facilities cost equation, which considers facility capital and operational expenses and ignores everything else.

As others have noted, the executives who make decisions also enjoy easy surveillance, which is facilitated by open plan offices.

Re: An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

#147

Post by Matt_Cutts »

Thanks for all the things you did. The Android jank stuff made a big impression on me--you made the value so clear with your work.

And also thanks for the rants when something wasn't up to par. I'm thinking about https://bgr.com/2015/02/18/google-nest-smoke-alarm-video/ , which has only grown more hilarious to me over time.

Re: An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

#150

Post by Matt_Cutts »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #147

Thanks for all the things you did. The Android jank stuff made a big impression on me--you made the value so clear with your work. And also thanks for the rants when something wasn't up to par. I'm thinking about https://bgr.com/2015/02/18/google-nest-smoke-alarm-video/ , which has only grown more hilarious to me over time.

P.S. If you're looking for some interesting chaos to revitalize your life, have you considered doing a tour of public service? :)
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