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Silicon Valley’s Productivity Secret

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Re: Silicon Valley’s Productivity Secret

#51

Post by ams6110 »

snprbob86 wrote: post #36
georgieporgie wrote: post #19

I mentioned that, at my last company, we sent weekly status reports with items completed and expected upcoming tasks. I was promptly told that status reports were a sign of a broken company. Apparently, if I'd called them snippets instead, I'd have been applauded for mentioning an innovative business tool? The thing which is always overlooked in articles like this is guidance and feedback. Sending "snippets" or statu…

Status reports aren't a sign of a broken company. Micro-management, over communication, and unnecessary process are. Turns out that many broken businesses utilize status reports as a weapon of oppression. However some small tweaks, like reminders, team-level sharing, company-wide search index, and a sane managerial attitude make Snippets popular with many teams at Google. Just like any tool, status reports can be mis…

Standups don't scale though. The company I was with got to the point where morning standup took nearly an hour as each person talked about what they did yesterday, what they had planned for today, and any blockers. Worse, the only person who really needed to hear all of this was the manager. Sometimes you had interest in what another person was doing because it might impact your work, but for 90% of the standup you were just standing there, bored, waiting for your turn or waiting for it to end. Terribly unproductive.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Productivity Secret

#52

Post by michaelochurch »

OP totally misses the point about Snippet systems.

The original reason for Snippets was quite a progressive one: to remove the manager-as-SPOF anti-pattern by allowing employees to market their less-visible accomplishments internally.

That's said without comment about the actual managerial environment at Google, where manager-as-SPOF is very much in force (because managers can abuse the process limitlessly to block transfers).

Re: Silicon Valley’s Productivity Secret

#53

Post by michaelochurch »

trimbo wrote: post #26

OKRs started at Intel, not Google.

Google shat the bed by hiring a bunch of incompetent execs from culturally defective companies like Oracle and not telling them to wipe their fucking feet off at the door. So they tracked a bunch of shit into the place.

The rank-and-file engineers at Google are a really amazing crop of people, and the founders and early architects were (and still are) brilliant, but the middle-managers and execs hired from without are so incompetent that they are flying a plane into the company (the three-word "mission statements", that idiotic stack-ranking, the idiocy that was downslotting).

Re: Silicon Valley’s Productivity Secret

#54

Post by karlzt »

akkartik wrote: post #10
irollboozers wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What have you been using them for then...

I've been saying what I did rather than reflecting on what is important and what to do next. Doesn't matter because I don't think anybody's been reading them either. Most of my team doesn't use them at all.

That's exactly what happens to me with my personal idonethis, at least I'm using Team idonethis: http://idonethis.com/habits/ the right way.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Productivity Secret

#55

Post by wahnfrieden »

ams6110 wrote: post #51
snprbob86 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Status reports aren't a sign of a broken company. Micro-management, over communication, and unnecessary process are. Turns out that many broken businesses utilize status reports as a weapon of oppression. However some small tweaks, like reminders, team-level sharing, company-wide search index, and a sane managerial attitude make Snippets popular with many teams at Google. Just like any tool, status reports can be mis…

Standups don't scale though. The company I was with got to the point where morning standup took nearly an hour as each person talked about what they did yesterday, what they had planned for today, and any blockers. Worse, the only person who really needed to hear all of this was the manager. Sometimes you had interest in what another person was doing because it might impact your work, but for 90% of the standup you w…

You should have been split up into smaller teams then. 6-7 people with a max of a couple minutes per will only take 15mins.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Productivity Secret

#56

Post by snprbob86 »

ams6110 wrote: post #51
snprbob86 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Status reports aren't a sign of a broken company. Micro-management, over communication, and unnecessary process are. Turns out that many broken businesses utilize status reports as a weapon of oppression. However some small tweaks, like reminders, team-level sharing, company-wide search index, and a sane managerial attitude make Snippets popular with many teams at Google. Just like any tool, status reports can be mis…

Standups don't scale though. The company I was with got to the point where morning standup took nearly an hour as each person talked about what they did yesterday, what they had planned for today, and any blockers. Worse, the only person who really needed to hear all of this was the manager. Sometimes you had interest in what another person was doing because it might impact your work, but for 90% of the standup you w…

Forgive me for quoting/paraphrasing myself, but...

"You shouldn't do [standups] because [agile consultants] [tell you to]. You should figure out a communication medium, cadence, and agenda/template, which works for you and your team."

Re: Silicon Valley’s Productivity Secret

#57

Post by dpritchett »

michaelochurch wrote: post #52

OP totally misses the point about Snippet systems. The original reason for Snippets was quite a progressive one: to remove the manager-as-SPOF anti-pattern by allowing employees to market their less-visible accomplishments internally. That's said without comment about the actual managerial environment at Google, where manager-as-SPOF is very much in force (because managers can abuse the process limitlessly to block t…

    > managers can abuse the process limitlessly to block transfers
There was some eye-opening stuff about Google's promotion system here on HN yesterday:

Google New York is pretty 9-to-5 these days, except for people who are gunning for promotion... and it's pretty hard to build up the rolodex (due to the "2-up rule", which is that promotion from level N to N+1 will be decided by a panel of N+2's) to gun for promo every year. So most people work 9-to-5 (actually, more like 10-6:30, because of the dinner) except before a launch if they believe it will lead to promo. [1]

I can't imagine how this works well in conjunction with the "choose your own team and product" ethos we've heard attributed to Google in the past. Maybe Google's historic growth and profitability has been masking serious issues in its talent management process.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3526263

Re: Silicon Valley’s Productivity Secret

#58

Post by Shenglong »

I'd also like to point out that the valley has some of the best weather I've ever seen in my life. I was only down there for a few days, but every day, I felt like I needed to do something. That's a 180 from east coast weather, when it's gloomy and raining every day.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Productivity Secret

#59

Post by gergles »

ams6110 wrote: post #51
snprbob86 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Status reports aren't a sign of a broken company. Micro-management, over communication, and unnecessary process are. Turns out that many broken businesses utilize status reports as a weapon of oppression. However some small tweaks, like reminders, team-level sharing, company-wide search index, and a sane managerial attitude make Snippets popular with many teams at Google. Just like any tool, status reports can be mis…

Standups don't scale though. The company I was with got to the point where morning standup took nearly an hour as each person talked about what they did yesterday, what they had planned for today, and any blockers. Worse, the only person who really needed to hear all of this was the manager. Sometimes you had interest in what another person was doing because it might impact your work, but for 90% of the standup you w…

The bigger problem with standups is when you are in a role such as operations, where you are often involved (extremely peripherally) with many development teams, each of which wants you at their "20 minute" standup.

I regularly spend a full hour a day in standups, and the useful content to me in them could be communicated in 5 minutes or in 2 emails.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Productivity Secret

#60

Post by gergles »

codyrobbins wrote: post #28
ericabiz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love the concept but hate the name. "iDoneThis" isn't even proper grammar... This is a case where a few hundred dollars on a good domain name would go a long way.

It’s an excellent name. It’s not supposed to be proper grammar—that’s part of the playfulness of it. It’s not a sentence, it’s a name. What you’re saying is like saying ‘Flickr’ isn’t a word.

It's a stupid name, because it also parses as a sentence, and a wrong sentence at that.

The product seems fine, but the name is irreparably bad.

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