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Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

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Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#151

Post by adverbly »

immibis wrote: post #125
adverbly wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To get promoted beyond a certain level, you must have brought some new product over the finish line This always confused me. It looked from the outside like Google does so many things right on the innovation front, but after some early success they have had a rough streak. I'd argue that one thing that Google is doing wrong is gatekeeping promotions based on (overly) well-defined criteria such as new products. Good…

You would think that. I would think that. But can you actually name more than a handful of things Google created that were good? Because I can't. There's search, obviously. Gmail, if that wasn't an acquisition.... What else?

You're kidding right? Maps, android, camera, calendar, hangout, pay/wallet, docs, sheets, slides, voice to text stuff, YouTube, chrome/debugger, kubernetes, grpc, Gmail, music, ads... Pretty ubiquitous suite of products both consumer facing and business facing... I don't think you can question that Google has been successful at innovation. You can question if they could be doing it better but impossible to say they aren't having some success doing what they're doing...

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#152

Post by immibis »

adverbly wrote: post #151
immibis wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would think that. I would think that. But can you actually name more than a handful of things Google created that were good? Because I can't. There's search, obviously. Gmail, if that wasn't an acquisition.... What else?

You're kidding right? Maps, android, camera, calendar, hangout, pay/wallet, docs, sheets, slides, voice to text stuff, YouTube, chrome/debugger, kubernetes, grpc, Gmail, music, ads... Pretty ubiquitous suite of products both consumer facing and business facing... I don't think you can question that Google has been successful at innovation. You can question if they could be doing it better but impossible to say they a…

Acquisition, acquisition, basic OS feature (and therefore part of the Android acquisition), Google EEE of thing you could already do (and developed by an individual Google developer without the approval of Google management), Google CADT, Google EEE of something you could already do, acquisition, acquisition, actual Google creation, don't know, Google EEE of something that already existed (Firebug was first), not good, too trivial to count, actual Google creation that I already mentioned, don't know what you mean, not good.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#153

Post by Viliam1234 »

quesera wrote: post #44
EncomLab wrote: post #26

Relate to the four stages of employment: 1) This is the new person "X" - they are amazing and are going to solve everything! 2) "X" is pretty good, but maybe not as good as we thought. 3) "X" turned out to just be another average performer. 4) "X" is obviously terrible or they would have left for someplace that would treat them better than we do.

I've never seen this written down, but I've definitely seen it in action. Experienced leaders try to avoid deluding themselves at step 1, and work to prevent things transitioning from step 2 to step 3. But sometimes it's impossible (or I'm not experienced enough!). Some employees really do start off strong and then fade out, even if the incentive structures are "good" / "above market" / etc. Honestly, I've seen the r…

Sometimes the new employee's superpower is all the good ideas they have seen in their previous jobs that they are now bringing to your company. But the fact that they work for you now means that they no longer get new experience about how things work in other companies.

Sometimes it is the fact that as a new employee, they are expected to still be learning new things, so they are given less work and responsibilities, which leaves them some time to think. Later, they will probably be given as much work and responsibility as possible, which leaves no time and energy to think about things. Especially with daily agile meetings, which make sure that everyone is only thinking about the things the management wants them to think about (hint: fixing technical debt is not one of those things).

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#154

Post by mdorazio »

saulpw wrote: post #131
mdorazio wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ones I personally use because they are/were good: Maps. Android (+ Auto). Chrome. Docs/Sheets. Translate. The issue is that most of these originated a long time ago and recent Google creations, like Bard/Gemini, tend to be mediocre copies of other things.

Google Maps: acquired in 2004 Android: acquired in 2005 Google Sheets: acquired in 2006 Translate: launched in 2006 Chrome: launched in 2008 So only 2/5 of the ones you mentioned were started in-house, and all were pre-2010 (pre-Sundar) creations. edit: Sundar joined Google in 2004 and apparently led Maps, Chrome, and eventually Android before becoming CEO. So "pre-Sundar" is technically incorrect.

This characterization is pretty misleading. For example, the Google Maps that was acquired was a C++ desktop application. What most people think of as Google Maps (the AJAX web app) was built and launched by Google.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#156

Post by adverbly »

immibis wrote: post #152
adverbly wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're kidding right? Maps, android, camera, calendar, hangout, pay/wallet, docs, sheets, slides, voice to text stuff, YouTube, chrome/debugger, kubernetes, grpc, Gmail, music, ads... Pretty ubiquitous suite of products both consumer facing and business facing... I don't think you can question that Google has been successful at innovation. You can question if they could be doing it better but impossible to say they a…

Acquisition, acquisition, basic OS feature (and therefore part of the Android acquisition), Google EEE of thing you could already do (and developed by an individual Google developer without the approval of Google management), Google CADT, Google EEE of something you could already do, acquisition, acquisition, actual Google creation, don't know, Google EEE of something that already existed (Firebug was first), not goo…

Fun! Flights, shopping, scholar, trends, tensorflow, Go, recaptcha, pixel, Chromecast, firebase, translate...

Re "too trivial to count"? We're commenting on a thread that involves an award given out for someone who wrote an excel script...

Re "not good": From whose perspective? If it makes company more profit then it's hard to say that it's a bad thing...

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#157

Post by quesera »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #153
quesera wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen this written down, but I've definitely seen it in action. Experienced leaders try to avoid deluding themselves at step 1, and work to prevent things transitioning from step 2 to step 3. But sometimes it's impossible (or I'm not experienced enough!). Some employees really do start off strong and then fade out, even if the incentive structures are "good" / "above market" / etc. Honestly, I've seen the r…

Sometimes the new employee's superpower is all the good ideas they have seen in their previous jobs that they are now bringing to your company. But the fact that they work for you now means that they no longer get new experience about how things work in other companies. Sometimes it is the fact that as a new employee, they are expected to still be learning new things, so they are given less work and responsibilities,…

All good points.

I'll qualify one though -- if the "management" who is present on daily standup does not prioritize fixing tech debt, then that person is simply at the wrong level of management to be present.

It's possible to do standups productively, though often they certainly are not.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#159

Post by gmfawcett »

gmfawcett wrote: post #149
parkerhiggins wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

outcomes > outputs It’s proven time and time again by DX programs (S.P.A.C.E. etc) that focus time is really the only KPI that produces outcomes.

Reference, please?

My laconic question was downvoted. Sorry, I was on my phone, but didn't want to forget about this. I'm sincerely interested in reading the source of this research. Searching for it now, I came across this article:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-spa...

But is this really the one you mean? Even the abstract states that there is no single metric that measures developer performance, which contradicts your claim:

> Developer productivity is about more than an individual’s activity levels or the efficiency of the engineering systems relied on to ship software, and it cannot be measured by a single metric or dimension

So I'm still interested in reading the research you're talking about, and I would appreciate a reference. Thanks!

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#160

Post by specialist »

hinkley wrote: post #127
ecshafer wrote: post #61

My goto example of a dysfunctional and bureaucratic organization is an example I saw in a finance company I worked for. I was a on team that we were doing a major project. We basically ran Kanban but had to run "sprints" so we chose 4 week sprints to get it out of the way and we put everything on the board we had to get done that month to stay on track. Our pipeline was setup in such a way that you were required to h…

It's funny that my anecdote also comes from a kanban team, but amongst mostly waterfall people and one Scrum nutjob. When you are showing people up they throw the book at you. Yes you're getting a lot done but you're cutting corners so that's cheating! In an org that is perpetually behind schedule they rely on one team being a scapegoat for why all the other teams are behind schedule, and when your team has never bee…

> Yes you're getting a lot done but you're cutting corners so that's cheating!

Yup.

Merits of Agile aside, I don't recall any of the project/product management books preparing noob me for the organizational (and personal) psychology stuff.

As you surely know, this is what the gray beards mean when they say most challenges (obstacles) to shipping software are not technical.

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