51–60 of 106 posts
Two cases: 1. You work for a tech company which produces a tech product (e.g., Google, Microsoft) 2. You work as a tech person in a business company (e.g., bank, insurance) This article fully applies to #1 where the core competency is technology. For #2, there's debate.
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Can you stop it by staying small? I don't mean a small business, I mean a small team.
Perhaps, which is to say that yes if you don't change you can avoid this fate, but not changing is its own form of death. One of the amazing things of being at a successful company is that each passing quarter increasing revenue brings a bigger pool to spend on doing things, and there are so many things you want to do. But you can't do everything yourself, and growing means hiring, and hiring means getting larger. Pe…
Why should the only kind of growth people recognize in companies be the kind that terminates in ossified monoliths? Isn't this a failure of imagination on our part? Life doesn't usually offer only one way to grow. I'm excited by the idea of a small organization whose revenue grows much faster than it does. Seems to me that this hasn't typically been thought of as the goal. What might happen if it were?
Am I the only person who feels woefully inadequate whenever I read articles where phrases like "10 or 100 times as productive as the average engineer". Sorry guys, I'm trying my best! :-(
Such people do exist. Notch, creator of Minecraft, is a good example. The guy virtually developed it himself. I'm currently developing a game myself and I can tell you, it is a lot of work. At minimum I would say the guy is at least 10 times more productive than the average developer/engineer.
This goes along with the well known effect of over-confidence from lack-of-knowledge when making judgements, or the way newcomers to a community are often overly-vocal in their judgements. I think it takes some sobering first-hand lessons to be able to see the difference between A-work and B-work.
It wasn't until I tried to code that old Windows star-spreading screen-saver in high school that I got even an inkling of how difficult it was to make all of Windows work, and it wasn't until I actually had to write something as a composition of partial recursive functions that I even began to appreciate the A++ work it took to conceive computing machines at all. Even now, I wouldn't consider myself capable of really distinguishing between A and B work except in a few very select fields.
The old hiring slogan, which they used in the MSFT hiring and hammered even harder in hiring manager training was, "As hire As; Bs hire Cs."
Who hired the Bs?
There are few things more destructive to a team than smart people who've completely checked out.
A constrained elite does seem useful within an organization. I like the idea of distinguishing those engineers who go above and beyond and really create something new. However it can also become a gerontocracy easily and can limit the adoption of innovative ideas in the long run. The problem I have with these sorts of social structures is that it assumes that one person out of a hundred is some how "gifted." After re…
"People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.
Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good."
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From the article: All of the great companies I have worked for (Apollo and Sun in various incarnations) or heard about (DEC, PARC, Bell Labs and the like) started around a core of incredible people. These were people who are or were legends in the field. Since the article talks of success and greatness in moral or intellectual terms, the conversation should not just be a simplistic comparison of money earned... that'…
"Legends" is partially dependent on luck (being in the right place at the right time). The stories of the "legends" are told, in part, because of their successes. We hear the stories about the right people in the right time/place. We don't hear about the right people in the wrong place.
Odds are wherever you are has a greater chance of being the right place.
the Google process reminded me of the time, more than 20 years ago, when I interviewed at Microsoft. And we saw how well that worked Microsoft from 1992 onwards? I guess we did; 20x increase in adjusted share price; in OSes alone, the release of Windows 3.1 (IMO the breakthrough move to GUI on PC, away from DOS), NT 3.1 (the original seed that grew to NT 3.51, NT 4, Win2K and all current kernels), breakthrough succes…
An event horizon means there is no going back, not that you are actually in the black hole. Although Microsoft may have continued to put out innovative products and create shareholder value after 1992, the company is now run by a textbook bozo. It must be depressing for people who actually know a thing or two about computer science.
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Man, I'm sort of with you. In the last few years, I've spent time in a variety of languages --- Python, Ruby, JS, Java, and lately Go and Haskell --- and Java just seemed completely terrible: bureaucratic, staid, and just plain mediocre by many standards. Then I started reading a lot of C++. And I mean no disrespect to the many brilliant people who use and enjoy C++, but it wasn't until then that I really got why Jav…
Go read Project Oberon , including the code, and realize why Java makes many people sad.
Also, let me stipulate that Java really does make me sad. It's just that in the realm of sad-making, I discovered new depths.