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Lessons from 14 years at Google

addyosmani.com

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Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#371

Post by dclowd9901 »

naijaboiler wrote: post #259
bigcloud1299 wrote: post #133

15 years in leadership worked at 3 jobs lead major transformations at retail where nearly 100B of revenue goes through what i built. Ran $55-$100M in a yearly budget… over 300 FTEs and 3x contractors under my or my budget,…largest retailer in google at that time…my work influenced GCP roadmap, Datastax roadmap, … much more all behind the scenes…. besides your capabilities and ability that had to be there to get you i…

we are human being interacting with other human beings. what you call "kissing ass" is just learning to influence and work with other humans. It is by far the most useful skill to have in workplace. But don't worry. continue your disdain of it, includeing calling it negative names, and watch your career stagnate.

I've literally never had the thought of "how do I influence other people." Why is that considered a valuable skill? It just sounds like a nicer version of "manipulation".

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#372

Post by rester324 »

naijaboiler wrote: post #259
bigcloud1299 wrote: post #133

15 years in leadership worked at 3 jobs lead major transformations at retail where nearly 100B of revenue goes through what i built. Ran $55-$100M in a yearly budget… over 300 FTEs and 3x contractors under my or my budget,…largest retailer in google at that time…my work influenced GCP roadmap, Datastax roadmap, … much more all behind the scenes…. besides your capabilities and ability that had to be there to get you i…

we are human being interacting with other human beings. what you call "kissing ass" is just learning to influence and work with other humans. It is by far the most useful skill to have in workplace. But don't worry. continue your disdain of it, includeing calling it negative names, and watch your career stagnate.

Or continue being an ass and kissing asses, and watch the workforce unionize and see how the people YOU disdain shows you who has the real power

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#373

Post by BLKNSLVR »

H8crilA wrote: post #350
euifii wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I really don’t get about these types of folks. Do they really want to remember their life’s work as “kissing ass and playing politics”? I get the “work to live” and all that, but you’re basically tossing away half your life…for what, money? How much money do you need!?

You need to have the right personality. Either actually enjoy the game, or have an unsatiable (fear-driven?) need for status, or something else of this sort. We don't get to choose our personalities, though some limited modifications are possible - see treatments for personality disorders, for example.

> actually enjoy the game, or have an unsatiable (fear-driven?) need for status, or something else of this sort

Ie. Somewhat serious mental disorders as requisite for leadership.

I wonder how we got onto this darkest timeline?

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#374

Post by Panzer04 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #354
Aurornis wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turning on their computers, and spending the next 10min chatting and drinking coffee One of my early tasks as a junior engineer involved some automation work in a warehouse. It got assigned to me, the junior, because it involved a lot of time working in the warehouse instead of at a comfortable desk. I assume…

One of my work involved automating some process which was very manual and tedious, took a lot of time and there was dedicated employee for that process. After I did the project, it turned out that this job wasn't necessary anymore and that employee was fired. I felt uneasy about the whole situation.

And they will have to go find another job instead. It feels weird but this is how we raise living standards - removing human labor from production (or, in other words, increasing the amount produced per human)

Automation is a game of diffuse societal benefit at the expense of a few workers. Well, I guess owners also benefit but in the long term that extra profit is competed away.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#375

Post by nubg »

ohso4 wrote: post #358
0______0 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, the actual apology is well written.

If you run it through originality.ai, you'll see that bits of it are his writing, some is mixed and some is just ai. This blog post everyone is discussing is also written with ai.

And who or what is "originality.ai" supposed to be that makes it an authority on AI provenance (an unsolvable problem)?

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#376

Post by jerf »

DenisM wrote: post #71
ramijames wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring the users is the correct solution. Defining company culture through software loading is ridiculous.

What about the second order effects? Ignoring the customers becomes a habit, which doesn’t lead to success. But then, caving to each customer demand will make solution overfit. Somewhere in there one has to exercise judgement. But how does one make judgment a repeatable process? Feedback is rarely immediate in such tradeoffs, so promotions go to people who are capable of showing some metric going up, even if the metr…

Everyone's brain builds a model of the world.

One of those higher levels of maturity that some people never reach is to realize that when your model becomes incorrect, that doesn't necessarily mean the world is broken, or that somebody is out to get you, or perhaps most generally, that it is the world's responsibility to get back in line with your internal model. It isn't.

This is just people complaining about the world not conforming to their internal model. It may sound like they have a reason, but the given reason is clearly a post hoc rationalization for what is basically just that their world model doesn't fit. You can learn to recognize these after a while. People are terrible at explaining to each other or even themselves why they feel the way they feel.

The solution is to be sympathetic, to consider their input for whether or not there is some deeper principle or insight to be found... but also to just wait a month or three to see if the objection just dissolves without a trace because their world models have had time to update and now they would be every bit as upset, if not more so, if you returned to the old slow loading time. Because now, not only would that violate their updated world models, but also it would be a huge waste of their time!

Thoughtful people should learn what a world model violation "feels like" internally so they can short-circuit the automatic rationalization circuits that seem to come stock on the homo sapiens floor model and run such feelings through conscious analysis (System 2, as it is sometimes called, though I really hate this nomenclature) rather than the default handling (System 1).

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#377

Post by Edmond »

Sephr wrote: post #287

This feels somewhat hypocritical coming from Addy. Addy Osmani plagiarized my code and 'apologized' years later by publishing an article on his website[1] that he has never linked to from his social media accounts. I cannot accept his apology until he actually syndicates it with his followers. Seems relevant to note this behavior in light of points "6. Your code doesn’t advocate for you. People do.", "7. The best cod…

Not to make excuses for plagiarism, I am looking at the code itself and somewhat scratching my head since it seems quite...trivial?

I don't mean to belittle the effort but at least in terms of volume of code and level of effort, I wouldn't recognize it as mine if someone had copied it from my work and passed it off as theirs.

Regarding the charge of plagiarism, is it possible that the PR attribution reflects someone eager to contribute something to a larger effort as opposed to simply trying to "steal" someone else's work?

One could reasonably interpret the PR and attribution as "I integrated this code into this project thus I am taking credit for it". In other words there is probably a stronger charge for misguided clout-chasing than plagiarisms.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#378

Post by MarkSweep »

This and the other top story on HN right now ( I charged $18k for a Static HTML Page) [0] make it clear the the most important thing as a software developer is jumping through hoops and being agreeable. It does not matter if it makes sense to you. I’ve come to accept that I can’t always predict what is actually valuable for the business and should just go with the flow and take their money. The leetcode-style interview selects for this by presenting as an arbitrary hoop you have to jump through.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46469877

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#379

Post by ytoawwhra92 »

naijaboiler wrote: post #259
bigcloud1299 wrote: post #133

15 years in leadership worked at 3 jobs lead major transformations at retail where nearly 100B of revenue goes through what i built. Ran $55-$100M in a yearly budget… over 300 FTEs and 3x contractors under my or my budget,…largest retailer in google at that time…my work influenced GCP roadmap, Datastax roadmap, … much more all behind the scenes…. besides your capabilities and ability that had to be there to get you i…

we are human being interacting with other human beings. what you call "kissing ass" is just learning to influence and work with other humans. It is by far the most useful skill to have in workplace. But don't worry. continue your disdain of it, includeing calling it negative names, and watch your career stagnate.

Nah, people say this all the time but organisations where these sorts of gratuitous social games are absent tend to BTFO of organisations where they're present/expected.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#380

Post by deadbabe »

Some people think clarity means abandoning language idioms and writing simple code that a first year computer science student could understand and follow.

If you do this, your team will write verbose, repetitive code, and put more emphasis on procedures instead of data structures and how they change over time.

Use the language features to write powerful concise code that really takes some skill and expertise in the language to understand. Force your team to become more skilled, don’t stoop down to the lowest common denominator. In time, this code will become as easily understood as any other simple program.

And when shit breaks down at 2 AM, you do nothing, because your code is clever enough to handle problems itself.

But don’t obfuscate.

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