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Lessons from 14 years at Google

addyosmani.com

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Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#391

Post by maximinus_thrax »

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…

> The top people are all who kissed each others ass and looked out only for their cohort (e.g. people who were in same positions as them in early 2013). So teach your kids to kiss ass and play poltiics.

After more than 20 years in big tech, I agree, this is basically it. Your work can only get you so far. If it makes you feel any better, you can reframe politics as 'people systems' and work on optimizing the relationships in the system. Or whatever. But the gist of it is to find a powerful group and try to become a member of that group.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#392

Post by yobbo »

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.

> It is by far the most useful skill to have in workplace.

This might be defacto true in most workplaces, but defending "politics over competence" boils down to "I deserve the rewards from other people's work".

People oppose it because it is morally wrong, not because they think it is an inaccurate description of reality.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#393

Post by wholinator2 »

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.

I agree. I was brought on as an intern to do automation for a business team. The company had built this gargantuan complex "programming tool" to help the boomers who'd been there for 30 years adjust to the new world (a noble endeavor for mortgage holders without college degrees, i believe). I was brought in to basically fuck around and find little things to optimize. In 2 months I wrote a python script to do about 50% of the teams work near instantly.

They had layoffs every year and i remember when the "boss's boss" came to town and sat at our table of desks. She asked me and i excitedly told her about my progress. She prompted how i felt about it and i nearly said "its very easy as long as you can program". But mid sentence i saw the intense fear in the eyes of the team and changed subject. It really hit home to me that these people actually were doing a useless job, but they all had children who need insurance, and mortgages that need paying. And they will all be cast out into a job market that will never hire them because they came on at the very end of not needing a college degree. The company was then bought by a ruthless and racist "big man investor" who destroyed it and sold it for parts. But my manager did somewhat derogatorily refer to the only programmer near them as "the asian".

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#396

Post by dartharva »

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…

Plagiarizing code is kind of a redundant concept nowadays in the era of LLM coding engines. It's a safe bet there's always copilot plagiarizing someone's code on one of its users' machines, both being oblivious to it.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#397

Post by Gigablah »

imiric wrote: post #153
riazrizvi wrote: post #126

This is a good list. Original, evidence to me that the author is the real deal.

There's hardly anything original here. These are regurgitated points you'd see in any article of this type. In fact, your favorite LLM can give you the same "lessons" from its training data.

Your favorite LLM can probably reproduce this entire discussion thread so what’s the point, right?

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#398

Post by anymouse123456 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #100
trescenzi wrote: post #13

> At scale, even your bugs have users. First place I worked right out of college had a big training seminar for new hires. One day we were told the story of how they’d improved load times from around 5min to 30seconds, this improvement was in the mid 90s. The negative responses from clients were instant. The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turnin…

> Your job isn’t to complete tickets that fulfill a list of asks from your product manager. Your job is to build software that solves users problems. Very important with this, is that not every work place sees your job as that, and you might get hired for the former while you believe it to be the latter. Navigating what is actually expected of you is probably good to try to figure out during the interview, or worst c…

This is huge advice for people who want to climb a given career ladder.

The overwhelming majority of organizations will say they want you focused on real user problems, but actually want you to make your boss (and their boss) look good. This usually looks more like clearing tasks from a list than creating new goals.

At Google there are both kinds of teams.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#399

Post by kamranjon »

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…

You posted the code to a public blog page, with no attribution in the code or request of attribution from others, no license, and seemingly intended to share it freely with the world.

Then you got an apology, and a second apology.

I'm confused about what you think you're owed?

The explanation makes perfect sense, the headers were obviously just copied with no malicious intent. What is it that is still bothering you about this?

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#400

Post by notatoad »

hbs18 wrote: post #33
trescenzi wrote: post #13

> At scale, even your bugs have users. First place I worked right out of college had a big training seminar for new hires. One day we were told the story of how they’d improved load times from around 5min to 30seconds, this improvement was in the mid 90s. The negative responses from clients were instant. The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turnin…

So what is the correct solution to that specific problem then, adjust loading time per customer?

The solution is to accept that this isn’t a software development problem, and to remove yourself from the situation as painlessly as possible.

If a manager wants to structure a morning break into their employees’ day, they can do that. It doesn’t require a software fix.

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