The absolutely relevant Dilbert strip: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-12-19/
Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
401–410 of 498 posts
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#402And how many failed projects came out of 20% time?
What is your definition of "failure?" A project that nobody uses and makes the company no money is a failure in terms of direct profitability, but may be a success for other reasons. Your engineers get to exercise their minds in unusual ways and keep themselves sharp. Your engineers are more willing to put up with boring tasks. You attract talented people who want to be self directed at some level.
Search and email are closer than tweeting and accounting. Not even a good comparison.
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference between lazy people and people with a disorder is that lazy people don't feel bad about not getting work done.
I'll go even further and state that the problem is using MBAs to formulate how to manage creative sorts cough agile cough cargo-cult coding cough . if the area under your productivity curve is greater than everyone else around you, I don't give a you-know-what about the shape of the curve, you're doing just fine. To be fair to agile though, I can see situations where it can work. The problem is that many of its adher…
> The problem is that many of its adherents seem to see agile as a hammer and all software engineering as various forms of nails.
Agile isn't a methodology, but a metamethodology -- or, in terms of the metaphor, it isn't a hammer, it is a set of guidelines to use in selecting tools.
Scrum is a hammer, but Scrum ≠ Agile. Often rigorous adherence to particular methodologies (usually Scrum) get misidentified as being "Agile", but rigorous adherence to a particular methodology is not only not the same as Agile, but is directly contrary to Agile principles (particularly, its a direct violation of the first value from the Agile Manifesto, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools".)
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
But last I checked SV and California in general pumped out more innovation than the rest of the country combined, and is preparing to colonize another planet and electrify transport. This is what people refer to as a 'reality distortion field'.
Reality distortion fields don't emit actual products that work. It's a field alright, and it does have some reality-distorting side effects, but there is actually a "there" there. If I had to boil it down I'd say it's this: (1) California believes in the future. People in California (stereotypically) think about what they can do tomorrow, building on what they have today. Everyone else thinks about what they already…
Have you actually been to and/or lived in California?
[A little background about me: I was born in Cali, left when I was 6 months old, returned when I was in my late 20s, and stayed there for 5 years (San Diego).]
The reason I ask you this is that your viewpoint is why I went to Cali. But when I got there I found that the idea of Cali is very different from the reality of Cali. I have lived in a variety of places around the world, and I must honestly say that California was one of the worst...
Re your first point: (1) California believes in the future. I would say NO, California believes in itself. They think (sometimes)that they are the future, but most often they build on what they have today because they fear about losing it. Not about what they can do tomorrow. A lot of what they do is about preserving the image of what they are, not about progress or the future. And as for the people (stereotypically)... Rednecks, gangbangers, surfer-dudes... There are a lot of them.
Your second quote: (2) California reasons from first principles more than elsewhere. Everyone else looks at what everyone else is doing and tries to superficially copy what looks like it works...
I think here you have it 50-50. Yes, some new things come out of Cali, but on the whole, they copy, (it's just that sometimes the copy is way better than the original)Except the idea of copy is a little changed, they don't copy exactly, they take an idea and 'shift' it. First is was a shift from real world to online. At the moment it's a shift from many to individual (online).
And your quote does need repeating, as is sums up Cali well, from gold rush to dotcom boom -
"For the engine which drives Enterprise is not Thrift, but Profit." - John Maynard Keynes
California runs on this.
Cali is about profit, nothing more, nothing less.
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
He was at Google for 6 months. Whatever you think about his opinions in general, he doesn't know anything about how things at Google work.
Not reflecting on this case specifically, but if six months isn't long enough for a new employee to generally understand how a company works, it would seem to suggest something's wrong with the company's culture, or at least with how people are brought on board. Six months is a long time in an industry where people change jobs every two years.
Part of the problem with mchurch was willful ignorance. A few colleagues, including some fairly senior people, reached out to him and volunteered to try and help him resolve his concerns. To my knowledge he never took them up on it.
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#406Wasn't the "all the wood behind one arrow" motto famous for heralding the decline of Sun Microsystems?
>Wasn't the "all the wood behind one arrow" motto famous for heralding the decline of Sun Microsystems?
all the wood led by deadwood behind one arrow ... this arrow ... now this arrow ... no, this arrow that has just been renamed to the name of that arrow ... of course it is an arrow, it just looks like a deadwood onshore washed tree trunk and weights like it, and flies like it, well, that of course if somebody can make it fly ...
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#407Wasn't the "all the wood behind one arrow" motto famous for heralding the decline of Sun Microsystems?
In all fairness 18 months ago the perception of Google is it was doing a LOT of things but none of them very well. Embarrassing attempts at social networks (wave, err, that other one I'm forgetting) is just one example. So narrowing their focus (still) seems like a good idea. But having great engineers is the most important thing for any success so not sure why you'd take away a mystical founding pillar of your cultu…
> Embarrassing attempts at social networks (wave, err, that other one I'm forgetting) is just one example.
Wave wasn't a social network, it was collaboration protocol with a proof-of-concept demonstration app.
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
"This community is getting worse every day." You've been in "this community" for less than 3 months according to your username. I'm not SV technorati, and I've run a business, as well as been a founder in a non-tech business that grew to 150 employees. I know business, and I know what I said is correct. "SV technorati" is itself a stereotype.
Yep, absolutely correct. Well, save for Nike, which was founded by an MBA. Oh yeah, and Apple, whose CEO has an MBA and was personally selected by Steve Jobs. Well, now that I think about it, Meg Whitman, the current CEO of HP and former CEO of eBay has an MBA. And wasn't Bonobos founded by a Stanford MBA? I think Birchbox was born by a group of MBA's as well. Except for those and probably thousands of other exceptio…
But Apple's founder didn't have an MBA. You know, the guy that came back in 1997 and brought the company from the brink of bankruptcy after it's collapse under the leadership of John Sculley, MBA.
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
[deleted]
>I don't understand why engineers who don't want to be managers give a shit about corporate promotions or corporate ladders. HR/MBA types value titles, buzzwords and other nonsense because most of them are incapable of actually parsing a technical resume. So, if you're going to look for a job, filling in your title as "developer" over a period of multiple years is a losing strategy. By the same accord, without titles…
>By the same accord, without titles, buzzwords, etc as an engineer I won't be able to differentiate between resumes of a regular graduate level physics educator and one who is capable of nobel prize level research.
if you're in the position to make a hiring decision and can't make such differentiation - well, yep, that is what we have in software engineering. In physics the situation seems to be a bit (though not much) better, in part because of CVs, in part because the network is smaller.
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#410Killing Reader -- something no engineer would ever do -- was already proof that the engineers are no longer in charge
Would they approve a 20% project that aims to bring back Reader? Or would you be able to work on that without approval? Just seems like a lot of politics would be tied up in what people choose to work on.