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John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

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Re: John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

#111

Post by dilyevsky »

jswizzy wrote: post #82
e1ven wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't just throw more random people at the problem - Adding too many developers can slow projects down and make them less likely to work. (9 women can't make a baby in a month, and all that..) The guy this post is about just came from Google, where he lead on the stuff you're praising. He can push these efforts in the right direction, and help make other strategic hires.. Isn't this exactly what you want?

Someone read The Mythical Man Month. :)

Lol beat me to it. Number of ppl in our industry who don’t seem to be aware of the Brooks’ Law never siezes to amaze me.

Re: John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

#112

Post by gumby »

commonsense1234 wrote: post #34
starshadowx2 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

9 women can't make a baby in a month but 9 women can make 9 babies in 9 months instead of 1 woman making 1 in 9 months. More people can work on more/different things in the same period of time, thereby increasing total work done. (Parallel vs sequential and all that..)

9 women cannot make 9 babies in 1 month nor 1 women can make 1 baby in 1 month. no concurrency in baby making for sure.

There is some potential concurrency: a woman can produce two or more babies in 9 months, although it is uncommon.

Re: John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

#113

Post by gumby »

m0zg wrote: post #21
dboreham wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um...you know JG was formerly at Google doing all that magic you love and is now at Apple, right?

JG was _managing people_ doing the magic. There's a difference. By himself, he can't really do much. He's not even a ML/DL guy per se.

JG is the reason Google has all that ML effort. He joined google via the MetaWeb acquisition; when he'd finished his earn-out he wanted to leave but was asked to look around for something useful to do and consolidated a bunch of dispersed ML efforts. He also bought Deep Mind on behalf of Google.

I don't know why you would say he's "not a DL/ML guy per se" -- he's a programmer, not an MBA type. You consider MetaWeb and TellMe inadequate?

Re: John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

#114

Post by rabidrat »

jen20 wrote: post #69
rabidrat wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shifts in computing paradigms are incredibly rare. They've only happened every decade so far: 1960 (IC), 1970 (DARPA), 1980 (PC), 1990 (GUI), 2000 (Internet), 2010 (smartphone).

Are you calling out the time these became mainstream? I'd argue if the PC can be slotted in at 1980 (the IBM PC didn't come out until 1981), the GUI should be listed as 1984, not 1990. Alternatively, the PC should be listed a lot later.

I was not going for exact years but some semblance of "around then" which conveniently rounded up to the nearest decade. The Apple II was 1978 and the PC was 1981. I agree that the GUI should be listed as 1984 in some official capacity (or is it 1978 with PARC?), but most of the world and I were using text mode by default in the 80s; it wasn't until Windows 3.1 (1990) that the GUI became the default. Similarly the internet was around before 2000 but became The Thing with the dotcom bubble (maybe this one should be called Google instead of Internet since I already put DARPA at 1970. Maybe 1970 should be UNIX instead?). Anyway I don't think this detracts from the larger point, which was that these huge shifts do seem to come along about once a decade in the computing sphere. Oh and we forgot to mention virtualization/cloud, is that more or less of a paradigm shift than Google and the smartphone?

Re: John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

#115

Post by talkingtab »

e1ven wrote: post #22
m0zg wrote: post #16

It's just unbelievable to me that the company sitting on a quarter trillion dollars is unwilling to spend a small fraction of that hoard to hire the best of the best in order to fix the very thing that will kill their cash cow in the next 5 years. I'm on iOS myself (and have been faithful since the first iPhone), but $30 Google Home puck feels like it's from the future. Understands me perfectly, comes up with decent…

They can't just throw more random people at the problem - Adding too many developers can slow projects down and make them less likely to work. (9 women can't make a baby in a month, and all that..) The guy this post is about just came from Google, where he lead on the stuff you're praising. He can push these efforts in the right direction, and help make other strategic hires.. Isn't this exactly what you want?

I've always found the mythical-man-month thing to be completely at odds with reality. Cities and ant colonies work because they use sophisticated collaboration technologies instead of top down rigid hierarchies. But maybe I'm wrong and there is a better explanation for NYC.

Re: John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

#116

Post by eecc »

starshadowx2 wrote: post #29
e1ven wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't just throw more random people at the problem - Adding too many developers can slow projects down and make them less likely to work. (9 women can't make a baby in a month, and all that..) The guy this post is about just came from Google, where he lead on the stuff you're praising. He can push these efforts in the right direction, and help make other strategic hires.. Isn't this exactly what you want?

9 women can't make a baby in a month but 9 women can make 9 babies in 9 months instead of 1 woman making 1 in 9 months. More people can work on more/different things in the same period of time, thereby increasing total work done. (Parallel vs sequential and all that..)

But those 9 women don’t need to coordinate, each one will merrily go along with her task alone. So let’s keep the metaphor as used originally, it doesn’t extend further

Re: John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

#117

Post by iainmerrick »

Despegar wrote: post #65
rabidrat wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shifts in computing paradigms are incredibly rare. They've only happened every decade so far: 1960 (IC), 1970 (DARPA), 1980 (PC), 1990 (GUI), 2000 (Internet), 2010 (smartphone).

The GUI is not something I'd break out separately from the PC. And the internet is something that massively improved the utility of PCs and increased demand for them, it wasn't something that was going to replace it.

The GUI is not something I'd break out separately from the PC.

Why not? The PC (and I’d include things like the Apple ][ and C64) was a legitimate success before GUIs took off. The GUI was a separate step, also hugely important.

And ~1980 and ~1990 are reasonable dates for when personal computers and Windows took off, give or take a few years.

Re: John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

#118

Post by aphroz »

Apple is not an innovative company.They are a marketing company. What do marketing teams do when they have a lot of money ? They start removing stuff, remove the wires, remove the inputs/outputs and kill the company. Good bye Apple, even this guy can't save you. I won't miss you.

Re: John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

#119

Post by Swizec »

rabidrat wrote: post #57
Despegar wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shifts in computing paradigms are incredibly rare. The smartphone is unlikely to be replaced for a long time to come. There will be plenty of head fakes along the way no doubt (smart speakers and voice bots come to mind), but the smartphone is simply too good and has too much utility to be easily challenged. And you also have to make a bet that Apple won't come to dominate that area as well (even if they aren't first…

> Shifts in computing paradigms are incredibly rare. They've only happened every decade so far: 1960 (IC), 1970 (DARPA), 1980 (PC), 1990 (GUI), 2000 (Internet), 2010 (smartphone).

From a hardware perspective: servers, personal computers, smartphones

That’s 3 computing paradigm shifts in 60 years.

Re: John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team

#120

Post by giobox »

talkingtab wrote: post #115
e1ven wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't just throw more random people at the problem - Adding too many developers can slow projects down and make them less likely to work. (9 women can't make a baby in a month, and all that..) The guy this post is about just came from Google, where he lead on the stuff you're praising. He can push these efforts in the right direction, and help make other strategic hires.. Isn't this exactly what you want?

I've always found the mythical-man-month thing to be completely at odds with reality. Cities and ant colonies work because they use sophisticated collaboration technologies instead of top down rigid hierarchies. But maybe I'm wrong and there is a better explanation for NYC.

The "Mythical Man Month" was specifically about challenges in software development with humans, so comparisons to cities and ant colonies aren't all that helpful. It is not a general purpose rule to be applied to any task that can be performed by n+1 people or ants, purely an observation on the nature of software development. I think many of us can likely attest to its frequent validity in that domain, even if it doesn't ring true in others.
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