141–150 of 239 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When human beings are part of an association that is verifiably elite, it is quite common for them to have elitist attitudes.
Elite in compensation, true. But is the average Googler contributing more to humanity than the average teacher? I'm not so sure.
I personally think that it is all matter of risk. The risk of contract work (which is what the agile manifesto writers were facing most of their careers [they are all consultants), is building something that the customer do not want or did not intend do. The actual tech risk is very low (e.g. ruby on rails on postgres) since most of them use mature technology. In this case the agile manifesto make sense - I.e. we can…
For much of what Agile development is applied to, the greatest risk is market risk. You want to get something out to users as quickly as possible to see if your assumptions about your users and their needs are right.
For google style projects, there is primarily technology risk rather than market risk. If you are trying to build something that is obviously useful but is perhaps impossible, it makes sense to focus on delivering working systems that allow you to see if your assumptions about technological limitations are correct.
> This type of innovation takes significant up-front design time, and working on components over longer than one week iterations. Because the projects have such simple external interfaces, and so much internal complexity, much of the work is not even visible to “customers”, so there is no way to write customer visible stories about it. This type of software takes 8–20 months to deliver the first working version to th…
Huh, as much as I've heard, good luck ever getting a promotion at Google with a track record of MEs and a single EE. People with SEE regularly get their promotions denied.
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Who said that Googlers are not part of those "masses"? Surely they enjoy products from their company as anybody else? And then, of course, nobody said you're part of those masses anyway. Maybe you're not. Do you enjoy Google product X as other hundreds of million do? Then you're part of the mass that enjoys it. Otherwise you are part of the mass that doesn't.
'The masses' refers to the lower classes (look at any dictionary and how the word has historically been used - 'opiate of the masses', 'the unwashed masses'). It would not typically be correct to say that a Googler is part of the lower classer. 'The masses' is definitely not the same as 'everyone'.
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Can you explain that better? Basically in a nutshell they don't have worthless agile processes?
Overall picture: Google recognizes it's a large company that has an extreme diversity of teams with idiosyncratic goals and personalities, and doesn't prescribe _anything_ Dollars to doughnuts, there's multiple teams doing extremely prescriptive Agile, but I've never seen one in 3 years in a 2,000 employee office. By far the most organized team I've been on merely kept track of bugs using an internal web app that ren…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When human beings are part of an association that is verifiably elite, it is quite common for them to have elitist attitudes.
Which elite verifier verified that?
But, no, I can't cite a study, it's a pattern I've observed at range of places.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elite in compensation, true. But is the average Googler contributing more to humanity than the average teacher? I'm not so sure.
From the 2018 shareholder's letter, Google created $335 billion in economic activity in 2018.[0] From the 2019 Q2 financial results, Google has 107,646 employees. By raw division the average Google employee creates $3,112,052 in economic global activity each year. [0] https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2018/ [1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2019Q2_alphabet_earnings...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When human beings are part of an association that is verifiably elite, it is quite common for them to have elitist attitudes.
Elite in compensation, true. But is the average Googler contributing more to humanity than the average teacher? I'm not so sure.
> This type of innovation takes significant up-front design time, and working on components over longer than one week iterations. Because the projects have such simple external interfaces, and so much internal complexity, much of the work is not even visible to “customers”, so there is no way to write customer visible stories about it. This type of software takes 8–20 months to deliver the first working version to th…
That had an extended 9 month design phase - but a short 12 week agile sprint phase that delivered two intermediate POC versions and then a final working project (we even delivered hardware when at the last minute the customer admitted they hadn't ordered a server) - we even took enough networking gear that we could have installed a net work if that was missing to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Little did my manager know that a few quarters of "meets expectations" had caused HR to drop me into the bottom 5% of the company and so I received a letter from HR that I was at risk of being terminated. This is disturbing and, I think, a twisted form of grade inflation, mixed with the usual suitspeak where words don't necessarily mean what they mean. If an employee is as good as you think they should be, why woul…
Eh, the language makes a bit more sense than that. It's a bit too euphemistic for my taste, but it's reasonable. "Meets expectations" — which expectations? The expectations for the role of for the employee? If we're talking about the expectations for the employee, then obviously it makes no sense for meeting expectations to be a bad thing. But if instead we're talking about expectations for the role, it's perfectly c…