Life at Google and the Talent Myth "I've talked to people who've come to Microsoft from Google (e.g. Danny Thorpe) and it definitely is as chaotic as it sounds there. For some reason, the description of life at Google by Steve Yegge reminds me a bit of Microsoft where there were two huge money making projects (Office & Windows in the case of Microsoft and AdWords & AdSense in the case of Google) and then a bunch of good to mediocre projects full of smart people dicking around. Over the years I've seen a reduction of the 'smart people dicking around' type projects over here and more focus on shipping code."
Someone seems to have forgotten that real artists ship.
I read the original article, "Good Agile, Bad Agile" expecting indepth analysis of Agile (or agile) methods. Instead it says things like, "Most of us in our industry are date-driven. There's always a next milestone, always a deadline, always some date-driven goal to it.
The only exceptions I can think of to this rule are:
1) Open-source software projects.
2) Grad school projects.
3) Google."
All of these cases are without time or money constraints.
Another post, "Stupid is as stupid does", says their methodology explains the continual betaness of Google, "Unasked by Joel, and left unexplained by Steve: everything at Google stays in beta, pretty much forever. Hmm. Why do you suppose that is? Well, you get a bunch of "really smart" people together, don't put any product/project management together, and let them move around at will... what do you get? You get a bunch of projects that end up being 80% done (i,e., all of the technically "interesting" pieces are done, but that boring "polish" stuff isn't).".
No comments:
Post a Comment