I agree to the overall tone, but there are also counter points.
One of them is the Google example. To get promoted beyond a certain level, you must have brought some new product over the finish line. Result? They have so many new things happening all the time, all of them suck, and then just move on to the next. Eg how many chat products do they need to invent before they settle on one and let it mature?
> To get promoted beyond a certain level, you must have brought some new product over the finish line
This always confused me. It looked from the outside like Google does so many things right on the innovation front, but after some early success they have had a rough streak.
I'd argue that one thing that Google is doing wrong is gatekeeping promotions based on (overly) well-defined criteria such as new products. Goodhart's Law applies to this situation: you're sure to see lots of new products if its highly rewarded - a lot more than you'd see naturally. As the author mentioned - this might still be desirable depending on the market conditions, but there is a lot more to this discussion, and it's not entirely clear that Google has it wrong.
I'd argue that they emphasize comparability of assessment results(e.g. being able to quantify someone's output like a percentage grade in a course) over the actual relevancy of the assessment criteria/work/kpi to the company's bottom line(e.g. does the course's test actually prepare students for the real world). This probably comes as a by-product of the organization's heavily academic-focused staff - so it might actually be the best culture choice for them given that context - but it might also lose to companies that can successfully put a bigger weighting on the right "intangibles".
You're kidding right? Maps, android, camera, calendar, hangout, pay/wallet, docs, sheets, slides, voice to text stuff, YouTube, chrome/debugger, kubernetes, grpc, Gmail, music, ads... Pretty ubiquitous suite of products both consumer facing and business facing... I don't think you can question that Google has been successful at innovation. You can question if they could be doing it better but impossible to say they aren't having some success doing what they're doing...
Acquisition, acquisition, basic OS feature (and therefore part of the Android acquisition), Google EEE of thing you could already do (and developed by an individual Google developer without the approval of Google management), Google CADT, Google EEE of something you could already do, acquisition, acquisition, actual Google creation, don't know, Google EEE of something that already existed (Firebug was first), not good, too trivial to count, actual Google creation that I already mentioned, don't know what you mean, not good.
Flights were acquisition and to this day are a bit of unlikely island internally (AFAIK QPX engine is still in use, and it's written in language otherwise verboten at Google)
So only 2/5 of the ones you mentioned were started in-house, and all were pre-2010 (pre-Sundar) creations.
edit: Sundar joined Google in 2004 and apparently led Maps, Chrome, and eventually Android before becoming CEO. So "pre-Sundar" is technically incorrect.
This characterization is pretty misleading. For example, the Google Maps that was acquired was a C++ desktop application. What most people think of as Google Maps (the AJAX web app) was built and launched by Google.
beyond just launching a product, the launch has to have some sort of "impact" (at least, this was true in the time period where I was trying to get promoted, roughly 2010-2013). Something that is not perceived as impactful by the promo committee is likely not going to count towards promotion. It's the job of the employee and manager to document the "impact".
If your manager is a director or higher, they can appeal the promo denial and an appeals committee can be manipulated into giving a promotion. That's what happened to me- promo saw no impact to my launch. Then my director went to appeals and basically said "promote him, he's doing good work".
Everything about Google messed up my expectations and planning around career. To work anywhere else (a startup, or a pharma) I had to unlearn all the bad habits of self-promotion and cookie-licking and impact-demonstration.
Of course many people joke the best way to get promoted at Google is to leave, get promoted elsewhere, and return to Google at a higher level (using all your newly learned negotiation skills).
100 %. There's a sweet spot. I worked for both, start-ups and huge corporations. It's not one or the other, you want the right combination of maturity and fresh attitude. We often don't realize it can take years to steer back to find the balance again, but not oversteer, which is usually the default :) Just as with any other organism.
The promotion thing seems severely overstated. At the higher levels for IC and management this is basically how all tech companies that build products are run. But you don't see this said about Microsoft or Amazon, even though they also have hundreds of new features and discrete new products per year.
My theory for why Google is different remains unpopular, however.
I think it's because Google has created an insular, navel-gazing culture that is excessively engineer driven rather than customer driven, to the extent of thinking people not at Google are just inferior.
Doesn't the leading anecdote give an example of a (dis)incentive that needs fixing? That it takes 10 months and lots of head-banging and then you get a $100 bonus, that would certainly disincentivise me to do any type of innovation.
> All large organizations – both government and corporate—need an innovation doctrine or else risk being outpaced by competitors.
I don’t think the anecdote fits conclusion. The reasons to innovate are many, but being outcompeted is not that salient to, say, an IT person in some agency.
If a fresh grad (phd or not) reaches that, then this title isn't worth much. No matter if he works insane hours like he mentioned or not. I'd rather say it's a counter-indication.
A workplace that incentivises this actually sounds quite toxic.
The big thoughts come when you can relax a bit and zoom out. That's what you'd expect from a principal title holder, instead of the willingness to permanent crunch mode.
Your observation is backed up by modern neuroscience. Effective multitasking is largely a myth.
Obviously one can context switch, but every switch comes at a cost. That cost could be hidden by happiness boosts from not having to think about this difficult thing (=pain) and instead do something simpler that feels like lower hanging fruit and gives more immediate gratification (=reward). But the shower you mention is key and can't provide progress on multiple hard things at once. I agree that this is akin to a procrastination strategy and commend you for the analysis and self reflection.
> I'm reminded of a book I read once called "No More Mr Nice Guy" where it explains that "nice guys" are actually kind of jerks because they behave certain ways to try to manipulate people and they expect reciprocation.
That's just red pill BS right there. Somebody is nice, I'm jealous, so he must be incompetent+manipulative, how else can I justify to myself that I want to see him as bad and myself as good? So let's just equate nice with bad, then jerk must be good, so I can just be a jerk and feel good about it!
No, just don't. Incompetent or not, nice is always better than jerk/toxic/.. No matter what red pill folks tell you.
The irony of this response is that I didn't actually claim that you said any of those things. I commented on the book's content and the summary you gave.
Thia reaction of yours is telling though. As well as how you finished your original message:
> niceness has become a huge red flag to me ever since reading that book. I much prefer someone who is good (in competence and/or in behavior) than someone who is nice.
"Niceness" as a red flag? How does that not confirm what I wrote and put you in the camp of those agreeing with the book's message?
> Don't do this. This pattern is easy to spot and you instantly lose all credibility.
The difference is, I don't go around telling you what to do. Be a nice guy if you want.
I simply stated my way of thinking, but it angers the "nice guys" and I get attacked for it.
Oh, and you're not the gatekeeper of credibility, nor do I care how "credible" my opinion is to you (what does that even mean?). Credibility of opinions is just more "nice guy speak".
Not credible and tedious to boot. I know you just learned of this "nice guy" conceit, and you're all excited about it, but I hope you grow out of it soon. Just because you have a new hammer doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I respect the part of diving in to build something on your own.
I don't respect what he actually built. Leeching off others' work and while doing it blasting out ads which ended up being the first wave of making browsing unpleasant in the early 2000s. Without any actual contributions.
And that then paired with "I didn't know how to code, and I hated reading." It's this attitude that software engineering is somehow what you do after having watched a fews youtube videos and discovered stackoverflow. My aunt still thinks that. Thanks for perpetuating that myth.
I mainly 'leeched' the table, tr, td row design aspect, as I had no idea that existed.. fwiw, I didn't copy anything else (text, images, etc)... that 'scaffolding' was helpful until I discovered Wordpress. And I dislike ads just as much as you. I usually just put 1 or 2 on the page. no popup nonsense or 'blasting' ads, ha. Now, since I sell onions in the internet, I'm the one often advertising on these types of small niche sites, and they tend to perform better than larger properties... either way, my 2c. (author here)
But isn’t software engineering one of the easiest domains to self-learn? I don’t know of any other profession that has such vast amounts of completely free resources online.
The amounts might be vaster than most, but it’s hard to imagine that any profession doesn’t have enough free resources online that can get you into it.
The big difference with software engineering is that you can just do it, similar to writing or design or animation or anything that is just you creating some output. In contrast, even if you learn everything you need to know about being a lawyer online you’ll still need to go to law school and pass the bar.
I'd disagree that really learning it and being proficient is any easier than other domains. People may have impression that it's easy to pick up since the number of 20 minute python tutorials vastly outnumbers 20 minute heart surgery tutorials, but it takes a long time, hard work and good mentorship to really pick up. A formal education helps as well, just like in other professions. You can self-learn carpentry or accounting or physiotherapy, but just like with software engineering, a good (!) proper education brings you further and quicker.
Something I didn't mention in my original comment, but have mentioned in another reply somewhere, is that I have the websites running behind Cloudflare, and I allow Cloudflare's ASN into port 443 but block everything else.
Essentially outsourcing the security of port 443 to Cloudflare.
My use-case is "hobby / enthusiast", so I believe I'm losing nothing and the "world at large" is losing nothing from this setup. Having said that, all policies on this kind of thing need to be strongly thought about in terms of their applicability to the use-case.
Were I running a small or even medium business, I'd probably do it exactly the same with maybe a bit more of an eye on what's being blocked and the ownership of the IP addresses, and I'd have some stats to point to on the range of sources of legitimate traffic. It'd have to be a pretty big, international business for it to cause much of an effect (although I'm talking well out of school here because I don't have anything at stake).
Flipside, though, I have my outgoing traffic routed through a couple of different exits, and I've had to make specific rules for some websites that block traffic from VPNs and VPSs, which is annoying, so I'm not completely dismissing your point.
Lastly, however, at all scales I'd still block the Internet Scanners for reasons I've given elsewhere. Blocking them massively cut down on the uninvited activity - again, it's not about making clean logs, but it really helped clear a lot of the noise.
Just because a fungus eventually breaks it down doesn't imply that it's "harmless". It can (and does) still accumulate in organisms and has many undesirable effects, including the human body. It can s easily end up in the food chain as long as it's not broken down, including areas where the fungus is not effective, which are plenty.
The only difference such a fungus can make is that it could break down in certain pockets in nature in the long run.
Yes, I see your point here. I think most objections to plastic including my own are about the longevity of its effects on ecosystems, but local, short term effects on health are equally problematic.
Fun fact, exponential growth is exactly what you need against NP-hard problems.