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Re:work – tools and lessons to make work better
- skorecky 11y agoUhhhh https://37signals.com/rework/ https://37signals.com/rework/
- npizzolato 11y agoIt's hard to complain about others reusing a title when the title is a simply a common English word. Rework : to make changes to (something, such as a piece of writing or music) in order to improve it[1] [1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rework http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rework
- TeMPOraL 11y agoBoth 37S and Google's "rework" is not actually the "common English word" but a particular split to 're' and 'work'. I guess it's a textbook example for why trademarks were invented - Google naming this that way with almost identical split to 're' and 'work' is just confusing the shit out of everyone.
- mikegirouard 11y agoI came here to note this exactly. Googling for the word seems to imply that the term is being used in a few different contexts — and it is a real word. I suppose my beef is that Google's re:work and 37S' both deal with the workplace. It's a little too close in context IMO.
- Mithaldu 11y agoIf it's close enough 37S could have a trademark case there.
- hlmencken 11y agoa. they don't have it trademarked. b. copyright protection is not available for titles of works
- Navarr 11y agoTrademarks exist without registration, though with limited protections
- briandear 11y agoThese guys do though: http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4806:xod0l9.2.4 http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4806:xod...
- drivers99 11y ago"This search session has expired" is what I get.
- endergen 11y agoWhile we're at it, Medium is just a ripoff of: https://svbtle.com/ https://svbtle.com/.
- wlesieutre 11y agoExcept Svbtle spent too long as an invite-only platform marketing themselves as an exclusive group of thinkers, and instead came across as kind of pretentious. By the time it opened up, they weren't the only minimally designed blogging platform and nobody cared. Svbtle is a new kind of magazine. It’s part of an invite-only publishing network that brings some of the best things from newspapers and magazines to a network of great people. We focus on the people, the writing, and the ideas. Everything else is secondary. Our goal is to make it easier and more natural for interesting people to write down their thoughts. In the process, we also hope to help our members become better writers. To accomplish these goals, we provide benefits that aren’t usually associated with blogging, like copyediting, to all members, for free. Think you should be a part of the network? Apply for membership below.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- striking 11y agoThey should probably put a space after the colon. And just generally make it look more like an email subject.
- js-coder 11y agoMy first association was https://github.com/reworkcss/rework https://github.com/reworkcss/rework
- TeMPOraL 11y agoYeah, exactly. I just spent 5 minutes trying to figure out how the hell Google is involved in that only to realize that they aren't.
- belzebub 11y agoWhy is google doing this?
- CardenB 11y agoThe posted this under "Why Rework?" https://rework.withgoogle.com/about/ https://rework.withgoogle.com/about/ Looks like they just want to improve their own work environment by learning from others
- srtjstjsj 11y agoP.R. to make it look attractive as a place to work. Execs wanting to be more important in the world and build a bridge to future opps outside of google
- allsystemsgo 11y agoI'm sure Basecamp is going to be thrilled about this. It's ironic since google is the antithesis of all that is preached in Rework.
- mikeyanderson 11y agoIt does suck that their using 37signals brand—but the idea is awesome.
- swagv 11y agoOnly slightly ego-mad.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- gdulli 11y agoI've seen nothing to convince me that I should pay attention to Google's idea about what makes a good workplace. The more Google reaches, the less of my engagement they've kept. At this point Google has reverted to being nothing more than a search engine for me. And a couple other services I use grudgingly or unenthusiastically.
- Omnipresent 11y agoThe most amazing service after their search engine has been Google Photos. The way their deep neural net can identify objects in images is going to be unmatched for a long time to come.
- gdulli 11y agoI liked Mail and Maps once, but feel like after endless redesigns they got less useful, less responsive, less straightforward to use, etc.
- dougmany 11y agoHave you found a maps replacement that you like?
- gdulli 11y agoNo. But I've lived in the same area for a while and know how to get around so it doesn't come up much. I use a dedicated GPS device in my car when I need it and prefer that to a smartphone app.
- MikeTV 11y agoI've switched over to using Here Maps[1]. It's fast and doesn't hide controls, unlike the new Google Maps, and you can get fully offline directions in its app by downloading map sets ahead of time. [1] here.com
- randomguy7788 11y agohave you tried maps in lite mode? maps.google.com/?force=lite
- n7c3c1 11y agoThis is just a PR stunt. >There's a lot of room for unconscious bias to color the information. Research tells us that subtle indicators - names, clubs, addresses, school, previous employment, race, parental status, socio-economic status, etc - may unconsciously affect expectations and assessment of a candidate. "Here at Google, we're independent, free-thinkers, and we're definitely not influenced by the militant leftist crowd that plagues the Bay Area. That's why you're not allowed to take anything about a person into consideration before hiring them. Literally nothing. We're all the same person in every way and everyone is as talented and special as everyone else. Everything is a bias and should be expunged from your evaluation process." These companies will let the PC police ruin them.
- delinka 11y ago"We're all the same person in every way and everyone is as talented and special as everyone else." That pretty much sounds like "hire whomever walks through the door."
- guelo 11y agoHopefully you realize that quote isn't from Google but from n7c3c1 trying to be bitter or edgy or something. (He's probably a white guy that wishes that good jobs were only available to white guys like in the good old days.)
- dang 11y agoPersonal attacks are not allowed on HN. Please don't respond to a bad comment by adding another one. That just makes the thread worse for everybody.
- natep 11y agoIs that an actual quote within your quotation marks? Or are you creating your own straw man and attributing it to them?
- mmanfrin 11y agoHere at Google, we're independent, free-thinkers, and we're definitely not influenced by the militant leftist crowd that plagues the Bay Area Stopped reading here. You might have had a good argument had you not just completely trangented off in an unnecessary political jab.
- bane 11y agoRe:hiring I've been through various pieces of Google's hiring apparatus a few times and have come away pretty unimpressed that they have it any more figured out than anybody else. In fact I'd wager that tossing all the resumes they receive down the stairs and picking whoever ends up at the top of the stairs for any given position would probably work as well as the broken process they have in place. Google's process is so bad from the applicant standpoint that I've had to short circuit and kill the whole process, twice, from my end it had gone so off the rails on Google's side. This isn't a particular criticism of Google's process in particular, hiring in general is pretty broken for every company, but it comes across as a bit of hubris that Google is going to bring something new to the table other than dysfunctions that are unique to Google. Here's an interesting anecdote, I've applied to Google directly, for specific positions I would be qualified for, about a half dozen times and gotten crickets each time. Then out of the blue, months later, I'll get contacted via Linkedin by a recruiter who ends up funneling me into filling a position I couldn't possibly fulfill -- and I'm very open about that up front. I've even sent open job reqs back to the recruiter that I thought I'd be better for, but some kind of internal momentum has dictated that I'm now in the queue for some job I don't want and wouldn't qualify for anyways. I'm sure I'm just a number to make sure the hiring manager passes some internal threshold so that they can hire the person they want anyways, but given the number and length of phone and in person interviews Google demands of candidates, it's a big time waste for everybody. These days I just tell the recruiters what I'm looking for and if they aren't hiring for that job in that location I'll pass.
- gdulli 11y ago> Google's process is so bad from the applicant standpoint That's an artifact of a time when Google believed that working for them is a privilege, and qualitatively better than working for any other company, so you should be willing to eat shit for the chance to do it. Well, they probably still believe it.
- mhurron 11y ago> a time when Google believed that working for them is a privilege I don't see that that has really changed. It doesn't help the number of people that also still believe it though.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- zenogais 11y agoI'm actually quite optimistic about this. Finding good, high-quality advice on hiring best-practices is difficult. We're currently looking to re-tool our hiring process at the place I work as we look to expand, and this could not have come out at a more opportune time.
- vonmoltke 11y agoAlso on hiring, I find the following passage wrongheaded and insulting: The average employee received thirty-one hours of training over the year, which works out to more than thirty minutes each week. Why not front-load the investment and spend the majority of time and money on attracting, assessing, and cultivating new hires? If you are better able to select the right people up front, then you can spend less time on training bad hires and dealing with the consequences. So, only bad hires need training, and by extension anyone who needs training is a bad hire? That's preposterous. Training is a good thing, and 31 hours is right about where it should be. It is the minimum required in most states to maintain a PE license[1] and many real engineering companies expect their engineers to take ~20 hours of job-related (as opposed to compliance-related) training every year. That increasing numbers of companies are pulling funding for this kind of training is terrible, not something to be applauded and encouraged. [1] http://www.nspe.org/sites/default/files/resources/pdfs/education/state_ce_requirements.pdf http://www.nspe.org/sites/default/files/resources/pdfs/educa...
- jlees 11y agoI think with a certain definition of training the argument works, but it's not clear if this is actually the definition they had in mind. If you have the choice between hiring two people for an engineering position, one of whom can write code and one who can't, you'll probably want to pick the one who can rather than training up the one who can't. If your hiring efforts are lackluster, perhaps you can only attract the latter category of people, so you spend a lot on training people to simply do the jobs they're hired for. It's a bit like the Silicon Valley "senior engineers are impossible to find" argument right now. Nobody wants to take the burden of training a junior engineer into a senior engineer if they can hire someone who's already made their mistakes somewhere else. (Not a mindset I particularly agree with, since it implies a failure-intolerant atmosphere, but you get the gist.) On the flip side, once someone is in a position that they are qualified to do, training for growth and development is a must-have -- 31 hours seems low to me. I definitely spent more than that in learning/development programs at Google, and I don't think that culturally they have an anti-training mindset, but I could be being too generous -- the quote on the site certainly reads exactly like your interpretation.
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- davnicwil 11y agoOn the recognize and learn from great managers section: I apologise in advance for the negativity, which is total on these points, but it's just my genuine opinion from experience that there are some truly bad ideas here. > Having identified eight behaviors of great managers at Google, the research team wanted to recognize the role models who demonstrated these behaviors and helped define what great management looks like. In my opinion this is a really, really flawed way of viewing and evaluating management. Management is about human relationships, and every team of humans and their interconnected web of relationships is completely different in myriad ways from every other team of humans. This applies even when you change a single member of a team: the new team now usually functions and interacts in a very different way from the old one, assuming the new member is actually embraced and included. I know this from experience of managing teams with frequent turnover (both intra and inter company) - the way you manage the team and even your relationships with people you already know changes every time a member joins or leaves, or even when people get promotions or slightly change their job focus, sometimes in very unpredictable ways. Sure, there are commonalities between good managers, just as there are commonalities between great athletes. You can intuit these and copy them, try new things and see what works in different situations. But trying to strictly categorise these behaviours across a massive, constantly changing organisation and build a quantitative analysis framework on top of these categorisations is a huge mistake and will never work. Humans are humans, and trying to map human behaviour and relationships to aggregate models is an approach now widely discredited by research in behavioral economics and psychology. Don't try to do it. > Who better to identify those great managers than the Googlers they manage? In 2009, the annual Great Managers Award (GMA) program was created to recognize some of the best managers across the company. Any Googler can nominate any manager for the award. Yes, this sounds like a great idea in theory, but see above - humans are not homo economici - I've seen schemes like this have the opposite from intended effect in previous companies where the votes and subsequent prizes break down and become basically a mix of an enforcement of the (often disliked) politics of the organisation and a popularity contest, as opposed to the meritocratic, democratic recognition mechanism they are intended to be. Everyone likes the theory, 80% of people in the organisation will probably be disgruntled by the reality of the implementation. Again, knowing how humans and organisations behave by default, it may be a huge mistake to even attempt this kind of thing.
- donnfelker 11y agoRework. This version is much better: https://37signals.com/rework/ https://37signals.com/rework/
- genericresponse 11y agoI find it an amusing irony that one of their issues with meetings is that they are about "abstract concepts" not "real things", but the entire book is about abstract concepts.
- gohrt 11y agoThat's why Re:work seemed so familiar!
- fredguth 11y agoI was thinking the same thing.
- bradnickel 11y agoYep! Really lame of them to use that name. Does no one there actually read good business books? How about a web search search before you decide on the brand?
- Hengjie 11y agoWhat is this wack interpretation of Material Design? I can't remember the last time MD was meant to have such high radius for corners.