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Remaining challenges in tech industry: scaling and incentives (and incentives at scale :). I also see a major extrovert bias, which might seem a little funny fo

Remaining challenges in tech industry: scaling and incentives (and incentives at scale :). I also see a major extrovert bias, which might seem a little funny for tech. But, again, product managers (or, God forbid, Sales people) are all really subject to the “let’s just get some people in a room” style of planning and problem resolution. I firmly believe some massive amount of productivity is squandered from people choosing the wrong communication paradigm — I think it’s often chosen for the convenience or advantage of someone who is either in an extrovert role or who is just following extrovert tendencies. Massive problem at Google, which is ironic given their composition. Amazon had some obvious nods to avoiding these sorts of things (e.g., “reading time”) but I don’t know how pervasive they were or how effective people believed them to be. Oftentimes you will have even engineering managers (usually ones who can't engineer their way out of a paper bag) fall back onto this tactic.

crdoconnor 9y ago
I do this as a developer, although not because I have an extrovert bias (I think). I'd generally rather not, but when there are so many disparate stakeholders for a particular issue then asynchronous planning and decision making just gets drawn out and stalls. The process keeps getting blocked by someone or other who is not responding or isn't available. This problem of actually having too many stakeholders for different problems I think tends to crop up because the organization or its systems are tightly coupled - 'spaghetti organizations' and 'spaghetti systems architecture'. If you don't have this you're lucky, I guess. Small startups obviously won't, some big orgs with talented and ruthless architects will stop it (Amazon seems pretty good at this). If you do, well, you need to deal with the problem somehow or you'll keep stalling. I've long suspected that Google, in spite of their reputation for having the creme de la creme of engineers, has a massive spaghetti code and spaghetti organizational problem, but this is just based upon bits and pieces I overhear. It's hard to know for sure.
- trevyn 9y ago
  >I've long suspected that Google...has a massive spaghetti code...problem It’s worse, it’s cold congealed spaghetti. Warm spaghetti you can insert and remove noodles easily, but when it congeals, removing or inserting an individual noodle gets problematic. They can get away with this because they have a huge number of engineer brains that are used to locally heat the spaghetti.

crdoconnor 9y ago

I do this as a developer, although not because I have an extrovert bias (I think). I'd generally rather not, but when there are so many disparate stakeholders for a particular issue then asynchronous planning and decision making just gets drawn out and stalls. The process keeps getting blocked by someone or other who is not responding or isn't available. This problem of actually having too many stakeholders for different problems I think tends to crop up because the organization or its systems are tightly coupled - 'spaghetti organizations' and 'spaghetti systems architecture'. If you don't have this you're lucky, I guess. Small startups obviously won't, some big orgs with talented and ruthless architects will stop it (Amazon seems pretty good at this). If you do, well, you need to deal with the problem somehow or you'll keep stalling. I've long suspected that Google, in spite of their reputation for having the creme de la creme of engineers, has a massive spaghetti code and spaghetti organizational problem, but this is just based upon bits and pieces I overhear. It's hard to know for sure.

trevyn 9y ago
>I've long suspected that Google...has a massive spaghetti code...problem It’s worse, it’s cold congealed spaghetti. Warm spaghetti you can insert and remove noodles easily, but when it congeals, removing or inserting an individual noodle gets problematic. They can get away with this because they have a huge number of engineer brains that are used to locally heat the spaghetti.