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Absolutely disagree, to the maximum possible extent. My entire job at Google was to find and fix inefficiency in other people’s projects. I didn’t own any proje

by bt848 7y ago

Absolutely disagree, to the maximum possible extent. My entire job at Google was to find and fix inefficiency in other people’s projects. I didn’t own any projects! But I submitted changes to foreign code daily and I rarely got any kind of pushback. Working on shared code is so easy at Google because they have a fantastic cross-referenced code browser and search engine, ways to inspect production jobs and configs that anyone can access, and everything is open and visible. By contrast the other large publicly-traded cloud company where I now work has the opposite culture: no code search worth using, “why are you touching my project?” culture, not enough tests to give anyone confidence in a change. The polar opposite of Google.

BeetleB 7y ago
>My entire job at Google was to find and fix inefficiency in other people’s projects. I believe when he said "organizational efficiency" he was not referring to technical inefficiencies, but rather chain of command, how organizations are structured, etc. Not at Google, but that is the case in my company as well. In most of the company, doing extremely great technical work is not going to get you far.
jeremysalwen 7y ago
Hmm, I think you interpreted my comment about "making a small change to shared components" differently than I meant it. I am guessing that your changes did not change the semantic behavior of other people's code. e.g. you were replacing one hash-map implementation with a more efficient one. That's something where obviously Google's tools do cancel out the inherent inefficiency of large organizations/code bases. My point was that Google has the level of efficiency of a small organization, despite being a large organization. That the default for big organizations is to "just suck" as you described, makes this remarkable, but I never felt like this resulted in a superhuman level of productivity that you might expect considering how advanced the tools are.

by bt848 7y ago

BeetleB 7y ago

>My entire job at Google was to find and fix inefficiency in other people’s projects. I believe when he said "organizational efficiency" he was not referring to technical inefficiencies, but rather chain of command, how organizations are structured, etc. Not at Google, but that is the case in my company as well. In most of the company, doing extremely great technical work is not going to get you far.

jeremysalwen 7y ago

Hmm, I think you interpreted my comment about "making a small change to shared components" differently than I meant it. I am guessing that your changes did not change the semantic behavior of other people's code. e.g. you were replacing one hash-map implementation with a more efficient one. That's something where obviously Google's tools do cancel out the inherent inefficiency of large organizations/code bases. My point was that Google has the level of efficiency of a small organization, despite being a large organization. That the default for big organizations is to "just suck" as you described, makes this remarkable, but I never felt like this resulted in a superhuman level of productivity that you might expect considering how advanced the tools are.