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Google might still have a chance to do interesting things. Somehow they're managing to avoid adding huge amounts of "process" to building projects? They ship co

• vchakrav 18y ago
  Actually, Google does have one major challenge -- how to motivate its people. I'm not talking about fresh college graduates, but rather people who are high up in the organization because they happened to join early on. Many of these people are worth a lot of money, and presumably see day to day work at Google as a way to spend their time, socialize, and to flex their political muscle. In such a place, bringing in new hungry blood is very difficult to do, especially since the old crowd will try very hard to protect their power structure. In the long term, this does cause problems in the ranks, since success within the company starts to become a measure of how well you can navigate politically, vs. the quality of work produced.
  • willz 18y ago
    Great insight. Very practical. I hope Google founders are NOT reading this.
• neilk 18y ago
  So you think Google ships code fast? How do you know? There are a lot of services Google tries to build that never see the light of day. And there are yet others that took a year or more to be released even as beta. There are some projects that seem to have gone from concept to launch in a few months, but I'd say those are usually the exception. Also: there is a lot of necessary process that comes with launching a Google service. Version 0.1 for a startup can be buggy, embarassing, ugly, contain security bugs, or be non-scalable. In fact, you might go all the way to acquisition and still have all these problems. Pretty much anything on *.google.com has to be ready for Digg on day one. I will say that there are many teams at Google that deliver quality, polished software faster than almost any other company. But that's more like winning marathons rather than sprints.
• mtts 18y ago
  He addesses this very point in his post: "As all organizations mature they tend to add PROCESS. These processes exist to insulate the companies from the mistakes that occur after a company gets to a certain size and can no longer trust its employees to always do the right thing. Requiring code reviews, design specifications, black box & whitebox & unit testing, usability studies, threat models, etc are all the kinds of overhead that differentiate a mature software development shop from a “fly by the seat of your pants” startup. However once you’ve been through enough fire drills, some of those processes don’t sound as bad as they once did. This is why senior developers value them while junior developers don’t since the latter haven’t been around the block enough." Sounds to me like he thinks Google is in need of some "process" (in fact, he specifically uses random breakage in Google apps to illustrate why this might be so). I'm not saying he's right (wouldn't know, I've always worked for small companies where there was little need for a lot of "process") but the argument he puts forth is that everything at Google is not, in fact, going fine.
  • evilneanderthal 18y ago
    If you go by what the on-board shuttle group [1] is doing for NASA, more process is the key to a better functioning organization. But then, that's how software should be written when there's lives on the line, which doesn't exactly describe Google. Still, something to aspire to. [1] http://www.fastcompany.com/node/28121/print http://www.fastcompany.com/node/28121/print
    • cliff 18y ago
      Sure, but there are plenty of downsides to this. I've always been fascinated by and impressed with NASA's software methodologies, but they are neither cheap nor fast. I'm not sure it's something to aspire to as much as one extreme on a continuum of code quality vs. code cost. I would suggest that it would not be in Google's nor in most companies' interest to do anything like this. Where a company falls on this line depends on their organization's size, purpose, and business model.
      • evilneanderthal 18y ago
• willz 18y ago
  I agree. To criticize Google still working like a start-up is a big complement.
  • aneesh 18y ago
    Not necessarily. Even pg will agree that a lot of the things that make a startup so productive and exciting fundamentally break when you have 15,000+ people.
    • apathy 18y ago
      Even pg will agree that a lot of the things that make a startup so productive and exciting fundamentally break when you have 15,000+ people. Well then, let's hear it from pg.
      • pg 18y ago
        They tend to in practice, but it may not be completely inevitable. Organizations have some control over how bureaucratic they become.
    • daniel-cussen 18y ago
      Nucor (18,000+ employees) comes to mind as a counterexample. But then, the exception proves the rule. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucor
      • neilk 18y ago
        I don't know if you meant it like this, but the original sense of "prove" was more like "test". That is, an apparent exception is a test of the rule's generality. According to that wikipedia page, Nucor believes in decentralization and objective metrics, so they are indeed a good test of the rule. If that page is accurate, Nucor employees can't get very far on politics alone.
    • deleted 18y ago
      [deleted]
• curtis 18y ago
  Since most of Google's applications are web-based, releases can happen just about any time and can happen frequently as well. This is not the same thing as shipping code fast -- the delta between any two consecutive releases might be quite small, much smaller than what a startup might do in the same period of time. Speaking as a newly-minted ex-Googler myself, I can say that for some projects, development is not what anyone would consider "fast".