6 ms·
To kind of go against the flow here: _most_ of the projects I worked on seemed to be a waste of time when I worked on them, but ended up making a lot of money m
by m0zg 6y ago
To kind of go against the flow here: _most_ of the projects I worked on seemed to be a waste of time when I worked on them, but ended up making a lot of money many years later, years after I'd moved on. I like the green field stuff, and green field stuff looks like a waste of time most of the time. The first three versions suck ass and don't do much, but without having them you don't get to something that doesn't suck. Both the first and the second project I worked on at MS seemed like horrible waste of time in early aughts, but have likely made tens of billions of dollars for it by now.
Then there are projects where I did something ahead of its time (and was ultimately unsuccessful) yet other people did the exact same thing later and made a ton of money.
Finally I ran engineering at a startup which spent ~3 years largely wasting time and money, only to be acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars for reasons that are still unclear to me.
You never really know. Success is a random, nonlinear process and your effort is but one input to it. I've given up trying to predict if something will be successful if the work that's being done at the front lines is solid from the engineering standpoint. Business is mostly about being very persistent and/or being in the right place at the right time.
For all you know your company might be one PhD hire away from absolutely blowing the doors off competition. Or it may get to that point years later because it started thinking about it now. Or having at least some sort of an AI strategy (even if not very successful) might double the acquisition price in some upcoming merger. All of those things would make your work worthwhile in retrospect even if the project fails. You never know such things.
These uncertain situations are usually a blessing in disguise: because management has no clue, you can pretend that you have clue, and steer things in the direction that's useful to you. Put some cool things on your resume, if nothing else. Move on, see if you have better luck elsewhere.
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoThank you - it's nice to have a considered view on these things
- jpm_sd 6y agoThis is a great comment. If you're comfortable sharing any more information, I'd love to know just a bit more detail. What were the technologies or strategies that seemed useless at the time, but eventually succeeded?
- m0zg 6y agoIn the first project I worked on at MS we were entering a new, established market with multiple strong competitors, and because Microsoft at the time did not have the right tech stack to do web services, the initial tech choices were dubious at best. The first version looked great, but under the hood it sucked like you wouldn't believe. Then sales somehow sold it to some pretty large/important customers, and the team had to spend the next 2 years fixing things "under the hood". Now it's one of the leading products in its market. My second project there was about enabling the desktop version of Office to be rented and backed by online services. At the time the idea was novel, and nobody believed it'd succeed, _especially_ because Ballmer was pushing it pretty hard. But succeed it did, wildly. I know multiple such examples anecdotally as well, from friends. The initial versions of Azure seemed like a waste of time also (VMs topped out at like 32GB, everything sucked mightily throughout the entire stack, nobody thought it has a fighting chance). Today it's the second largest cloud, and growing rapidly. Still kinda sucks though. :-) The initial version of Bing crawler was pretty horrible also (index team had more time, so their code looked squeaky clean in comparison), and it spent years trailing behind Google until they figured out how to close the gap (with "hiybbprqag" thing - the press got it wrong, they weren't "stealing" Google results per se; they augmented training data with clicks that come from Google search pages IIRC). Today Bing powers Duck Duck Go among other things. It's still not a wild success, but it's most definitely not a waste of time either.