7 ms·

All organizations that grow rapidly face an "Alexander bias" where the sort of incentivizes, perspectives and people that allowed them to rapidly capture territ

All organizations that grow rapidly face an "Alexander bias" where the sort of incentivizes, perspectives and people that allowed them to rapidly capture territory cause them to value capturing new territory even when it is no longer possible or in their organizational interest to do so. Even when organizations identify the problem, evolving from the cult of the new to the cult of incremental improvement is always hard.

felixgallo 6y ago
I like the "Alexander bias" term -- is that yours, or are you quoting someone else?
- cpeterso 6y ago
  What does "Alexander" refer to here?
  - necheffa 6y ago
    Probably Alexander the Great.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - robotresearcher 6y ago
    'And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer.' Attributed to Alexander the Great. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/03/19/and-alexander-wept/ https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/03/19/and-alexander...
    - cercatrova 6y ago
      "It is reported that King Alexander the Great, hearing Anaxarchus the philosopher discoursing and maintaining this position: That there were worlds innumerable: fell a-weeping: and when his friends and familiars about him asked what he ailed. Have I not (quoth he) good cause to weep, that being as there are an infinite number of worlds, I am not yet the lord of one?"
  - cercatrova 6y ago
    Alex's Alexander the Great, who was great at conquering but not at administrating.
jethro_tell 6y ago
How does this apply to all the chat apps? Google chat was great, wouldn't redoing the tech and making apps for all platforms have captured more territory than changing every couple years? When you have network effect, it's just crazy to try to rebuild that network every couple years if the point is to grow.
- recursivecaveat 6y ago
  It's not about capturing marketshare for the company, it's about capturing bullet points for your resume. Working on new stuff is valued much more highly than fixing old stuff, and you naturally move much faster with more impressive sounding accomplishments in the early days of a product.
- bsmith89 6y ago
  I think the premise is that the culture/behaviors/tactics that allowed Google to capture new territory early on are hanging on past their usefulness, not the actual capturing of territory itself. Growing existing products wasn't the important thing before, so _now_ the incentive structure at Google is mis-aligned with capturing territory in that way.
abc_lisper 6y ago
This may be true, but there have been articles in public since 2010s if not longer, that show general contempt for having clean code and code maintenance, like having clean code is what lesser engineers worry about. I’m saying that thinking seeped into universities where smart kids, who generally imitate the smart professionals in their profession first. Google may not be the only company guilty of it, there are places like Uber where backend code is held by so much duct tape , 3m shares rose up as a result.
- throwawaygler 6y ago
  That doesn't match my experience at all. If anything, Google suffers from the opposite problem: engineering teams spend enormous resources on migrations and rewrites that make their systems cleaner/simpler/more general, but have little or no business value. There are tons of teams that could be making incremental user-facing improvements, but are instead spending their cycles on projects that are mostly about internal development velocity.
  - duncanawoods 6y ago
    Sounds like a different symptom of the same illness. The team rushes at the problem, has a honeymoon period where things look nice and progress is fast but... it all then goes to shit. If your reaction is to blame technologies or the previous generation of staff, dump the code and repeat the cycle, you end up in the same place.
    - mav3rick 6y ago
      I love the arm chair analysis of every external person here. Code quality is extremely important at Google. That doesn't mean people don't write any features.
  - nostrademons 6y ago
    I think it's changed, dramatically. I was there from 09-14 and then just rejoined last week. In 09-10 there was a huge problem of "launch and run" - people would launch, they'd get promoted, then they'd be reassigned to other higher-priority projects to get them launched too, and their previous project would get shut down rather than maintained. Nowadays there seems to be a lot more emphasis on stability and long-term code-health, people are getting rewarded for internal cleanups rather than launches, and many people have multi-year tenures on the same team rather than lots of single-quarter launches.
hinkley 6y ago
One of my employers was spun out twice, after having been acquired years ago. It was sort of a joke to tell people who the owners were. It made no goddamned sense. Sure, we had customers in common, but so do Xerox and people who lease out coffee machines. The toner-flavored coffee jokes practically write themselves. They just got onto a growth tear and bought a bunch of things they shouldn’t, and eventually rounded up all of the vaguely similar ones and divested. I wonder sometimes if Google would be better off having a system set up for spinning off ideas that are complementary to their business model but distracting, or not high volume enough. Not every idea has to be a billion dollar idea, and a one time cash infusion to five $200M ideas would be a pretty small opportunity cost for them. The fact that such ideas are not a direct competitor also achieves another goal of overly large employee pools, which is to choke off the supply of talent to upstarts.
- throwawaygler 6y ago
  https://area120.google.com/ https://area120.google.com/
  - hinkley 6y ago
    Does “sign up for early access” just mean get sneak previews, or that this is a new thing? If the latter, then good for them but another thing they should have done ten years ago.
- munificent 6y ago
  > I wonder sometimes if Google would be better off having a system set up for spinning off ideas that are complementary to their business model but distracting, or not high volume enough. Is that not what Alphabet is?
  - hinkley 6y ago
    That's what I was hoping Alphabet would be, but it seems like this bit is still a sticking point: > or not high volume enough Kind of a let-down
scarface74 6y ago
Yet Microsoft, Amazon and Apple continuously diversify. Google still gets most of its profit from ads.

felixgallo 6y ago

I like the "Alexander bias" term -- is that yours, or are you quoting someone else?

cpeterso 6y ago
What does "Alexander" refer to here?
- necheffa 6y ago
  Probably Alexander the Great.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- robotresearcher 6y ago
  'And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer.' Attributed to Alexander the Great. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/03/19/and-alexander-wept/ https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/03/19/and-alexander...
  - cercatrova 6y ago
    "It is reported that King Alexander the Great, hearing Anaxarchus the philosopher discoursing and maintaining this position: That there were worlds innumerable: fell a-weeping: and when his friends and familiars about him asked what he ailed. Have I not (quoth he) good cause to weep, that being as there are an infinite number of worlds, I am not yet the lord of one?"
- cercatrova 6y ago
  Alex's Alexander the Great, who was great at conquering but not at administrating.

jethro_tell 6y ago

How does this apply to all the chat apps? Google chat was great, wouldn't redoing the tech and making apps for all platforms have captured more territory than changing every couple years? When you have network effect, it's just crazy to try to rebuild that network every couple years if the point is to grow.

recursivecaveat 6y ago
It's not about capturing marketshare for the company, it's about capturing bullet points for your resume. Working on new stuff is valued much more highly than fixing old stuff, and you naturally move much faster with more impressive sounding accomplishments in the early days of a product.
bsmith89 6y ago
I think the premise is that the culture/behaviors/tactics that allowed Google to capture new territory early on are hanging on past their usefulness, not the actual capturing of territory itself. Growing existing products wasn't the important thing before, so _now_ the incentive structure at Google is mis-aligned with capturing territory in that way.

abc_lisper 6y ago

This may be true, but there have been articles in public since 2010s if not longer, that show general contempt for having clean code and code maintenance, like having clean code is what lesser engineers worry about. I’m saying that thinking seeped into universities where smart kids, who generally imitate the smart professionals in their profession first. Google may not be the only company guilty of it, there are places like Uber where backend code is held by so much duct tape , 3m shares rose up as a result.

throwawaygler 6y ago
That doesn't match my experience at all. If anything, Google suffers from the opposite problem: engineering teams spend enormous resources on migrations and rewrites that make their systems cleaner/simpler/more general, but have little or no business value. There are tons of teams that could be making incremental user-facing improvements, but are instead spending their cycles on projects that are mostly about internal development velocity.
- duncanawoods 6y ago
  Sounds like a different symptom of the same illness. The team rushes at the problem, has a honeymoon period where things look nice and progress is fast but... it all then goes to shit. If your reaction is to blame technologies or the previous generation of staff, dump the code and repeat the cycle, you end up in the same place.
  - mav3rick 6y ago
    I love the arm chair analysis of every external person here. Code quality is extremely important at Google. That doesn't mean people don't write any features.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  I think it's changed, dramatically. I was there from 09-14 and then just rejoined last week. In 09-10 there was a huge problem of "launch and run" - people would launch, they'd get promoted, then they'd be reassigned to other higher-priority projects to get them launched too, and their previous project would get shut down rather than maintained. Nowadays there seems to be a lot more emphasis on stability and long-term code-health, people are getting rewarded for internal cleanups rather than launches, and many people have multi-year tenures on the same team rather than lots of single-quarter launches.

hinkley 6y ago

One of my employers was spun out twice, after having been acquired years ago. It was sort of a joke to tell people who the owners were. It made no goddamned sense. Sure, we had customers in common, but so do Xerox and people who lease out coffee machines. The toner-flavored coffee jokes practically write themselves. They just got onto a growth tear and bought a bunch of things they shouldn’t, and eventually rounded up all of the vaguely similar ones and divested. I wonder sometimes if Google would be better off having a system set up for spinning off ideas that are complementary to their business model but distracting, or not high volume enough. Not every idea has to be a billion dollar idea, and a one time cash infusion to five $200M ideas would be a pretty small opportunity cost for them. The fact that such ideas are not a direct competitor also achieves another goal of overly large employee pools, which is to choke off the supply of talent to upstarts.

throwawaygler 6y ago
https://area120.google.com/ https://area120.google.com/
- hinkley 6y ago
  Does “sign up for early access” just mean get sneak previews, or that this is a new thing? If the latter, then good for them but another thing they should have done ten years ago.
munificent 6y ago
> I wonder sometimes if Google would be better off having a system set up for spinning off ideas that are complementary to their business model but distracting, or not high volume enough. Is that not what Alphabet is?
- hinkley 6y ago
  That's what I was hoping Alphabet would be, but it seems like this bit is still a sticking point: > or not high volume enough Kind of a let-down

scarface74 6y ago

Yet Microsoft, Amazon and Apple continuously diversify. Google still gets most of its profit from ads.