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Selective cargo culting is great. I recall talking to someone who was very very happy to brag that his company was doing "everything just like Google" and foll
by 908B64B197 6y ago
Selective cargo culting is great.
I recall talking to someone who was very very happy to brag that his company was doing "everything just like Google" and following the exact same practices he read the company did on various engineering blogs.
I asked him what was the compensation like and how he managed to get kids from Stanford to work at his company instead of their startups and he just gave me a blank stare. Said something about how they were not in Silicon Valley and paid median salaries and that he had "no trouble finding Google caliber talent in the local market." and that "it's not really the local market's customs to give stocks to coders".
- jimbob45 6y agoIn fairness, cargo culting can be good in very targeted ways. My company didn't have a clue on what to purchase for software development equipment or how to organize it. As a result, they observed what Google did and copied it to the best of their ability as their pocketbook would allow. Although it's not perfect and they have no idea why it works, it's certainly better than anything they could organically have come up with.
- the-dude 6y agoAre you talking about computers or chairs and desks?
- gowld 6y agoThose are all the same class of tools. The other side of that "or" is datacenters and networking infrastructure.
- the-dude 6y ago> software development equipment You seem to be talking about production equipment. At least I have never needed a datacenter to develop software. But hey, that is just anecdata of course.
- cutemonster 6y agoI thought it was software, but I'm a bit confused because isn't most good software infra open source (eg postgres, Linux, most web servers).
- yks 6y agoI don't understand your point, you don't need "kids from Stanford paid in stock" to run a monorepo, k8s (borg), bazel (blaze), SRE and whatever else you can read on the blogs. That's literally the point, to spread ideas around the industry so everyone can try them out. Now I would understand the complaint if that company had the same hiring hoops as Google but a dud of TC but that's an orthogonal issue.
- georgeecollins 6y agoI think the point the author was trying to make was that the example company was doing “everything like Google” EXCEPT being as picky about who you hire, paying as much, and aligning employees with stock options. If you try to bake a cake following a recipe, but only using half of the ingredients listed, you are going to get an odd cake.
- yks 6y agoI guess I disagree. Yes, you need a high class talent to move the field forward but once the new frontier is conquered, it ceases to be a frontier and everyone else can enjoy the fruits. Regular engineering practices of today are cutting edge of yesterday.
- the-dude 6y agoAnd still all initiatives to clone SV successes failed ( The Netherlands is full of Valleys, we have a Food Valley, an Energy Valley etc ) Cargo culting only by name.
- p_l 6y agoWithout massive, cheap investment money combined with massive simple integrated market, one cannot replicate conditions of Silicon Valley :/ EU might have more population, but USA has population that speaks single language and largely zero trade barriers for typical SV product.
- renewiltord 6y agoWell, isn't that the magic of picking the right tooling? You then don't need superstars to operate the system. That sounds like a productivity coup. It is, natural, of course that the productivity accrues to capital rather than to labour in this relationship.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoDoes your company maintain operating systems, compilers, web browsers, libraries for cryptography, machine learning, compression, etc? Do you have services used by billions of people that process petabytes of data every day? If not, you do not need Google caliber engineers. You need common sense.
- gowld 6y agoGoogle also makes a bunch of webapps and phone apps.
- 29athrowaway 6y ago...that serve billions of people.
- higerordermap 6y agoAnd are pretty buggy..
- datalus 6y agoAnd most end up in a graveyard...
- 29athrowaway 6y agoNot really. Google docs, Gmail, Google maps, Google translate work pretty well for me. In fact, they work faster and more reliably than competitors. Office 365 web sucks, for example.
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- flukus 6y agoI used to work for a CEO who was always going on about "we're going to be the google of x". No 20% time, no food provided, low pay, horrible management and would hire any random contractors that applied, but we had an xbox we were allowed to use after work "just like google". Half a billion dollars later they failed to be the ask jeeves of x. The other big cargo cult you often see is agile. Press an "agile" company on what agile practices the follow and more often than not you'll just get "we do daily stand ups". Ask them what they think the most important rule in the agile manifesto is and you'll get blank stares, they can't even read the cults literature.
- walshemj 6y ago"coders" is just such a red flag here
- jojobas 6y agoIf it's selective then it's not cargo culting.
- higerordermap 6y agoMicro cargo culting.
- Waterluvian 6y agoI think for most cases "google calibre talent" is overrated. Most companies run fine on 87 octane.
- sk5t 6y agoI'm reasonably certain you're describing a delusional or deeply ignorant person--not someone who actually follows meaningful Google-esque practices of any sort. "We use Guava and are looking into Go"-level overlap with Google and not much more.