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Why I left Google. What happened to my book. What I work on at Facebook.
- gabaix 15y agoPaul Adams' last year presentation on Slideshare had a huge impact on my work designing social products. He really put it out there the frustations caused by Facebook. I am really glad he joined Facebook to work on those problems. I can't wait for his new book to come out.
- edanm 15y agoJudging from the post, it doesn't seem like he's working on any of the problems he was talking about. He specifically mentions he isn't working on lists or groups, but rather working on advertising.
- pratster 15y agointeresting timing of this "blog post"...Facebook's PR machine has been known to go to great extents in the past. Hopefully the author was not influenced by that.
- padday 15y agoI wrote this independently. Just my own thoughts - I think it's pretty balanced. Wanted to get some facts out there as people were speculating.
- pratster 15y agothat's good to know. were you able to get clarification around who "owns" the work produced while being employed by a company? based on my understanding in CA the company owns pretty much everything unless you can prove without doubt that it was done outside of work/work resources.
- ralfd 15y agoHi there! It is funny: Everybody assumed you are responsible for the newest-cool-thing-feature in social networking and are now bringing the light to Facebook. But instead you are working in a rather different area.
- pak 15y agoIt was an interesting read, and thanks for coming here to talk about it! There were a few questions that came to mind... - In what ways does Facebook prioritize social science over technology? By all accounts it's just as engineer-driven as Google. - Also, you seem to have pivoted away from research upon your arrival. Does Google not allow researchers to transition into product development? Would that have been a desirable path for you? - Finally, did you leave Google before or after you knew about the Google+ launch, and is there any part of you that wishes that you retained some input into the product? It is quite evident that it was built centrally around the results of your research, and I wonder what it must feel like to be working for a competitor when the product of your vision finally goes live and reaches 10 million users.
- Indyan 15y agoIt is a lot more likely that the discussions generated by Prasanna's blogpost (http://rethrick.com/#google-plus http://rethrick.com/#google-plus) probably prompted this "clear the air" kind of update.
- Devilboy 15y agoYou can't work there and not be influenced (at least somewhat) by stuff like that.
- redthrowaway 15y ago>Many of you have asked me why my book ‘Social Circles‘ was delayed >The good news is that I’m channeling this frustrating experience towards a better place, and am writing a new book. It’s called Grouped Anyone think that's a coincidence?
- Groxx 15y agoI think I'll assume the reverse, and work from there. Which means they decided to change the book's name to "Grouped" before joining Facebook. Hmmm... either serendipitous in the extreme, or the most epic book-marketing stunt I've heard of; start writing book about X, get X implemented, change name to company Y's offering, join Y, get X implemented at Y. The scandal of it all will drive book sales through the roof, allowing them to leave Y and live on royalties, richer than they could've been from programming. I like this plan.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- class_vs_object 15y agonothing says "open" like blocking publication of a book
- tszming 15y ago>> Google is an engineering company, and as a researcher or designer, it’s very difficult to have your voice heard at a strategic level. So the answer? http://www.facebook.com/designjobs/ http://www.facebook.com/designjobs/
- ChuckMcM 15y agoGo Paul! Having experienced the 'its not a great idea until someone with an Employee # < threshold has endorsed and/or invented it' first hand, I totally understand how weird that all feels. Glad you did the right thing and got to a better place.
- nostrademons 15y agoI wonder if there's any way to avoid this if you happen to be an employee # < threshold. It's an interesting problem - you can't just endorse the idea because the whole point is to create a culture where good ideas can thrive regardless of whether they're endorsed by a Big Important Person. Ultimately, it's like the scene in Life of Brian where Brian's telling everyone to think for themselves, and they just parrot his words back: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQqq3e03EBQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQqq3e03EBQ I get the impression that the employees with # < threshold would actually prefer this, but when it comes to what people actually allocate their time to, the vast majority of employees are far more willing to devote it to what top brass thinks is important than what brilliant peer thinks is important. It's a shame, too - the biggest benefit of working at Google is that your peers are incredibly smart, and most people recognize that and verbally say that those ideas should get more air time, and yet when it comes to allocating actual engineering time, people generally work on what they're supposed to. There's probably a selection bias at work as well - people who don't like taking orders from the top generally don't work as an employee of large companies, which means that the majority of employees do like taking orders from the top.
- ChuckMcM 15y ago"I wonder if there's any way to avoid this if you happen to be an employee # < threshold." That is, and continues to be, an excellent question. At Google some of the low employee number folks were actively trying to break this bias. (for them its a question of being able to scale their time, if nothing gets done until they engage in it, they become a limit to scaling. And while there will always be people who bask in the 'I'm so important the company stops when I do' limelight, I felt that in general those folks were in the minority.) It was the overall bias in the otherwise weak senior management (remember Google is very engineering driven) against ideas from people who weren't already 'well known.' Prior to Google I was with a company called Network Appliance and they had an excellent program where every 6 months or so the senior engineers got together and talked about various ideas (some evolutionary, some revolutionary, and some very off beat ones). It was later that I recognized that for a certain size and larger, you needed some sort of event like that so that folks could talk face to face, without the 'distractions' of the day to day fire drills, which created the constituencies which could champion ideas from any source. It also gave the folks who had to allocate resources (the managers) some notion that the idea had been surfaced in a place where, had it been untenable for some reason, those reasons would have come out and been discussed and weighed. I knew it worked at NetApp when I participated, and I missed it when I was at Google, but more importantly I came to understand how important it was to have a company have a healthy way of having technical conversations internally when you were bigger than a single office in terms of your engineering staff. Without it, the ability for a manager to filter 'good' ideas from 'bad' ideas is limited to their own experience and I can completely understand how they might unconsciously (or consciously) use tenure of an employee as a crutch. At Sun we called it 'checkin approval by uid' (which was to say that some folks just wrote good code and so the gate keeper for a release would be much more likely to take their change than the same change from an unknown contributor.)
- gojomo 15y agoGiven what Adams says about the book's contents (no proprietary information) and the prior written permission, it's hard to see how Google could block its publication. Google could request their name not be used to imply any endorsement, and perhaps raise a stink about the similarity in title to their now prominent feature. But prevent the publishing of its contents? On what basis? (Threats of disfavoring the publishing house in the future?) Even if the book did have trade secrets, our legal system isn't big on placing prior restraint on authors/publishers.
- ma2rten 15y agoIsn't it actually the case that this book was written as part of his work at Google and therefore they OWN the copyright of the book? At least that is what I make out of this.
- gojomo 15y agoIndeed, I'd overlooked Adams' phrasing "I wrote the book in collaboration with Google". That implies some sort of formal co-authorship or sponsorship/branding was previously agreed upon, though probably not that the whole thing is a Google-owned work product. That definitely makes for a more messy analysis, especially if parts were written on company time and had contributions/review from Google coworkers.
- vibrunazo 15y agoSome commenters on google+ are saying he might have signed a NDA. Isn't that the case?
- ChuckMcM 15y agoEveryone who works at Google signs the "Employee Agreement" which includes, among other things, a blanket NDA. The other parts that it includes are you transfer to Google all rights and ownership in anything you work on while you are employed at Google (during work time or not, on Google supplied equipment or not). And while there is a specific California exemption (since California has wording in its labor law that forbids this sort of blanket grab) there is wording around that exemption even in the agreement which, according to some opinions, attempts to have you give up that protection as well. I had a dispute with them about it, I talked to a lawyer and his advice was pretty simple. He suggested that yes, you could probably litigate it and get your rights back in California, but if you were litigating against the company you were working for, you rarely continued to work for them, so in my case (since I had not yet started on my project) his advice was to quit and then work on it which would make things much clearer for everyone. In Paul's case if he had written permission to publish and then they verbally revoked that permission (which was what he said as I recall), he could probably litigate it successfully. But cost of lawyer vs the expected royalties on an technical book? I think publishing a new book is a better choice.
- clobber 15y agoSigh. I feel like a lot of people in this generation are using their talents thinking up new ways to get users to click ads. Myself included.
- ignifero 15y agoAnd many more work with enabling people's social lives online. The truth of the matter is, while popular an useful, social apps are quite plain vanilla in terms of the science and technology behind them. The endorphic rewards one gets from creating social apps is derived mostly from popularity rather than some internal sense of achievement, beauty or genius.
- kmavm 15y agoYou're factually wrong about social sites running on vanilla technology. I bummed more cache misses out of tight paths, and invented more data structures in one year working on Facebook's search backend than I did in any of my nine years working on VMware's virtual machine monitor. Being a mediocre guitarist is probably easier than being a mediocre violinist; and writing a Facebook clone that works for a few million users is easier than writing a web search engine that supports comparable traffic. But when you are trying to expand the boundaries of what is possible, everything is hard, even things that seem easy when tried in their simplest form.
- ignifero 15y agoFacebook is an exception due to its huge scale, i was thinking of the medium size social apps space. Surely scaling problems are hard, but maybe not fundamentally new to the web? It would be interesting to hear some unconventional solutions employed in the facebook scale.
- jshen 15y agoI think you over value "science and technology" and under value interface design, ux, social behavior, etc. Well, you're at least biased towards one set of problems over another. I've gained far more value from twitter, hacker news, facebook, etc than I have from most academic research that's been done on ... pick a topic.
- ignifero 15y agoHe was probably ill fit for a company that "values technology, not social science" - I love google for that. And i think changing careers is always rewarding. What's more interesting is his thoughts about how the "web is being fundamentally rebuilt around people". Personally, i would not like to see that happen. The value of the web for me comes exactly because it's the information that matters, not who said it and what others think of it. I also see the ubiquity of identity information to be a blocker for radically free thinking, a factor that has given great value to the content of the web till now. It's good to have social networks for those who want to use the internet as a communication medium, but i personally dislike the way social networks become omnipresent.
- ellyagg 15y ago"I love google for that" Actually, I think the point is that Google was ill fit for using and rewarding his value, because it slavishly fetishizes engineering to the exclusion of other expertise. If you've been following this story, then you know that Google did eventually acknowledge the message from his presentation and book, to the point that people internally were upset his presentation was "leaked" and Google blocked and continues to block his book.
- bhennessy 15y agoA very smart former former boss of mine liked to say, "The greatest engineering marvel ever created is sitting under a tarp in somebody's garage because the engineer didn't bother to find out if anybody wanted it." I agree. IDEO's Design Thinking, which puts emphasis on desirability (people) helps avoiding problems with great engineering of undesirable stuff. Still, Google does satisfy desires for a billion people. That ain't bad.
- TY 15y agoQuite disappointed that Google has blocked release of Paul's book, even post G+ release. I guess "don't be evil" does not apply to this case in the house of Google. Sad.
- MikeCapone 15y ago"I wrote the book in collaboration with Google" Chances are that he's not the sole author/owner of the copyright of the book. It's possible that other features of G+ that haven't been released yet are in the book, and that Google is waiting for a full launch..? That's my best guess.
- dusklight 15y agoHey so we know that facebook has hired PR people to try to make google look bad .. what's up with these recent anti-google posts from ex-googlers? Can anyone verify that these posts weren't paid for?
- bonch 15y agoAmidst the constant stream of Google posts on HN, a couple of slightly critical posts from ex-Google employees must be bought and paid for? Hell, can you verify that half the posters on HN aren't Google employees submitting all the Google+ news coverage themselves? If you're going to be paranoid, you may as well be equally paranoid.
- ananthrk 15y agoThe earlier book was called "Social Circles" and the new one is called "Grouped"? :)