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There is a similar story about Larry Page when Gmail was being developed: Before Google launched Gmail in 2004, its creator, Paul Buchheit, brought it to
by sxp 12y ago
There is a similar story about Larry Page when Gmail was being developed:
Before Google launched Gmail in 2004, its creator, Paul Buchheit, brought it to
Page’s open cubicle office for a review.
As Buchheit called the program up on Page’s computer, the boss made a face.
“It’s too slow,” Page said.
Buchheit disagreed. It was loading just fine, he said. No, Page insisted.
It had taken a full 600 milliseconds for the page to load.
“You can’t know that,” Buchheit said. But when he got back to his office,
he looked up the server logs. It had taken exactly 600 milliseconds
for Gmail to load.
http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-2014-4#ixzz3TLJzGy9x http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-2...
It is quite plausible for people who being to obsess over a certain aspect to become overly sensitive to it. In my case, a lifetime of playing high speed video games makes it possible to notice things that others miss when it comes to things like framerates and microstutter in computer graphics. I find it likely that Jobs and Page were able to pick up on millimeter & millisecond defects.
- aros 12y agoHow is this story similar? It's not even related to the topic.
- Raphmedia 12y agoThe thing is, 600 milliseconds is a number that comes up often. You don't have to be precise to the milliseconds, you only have to be able to recognize 100 milliseconds, 500 milliseconds and 1000 milliseconds. The rest is guessing work. It's the same thing with the width of elements on the web. Know what 10px is, and you will be able to guess anything.
- bilbo0s 12y agoWell... I would agree that the Page story is not that impressive. Obviously, most people from the video game generation would be sensitive to a time period greater than 500 milliseconds. But that misses the point of the Jobs story. Some people really do have sensitivity to things that the vast majority of others have trouble perceiving. Most people would have trouble perceiving a millimeter difference in spatial dimension by touch. Having said all of that... the likelihood that the Project Manager in the original story... or even that the Project Manager in your workplace for that matter... is the maven that Steve Jobs was is remote in the extreme.
- dilap 12y agoI used to play a racing game called Trackmania; there was no collision, but it was really competitive in that you'd be racing simultaneously networked w/ other players. You could definitely tell when you completed the lab in a time that was say 10ms behind a different time. 600 milliseconds, +- say 50ms, is pretty recognizable.
- raziel2p 12y agoTop level players will gain ~10ms or more on eachother every other turn. At a level below the very top you're going to see gaps far bigger. With experience, you'll definitely be able to tell which parts of the track you did well or poorly at, but there is no way you're going to be able to get an accurate feel for all of those tiny gains and losses over the course of a 30-60 second track to accurately judge exactly how far ahead or behind another time you are. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6Ri6XUq6no https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6Ri6XUq6no
- dilap 12y agoI think you might be right...maybe I am remembering differences of more like 100ms? And thinking about it, in Trackmania it was less a perception of time that you noticed, but a sense of how smoothly and perfectly you had hit every turn. You could easily race the almost the exact same time multiple times in a row, and then feel it when you hit a turn more smoothly and shaved a few fractions of a second off your time. (Or similarly feel it when you screwed up and added a few seconds.) Man, thinking about this is making me miss trackmania :)
- dilap 12y agoOK, I got curious enough I wrote a small console game to test reaction times. It turns out I'm not nearly as good as I thought. I can nail a delay of 100,200,...,900ms exactly only about 40% of the time, and within +-100ms about 80% of the time. If anyone else feels like trying, you can do "go get github.com/erinok/howlonghowlong". Hit space to see a flash, and then type 1-9 for how long you think the flash was. It's surprisingly fun. (At least if you're incredibly weird like me.) I find I'll have periods of concentration where I can just nail it, and then it'll leave me, and I'll be sloppy.
- sytse 12y agoGreat story, I hope that Larry loads drive.google.com sometime this week and orders that the loading time has to improve as well
- yellowapple 12y agoOr pretty much anything in *.google.com, for that matter.
- NegativeK 12y agoI thought you were being hyperbolic, but Drive really does take second god damn seconds to load.
- sytse 12y agoIndeed, it takes multiple seconds, I have a drive tab pinned permanently to avoid it (actually two tabs, one for each google account I use)
- guelo 12y agoFine story but it has no "remove the duck" element to it.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- zipfle 12y agoThat's a super old story, at least as old as this zen koan: http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans/48accurateproportion.html http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans/48accurateproportion.html
- Throwaway1224 12y agoHave you ever read this one: http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans/34asmileinhislifetime.html http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans/34asmileinhislifetime.html I've been reading it for 12 years, and I still can't figure it out. I have thoughts about it... but nothing that's sort of an "aha".
- ggchappell 12y ago> I find it likely that Jobs and Page were able to pick up on millimeter & millisecond defects. Quite possible. It's also possible that Jobs & Page made all kinds of more or less random comments, and people remembered and retold the stories about the times they were strikingly correct. I'd guess the truth is somewhere between the two.
- leppr 12y agoThird plausible option for the Steve Jobs story: he knew his colleagues very well and just guessed what they did through their body-language. If I was going to pull off something like that on my boss I'm pretty sure I'd act differently than usual, and marketing/business-type people tend to be socially hyper-aware.
- ggchappell 12y agoWe could take that idea to the extreme. Perhaps Jobs knew nothing about technology; he was just highly sensitive to the body language of talented engineers. So he hired top-notch people, and then he yelled at them until he could see that the engineers knew they were doing excellent work.