Software Development Practices At Google

prostoalex writes "It's widely known that Google allows its engineers to spend 20% of paid work time on personal projects (that are nevertheless considered property of the company). But how does the practice actually work? Joe Beda provides a helpful insight in his blog, pointing out other interesting software development practices at Google. The code database is open for everyone, the snippets and pieces are documented and one is encouraged to re-use existing code. The intranet is transparent to the max and the company accepts the fact that there's more than way to accomplish something, so a better method is always welcomed. Interesting to note that just like Hawaiian shirt days in Office Space, the 20% per projects are "actively encouraged" - Joe suspects his review ratings might slip if he doesn't have one soon."

Comments

Mirror, in case of slowness

[winkydink]

Here

Re:Mirror, in case of slowness

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to be holding up pretty well...looks to be about 80 percent.

Of course that could just mean he's found some use for the other 20% since writing this article.

Personal projects?

[thundercatslair]

So you work on your personal project then google owns it? It seems like it would be more worthwhile to do them on your own time then.

Re:Personal projects?

[Rei]

You're paid to do it on company time, though. If you want to own it, do it on your own time and pick something else for company time.

Re:Personal projects?

[yitzhak]

It's not just getting paid to do it - having access to Google's codebase and infrastructure would allow you to do "pet projects" that simply wouldn't be possible on your own.

Re:Personal projects?

[spyder913]

Hey, how do you think they optimize the non-safe Image search to be more... comprehensive?

Re:Personal projects?

[SmokeHalo]

It's just a code word...

PeRs0Nal projects.

Re:Personal projects?

[El Pollo Loco]

For real. Google's got the advantage here. Give employees 20% of their time to put on random personal projects. It makes them happy, and makes people want to work for Google. And by retaining ownership, Google will make all the profits off it. I'm not sure I would do it if I was at google.

At least, I'd rather see them leave 20% ownership of the product to the employee. Then, the employee that created it/built it can still sell the rest to google, or to the highest bidder, etc.

Re:Personal projects?

[ackthpt]

So you work on your personal project then google owns it? It seems like it would be more worthwhile to do them on your own time then.

Get ready, this may come as a shock, but some people actually do contribute to their employer's welfare, because they realize what's good for their employer is good for them. I can see where people who feel unfriendly to an employer would develop their own special projects at home, especially if morale has sunk pretty low at the workplace or the company doesn't seem to be fairing well and the employee only has a job to lose, rather than an idea which would be sold off in a portfolio of patents/copyrights.

As many people at Google have shares in the company and stand to gain much more, I can see where they may kick in some good ideas, especially if they wouldn't have much of an opportunity of developing them further wihtout quitting and raising some venture capital and hiring a bunch of employees (who may wish to withhold their own best efforts) into a startup.

Re:Personal projects?

[wootest]

Mix that with an intranet sporting a database which encourages reuse and you've got yourself a winner.

Re:Personal projects?

[yuriismaster]

Since you are programming something you need (itching your own scratch), you get the benefits of your program immediately, you may get the help of other Googlers on your project, and you get paid. Not to mention a supercomputer grid to do some compilation ;)

What also arises is the ability of Google to integrate your wonderful project into their codebase if needed. Say you make a meta-tag scraper thing, or some other seemingly useless diddy, and then Google finds a good use for it. They test it out (but it should already work: you made it ;) ), and add it to the codebase. You've contributed to your own benefit initially, got paid for doing it, and in doing so, helped your employer. An ingenious system, if I do say so myself.

Re:Personal projects?

[Zen]

20% for a project of your own choosing and one that actually interests you? That's awesome. I'd give just about anything just to get my workload of projects that are dumped on me down to only 100% of my time (if 100% is 40 hours a week instead of the typical 60, that is). Sounds like their management team actually understands the concept of burnout.

Re:Personal projects?

[kindbud]

If you want to own it, do it on your own time and pick something else for company time.

That sort of defeats the purpose, doesn't it? If the employee does his real personal project on his own time, and a fake personal project on company time, he has cheated Google out of what they expected, hasn't he?

Re:Personal projects?

[winkydink]

Unless you're extremely careful about documenting how & when you spent time on your personal project that you're working on in your own time, chances are Google owns that too (based on the IP agreements I've read in the Valley).

Re:Personal projects?

[nathos]

"So you work on your personal project then google owns it? It seems like it would be more worthwhile to do them on your own time then."

It's not always that simple. Many (most?) companies involved in software development have clauses in their employment contracts / Non-Disclosure Agreements that make it difficult for employees to work on their own projects, even on their own time.

Such a clause might stipulate that any software created during the period of employment is property of the company.

Of course, if you have a pre-existing project you own, you could list that as an exception prior to accepting a job with the company.

Re:Personal projects?

[kin_korn_karn]

What's good for my employer is good for them. If it's good for me, that's a nice side effect that gives them a little internal P.R.

I give my employer a little less than one third of my life, and they give me a paycheck. I owe them no more than what's in my contract and vice versa.

I work for a huge multi-national, though, and own no stock in the company. Shares in a relatively small corp like google are worth contributing to. Here, I'd just be one of the hundred million or so meaningless shareholders.

Re:Personal projects?

[MoneyT]

I think the idea is to get people to play with code on their own ideas, without corporate overhead.

Re:Personal projects?

[badmammajamma]

Yes, and I'm sure if some Google employee came up with some great idea that he spent his 20% free time on, and Google made an assload of money on it, they would give that employee a cut. NOT!

I'm guessing he would walk away with a pat on the back and maybe a couple grand bonus. The only thing this is for is to exploit the employees out of good ideas to make more money for Google. That's it. This is not any kind of "we're so nice" bullshit that peole want to make it out to be. It's great PR for Google and I'm sure it will attract a lot of people who don't think it through, but it's all just a scam. Imo, the whole "we try not to be evil" bit went out the window whenever the implemented this supposed "benefit."

Re:Personal projects?

[MoneyT]

A couple grand bonus is nothing to scoff at if your idea wouldn't have made it to daylight without any google code, or the time your were paid for, or the other people to help you, or Google's name attached.

Think about it, some guy programs a Dock like program.

That's nothing new, and certainly no one really cares.

Untill google's name is attached to it. Then it's front page slashdot and linked to all over the web.

Never underestimate the power a brand name can give to your pet project.

Re:Personal projects?

[aldoman]

Google is not a 'relatively small corp'. It is worth more than both Ford and GM.

I think people do forget that Google is not a little project from two students. It's a huge business. I think it says a lot about our culture and society that Google, essentially nothing more than an advanced information filter, is worth more than the manufacturers of the thing that changed transportation and human contact forever. It just really does show how much information is worth these days.

Re:Personal projects?

[lawpoop]

It's a personal project in the sense that it's self-directed. It's not some PHB saying "code this", but you doing *whatever the hell you want.* It's not personal in the sense that you own it.

Re:Personal projects?

[Rei]

But the thing is... you're getting paid, to do something that you want. If there's nothing that you want to do that you aren't willing to relinquish copyright on, then do something that you're not interested in. At the very worst, it's no worse than working at your average business, where you work 100% of the time on some specific corporate project; at best, it's a lot better, since you have a degree of freedom.

I have trouble comprehending how people here feel that it's a bad thing to give people a choice on what project they're going to work on but not have ownership over, as opposed to having no choice as to what project they're going to work on and not have ownership over.

Re:Personal projects?

[kin_korn_karn]

I didn't mean it's worth less, I meant that it is smaller than my employer. Trust me - Google is definitely smaller than my employer, and has fewer shareholders.

Re:Personal projects?

[Anonymous Coward]

Granting ownership to employees is silly because it discourages code sharing, code re-use, open discussions etc. Apart from that... would you also charge the developers for using Google's hardware, infrastructure etc. during those 20%?

Re:Personal projects?

[daigu]

Reminds me of King Solomon. It's a logistical nightmare. Half a baby or 20% of an idea - it would be madness to do it that way.

Re:Personal projects?

[14erCleaner]

Yes, and I'm sure if some Google employee came up with some great idea that he spent his 20% free time on, and Google made an assload of money on it, they would give that employee a cut. NOT! Here's a clue for you, young fella: all employers do this, not just Google. You have to make lots of money off the good ideas to pay for the 90% of your employees that are mostly dead weight.

Good companies will recognize their productive employees with promotions and pay increases. Bad companies will lose these people. In either case, the good people tend to wind up making more money in the long run, so just do your best and trust that things will work out in the long run.

Or if you aren't the trusting type, start your own company, and then you can be the evil one exploiting your employees. You will wind up doing this, or you'll fail.

Re:Personal projects?

[malfunct]

Actually google gives a very large (what that means I don't know) bonus to a person that made a very successful project. The problem is this generates a culture of people that get a project to beta, get the money and then drop development in order to get a new project into beta. Its one of the reasons why google has so many beta projects and finishes only a few of them.

Re:Personal projects?

[AuMatar]

Except California law states that if you do it on your own time and on your own equipment, you own it. Its not legal to request an employee to sign that away, and is not enforcable. Burden of proof is on the employer to prove the employee did it on work time, rather than the reverse. In this state those IP agreements are a scare tactic, nothing more.

Re:Personal projects?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come again? What is a "fake" project?

Re:Personal projects?

[Anonymous Coward]

(warning: IANAL)

> based on the IP agreements I've read in the Valley ...which generally aren't worth the toilet paper they're printed on. California has some of the best laws in the country for protecting employee's rights to independently-created works (I don't remember the exact statute #, maybe someone else will reply with it) It's one of the reasons I live here -- in most other states employers can get away with really nasty things in this regard.

Now that doesn't prevent some valley companies from putting truly atrocious IP claims in their employment agreements. If push came to shove though they would be laughed out of court if they tried to enforce some of those contract claims.

Again: IANAL, please consult a lawyer with any specific questions, etc.

Re:Personal projects?

[winkydink]

You do, of course, have to pay to defend yourself if sued. One assumes Google can afford it, can you?

Ever connect to your home account from work? Leave a PuTTY window open all day? Remember, it's a judge with a law degree who'll be making the decision, not a geek with a BSCS.

Re:Personal projects?

[AuMatar]

I don't connect to my work from home. Ever. If its not important enough for me to drive in, its not important enough for me to work on.

Thats besides the point though. If a large corps wants to try and sue you into submission, they can with or without a contract, and with or without a real case. They can make shit up and claim you stole their code if they want. Its not worth worrying about, because there's nothing you can do to avoid it.

Re:Personal projects?

[Moofie]

Is it that unreasonable for the company to expect to own something that you built on their equipment, on the time they bought from you?

Re:Personal projects?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that mean it's personal as in "beer" not "speech"?

Re:Personal projects?

[cduffy]

Where do you work?

I ask because I work at a startup, and it's *very* well understood how the company's financial wellbeing will contribute to our own. My stock options are such that ((current_share_price - strike_price) * (number_of_options)) is well over 50% the price of my house, and anything that can be done to boost that share price a bit more... well, the benefit is obvious.

So, see, I don't mind giving good ideas to the company, because they boost that share price, and thus my potential future earnings. Not only that, but ignoring the company's benefit in exchange for focusing on my own cheats not only me and the company -- but the folks I've worked with over the last few years as well. So from where I stand, trying to keep good ideas for oneself is shortsighted (I can probably make more off these ideas w/ the company backing them) and selfish (sharing the ideas w/ the company means it's not just my own benefit but that of my cohorts as well).

Google may not really be a startup anymore -- but from what I can gather, they do their very best to stay an engineering shop -- and a good chunk of the company is in the hands of their employees. If you want to see the worst when you look at them, you're welcome to do so -- but those of us who are a bit less cynical (and who have worked in environments closer to the ideal they strive for -- my last employer was also a startup engineering shop with a damn-near-elite engineering team [and is, incidentally, still in business]) can see a far less tainted side of things.

Re:Personal projects?

[PedanticSpellingTrol]

I think you mean,

It s future earnings potential is worth more than that of both Ford and GM In the estimation of rich guys and holding companies that can usually afford to eat the loss if they're wrong

I wish more people would get a clue about how the stock market works.

Re:Personal projects?

[GlassHeart]

I'm sure if some Google employee came up with some great idea that he spent his 20% free time on, and Google made an assload of money on it, they would give that employee a cut. NOT!

How would you know? Do you have an example?

It only takes one shining example of Google screwing an employee in the way you describe (make a bundle off his or her invention but giving the inventor only a pat on the back) before people stop using this 20% "free time" on anything worthwhile.

Re:Personal projects?

[acehenry]

Are you nuts? Google is not worth ANYTHING near Ford or GM. This doesn't show "worth" exactly, but try to find Google on this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_500

Re:Personal projects?

[MasterOfUniverse]

having access to Google's ... infrastructure would allow you to do

Exactly! like access to its search engine, google.com ;)

Re:Personal projects?

[soft_guy]

Even if you do it on your own time, they still own it unless they give you a release or you declared it when you began your employment..

Re:Personal projects?

[EnderWiggnz]

i'm sure that if your 20% project became a big money maker, that google would take care of you, in a substantial way.

google is setting an example as an ethical tech company, and its about time.

Re:Personal projects?

[Bad D.N.A.]

I agree.

I'm a physicist. I do what I want. Sure my boss asks me to look into this or that from time to time but the vast majority of the time I'm pursuing things that I find interesting.

The physicist case is a little different as if the projects that I work on don't produce enough results I simply wont get any funding in the future and am therefore out of a job...oh wait a minute... perhaps they are not that different after all.

Re:Personal projects?

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

More like better access to the database to perform queries that would be bad to allow publicly, but fun internally.
An example of a neat pet project you could do at google would be making something where you enter a url and have it generate a faux directory list based on every page that has referenced files inside the dir. (I know about inurl:, but that only returns indexed documents. my idea would reveal all the jpegs in some girls private webspace with an empty index.html because someone else linked to the file on their live journal. again, entirely hypothetical)

Re:Personal projects?

[koreth]

One assumes Google can afford it, can you?

I don't think Google can afford it, actually. Financially, of course they can -- but consider how carefully they've cultivated an image as a place where self-motivated, super-intelligent people are welcomed with open arms. They are pretty clearly following a management philosophy that says, "Hire the best and smartest people you can find, and get out of their way."

Suing an employee to gain ownership of a personal-time project would be a serious blow to their future recruiting efforts and would cost them untold amounts of geek cred. It's hard to see what kind of personal after-hours project would be worth enough to risk the huge damage such a suit would do to Google's brand name. Even if they win, they lose.

The only way they'd do it is if someone fraudulently claimed that a company-sponsored project had nothing to do with Google. In which case that person is kind of asking for it anyway.

Re:Personal projects?

[ReeprFlame]

Not only is it good to work on your own project, but help is there when you need it. Brainstorming sessions, precreated code, others to debug or find security flaws in code, etc. Why would one not want to take advantage of these benefits?

Re:Personal projects?

[Jeremi]

Yes, and I'm sure if some Google employee came up with some great idea that he spent his 20% free time on, and Google made an assload of money on it, they would give that employee a cut. NOT!

That's what stock options are for... so that employees get a share of the company profits, and therefore have more motivation to help the company succeed. I presume that Google provides stock options to their employees?

Re:Personal projects?

[Anonymous Luddite]

>>Ever connect to your home account from work? Leave a PuTTY window open all day? Remember, it's a judge with a law degree who'll be making the decision, not a geek with a BSCS.

And that is exactly why I never, ever do anything personal at work.

I had our legal department give me a letter clarifying the IP agreement between us. Essentially it says: company time==company property and everything else is mine, so my source code never touches their hard drives and I don't even talk about my outside interests at work.

If it's worth real cash and they can take it, colour it gone. It's not right, it's not fair, but it would be seen as "good business" in some quarters...

Re:Personal projects?

[Rick and Roll]

Do you know what relatively means?

Well that explains it.

Re:Personal projects?

[stewby18]

Except California law states that if you do it on your own time and on your own equipment, you own it. Its not legal to request an employee to sign that away, and is not enforcable. Burden of proof is on the employer to prove the employee did it on work time, rather than the reverse. In this state those IP agreements are a scare tactic, nothing more.

No, that's not at all true. The first exception in CA Labor Code Section 2870 says it doesn't apply to inventions which:

Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer;

(Feel fre to Check it yourself.)

If you work for a large software company, that covers a *lot* of ground.

Re:Personal projects?

[hellraizr]

Yes this seems correct but what about companies who have no policy on such things? My point, I developed a C library that would process CGI code http://sourceforge.net/projects/libcgilite almost transparently to the user. I instructed my employers that they may have exclusive license to it, but not deny'ing my right to it in any way. They agreed. So I gave them license to use it but I retained authorship to the project by posting it to sourceforge.net. This was agreed on by the highest level even while I was employed as a programmer at the company. Can you debate my issue? Do you feel violated pulling a M/S on your code. Or do you feel ppl should die for your secrets? Let me know

Re:Personal projects?

[anaesthetica]

the 20% per projects are "actively encouraged" - Joe suspects his review ratings might slip if he doesn't have one soon."

"I thought I remember you saying you wanted to express yourself. You do want to express yourself don't you? Well, I'm looking, and I still only see 15 pieces of flair. See Brian over there? He has 37 pieces of flair. Some people choose to do more, and we encourage that."

(Yes I messed up the quote, shut up)

Re:Personal projects?

[God! Awful 2]

You're paid to do it on company time, though. If you want to own it, do it on your own time and pick something else for company time.

Do you think that the average Google employee is expected to work an 8 hour day? What is your own time anyway? Probably, you just end up spending 8 hours a day on Google stuff and another 2 hours on personal stuff. You work unpaid overtime like everyone else, but at least you get to choose what to work on.

-a

Re:Personal projects?

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

I think it says a lot about our culture and society that Google, essentially nothing more than an advanced information filter, is worth more than the manufacturers of the thing that changed transportation and human contact forever.

Yeah, except that Ford and GM make pretty mediocre cars these days! All of the innovation seems to be coming out of Japan and Germany...

Re:Personal projects?

[Tuzanor]

I think you're confusing share price with value of the company, a common misconception to those who don't fully understand the stock market. Google's share price may be higher than that of ford or GM, but those auto companies have a LOT more shares, my friend. There are some stocks that have share prices in the tens of thousands of dollars. The owners don't split it, because they feel that would leave the company at the mercy of the "idiot masses" so they keep the share price out of range, but these companies have a lot fewer shares.

Re:Personal projects?

[callqcmd]

Does it then mean that I can choose to do nothing for the 20% of the time too?

Re:Personal projects?

[aldoman]

I was using market cap, not share price.

I know it's not a perfect valuation of the company but for publically listed ones it's really the only one...

Re:Personal projects?

[smithmc]

Google is not a 'relatively small corp'. It is worth more than both Ford and GM.

Are you talking about its market cap? That's not how much Google is worth; it's how much people are willing to believe Google is worth. If that belief were to vaporize, Google would be worth very little. Ford and GM, meanwhile, would still at least have all their plants and machinery, and a physical, saleable product.

Re:Personal projects?

[augustw]

Ah, yes, PuTTY. Writen as a personal project by an employee of ARM Ltd...

Re:Personal projects?

[badmammajamma]

If my choice is between getting $2k and Google making millions off MY IDEA, or nothing...I'll choose nothing.

Btw, grats on being brainwashed by corporate america. They appreciate you bending over for them.

Re:Personal projects?

[badmammajamma]

" Actually google gives a very large (what that means I don't know) bonus to a person that made a very successful project."

Really? Prove it. The only thing I've read so far is that you *might* get stock options. What are the restrictions on those options?

My point is that a lot of companies try to act like they well reward their employees for this type of thing but 99% of the time when you look deeper into it, you find that it's a fucking joke. If Google is one of the rare few that's different then koodos to them!

Re:Personal projects?

[MoneyT]

Fine, you choose nothing. In the mean time, I'll eat 3 full meals a day, and know that my ideas are actualy being used where as yours are being put on some geocities site.

It's not a matter of brainwashing, it's a matter of common sense. Unless you want to invest the time, and energy into creating, distributing and supporting your own idea, on top of working another job, there's a 99% chance your idea will NEVER see the light of day.

Coders are artists, they like to see their work on display, and personaly, I would rather see google using my code than not see my code at all.

How long...

[Phil John]

...till he gets dooced? I give it 48 hours ;o)

Personal projects?

[Nevtje(hr]

Hang on... we all know majority spend 20% of their time on porn, but labelling it "personal projects".... yeah, could work as an excuse for filling in the efficiency void :)

Transparent to the max?

[tquinlan]

Gnarly dude!

What is this... a 1980s BMX article? ;)

Re:Transparent to the max?

[BinBoy]

I miss my BMX Action magazines. heh

Re:Transparent to the max?

[Anonymous Coward]

BMX Plus was better... But nobody could top Freestylin' magazine.

career impact?

[kin_korn_karn]

The flip side to their encouragement of extensive code-sharing is, how does a young programmer make a name for himself at Google? In my opinion, a system that merely strings prefab parts together is not nearly the accomplishment that a from-scratch system is. If everything you are assigned to do is already written, then what have YOU done, other than figure out other peoples' APIs?

Not that that can't be challenging, but IMO smart people do things their own way, not someone else's, because their way is better.

And here comes the cavalcade of leeches spouting "smart people don't reinvent the wheel.."

Re:career impact?

[Homology]

The flip side to their encouragement of extensive code-sharing is, how does a young programmer make a name for himself at Google? In my opinion, a system that merely strings prefab parts together is not nearly the accomplishment that a from-scratch system is. If everything you are assigned to do is already written, then what have YOU done, other than figure out other peoples' APIs?

Exactly! So when I needed to add some database capability to a program at work, the first thing I did was to design and implement an ACID compliant database with replication support!

Re:career impact?

[oGMo]

And here comes the cavalcade of leeches spouting "smart people don't reinvent the wheel.."

Smart people find wheels that haven't been invented.

Re:career impact?

[zyridium]

This is a ridiculous comment. You make a name for yourself by doing something new. You are just really lucky because you have a whole slab of code to stand on top of to get there a lot quicker!

If all you need to do is hook a few apis up together then you could be doing it in a novel way.

If you think you can do a better job, then go and improve some of the APIs, I am sure that would get you even more attention...

Re:career impact?

[TiggertheMad]

And here comes the cavalcade of leeches spouting "smart people don't reinvent the wheel.."

Smart people don't reinvent.....uh, damn.

That was some sort of jedi mind tick wasn't it?

Re:career impact?

[Rylz]

Google probably doesn't care about how a young programmer could make a name for himself. They just want to create the most productive environment possible, not one in which code has to be rewritten dozens or hundreds of times. As for a smart programmer having a better way to do something, if this is so, she's likely to go ahead and change something in the universal code base, since everything is apparently transparent.

Re:career impact?

[zyridium]

But were you sensible enough to design and fab custom hardware, because you know how terrible the standard off the shelf stuff is?

Re:career impact?

[kindbud]

And here comes the cavalcade of leeches spouting "smart people don't reinvent the wheel.."

You used an already existing language - English - to post this article. You leech.

Re:career impact?

[theperplepigg]

nice troll.

Let me ask you, though: How is technology supposed to move forward if all the smart people spend their time redoing the same things?

To me, you are saying that the people who made C++, Java, PHP, or <insert favorite language /> might be considered smart, but the people who use those languages are just not. After all, all they really did was learn other peoples' APIs. To me, the very essense of programming IS stringing pre-fab parts together. you want to use the std::vector? java.util.*? These are just packages pre-made so that future programmers can benefit. I'm not saying smart people don't reinvent the wheel (though feel free to still call me a leech); instead, I would say that smart people know WHEN to reinvent the wheel, and when to use off-the-shelf parts.

Re:career impact?

[lpp]

No, that would be the wraith leeches from SG:Atlantis.

Dark Tick of the Sith.

Hmm... Spoooooooooon!!

Re:career impact?

[grahamsz]

The flipside is that you can make a name for yourself by making stuff that's simple, fast and "just works"

Re:career impact?

[wootest]

Yeah, like the square one!

Re:career impact?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares if a programmer solves problems by piecing together already-existing code? I mean what's really important here?

1: Is the problem solved?
2: Is the solution maintainable?
3: How will the solution impact other problem-solving efforts going on concurrently?

If someone is good, and I mean -really- good at taking advantage of existing code, and they're in an environment where there's a good base of code available for use, then it seems to me they can "make a name for themselves" by taking advantage of that to be more efficient.

Being able to do that effectively isn't necessarily easy. Maybe some routine does 80% of the job you need... do you write a new one or add on the functionality to the old one? (And what impact does that have on code that's already using that module?) Or maybe the module makes some assumptions that don't fit what you're doing. It's not trivial to sift through a library of code to find parts you can use - but as your skill with a particular library of routines grows, you become more valuable in that environment because you can get more accomplished.

And then, of course, there are plenty of times where it really does make sense to re-write things for better performance or more flexibility or whatever. By performing mundane tasks more efficiently, more time is left later on for the optimization phase.

Re:career impact?

[Rei]

Hey, if I ever need a wheel in a world with a "taxicab metric", I'll probably do just that. :)

Re:career impact?

[AndroidCat]

"smart people don't reinvent the wheel.." unless they can make it rounder.

Re:career impact?

[kin_korn_karn]

nice troll.
Thanks. I was half-serious, but it's nice to let loose on a friday.

Let me ask you, though: How is technology supposed to move forward if all the smart people spend their time redoing the same things?
Here's how I rank level of accomplishment.

1) Visionaries that come up with entirely new ideas that change humanity forever. Examples: Einstein, Galileo, Da Vinci, Tim Berners-Lee. Depending on your perspective you might even put Vint Cerf and other inventors of the internet in this group, also.
2) People who invent something completely new to solve an existing problem that couldn't be solved before. Examples: Kernighan & Richie, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell.
3) People who take an existing idea and improve it. Examples: Linus Torvalds, Henry Ford, Wozniak and Jobs.
4) People who take others' ideas and realize them from scratch. Examples: Experienced software developers get to do this.
5) People who do nothing new or special.

It takes more intelligence to create than to copy. That's a plain fact. It takes a high degree of skill to copy -well-, but not intelligence. The idea men are the ones whose names get in the history books, their copiers get planted and rot.

To me, you are saying that the people who made C++, Java, PHP, or might be considered smart, but the people who use those languages are just not. After all, all they really did was learn other peoples' APIs.
It's all relative. Some people consider me to be amazingly intelligent because I CAN learn other peoples' APIs. I personally don't feel like I'm accomplishing anything in doing so. I consider my abilities to be very insignificant in comparison to giants like Knuth or Larry Wall or hell, even the guy that sits across the aisle from me at work, who is one of the best programmers I've ever worked with. But, my company seems to think that adapting other peoples' code is as much an accomplishment as writing it myself, so as long as the paychecks cash...

Re:career impact?

[Scott7477]

I'll tell you how a young programmer could make a name for him or her self at Google: add a script to the home page that when "I'm feeling lucky" is clicked gives the would be searcher the finger. I guarantee you wouldn't soon be forgotten.

Re:career impact?

[kin_korn_karn]

hadslkf asdhlks 3kjl32hkf dhflksadf

oh shit, i used an existing alphabet...

Re:career impact?

[FLEB]

A fair amount of technologies, especially those on the Web, are just new interesting methods using old technology. How many interesting, useful, and novel applications involve little more than a text file and some pattern-matching?

Although there is still a place for down-and-dirty development, the proliferation of easy-to-use, easy-to-implement technologies and growing masses of existing code-base means that people can dedicate more energy to thinking things up and making things happen.

Re:career impact?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not about reinventing the wheel, though that is sometimes necessary. What makes an achievement valuable is the recognition of the need and the fulfillment of that need. You distinguish yourself more by comming up with the idea than you do by implementing it.

If you create a solution to a real-world problem that saves people's (either outside or inside the company) time, you've provided something valuable. Even if 99% of the code used is written by someone else, the application of that code is valuable because it solves a problem. The great part is you credit the code that you re-use and it makes that project all the more valuable.

To give a non-Google example, take a look at (pre-lawsuit) Napster. On the face of it, it's just another boring-looking MFC C++ app with some network connectivity. There's obviously a server component too which makes it a moderately complex system, but there are still a ton of programmers who, given the idea, could bang it out pretty easily.

The genius of Napster was in the recognition of the P2P (uncoined, at that point) model and how it could be applied to sharing music. The implementation details didn't really matter...he could have used a third-party search tool for indexing and finding songs or any number of available code libraries. That's not the valuable part...the idea is.

And that's what's so great for Google about their 20% policy. Groundbreaking ideas cannot be produced, they just happen while you're thinking about something else. They come to people in the course of thinking about similar problems. They frequently require a lot of follow-up work to realize, but the initial seed of the idea cannot be sewn. But if Google hires enough bright programmers, they can reasonably assume that a certain percentage will come up with really good ideas and then the company can pick and choose from these ideas when they decide what to pursue.

Re:career impact?

[emurphy42]

Already been done.

Re:career impact?

[kin_korn_karn]

Although there is still a place for down-and-dirty development, the proliferation of easy-to-use, easy-to-implement technologies and growing masses of existing code-base
Isn't this the place where the people say that coding is art? Well, what's artistic about pasting together a bunch of premade stuff?

I guess you can make sort of a pop/dada argument out of it, but I thought that the joy of creation for us geeks was in figuring out a way to do it, not in finding out what others have figured out.

Re:career impact?

[dillon_rinker]

how does a young programmer make a name for himself at Google

How, then, did Isaac Newton make a name for himself? By standing on the shoulders of giants."

He had a host of mathematical notations (and if you think THAT'S nothing, try doing calculus using only words.) There were already techniques for finding what we would call the first derivative for most functions known at the time, as well as for finding the area under curves. The planets were already known to move in ellipses, and Galileo already had formulated (for objects on the earth) the acceleration of due to gravity.

You might as well ask how a young programmer makes a name for himself ANYWHERE, when he has compilers, libraries, optimizers, editors, development environments, revision control systems, etc. After all, the hard work is done for him . All a young programmer has to do is string together some statements that (let's be frank) are practically English.

To answer your questions, if everything assigned to you is already written, then you can get your work done REALLY fast. Perhaps you will become known as the guy who can do anything fast. You will be tasked with doing even more. Your familiarity with the code base will grow. When asked to do something taht would take others days, you will see clever ways to combine existing chunks of code. On your own time, you will be creating new and interesting things out of other people's code, things they didn't think of doing because they were thinking of something else.

And you're right, smart people don't wake up in the morning, chop down a tree, hew it into timbers, bind the timbers together, chop them into circles, and attach them to an oxcart. Smart tools build clockwork mechanisms containing dozens or hundreds of gears, wheels, cams, shafts, levers, and springs. And that's before breakfast.

Re:career impact?

[Anonymous Coward]

"In my opinion, a system that merely strings prefab parts together is not nearly the accomplishment that a from-scratch system is."

Java? ;-)

Re:career impact?

[AutopsyReport]

I'd gather a programmer has already made some sense of a name for himself just by being hired by Google.

Re:career impact?

[danharan]

And here comes the cavalcade of leeches spouting "smart people don't reinvent the wheel.."

That's right: they invent a car, a motorcycle, a unicycle, bycicle, trycicle, a truck, a moped, a skateboard, an inline skate, a bus, a tractor, a cart, a wheelchair or a Segway.

Re:career impact?

[CableModemSniper]

Not necessarily, you could have just been using existing glyphs in a new alphabet.

Re:career impact?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or sends him to the nearest massage house based on his Google Local preferences.

Re:career impact?

[LordLucless]

If you want to learn, then do it from scratch.

If you actually want to accomplish something, then reuse existing components.

Most of the time, when someones paying for your time, they're paying you to accomplish something, not educate yourself. For example, at work I recently had to write a program that communicated over the serial port. Not too hard, but I hadn't done it before. At work, I downloaded a library that simplified access to the serial port. When I got home, I looked at the code for that library, and figured out some of how it did what it did.

There's good reason for developing something from scratch, but calling anyone who uses a pre-existing component a leech is just self-righteous stupidity.

Re:career impact?

[TheLink]

Reinvent != reuse.

Using English != reinventing English

Smart people use/reuse the wheel when appropriate, because that gives them more time to invent new stuff (hopefully cool stuff for the rest of us to use/reuse).

Re:career impact?

[FLEB]

There might be art in finding "the best way to do it", but there is just as much art in finding out a new "it" to do. When it comes down to it, you've still got something that wasn't there before, regardless of if from-scratch or building-block turns out to be the best way.

Re:career impact?

[kin_korn_karn]

There's good reason for developing something from scratch, but calling anyone who uses a pre-existing component a leech is just self-righteous stupidity.
What's self-righteous about it? All I'm saying is that if you're not doing anything new, you're probably not doing anything special. Working on some utility codebase that has 1000 different people's names in it already doesn't lead to greatness.

Googledot

[Godman]

We need a new google section...there has been way to much google information flying around lately.

Main
Apache
Apple
GoogleDot
AskSlashdot :-)

Re:Googledot

[winkydink]

And a separate one for Linus Torvalds too.

The Apple one should have an iPod subcategory.

Typo :)

[mookie85]

"that there's more than one way to accomplish"

What if you only did 19%?

[OsirisX11]

What if you only did 19%?
Or 18%? 17%? Where do they start saying..
"hey...you need to work less on what you are supposed to and more on your side project."

Re:What if you only did 19%?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what, Stan, if you want me to wear 37 pieces of flair, like your pretty boy over there Bryan, why don't you make the minimum 37 pieces of flair?

Re:What if you only did 19%?

[bonniot]

The idea of 20% is 1 day per week (1/5). Not sure if one specific day is recommended (friday?).

Re:What if you only did 19%?

[bird603568]

It sosen't matter, because they are making money either way. You do your own thing they own it or you do your job. They win either way.

My 20% time

[Steven Edwards]

If I was at google I would spend my time working on

1. Voice to search features
2. Image searching features for iPaqs and the like to take images and search google.
3. A better AI for being able to understand end user questions.

My father in law is a farmer and lost most of his crop last year because the local university took 6 weeks to get back with him and tell him what was eating his crops. If instead he has a iPaq hooked up to google with a camra and speach search software he could have said "Hey google what the hell is this yellow stuff in the picture eating my plants"

Re:My 20% time

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

"Hey google what the hell is this yellow stuff in the picture eating my plants"

Spongebob?

Re:My 20% time

[mycro]

That would be great if they had something like that. Maybe they could incorporate it with Google answers...like images.answers.google.com/browse?catid=wtf

Re:My 20% time

[Steven Edwards]

I have talked to a few people on the inside and while they like the ideas they just have a lack of man power. They have a lot more great ideas but no one to implement them all. Thats where the 20% thing comes in. If it can be made to work and can make money then they are all for it.

Re:My 20% time

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe he could have paid to have a professional tell him so he wouldn't lose the crop?

Duh.

When it's your business you better take care of it. Was the crop loss less expensive than just hiring someone to figure out the problem? Sheesh.

Re:My 20% time

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, most professors in the USA are not paid by their university over the summer, but only for the fall/winter/spring. They have to find their own summer salary from other sources, or just take a vacation, or work for free.

Did he have a professor on retainer? It is pretty cheap to get someone on a retainer, and good insurance in case you really need their expertise on a short time frame. If he didn't, what you really meant was "the local university's free assistance arrived too late to help him save his crop."

Re:My 20% time

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

That's nice, but what does it give to society? I would spend my time optimize google searches "free porn" algorithm.... That's good for us all.

Re:My 20% time

[dodobh]

Bleh. Out here, the standard response time is next working day for such things.

Re:My 20% time

[Merk]

Uh... your father in law didn't lose most of his crop because the University was slow to get back to him. He lost most of his crop because something was eating them. He was lucky enough not to lose all of it because the University helped him out.

I personally don't see the value of voice-to-search features. I think image searching is good, but really, really hard. AI to better understand what people want to find would be a killer feature (but is also really, really hard).

Not so...

[TiggertheMad]

That assumes that you want to own it. Think open source type stuff. Even if you wanted to 'own' something like that, you can't, due to GPL.

I like to write games in my free time, but most are just sort of practice platforms to try differing things out, not to market. If I could do something like that, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I write stuff for my own personal useage, so if Google wanted to 'own' the code, I would care less.

Re:Not so...

[GigsVT]

You can have a closely held GPL project. The key is to not accept even 2 line patches unless the submitter is willing to sign a copyright assignment to you for it.

You still own all the code and are free to dual-license it as you see fit.

Re:Not so...

[dillon_rinker]

Legally, yes. Practically speaking, if your code becomes even mildly popular, you're begging for it to be forked. Nothing wrong with that; just the way it is.

Re:Not so...

[GigsVT]

Nobody's forked ghostscript, and that's closely held like I said.

Re:Not so...

[Narchie Troll]

http://www.google.com/search?q=esp+ghostscript

Re:Not so...

[GigsVT]

Well, it's not much of a fork. I don't consider it much more of a fork than Red Hat's backporting of patches to older versions, or distro kernels, etc.

In other words, it doesn't particularly threaten the viability of the original project.

Re:Not so...

[Anonymous Coward]

I write stuff for my own personal useage, so if Google wanted to 'own' the code, I would care less.

You would care less? That must mean that you do care indeed if it's possible for you to care less.

So if Google doesn't want to own the code, you wouldn't be able to care less? Because of course, if you don't care at all then it's not possible care any less.

freedom of expression, a positive initiative!

[v3xt0r]

I personally think that it should be encouraged to continue to break the monotony of repetitive processes, and continue the learning/experimentation process, in between projects, if at all possible.

The development process can never be fully mastered, as it continuosly changes with technology, time, as well as creativity.

To hinder the development process to 'work with what we have now, and ignore what else is available', is obviously limiting to the potential growth of the company.

You Do Want to Express Yourself, Don't You?

[Shky]

How many pieces of flair do they have to wear?

Re:You Do Want to Express Yourself, Don't You?

[Anonymous Coward]

TPS = Technical Personal Strategy

Re:You Do Want to Express Yourself, Don't You?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what, Stan, if you want me to write 37 lines of code, like your pretty boy over there Bryan, why don't you make the minimum 37 lines of code?

Stan: I thought I remembered you saying that you wanted to express yourself.

You know what, I do want to express myself, okay. And I don't need 37 lines of code to do it.
[flips off Stan]

Re:You Do Want to Express Yourself, Don't You?

[SnprBoB86]

more than the minimum...

Re:You Do Want to Express Yourself, Don't You?

[killjoe]

It's a joke but...

Most companies start out this way. Friendly, open, honest, exciting. Then the company start growing and soon you no longer know the name of everybody who works there. Soon after that the management will turn over and they will bring in the CPAs. The CPAs will start talking about shareholder value and write vision statements. About six months to a year after that somebody will pull you aside and start talking about your flair.

The insane thing is that all the smart people will leave as soon as the vision statement gets written. Those people can get jobs anywhere. The mediocre people will run the company from that point on but by now the company is so large it won't matter. Everything will take ten times longer, customer service will suffer, employees won't give a damn and yet the company will still somehow survive.

I can't explain it but I have seen it a few times now.

Re:You Do Want to Express Yourself, Don't You?

[Anonymous Coward]

and they will bring in the CPAs. The CPAs will start talking about shareholder value and write vision statements.

Which is the moment when the company discovers thatit has an over-supply of Certified Public Accountants, and those "vision statements" should be really "mission statements"

And that's when they bring MBAs.

Re:You Do Want to Express Yourself, Don't You?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree 100%. I'm watching the company I work for now undergo the same transition. I started here on the tail end of the boom, a few years after IPO and it was still the startup "You can have everything you need to make it happen" mentality. This is slowly dwindling away to the weekly staff meetings, excessive paperwork, and less exciting benefits. It's still a good job, but not quite as enjoyable as before, and will likely continue to mediocrity.

(posted anonymously so the company in question isn't discovered.)

Re:You Do Want to Express Yourself, Don't You?

[KaiserSoze]

The CPAs? Are you kidding? Or did you mean MBAs? Because I have a hard time seeing how certified public accountants would direct a company to focus on shareholder value rather than employee morale or product quality or innovation. Certified public accountants don't write vision statements; that's the executive committee (at their $2000/day offsite).

I can't explain it but I have seen it a few times now.

Maybe you should stick to the watching and stay away from the explaining, then.

Re:You Do Want to Express Yourself, Don't You?

[Mr.123]

I quit my first job after seeing exactly what you described here.

The mass exodus will continue as the smart people get jobs elsewhere. We've lost quite a few people but that doesn't seem to worry management. Just ship everything off to India! They're take care of it.

Re:You Do Want to Express Yourself, Don't You?

[ActionAL]

Yes I agree. I can say I have seen that happening at the corporate I work at. If I ever started my own company I'd never join the stock market. Something different happens when your bosses start working for the shareholders and the board rather than caring about people and real work. Somehow, someway, money takes over the medicore people's attention.

Re:You Do Want to Express Yourself, Don't You?

[fuzzybunny]

A senior management offsite for $2k/day? Whoa, let me know where you found that, I have some clients whose management would LOVE to save 95% of their offsite costs. :-)

Seriously though, I think he's referring to the 'CPA mentality' more than using them as a literal example. Part of the general tendency of techs to see anything non-tech as "the business". And I can attest to the problem of bean counters' tending to curb innovation and open culture in favor of excessive process orientation and cost awareness.

He's got a few terms and concepts mixed up (shareholder value et al) but his point's kinda valid.

Google OH face

[Snommis]

Google owns your "20% Project"? "Jump To Conclusions" would be owned by Google? Hmmm... "I mean, Lumbergh Googled her..."

eightypercent.net?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heck, I don't have a good 20% project yet and I need one. If I don't come up with something I'm sure it could negatively impact my review.

Maybe he should move his blog over to twentypercent.net...

Innovative is good...

[rice_burners_suck]

It's very interesting and refreshing to see a technology company that is actually run, as a business, in as innovative a fashion as its programs do from a technical perspective. And most surprising is that Google is actually quite successful. Companies like that can be counted on perhaps one hand.

But one does have to remember one thing: It's not easy to make a company succeed in this fashion. Sometimes, as a manager, one wants to give one's employees everything, but one simply can't because of lack of resources. At Google, that isn't quite as large a problem, and they have the ability to perform some very long-range thinking and innovation, because their commercial success is giving them the freedom to do so. Their annual revenue is in the billions.

I would say that Apple is also quite innovative in quite the same respect, though that will be highly debated, as is Wolfram Research, which will probably not be debated very much.

Business that treat their employees like crap will ultimately lose. Businesses that are innovative in every respect, including business practice itself, don't have guaranteed success, but those that do succeed will do so in large quantities and the people who work there will have great fun in the process.

Re:Innovative is good...

[rokzy]

>as is Wolfram Research

yes but Wolfram himself is a prick and a disgrace to science. why publish in peer-reviewed journals and engage in debate when you can just write a book and claim you've reinvented science? who needs actual results when you're a millionaire?

Re:Innovative is good...

[dillon_rinker]

Just curious - which peer-reviewed journals approved the scientific method? Or conjecture-proof? Or thesis, antithesis, and synthesis? I can't think of any other modes of inquiry that have nifty names, but you get the idea. Also, since when do books not engender debate? Did you miss out on the bit where peer-reviewed scientific journals show up a few hundred years after the printing press, which showed up a few millenia after scholarly writing?

And as long as we're engaging in ad hominems, Godel went insane, Einstein was a philanderer, and Heisenberg was a German.

I don't dispute your conclusion, by the way. I don't know Wolfram and haven't read his book. I merely dispute your lack of support for your statement. Which has nothing to do with the post you've replied to.

Re:Innovative is good...

[rokzy]

>Which has nothing to do with the post you've replied to.

yeah but what's a guy got to do to get modded down around here? I tried personal insult and I tried blasphemy. so I decided giving offtopic a shot.

but not to give in to your straw man argument: I never said books can't provoke debate, I said that the way Wolfram went about publishing his research meant that he got almost zero input from the community until after he published a book. compared with peer-review, where every stage of his work would be checked - the only checking his work got was spell checking. and it seems obvious from reading the work itself he was more concerned with trying to make a reputation for himself than actually making a significant cntribution to science.

Re:Innovative is good...

[Anonymous Coward]

I read somewhere that 3M also gives its employees paid time to work on their own projects. Would 3M also be considered "successful"?

Re:Innovative is good...

[MustardMan]

More importantly, the book doesn't CITE anyone. He acts as if he invented the entire field of cellular automata by himself, with no help from anyone, and with never ever reading a paper on it. There's no way a peer reviewed journal would have let him get away with writing without giving credit to those whose work he built upon.

Re:Innovative is good...

[iabervon]

Google has an advantage in supporting the pet projects of employees that they're a software company. It doesn't cost a lot to make the whole codebase accessible to employees to play with (unlike, for example, giving employees access to hardware fabrication or something). As for the time, I wouldn't be surprised if Google gets just as much work on the assigned projects out of their employees as other companies do, simply because the 20% for pet projects comes primarily out of time people usually spend bored and sleepy.

Re:Innovative is good...

[rice_burners_suck]

I said that the way Wolfram went about publishing his research meant that he got almost zero input from the community until after he published a book.

Not that I know that much about Mr. Wolfram personally, but you can't argue with success: The man's company made him millions. That's a fact. And those millions allowed him to go about his research, while his innovative engineers and businesspersons with whom he surrounded himself produce his software and his income. That is very smart indeed...

Google wants to be surrounded by smart people. They have more PhDs working for them than any other company, iirc. Wolfram's success stems, imho, from similar actions. Most companies, on the other hand, are full of mediocre people. Every business manager complains about that. The real genius isn't in how some line of code is written... it's in finding the right people and surrounding yourself with them. That's how Google, Apple, and Wolfram have gained so much success with what little they started out with.

And to answer that thing about Wolfram not getting any input from others while doing his research: Have you looked at the first few pages of his phone-book sized book? It's in fine print, two columns per page, perhaps several hundred lines per column... names of people around the world, some of whose names I cannot pronounce because I don't know what some of the letters in their names are, with whom he collaborated on the science he reinvented. I'm not saying his research is some new truth that affects all of science... though he might believe it is, but he had some good ideas, and some concrete products (Mathematica) came out of it that help businesses of all kinds today. Prick or not, you can't argue with success.

Re:Appaling

[Anonymous Coward]

lame, you must have just learned about slashdot too, go figure.

Vital Company Secrets

[osewa77]

"You're fired for blogging!"

I'd be content with 20% for work-related projects

[boomgopher]

Shit, let me work on whatever part of out product I want for 20% of my time, and I could add some nice improvements. As it stands, the energy burnt off trying to get directors, product managers, etc to approve anything makes it too difficult...

Like this is new..

[Anonymous Coward]

Pre-Carly HP had similar requirements in the division I worked at. You were not just encouraged, you were expected to do experiment and perform pet projects and report the results.

In fact, EVERY Place I have worked my 25 year professional career (3 companies) had this same policy. One place the number was 10%, the other two, including HP, it was 20%.

Nothing to see here. Move along. Google is not innovating in this case.

Re:Like this is new..

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone mind telling me why this is modded as "Flamebait"?

Re:Like this is new..

[AuMatar]

I work at HP. Its 0% here. I wouldn't have the time to work on a side project if I wanted to. Its considered a coup if I have time to put down my defect list and requirements list and do architecture improvement for a few hours.

www.fuckedgoogle.com calls bullshit

[googisgod]

http://www.fuckedgoogle.com/

All the daily news about Google that they'd rather you didn't read about.

Re:www.fuckedgoogle.com calls bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I like fuckedgoogle.com, however it doesn't list anything related to this story.

Re:www.fuckedgoogle.com calls bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

That site is hilarious, although I don't see any news items about today's slashdot article.

I've seen that site posted here before and it inevitably gets modded down to flamebait by Google supporters who don't like anyone taking a negative viewpoint of their new dot.com lord and savior, though.

Re:www.fuckedgoogle.com calls bullshit

[rpozz]

Intereesting. Whoever made that site is obviously really bitter. Could well be an ex-employee.

Re:www.fuckedgoogle.com calls bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Google did fire an employee who blogged about the company, although I remember that site being around before all of that was reported.

It does seem like somebody has a serious axe to grind.

Is there some info on the person behind that website? I don't see anything obvious, just from giving it a quick glance over, except for a hotmail comment address. Maybe a microsoft plant?

Re:www.fuckedgoogle.com calls bullshit

[gotmemory]

Could well be a Yahoo employee...

Re:www.fuckedgoogle.com calls bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL. The scary thing is that somebody actually spent the time to write that site and copy/create those graphics.
Maybe an ex-girlfriend of one of the founders? I find it hard to imagine someone holding a grudge that large otherwise..

Re:www.fuckedgoogle.com calls bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Its made by Pud of fuckedcompany.com fame.

Re:www.fuckedgoogle.com calls bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt it.

Re:www.fuckedgoogle.com calls bullshit

[TheLink]

Heh, just took a look at it. Whoever is writing the site just sounds jealous to me. The background should probably be green and not red ;).

If that's the worst they can come up about Google then Google is not doing too badly.

Just compare it with the plentiful crappy companies for instance. Or even just an average company.

For laughs, compare it with HP in the days of Ms Fiorina...

Heard this idea from Fred Brooks at GDC

[jparker]

At GDC 2003 or 2004 (can't quite recall) Fred Brooks (author of The Mythical Man Month, in case you're here by mistake) gave the programming keynote, and one of his suggestions was exactly this: to give your employees 20% of their time to work on whatever they want. He mentioned the benefits to morale, retention, etc., but he said the main benefit was the freedom to find new methods and new technologies. Pounding away on the day-to-day coding will only give you incremental benefits, but these 20% projects could provide the germ for an entire new product or business model. It's basically making everyone part of the R&D department.

Also, if you have the chance, I highly recommend seeing him speak. In addition to being obviously brilliant, he's also a very entertaining and amusing speaker.

Re:Heard this idea from Fred Brooks at GDC

[Coppit]

And do it soon. We're lucky to have many of the founding fathers (and mothers!) of computer science still with us.

Re:Heard this idea from Fred Brooks at GDC

[SewersOfRivendell]

Parent poster may know this, but I wanted others to know: Fred Brooks is also one of the people who laid the foundation for modern computer architecture back in the late fifties/early sixties. The Mythical Man Month isn't clear about this, IIRC, but Fred Brooks was actually the lead _hardware_ architect on the IBM System/360 project, and then later the OS/360 manager.

Re:Heard this idea from Fred Brooks at GDC

[Anonymous Coward]

But does the 20% rule work in all situations, e.g., when you don't have the top-20% (or even top-50%) developers in your organization?

A damn good idea

[the eric conspiracy]

I really like the concept of 20% for projects like this. Some other companies like 3M have tried it and benefitted tremendously both in terms of employee engagement and in innovative products.

Re:A damn good idea

[cpeterso]

I have founded a startup and I hope to attract the very best hackers. I let my employees spend at least 100% of their work time on their own projects.

Re:A damn good idea

[Svencer]

From Fortune magazine: "One of 3M's crazy-like-a-fox traits is famous - the '15% rule' that tells researchers to spend that much of their time working on something other than their primary project."

The significant difference is that Google extends this policy to all of its developers. Since developers form a greater proportion of Google's worforce than do researchers at 3M, Google is making a much greater investment in personal projects. It will be interesting to see whether Google can maintain this policy as it gets larger, or whether it will eventually start using the separate "lab" model, like IBM and HP.

Some personal experience

[PIPBoy3000]

I was a web developer back in the early days when our company was trying to figure out the whole "Intranet" thing. I was lucky enough to have the time to crank out what I thought might be some useful general tools such as a survey builder and form builder.

To this day, those basic tools have become central to our business and saved huge sums of money. Shucks, the paper costs associated with printing, distributing, and analyzing surveys were tens of thousands of dollars each year.

In general, I think that giving bright developers some time to themselves is a good way to foster creativity and minimize project burn-out.

20% time works pretty well in my opinion.

[GoogleGuy]

The 20% projects work well in my experience. Sometimes you have to take the initiative to make sure you take that time, but you usually end up doing fun, search-y type stuff. And you end up meeting other people from different parts of Google, and getting familiar with new/different bits of the Google code base. It's also a good way to break out of a rut and make sure that you think about "bigger picture" issues. If you end up crunching on an important project, you can also bank that 20% time and use it up later.

OT: "Actively Encouraged" Personal Projects

[jac1962]

A manager's first job is to shield her workers from buffoonery, not perpetuate it.

My employer funds my open src development...

[tcopeland]

...on this.

It's already paid off - I've gotten some good input from outside folks, and our company can use it however because it's under a BSD license. Everybody wins!

Re:My employer funds my open src development...

[tcopeland]

-1 Flamebait? Huh. I don't get it...

Re:My employer funds my open src development...

[sn00ker]

Flamebait? What the fuck?!

Someone got a bad case of the anti-BSDs or something?

Is /. the result of a Google employee?

[mcguyver]

If slashdot were owned by a Google employee then that would explain why 20% of the stories that run on /. are about Google.

/bye karma

Re:Is /. the result of a Google employee?

[cooldev]

And the other three /. employees are super-bitter because they were fired from Microsoft. ;-)

Reuse!

[14erCleaner]

Wow, they seem to actually have code reuse company-wide!

My personal experience with this: when I was working for a big multinational corporation a few years ago, the VP of my group declared that we would henceforth be reusing software components. A place was designated for placing the reusable pieces that would be reused in the future.

Needless to say, the "reuse repository" sat their empty, until it was finally forgotten and presumably disposed of.

I worked on a number of projects there, and I tended to copy useful bits from one to the other. I think I probably reused more software than the whole rest of the organization put together.

My conclusion from this: reuse is really hard to implement, unless you trust the source of the code you're reusing.

I suspect that Google can get it to work, mostly, because they get the cream of the crop programmers, so the stuff they have to share is really, really good. I kind of wish I could work somewhere like that...sigh...

Re:Reuse!

[iabervon]

If the "reuse repository" was otherwise unused, why didn't you use it for the bits you copied from one project to another? I'd guess that the rest of the organization was also reusing their code by copying it from project to project without anybody knowing.

One problem with that general plan is that you don't reuse code in the future; you reuse code from the past. When you write something, you don't know if it is going to be useful in projects which haven't started yet. You find out that something is reuseable when you need it and you've written it before. At that point, instead of copying it into the new project, you can move it into the common area and use it from there.

I don't think the perceived quality of the code that's shared matters all that much; if it did, you wouldn't be willing to work on projects with other people. I think it's more a matter of having access to code that wasn't originally written to be shared.

Re:Reuse!

[JDisk]

One has to distinguish two kinds of software reuse: Personal and Organisation-wide:

I worked on a number of projects there, and I tended to copy useful bits from one to the other.

This is personal reuse: It takes almost no additional effort because you are acquainted with to original code, you know what it does, its limitations and so on. If it needs to be extendes, you can do it on the fly.

For other people to reuse your code, it needs at least to be polished and documented. Normally there is some additional programming necessary to extend it to more general cases, add generalised error checking etc. This effort is very often underestimated. In The Mythical Man Month Fred Brocks quotes a factor of at least two, i.e., you need to spend at least same amount of time again that you needed to write the customized code in the first place.

when I was working for a big multinational corporation a few years ago, the VP of my group declared that we would henceforth be reusing software components. A place was designated for placing the reusable pieces that would be reused in the future.

And this is where (in my experience) most institutionalized code reuse fails. Higher-up Managers invent nice procedures but are not willing to spend the money to get the code resuable. Which then means that most projects just ignore those nice plans. And yes, as a project manager I would as well. Why should I spend my budget on making code reusable if I don't get a benefit out of it for the current project. I want the money/resources up front, then I can accept additional project goals like "make this component reusable for the whole company, according to this or that guideline"

Making code really reusable is like many other things in business. You need to invest up front to reap the benefits later. For some reason, for reusable components, PHBs like to overlook the invest part and want the benefit for free. Understandable, but life (and software development) doesn't work that way.

One Fine Day At Google

[ackthpt]

What if you only did 19%? Or 18%? 17%? Where do they start saying.. "hey...you need to work less on what you are supposed to and more on your side project."

Let's consider this...

Manager: Hey, welcome to our team, we're all going to be working on a great, exciting project! Are you all looking forward to a fun challenge that can add cool new features and attract more customers?
Employee: [Yeah, right, exciting for you, but not for me, mister millionaire manager.] Yeah.
Manager: Excellent! Ok, we've all got new workstations, the latest and greatest, installed with all the tools you should need, but if you need anything else just scribble it down and zap it over to me, I want to make sure you have everything you need.
Employee: [Yeah, everything you need to squeeze every last drop of blood out of me, you capitalist pig.] Ok.
Manager: Further, don't worry about your hours, come in late work late, come in early leave early, whatever, just so long as you can all make necessary meetings and hook up with each other when you need to.
Employee: [Yeah, you'd really like it if I came in early and left late, mister exploiter.] Cool.
Manager: And I'll have a caterer bring you lunches, snacks and drinks, whatever you like, just jot it down and I'll add to the list. Don't forget to take breaks now and then, we don't want anyone to burn out.
Employee: [Why not, because then you'd have to go find some other guy to wring the life out of?]
Manager: Oh, and one last thing, we did really well last quarter and everyone will get an additional bonus in their check. We'll also throw a party on Saturday where you can all kick back and have some brews and listen to a live band and bring your kids for a pool party and lots and lots of food.
Employee: [You'd just like me to slave away on things and then choke on damn eggroll, wouldn't you, you bastard.] Wow!
Manager: Carsten, you ok? You look a bit down?
Employee: [Yeah, trodden under your oppressive boot.] Oh, I'm fine.
Manager: Ok... but why don't you take the rest of the day off, have a long weekend. Heck here's some tickets to see the Warriors, if you can't use them, pass them to someone else.
Employee: [You'd like that, wouldn't you, me sitting in the third row just as a fight breaks out and I get mauled by some genetic freak.] Uh, thanks.

Yeah, I can see how working for such a place could suck...

Re:One Fine Day At Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup.

I know people like yourself.

They could have gold handed to them on a platter, and they'd still drop trou and shit all over it.

Re:One Fine Day At Google

[sisukapalli1]

Funny? It is more like insightful... I was talking to a colleague (a part-time student researcher) about why he should be full time (he spends all the time at the university anyway), and his logic was that "I don't need the money now, and if I get more money, I wouldn't know what to do with it, so I may go crazy with wanting more and more money." Coming from an early twenties kid, is is surely quite thought provoking.

I am sure there would be the opposites of this kid, who will always be bitter irrespective of how much they get.

S

Re:One Fine Day At Google

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG how did this only get a 4 (that's right FOUR) for Funny?

And what's the Interesting, Informative and Insightful scores for this post? Hmmmmm....
================
The Disguised Rooster

Re:One Fine Day At Google

[NoMaster]

You're modded "+5, Funny", but that's pretty much how it goes where I work - for the 6 months or so that the employment agreement is being re-negotiated.

For the other 18 months or 2 years, the thoughts in brackets are usually the correct ones...

(Yes, it's a union-negotiated agreement. Yes, I'm aware that the /. groupthink is that unions are evil. You'll learn when you grow up...)

Re:One Fine Day At Google

[Dolly_Llama]

I am sure there would be the opposites of this kid, who will always be bitter irrespective of how much they get.

His name is Ellison.

Re:One Fine Day At Google

[AvantLegion]

Heck here's some tickets to see the Warriors

Well now that part IS pretty fucked up...

Joe Beda? Explains a lot!

[the grace of R'hllor]

Hey, this Joe Beda sure worked on a lot of products:
Google Groups Beda
Image Search Beda
Google Local Beda
Google News Beda
Google Catalogs Beda
etc...

Maybe they should fucking hire a guy named "Released".
(Beda, Beta; you say tomato, I saw tomato)

Re:Joe Beda? Explains a lot!

[the grace of R'hllor]

Wow, I sound disgruntled with the company. Not so, just found it funny given Google's 'beta' policies.

Re:Joe Beda? Explains a lot!

[Stanistani]

>Maybe they should fucking hire a guy named "Released".

You mean "Reweased".

Beautiful!

[Cap'n Steve]

Searching by image is exactly the killer app that would cement google as the industry leader. However, given their current neglect of even the basic image search, I doubt it'll happen. Even just being able to search for similar images would be dreamy.

Todays management techniques

[CherniyVolk]

The assembly line was created, thanks to Henry Ford. During that time, machines assisted less qualified humans to complete complex tasks. Nolonger will a master shoe maker be needed, an idiot can inspect components down an assembly line.

During this time, a person who could screw ten screws into a peace of metal within a particular time frame could directly be translated to production and in turn relate to prospective profits. (Time cards were probably born.)

During the dawn of industrialism, economists and businessmen developed optimal management techniques in accordance to this model of production. It is a fixed model, you peace thirty components together in a day, that's thirty peaces of merchandise out the door; management is now tasked with optimizing output from workers.

Today, a lot of work is more what I call, artistic. A software developer or engineer has to create an idea and apply it. This is a far cry from simply grabbing a screw and twisting it into a peace of metal; there is much more involved and worse there is no reasonable time frame or consistancy in production.

The management techniques, economists, the business classes in schools and universities have not evolved from an assembly line managment goals to techniques to accomodate artistic development.

IBM tried many years ago. They tried to pay a developer by how many lines of code were written, we all know this leads to utter failure in quality design and robustness.

My point is, most companies are NOT going to adopt this model of management. They do not make sense of permitting a worker to spend 20% of his time on a personal project, becuase to them, that's 20% of the time away from production of their interests. The math hasn't been developed, and frankly, everything todays managers and businessmen were taught in school about management and business is completely wrong in regards to dynamic production.

Re:Todays management techniques

[MrScience]

I don't know... the 40 hour work week was created as the maximum you could push a worker before defects started cropping up. I think this 20% thing would put Google more in line with the rest of the world, with the added benefit that the workers or their "spare" day are actually contributing to Google's bottom line and having increased morale.

Thought :

[Anonymous Coward]

For once, I'd like to work for a company (perhaps running my own is the right answer) that allows me to give 100%.... to breach the rubicon... to fly to Australia[1]... to do it right.... and not to feel like a schmuck ... due to humiliations at the hands of office politics.

Frequently, one of two things happens in my experience in companies... well, one of three.

A: No room to do _anything_ innovative.
B: Do something innovative... be the pariah, that everybody hates.
C: Try to do something innovative, but, those "above" and to the side of you, are too busy, keeping their toys in their prams.

I think the only real answer, to *own* my joy (my coding if you will) is to stop trying to have people pay me for it... because it's twisted then...

I do it for joy... *companies* just suck... when you get right down to it.

I'm not trying to bleat... but, the most frequent obstacle, I've seen to getting things done.. and done well, is McPolitics... and serial responsibility dodging.
Second to that is a restrictive environment, which kills the joy for development... is in it's methods..... but ...
But, those jobs are almost always simple.

The only answer is to be a PHD... and never *work* again... just get fat at Bell Labs... *University* and have a nice life !

[1] Douglas Coupland reference, a 46 hour coding spree.

New Creative Companies Explained

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

Google goes along the 'new economy' lines of thinking. If they make money as a company, everyone benefits, and since everyone benefits everyone stays and works together to benefit more. Think about working in a big corporation where it was a huge team, and everyone loved working there.

Done dreaming? Well, that's what GOOG wants to sell themselves as. If there were a company which had no politics, no minor empires, little ambition but to do a good job, and everyone was going to have enough for sure, that would be ideal. Collaboration is in the corporation's interest, and the interest of all the individuals involved because they all gain and feel their contributions are recognized and rewarded.

This is why people want a job at Google, not because they get time to develop what they want, but because the corporate culture is more open. As I develop Access VBScript to interact with FoxPro databases and wait for some moron to install Business Objects and give me enough access to the data mart to do the worthless Monthly Record Review reports noone looks at except to gauge their bonuses, (I am in QA) I think more and more that I want a job where I've got that kind of freedom, that kind of collaboration, that kind of workplace.

It's like being in the 90's all over again, only this time they're able to put the bar that much higher, and I wish I made the cut.

Does it have to be search-related?

[argent]

What if your 20% is a videogame, IRC client, MUD, or new GUI/Window system?

Re:Does it have to be search-related?

[/dev/trash]

Like Gmail and Orkut are search related?

Re:Does it have to be search-related?

[argent]

Like Gmail and Orkut are search related?

Oh yeh they are... they feed enormous amounts of useful data into the Google database, particularly Gmail's ever growing spam recognition engine.

One could say...

[teamhasnoi]

that with all the reuse of programming they are doing at Google, they are

Gleaning the Code!

Ugh. I'm going to slam my head in a car door now. Rad.

Texas?

[3770]

Does anyone know if the same is true in Texas?

Re:Texas?

[ChuckSchwab]

Yes, it's true in Texas, in fact, all the states except Missouri and New York.

Re:Texas?

[Viking Coder]

Do you have a reference for this?

Re:Texas?

[ChuckSchwab]

The internet.

Re:Texas?

[stewby18]

It's not even strictly true in California.

I think that's the point

[Anonymous Coward]

duh.

DNF is a 20% project

[Joe123456]

DNF is a 20% project

How long before..

[E IS mC(Square)]

How long before he is fired from google? Like this other guy Mark Jen.

Pink slip

[Anonymous Coward]

Prepare for the inevitable pink slip, bub.

Version Control?

[grem]

Anyone know what vesion control or configuration management software they're using? It has to be something pretty powerful to handle a single repository of the size of Google's.

Re:Version Control?

[crap_on_you]

Totally crap_on_you.

Re:Version Control?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Yahoo does the same thing (almost everything with the possible exception of the code of some recent aquisitions in a single repository) and CVS is more than sufficient. I'd expect Yahoo to have much more code than Google given the much larger engineering team (more engineers than the total staff at Google), longer history and much larger number of products.

I wonder...

[dghcasp]

I wonder if this would be as effective at the "Average" company...

Google is well known for their Ph.D. hiring fetish; generally, people with Ph.D's have experience with doing directed research and projects. Would a company staffed with average programmers get the same benefit from having them "play?"

Re:I wonder...

[glinden]

There's some a good pile of business research that says that treating people well and giving them autonomy easily pays off in higher productivity at all companies, not just companies staffed with PhDs.

If you're interested enough in the details to want to dive on in, "The Human Equation" is a light read with a good summary of the evidence.

Re:I wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't necesarily need a PHD to do research, ex: recently graduated PHDs that stayed at the school after finishing their bachelor's degree, masters and PHD don't have any experience doing research, don't have a clue about the business world though have a PHD title, and when they start working in a company doing research is hard for them to start contributing.

Re:I wonder...

[happyduckworks]

Yes, I agree that having PhDs is a key to making this work. At Bell Labs Research, where almost everyone has a PhD, people are expected to self-direct their research to a large extent. The goal is that about 50% of their time should be spent on conference quality research/breakhrough ideas/long term groundwork stuff. They aren't getting the best use of their PhDs unless they do this. Google's 20% has never been very impressive to me.

Google, yada yada yada

[ning]

ANOTHER Google story? Seriously, guys, I can't remember the last time I checked Slashdot and there wasn't a Google story. Could you please be less of an advert/rumourmonger for Google and more.. well, more anything else? thanks.

"...one is encouraged to re-use existing code."

[Anonymous Coward]

Every fucking programmer in the universe is "encouraged" to do that. It's *always* part of the run-of-the-mill "software development policies" document of e-v-e-r-y single software companie in the universe and beyond.

It's really just too bad that Joe Programmer doesn't have a fucking clue what "re-use existing code" means...

(For me, software engineering is a career, not a job. So sue me.)

Google vs "other" companies

[Anonymous Coward]

So does Google fire employees if they don't tow the party line? Apparently saying "no" in a forceful manner (no, hell no) can get you fired or at least a chit-chat with HR.

Seems "teamwork" around here actually means "don't rock the boat and don't challenge your coworkers or drill a vendor."

Bees

[Viking Coder]

This topic somewhat reminds me of this:

http://www.infobear.com/howswdie.shtml

Windows Made Me This Way

How Software Companies Die

Windows Sources, March 1995, p. 208

By: Orson Scott Card

You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees.

The environment that nutures creative programmers kills management and marketing types - and vice versa. Programming is the Great Game. It consumes you, body and soul. When you're caught up in it, nothing else matters. When you emerge into daylight, you might well discover that you're a hundred pounds overweight, your underwear is older than the average first grader, and judging from the number of pizza boxes lying around, it must be spring already. But you don't care, because your program runs, and the code is fast and clever and tight. You won. You're aware that some people think you're a nerd. So what? They're not players. They've never jousted with Windows or gone hand to hand with DOS. To them C++ is a decent grade, almost a B - not a language. They barely exist. Like soldiers or artists, you don't care about the opinions of civilians. You're building something intricate and fine. They'll never understand it.

Beekeeping

Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey. You keep these bees from stinging by paying them money. More money than they know what to do with. But that's less than you might think. You see, all these programmers keep hearing their fathers' voices in their heads saying "When are you going to join the real world?" All you have to pay them is enough money that they can answer (also in their heads) "Geez, Dad, I'm making more than you." On average, this is cheap. And you get them to stay in the hive by giving them other coders to swarm with. The only person whose praise matters is another programmer. Less-talented programmers will idolize them; evenly matched ones will challenge and goad one another; and if you want to get a good swarm, you make sure that you have at least one certified genius coder that they can all look up to, even if he glances at other people's code only long enough to sneer at it. He's a Player, thinks the junior programmer. He looked at my code. That is enough. If a software company provides such a hive, the coders will give up sleep, love, health, and clean laundry, while the company keeps the bulk of the money.

Out Of Control

Here's the problem that ends up killing company after company. All successful software companies had, as their dominant personality, a leader who nurtured programmers. But no company can keep such a leader forever. Either he cashes out, or he brings in management types who end up driving him out, or he changes and becomes a management type himself. One way or another, marketers get control. But...control of what? Instead of finding assembly lines of productive workers, they quickly discover that their product is produced by utterly unpredictable, uncooperative, disobedient, and worst of all, unattractive people who resist all attempts at management. Put them on a time clock, dress them in suits, and they become sullen and start sabotaging the product. Worst of all, you can sense that they are making fun of you with every word they say.

Smoked Out

The shock is greater for the coder, though. He suddenly finds that alien creatures control his life. Meetings, Schedules, Reports. And now someone demands that he PLAN all his programming and then stick to the plan, never improving, never tweaking, and never, never touching some other team's code. The lousy young programmer who once worshiped him is now his tyrannical boss, a position he got because he played golf with some sphincter i

I've been there

[fireman sam]

I worked in a place that allowed me to work on whatever I wanted (as long as it was related to what the company did). I could get whatever I needed like set top boxes, ipaqs, dvd players. What I developed, they were marketted.

First thing I did was port Mozilla to Nano-X, then get it running on an iPAQ. It was fun. The company however closed the Australian office (R&D) and I had to work elsewhere.

Anomaly

[Duncan3]

Lets not forget that Google is a complete anomaly, they were in the right place, at the right time, with the right algorithm. Since then, they have had no real competitive pressure, and they make plenty of money on that first idea to fund anything they want. They could easily all sit and work on their own projects 100% of the time, and Google would still be profitable.

Google is not the real world, is nothing like a normal company any way and so should not be compared to other companies in any way.

The day Google faces real competition in the search realm, expect them to become a normal company in every way in a real big hurry.

Dude

[Mike Hawk]

Rad.

Ah, the "Indepence" in ISV

[wannabgeek]

From TFA
The intranet in Google is super transparent. Teams are actively encouraged to share the most intimate details of their projects with the rest of the company. This happens through tech talks, design docs, lunch table conversations, etc.

That is the advantage of being an ISV. In companies where you work under non-disclosure agreements with some other software provider, liberties are limited. (I know, that would not be the case if everyone in the world uses open-source, but that is not the case, yet). Yes, there will still be opportunities to share good ideas in the form of utilities and stuff, but there certainly are limits to what you can share with other teams without infringing on NDA.

Hell, a few companies I know (in particular software contract-companies), have different access cards for different groups - preventing physical access. Sometimes it is imposed by client. But many times it's just the wisdom(!) of the PHBs who impose policies like, everything will be shared on a "need-to-know" basis!

On trust and good ideas

[SuperKendall]

I'm not even going to go into the 20% thing, because that has been done to death. Except that is to make one observation - the 20% works at Google because the people they hire are good fits for the plan. There are a lot of people at other companies that might not know what to do with a self-directed 20% plan...

But there are a lot of other great ideas there as well. Everyone using the same codebase? Thank god you can finally look at any company code you want! Workers have to actually buy in to business plans instead of having to implement every crazy idea that comes down the pike? There's a breeze of fresh air a lot of companies could use.

But what ties all of these great ideas together is the greatest idea of all - all of them rely on the fundamental assumption that Google trusts its workers. When you work with people you trust and they in turn trust you, many great things can be done - as Google has shown.

Companies should ask at every step of the game if things they are doing show more, or less, trust in employees. Especially important to remember in the days of Sarbanes-Oxley when companies would cut of their own noses just to keep the auditors happy - even when they would have been happy without the drastic cosmetic alterations.

You can read it just for the history

[ynotds]

This is costing somebody a funny point, but as somebody who did read the NKS book from cover to cover, including the copious notes, I can't let this popular but blatantly false rumour be repeated again unchallenged.

If Wolfram did anything that might be questionable it was largely cutting himself off from others who were working in the same areas for the decade he was predominantly focused on the research that went into the book. Yet it's obvious he wasn't expecting it to take more than ten years when he started and it obviously got to a point where getting it finished and out there became his dominant motivation.

Sure, he doesn't get everything right, and he makes some leaps that aren't all that convincing, but those faults are only a tiny fraction of the totality.

To me one of the most impressive things was the way he presented the background stories to all the key topics. Those I know a bit about were accurate enough that I can only presume the others were to.

The book is the way it is largely because he convinced himself that he was onto something significant that others had missed. However that something was certainly not, as neophites seem to assume, the general field of cellular automata, but rather his "Principle of Computational Equivalence"--an ambitious claim which he felt could only be presented in the context of substantial research.

Origin of 40 hour work week

[bedotted]

What good sources do you have for the adoption of a 40 hour work week as a quality control measure?

I had always imagined 40 hours to be the somewhat arbitrary point at which management, labour, and legislative negotiations arrived based on some other arbitrary calculations such as: dividing a 24 hour day in thirds, and dropping a day from a previous 6 day work schedule. I would be interested in knowing about any findings that 40 hours in a work week was a more optimal quality control point than 35 or 45 hours.

Re:Origin of 40 hour work week

[MrScience]

On further research, I can't point to any hard evidence. It may actually be an Urban Legend that I've inadvertently reseeded. Sorry!

one of the most respected co's

[recharged95]

The code database is open for everyone, the snippets and pieces are documented and one is encouraged to re-use existing code. The intranet is transparent to the max and the company accepts the fact that there's more than way to accomplish something, so a better method is always welcomed. Interesting to note that just like Hawaiian shirt days in Office Space, the 20% per projects are "actively encouraged"

Hmmm... For a second there I thought we were talking about a typical university!

Hmmm... Universities don't make money (i.e. the margins are low). Hopefully this is not the fate of google.

Re:one of the most respected co's

[Derleth]

Universities don't make money

Well, they also aren't selling the software they make, or building businesses around the fundamental research they do. All their money comes from tuitions and philanthropic groups and (at least for some) taxes. If a university professor or student invented a million-dollar idea, I don't know if the university itself could hope to reap the profits directly.

The example I think most people here will be familiar with is BSD Unix, originally developed at the University of California at Berkeley. A lot of people got a lot of use out of that code, but I don't think UC-Berkeley ever saw a dime of direct profit.

Progress since VA and Redhat?

[heroine]

So the latest crop of CS graduates is now worshipping Google, Apple, and Pixar the same way the previous group worshipped VA Research, Redhat, and Cobalt.

Given all the things these current hot companies do right and the previous hot companies did right, is anything about the current batch of hot companies a net improvement over the previous batch of hot companies or is this a different patch of the same ground being retreadded?

Salaries are a fraction of what they were in 2000 but maybe software development processes have improved. Pensions and health benefits are gone but now the company intranet is transparent. Dot com parties are gone but there's 20% time for personal projects. Is this round of companies really better than the last iteration?

Only by components, rest is exclusionary politics

[edgedmurasame]

Well, if you look at them and the upstream from those projects up to the company with regards to the education of those whom work there:

Gmail: Forever in beta, forever mired by that "50 perpetual invites" syndrome. Applies their search technology to your email.

Orkut: Why Stanford culture is better as a test case to study social interaction [gone wrong] versus their development of something to facilitate it. Little relation from what's seen except concepts to build up Orkut, mostly to defend it against the majority.

Google: Upstream of both projects, the search technology powers Gmail if not both.

Well, if you look at it - they only contain parts that are search related. The rest is signature work by Stanford, MIT, et al - innovation by absolute exclusion. Never mind the highly competent minds that come from the landlocked states and/or those not of the Ivory Tower philosophy. If these kind projects came from a search company with a Berkeley or Midwestern mindset, they'd not have as many of the ones with FOAF as a requirement to use given anything but the thumbs down.

Totally wrong and dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

This merely perpetuates the geek-boy fantasy that software development is the most important single thing to a company. No wonder they get mad at Microsoft--it's the most obvious of numerous counter-examples.

Sorry geeks, you're not as important as you think you are. And despite Mr. Card's rantings, companies neither live nor die by their software development alone.

Re:Totally wrong and dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

And it's a pity companies don't fail over SW quality. Otherwise nincompoops like ISS would have long since imploded. Talk about SHIT for software. Computer Associates too.

Obligatory Simpson's quote

[Anonymous Coward]

Abe: I'll be deep in the cold cold ground before I recognize Missouri

What's this "review score"?

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds a little ominous.

Competition and Plagiarism

[mmThe1]

I'm curious here: Wouldn't there would be many instances where two employees complete for similar-themed side-projects? Or may be one employee plagiarising someone else's brilliant idea and implement it first (it would be fruitful for the company in the end -- but probably not for the employee with the original idea)?

How do companies like Google deal with above scenarios?

Re:Competition and Plagiarism

[lachlan76]

Google probably would encourage such employees to work together on their projects.

How many of us waste

[dietsunkist]

... 20% of our time in process?

Cooperation vs Competition and Plagiarism

[Jeff85]

I'd imagine they'd collaborate on the project together, combining the best of both person's ideas.

Novell is trying something similar, but worse

[Scallawag]

they expect people to move to UTAH, use their empty offices, be provided with administrative and support services - and then share in the profit of their OS project with NOVL. They question is, what profit?

See link. http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050322/sftu077_3.html

Re:I'd be content with 20% for work-related projec

[SSilver2k2]

heh, reminds me of a dilbert comic, where the PHB was said to motivate employees be rewardnig them by getting rid of something bad in thier corporate culture. The phb said alice didnthave to go to the team meeting this week. Just made me laugh. haha.

Personal Project -- Porn Collection

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just waiting for a Google employee to get fired for having a personal project that consists of scouring the 'net to download as much pr0n as possible for the programmer.

Manager: "Jones, what have you been working on?"
Jones: "A data collection project. Basically a stripped down thingy. It's a very stimulating project...."

I don't think so.

[Schwarzchild]

"Suing an employee to gain ownership of a personal-time project would be a serious blow to their future recruiting efforts and would cost them untold amounts of geek cred. It's hard to see what kind of personal after-hours project would be worth enough to risk the huge damage such a suit would do to Google's brand name. Even if they win, they lose."

Apple took ownership of some code developed by one of their engineers in his spare time. I think he had his own side business. The odd thing here is that Steve Jobs paid Andy Hertzfield a lot of money for some code he wrote in his spare time but their attitude towards this has apparently changed.

Given all this, I imagine that they still attract a lot of top notch talent.

Is he wrong?

[Schwarzchild]

A physicist wrote the following statement about Wolfram's book. Is he wrong?

Dis-recommended Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science [This is almost, but not quite, a case for the immortal "What is true is not new, and what is new is not true". The one new, true thing is a proof that the elementary CA rule 110 can support universal, Turing-complete computation. (One of Wolfram's earlier books states that such a thing is obviously impossible.) This however was shown not by Wolfram but by Matthew Cook (this is the "technical content and proofs" for which Wolfram acknowledges Cook, in miniscule type, in his frontmatter). In any case it cannot bear the weight Wolfram places on it. Watch This Space for a detailed critique of this book, a rare blend of monster raving egomania and utter batshit insanity.]

ANKOS is in my reading queue but I have not quite gotten to it yet.