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At X, Failure Is Not an Option: It's a Feature (Astro Teller's 2016 TED Talk) (backchannel.com)
New submitter Evan Hansen writes: Everyone likes to pays lip service to "fail fast," but when was the last time your boss gave you a bonus when your project was killed? In his 2016 TED Talk, concluded just moments ago, Astro Teller, the head of Alphabet's X R&D lab shares some never-before revealed stories of his team's failures and iterations, and explains how "fail fast" can be more than a trite cliche. The first X project was the self-driving car, and subsequent ones include Google Glass, Project Loon's Internet service via balloon, Makani energy kites, and a drone delivery service dubbed Project Wing.
Man, it has got to be great being at the top. Where you can fail and nobody will fire you for it. In the rest of the world, when you are associated with a failed project, that puts you first in line the next time layoffs come around.
This depends on the nature of the project. If you're doing yet another ERP system integration, yes, you should succeed, and there should be negative consequences if you don't, because there is nothing new involved, just lots and lots of detail-oriented grunt work. It's hard, but good planning and careful attention to detail will get you to the end of the job, and if it doesn't, it's because you did a poor job, not because the job was not doable.
But when you're breaking new ground, trying to do things that have never been done before, if your management expects success, they're idiots. I grant that lots of companies are led by idiots, but that doesn't make them any less wrong. Google is where it is precisely because its leadership understands that failure is always possible, and the more audacious the goals the more likely it is that you'll fail. When you're pushing the envelope, true failure isn't when the project stumbles and falls due to some major technological obstacle. It's when you fail because of something you really could have foreseen... or when you fail to learn from your failure.
Google has a culture of post mortem analyses to ensure that that last sort of failure doesn't happen. Whenever anything goes seriously wrong, a detailed analysis of what went wrong, and when, and why, is conducted. Not with the goal of identifying people to blame, but to determine what lessons can be learned and what can be done to ensure that failure doesn't happen again. For someone who grew up outside of the Google culture, it's pretty terrifying to go through your first post mortem, for something you built. It's hard not to be defensive. After a few times, though, you begin to internalize the fact that unless the cause was you just not doing your job, you have nothing to worry about and may well come out with kudos or even a bonus.
He got into Google because Googlers distrust people who are not like themselves.
I got into Google as a 42-year old graduate of a podunk little four-year state school that no one has heard of, with an unaccredited CS program. I can't comment on whether I'm like the typical Googler, because I'm not sure what that is. Aside from the well-publicized issues around gender and race, which exist across nearly all tech companies, it's a very diverse place (note that race and gender diversity are important, but they're far from the only forms of diversity). The "Stanford MSCS" is well-represented, of course, but I work with one engineer who has only an associate degree and another who got his GED at age 29 and never attended college at all.
He even gets away with a stupid-ass name like "Astro" where in the rest of the world a name like that will get you swirlies.
Very true. All sorts of quirkiness is accepted and even embraced at Google. That's one of the things I most enjoy about working here.