Former Google CIO Suggests 'Do Dumb Things' 202
itwbennett writes "Speaking at the CA Expo in Sydney, Australia, former Google CIO Douglas Merrill shared some management tips he learned during his tenure at the search giant. At the top of the list: 'Don't be afraid to do dumb things.' Merrill recalls that 'most of the early Google hardware was stolen from trash and as the stuff they stole broke all the time they built a reliable software system. Everyone knew we shouldn't build our own hardware as it was 'dumb', but everyone was wrong. Sometimes being dumb changes the game.' Another pearl of wisdom from Merrill: 'the more project management you do the less likely your project is to succeed.'"
Re:Project management (Score:2, Interesting)
I think most project managers are a waste as well. In a small company it is unneeded.
My job is a fucking endless nightmare because of people who think like you. :(
Still, in all fairness, I would (and do :/) take no project management at all over bad project management. Bad PM isn't just catastrophic, it's an extinction-level dinosaur-killing asteroid of fail.
A funny thing happened on the way to the IPO. (Score:2, Interesting)
From TFA:
"Don't be afraid to do dumb things. Larry and Sergey developed a search product called 'Backrub' - don't ask me how they got that - and shortly after that launched Google as part of the Stanford domain. Most of the early Google hardware was stolen from trash and as the stuff they stole broke all the time they built a reliable software system."
So this brings back one of my fondest IT memories. One week in the late 90s, I went down to the bay area for some very expensive naptime my employers referred to as "training." While I was down there I got to visit with a lot of old friends, including one brilliant network engineer who shall remain nameless. He took the lot of us on a tour of the colocation cages of his employer's datacenter, which featured a number of dotcom era luminaries. After oohing and aahing over the very shiny, very expensive servers of Angelfire, eBay, Lycos and others, we came to the end of a long hallway. To our right was a small cage with a single 19" rack in it. It was the ugliest rack you could hope to imagine. Naked motherboards were slotted in every inch, and a massive rat's nest of CAT-5 cables spilling out the front like it had puked up a lunch of yellow spaghetti. You could even see hard loose hard drives sitting on some of the motherboards, using swatches of gray foam as "mounting hardware." It was awesomely horrible. We had to know who was responsible for this monolith of kludge, and of course this was the moment he was waiting for.
"Oh. That's Google."
And with that our tour was over.