Google's Idea of Productivity Is a Bad Fit For Many Other Workplaces 167
New submitter rjupstate writes "Google places a lot of value on the spontaneous creativity that can occur when two employees from completely different parts of the company meet. It's an ideal that Google has perfected over the years, but it's not something that will work for most other organizations. Executives trying to replicate Google's approach could even create major problems among their workforces."
Google, eh? (Score:5, Interesting)
While google do this and I'm sure are very good at it, it's not Google's invention and it's certainly not new.
This is/was one of the major roles that the US National Labs play. Compared to univesities there is a lot more mixing between divisions and as a result a lot of very interesting science gets done because new and unexpected things pop up.
Of course now that they're run by nice efficient profit making private companies rather than hippie commie inefficient public universities, that's pretty much been killed and all semblance of productivity has gone. But that's a rant for another day.
If companies think that this kind of innication nd productivity is a bad fit then it's because they're assuming implicitly that they won't be around for more than a year. If they're going to be around you need to develop new products and also develop better ways of creating/designing/building those products. If you're not doing that, then you risk losing out to someone who does.
Islandism (Score:1, Interesting)
The reverse, however, does not work either (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Examples? (Score:5, Interesting)
Google wave was certainly innovative, mostly because it so effectively made even young users feel old.
"This seems cool, but I'm not really sure what use it is or even how to use it. I'll just go back to email, then."
As for innovative stuff which makes no money: most of it never will, that's life. Look at university research. Most will never see the light out of some small academic circle. But every so often it comes out with massive world changing things. The thing is, it is impossible to predice in advance what will be interesting and what will be useful.
Though search aside, I'm having trouble of thinking of things from google with a really big impact.
Android was purchased from outside. Chrome has made a big impact, but it (a) uses the webkit engine which isn't google, (b) is heavily advertisied on the worlds biggest advertiser and (c) is solid, but not especially innovative. Google groups came from deja-news years back, worked great until they removed threading, then sucked.
Google maps was really pretty cool. Though I remember seeing a java applet one a few years prior which was considerably smoother. Google maps is the first cool and not needing a plugin one that I remember seeing.
Google earth---they just bought some GIS company and released for free what GIS people were used to paying $-nan for. Cool, but not new.
Drive---meh.
Docs, kinda alright but I work with sharp people and LaTeX + git has served me very well so far.
Go seems OK as a better alternative to scripting languages, but the go authors seem to have (a) hilariously misunderstood C++ and (b) be baffled as to why it's not got much traction in the C++ community. This is particularly surprising given the names involved. Nevertheless it seems a decent enough language.
But one does hear of interesting and useful internal projects, like a C++ refactoring tool based on the LLVM parser that allows things like automated API changes to huge codebases, except that these things have a habit of never appearing outside. Maybe it makes them more competitive or maybe it's just smoke. Hard to tell.
60s era thinking (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work at General Atomics's original campus in La Jolla, which was created in the 60s.
The campus was mainly a series of concentric circles. The main circular building had a curvature which was "calculated" to maximize random interactions with scientists and engineers outside your normal working group while also giving an illusion of working in a small group. There were pools, gyms, baseball fields and support buildings around the outside and along the radial lines. The center of the circle was a large cafeteria.
This was all great as long as nuclear power was going to save the world and money was rolling in. When the company hit hard times the ball fields were turned into office rentals and many non essential services were stopped.
When the company once again was making money with military hardware, the new buildings were simpler and located in a less expensive area of San Diego.
Re:Google, eh? (Score:2, Interesting)
"Google understands - creative people dislike being told what to do, but more importantly LOATHE being told how to do it."
going one direction with that:
true, but they enjoy being show interesting problems and appreciate being shown tricks that help when they get stuck
Maybe managing interesting folks who can create neat new stuff is an art in itself.
going another direction:
Is Steve Jobs a counter example. He did what should run off the good folks, but got pretty good stuff out.
Re:Google, eh? (Score:4, Interesting)
It helps to think of a capitalistic economy on a macro level as a series of bubbles percolating to the surface. Heat (productivity) is added to a jumble of H2O. For every bubble that pops (Microsoft, later google) there will be another bubble forming down below amongst the 'losers', 'newbs'. Large companies that fail to innovate are just part of the landscape; They are bubbles that have formed and released the sum of their heat productivity- Their remaining productivity now free to drip through the consciousness of the consumer (delivery), slowly until it is gone and all new productivity is lost (steam). It makes it easier for new bubbles to form, rise and eventually pop themselves. It also helps to imagine at the end you get nice warm tasty cup of joe (culture), to contemplate the endless business cycle.
Capitalism = Coffee.
I don't work for Google... (Score:4, Interesting)
...but I've followed them closely.
A long time ago I noted that the biggest challenge of the Internet was going to be finding things. As an undergrad I earned a bit of extra money working in the university library, and was told, on my very first day, that if you don't put something in the right place you might as well throw it away, because it's unlikely anybody will be able to find it otherwise. Now we have Google. Dave Cheriton was one of my undergrad profs, BTW, a 2nd year course in data structures that used Pascal.
Another lesson from my undergrad days is that the structure of a product is isomorphic to the structure of the group that created it. I currently support legacy software that was created by people who never talked to each other, who never even sat down for a chat over lunch. It shows. The interface specs read like legal contracts. The product line worked for a while, but is now unmaintainable, unsupportable, well in to its end of life bug explosion, and we are actively developing replacements.
The company imploded in 2001. What was left tried a looser development process. It sort of worked, but eventually failed. The biggest issue was a couple of extremely forceful people who steamrollered their own pet ideas and who refused to listen to others. The bosses needed to rein them in, and didn't. It cost us the company.
Our current development model is basically a surgical team in a skunkworks sort of environment. Head office is in Dallas. I'm in Vancouver. The physical separation is helpful. There aren't enough of us in the company to do much else. It works. We're doing good work. The company is making money. The bosses are happy. We're happy.
I like a lot of what Google is doing. I like the encouragement to be creative. Good people are creative, and if they're going to be creative, you might as well get them to be creative for you. And you have to take some risks. Not all decisions are right. Not all products are winners. But if you don't risk failure, you don't risk success either.
I have issues with the work/life balance implicit in the Googleplex work environment. Maybe I'm too old or something (I'm 51), but I expect to have a life apart from my work.
...laura