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About Anne
Anne Truitt Zelenka is a web technologist turned high school math teacher. She is the author of Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working. She writes about family at The Everyday Cafe. Read more about Anne.
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links for 2006-10-07
This entry was written by Anne Z and posted on October 7, 2006 at 5:20 pm and filed under Delicious Links. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
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4 Comments
Have you read steve yegge’s agile comments yet? interesting stuffs. Disclamer: i work at the same place as him, although i decided to start before he wrote that.
Hey Ryan, I saw Steve’s article and there was so much I wanted to think about and comment on that I didn’t do anything with it yet. What did you think of it?
How is your new gig going anyway? I hope you are enjoying it.
Hey anne,
I _just_ started 1 week ago - so far, so great. Everything steve says is 100% true and there is no hyperbole in his actual words on working for Google. People sort of assume that everything he says is impossible and not true (especially the “leave mid project” bit. It is possible, but like all good things, you have to consider your working relationships carefully - so it’s not like people have a free card to just jump around and not finish things).
As for Agile - if it is an amazing methology it shouldn’t require really smart and highly dedicated people to implement it succesfully. That’s the point of a methology - you abdicate the necessity of having uber-smart people on the team. I did scrum at my last place, and it really doesn’t improve productivity or much at all. It does give you more insight to why you aren’t getting work done, but it doesn’t magically solve issues of say, morale and boredom.
However, Google’s way does address morale and boredom. The basic theory is this: “you’ll work hard and be effective on a project that you are passionate about.” One way to do this is to have cool projects. Another way is to let smart engineers make boring projects cool. Usually in most ‘business 1.0′ places you can’t make boring projects (implement business feature X) interesting - management just gets mad at you for implementing a flexible business rule engine.
Anyways, I’ll try to skype myself sometime. This place is shaping up to be uber-cool.
Ryan, that does sound uber-cool. I don’t doubt that Google runs like that, but I think it has at least as much to do with the piles of cash they have sitting around as that it’s actually an effective way to run things. Could be wrong… just my gut instinct from here. Maybe I’m just envious.
Yes, I am envious! It sounds energizing and exciting.
Right–Agile should allow you to make good software without brilliant geniuses working for you. I wonder how much it’s a myth though that the brilliant geniuses are better than the above average, but hard working engineer. I know all the background, the top programmers are 10X, 100X more productive. In a real working environment, being able to write good code is only a part of being effective and productive.
Well, as I said when I linked to Steve’s post… I need to reread it and think about it some more. I have some doubts, but it’s inspiring too.
I’m really glad you’re enjoying it. Congratulations on the great career move.