Yegge Writes About How Google Works
Google’s Steve Yegge wrote a lengthy critique on Agile development about a month ago. The piece is ostensibly about agile development, but it’s really more about how Google works and why it doesn’t need capital-A Agile methods.
My favorite bit: “developers can switch teams and/or projects any time they want, no questions asked; just say the word and the movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team.”
Sounds like fun. It’s not something every company can do, though, especially not well-established ones. The way I see it, this amazing degree of freedom stems from two particular luxuries.
Luxury #1: Incredibly deep pockets. When you’re flush with cash you can hire the best and brightest, and reward them heavily. Google is so rich that it can spend disproportionately on acquiring and retaining talented people, even when going head to head against its richest competitors. And its business model is so highly profitable — again, compared to competition — that it should be able to continue doing this indefinitely.
Luxury #2: Very few dependencies. Google delivers software straight to the web and millions of largely nameless customers, rather than into the hardware production pipelines of a handful of OEMs or the IT integration pipelines of a few thousand corporate clients. That’s why they can pick and choose what to build, and when to ship it, if ever. That’s why they can label products as “beta” in perpetuity if they wish to: their customers aren’t yet demanding any more than that. And that’s why Google developers can vote with their feet on which projects to work on: at the end of the day, there isn’t a customer on the phone line holding them accountable for a slip in the schedule of Project X.
Lucky ducks.
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me said,
November 7, 2006 @ 1:00 pm
When ever I run into companies that think they have “the secret” — attracting and retaining the best, motivating people, building a tight corporate culture, getting on every best employers list, benefiting from huge productivity and commitment — they are always *always* companies who have yet to go through a down cycle.
If you’re winning, and you’ve always been winning, everyone is a champion. Every tool to create intrinsic or extrinsic motivation is at your disposal — and you don’t even need them.
It’s easy, and it’s cocky, to think you have found the secret recipe when you haven’t tested that recipe through a few years of hardship.
Let’s see how Google does with this team switching when they’ve gone through their first retrenchment.
maddog said,
November 10, 2006 @ 10:34 am
While I agree that it is during times of hardship that people’s true loyalties are exposed, there is something to be said for having a culture that promotes retaining hires.
Let’s face it - the IT industry is rife with, for lack of a better term, mercenaries. Those who answer to the highest bidder. However, there also exist a few gems of companies where being part of a culture has value attached to it that outweighs the siren call of more money.
If the mindset of a company is to work hard and play just as hard, and has other perks that not only draws great employees but manages to retain them despite other, better-paying options, then I would argue that the company would continue to retain those employees even in times of strife.
So I put the cause-effect question out: If these companies are *always* the ones that have yet to go through a down cycle, why is this? Is it luck? I think not. Maybe “the secret” they have discovered is that they have managed to have a culture that manages to avoid the down turns, or at least promotes being able to work through them with the minimum of stress on the company and its employees.