[HN Gopher] Chrome was delivered without any sprints at all (2021)
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Chrome was delivered without any sprints at all (2021)
Author : luu
Score : 162 points
Date : 2022-08-14 20:38 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Sprints are only really necessary when there's a deadline to hit.
|
| For the longest time, one of the advantages Google has had as a
| software house is that when you're an industry leader, deadlines
| are soft because all you're worried about is somebody playing
| catch up, not your need to catch up to somebody else. As the
| company has grown in size and scale, calcified a bit, and
| branched out into spaces where they aren't the leader, the
| culture around this sort of thing has changed. They are not, for
| example, the leader in Cloud, and the life of a Cloud SWE is
| markedly different than the life of an ads or artificial
| intelligence research SWE.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Sprints are just a formal way for management to check in that
| the team isn't down a weird rabbit hole / getting them to do
| regular check ins with the team for visibility.
|
| It's independent of deadlines.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Even since "Agile" starting taking off ~2010, it has made be very
| sad that many junior engineers today genuinely believe that
| somehow no software was ever written correctly without it. They
| were taught in school that there exists this bogeyman software
| development methodology called "WATERFALL" where pencil-pushers
| in a windowless office write requirements which they hand off in
| a printed binder to the team of engineers in the basement, who is
| not allowed to ever talk to the user.
|
| The Agile consultants somehow convinced a large segment of the
| industry that they discovered and/or invented the notion of
| working with users, of gathering feedback from them, of checking
| in with your teammates, etc. And they completely disregard the
| possibility that maybe --just maybe-- there are some developers
| who can get a metric shit-ton of work done without someone poking
| them repeatedly for status.
|
| And they popularized the term "Cowboy Coder" as a reckless
| developer who does whatever the hell he wants and dares you to
| mess with him. When in fact, their so-called "cowboys" are simply
| the best developers in the team, who write great code and don't
| need a scrum-master to help them plan it. But the Agile
| methodology resists the notion of some developers simply being
| awesome at their job -- in Agile, you are good at your job by
| meeting your "points" for every sprint.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > They were taught in school that there exists this bogeyman
| software development methodology called "WATERFALL" where
| pencil-pushers in a windowless office write requirements which
| they hand off in a printed binder to the team of engineers in
| the basement, who is not allowed to ever talk to the user.
|
| Having worked in government and big-co companies before: sadly,
| this is not a bogeyman trope, but reality. Including the
| printed binder, although it's called "spec sheet" or "tender
| document" (or whatever the correct english words for
| "Ausschreibungsunterlagen" and "Lastenheft" are).
|
| The amount of "silos" and "leadership" involving themselves in
| petty fiefdom fights is _astonishing_ - that is partially a
| reason why small startups are so much more efficient, they
| haven 't had the time to develop layers and layers of middle
| management wanting to justify their existence, protecting
| budgets or establishing their authority. Government projects
| tend to be the worst target for such micromanager wannabe-king
| types, given that they can rarely be fired from their jobs for
| incompetence.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| I had this problem too. My younger developers pushed really
| hard to bring Agile in. One of the supposed benefits was that
| all developers were treated equally (today we might say they
| were fungible)
|
| We have it a really good shot; we even hired a Certified Scrum
| Master. But after a while it seemed to me that we were just
| doing lots of tiny waterfalls. It was nothing for a developer
| to spend a whole sprint spinning their wheels and not making
| progress.
|
| Long story short, 2 years later I took over the team, threw it
| all out, and set up a system based around Kanban and hands-on
| management. And suddenly we became productive again.
|
| (Not saying Kanban is a solution, just that Agile is not)
| detaro wrote:
| People really use weird labels nowadays. Kanban is agile!
| bitwize wrote:
| "Agile" in job reqs usually means "we do Scrum with Jira,
| you'd better be able to align with the Scrum process".
| rr808 wrote:
| Before Scrum we had 3x 1-hour team meetings a week to talk about
| what we're on and what we might need help with. After we went
| "agile" we moved to having 3x 1-hour team meetings a week with
| the same. Power to the developers. :)
| khazhoux wrote:
| Ha, I remember the first project I encountered that "went
| Agile." The weekly team meeting (which everyone complained
| about) was replace with daily standups (30 minutes), a two-hour
| retrospective (useless) every 2 weeks, and a 2-hour sprint
| planning every 2 weeks. Power to the developers indeed.
| IMTDb wrote:
| So basically, you are able to find the time to criticise your
| team process in a completely unrelated HN post. But when
| there is dedicated time for that - in the process itself -
| you call it "useless" ? ;-)
| dijonman2 wrote:
| Sprints are to knock down the high achievers and provide an
| opportunity for substandard developers to all appear as if there
| is progress. A place to hide, if you will.
|
| All of the high functioning teams I've worked on didn't have any
| kind of agile structure.
|
| Agile can be done well, but more often than not it isn't.
| oars wrote:
| I wonder how UNIX would look if it had been delivered with Agile.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| But what about the ceremonies?!?!
| jimjimjim wrote:
| everybody solemnly chants the holy words "you're on mute"
| sktrdie wrote:
| He said there were no divorces! /s
| koala_man wrote:
| Sprint here refers to crunch time, and not agile development.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Probably also was done without agile, I didn't really see
| anyone doing "agile" in my time at google.
| koala_man wrote:
| "Agile" means different things to different people.
|
| I would argue it's agile if you release early&often to
| continuously incorporate feedback, even if you don't play
| Planning Poker in Scrum Sprint Planning every two weeks.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > Planning Poker in Scrum Sprint Planning every two weeks
|
| I would argue that isn't agile at all.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I did. Or rather, I saw teams that thought they were dong it,
| because they used pivotal-type tracking tools and stories.
| But it always degraded into broken-down-waterfall.
| cornel_io wrote:
| nine_zeros wrote:
| But but, how else would I introduce more bureaucracy for
| engineers?
| surfpel wrote:
| I'm not familiar with the twitter UI, does this put things in the
| correct order?
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1427137725119959046.html
|
| In response to this thread:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1426587396343099397.html
| pessimizer wrote:
| It was a product that no one had asked for and no one was waiting
| for, and wasn't intended to make a dime.
| taf2 wrote:
| I disagree, many of us wanted this but none of us had the money
| to fund it... Google has a special kind of magic for the
| time... IBM would fund some developers to work on Mozilla...
| Mozilla had some money to fund development on Mozilla... Apple
| had a few funds for developers to maintain a browser for
| Apple... Microsoft was happy to maintain IE... Google was
| different it was a place for innovation. It disrupted search,
| email (gmail) and mapping (google maps)... now to support those
| 3 products it made sense to fund a better browser... then with
| the purchase of YouTube... 4 disruptive web based platforms it
| made even more sense to fund a browser. I hear chrome team
| saved youtube billions in network costs (per year) just by
| ensuring more adoption of vp8/9... Today we tend to focus more
| on the ad business Google purchased doubleclick and the evils
| of it's tracking... but think back to this Google had at least
| 5 major disruptive technologies... search, email, mapping,
| video consumption, and the 5th IMO... enabling countless
| businesses to build successful web applications because of the
| development of a "good" browser.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| You're not getting the point.
|
| Chrome never needed to slay itself, because there was no
| customer expecting delivery. It literally couldn't be late
| because there was no set schedule. It was done when the
| engineers finished it.
|
| Like many projects at Google. My experience in general is
| they don't do schedule-discipline well at all. And management
| there seems to think throwing ever more headcount at things
| will make them ship faster (it rarely does).
|
| And there's very little accounting when promised dates are
| missed. Even by years. I worked on the software for Home Hub,
| and everything was supposed to get rewritten in Fuchsia, and
| they promised to be ready in like two quarters, almost
| immediately after we shipped it. They had unlimited headcount
| and the blessing of upper management, but failed schedule
| after schedule with no consequence. It took them another two
| and a half years.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Wanted or not, nobody (or at least not many people) asked for
| google to make a browser, and nobody waited for it, which was
| what the parent comment said.
|
| Also I had a really hard time reading your comment with all
| the ellipses making it seem like it was just a huge sentence,
| that might just be me though.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| jahnu wrote:
| And yet this succeeds very rarely
| blondin wrote:
| funny you say that, since we are talking about Google here,
| because Gmail has a similar story.
| pessimizer wrote:
| People are actually very good at producing products that make
| no money that no one is asking for.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| It was also based on existing open source. None of this is to
| say that Chrome wasn't an amazing accomplishment. I do wonder
| how much crunch time the Chrome teams face now that Chrome has
| customers?
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Which almost proves the point.
|
| I've never seen anything good from intense pressure from above
| --it barely even changes the timeline. You take the pressure
| away and you can still solid work in an orderly fashion.
| [deleted]
| 3a2d29 wrote:
| This is an underrated point
| senttoschool wrote:
| And the company's fortunes did not rest on the product being
| successful.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Seeing as it's money-losing (like virtually all of non-ad
| google), it wouldn't have helped anyway. The only value to
| Chrome for Google is the monopolistic market-distortion
| through vertical integration.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| thrwy_918 wrote:
| The author is using the word a bit differently, but the fact that
| "sprint" has been normalized as a unit of work for software
| development, and developers are expected to be in a "sprint" more
| or less at all times, has always been a source of the deepest
| absurdity to me.
|
| A "sprint" is, almost by definition, a pace that's sustainable
| only for short periods. The fact that developers are expected to
| perform sprint after sprint endlessly, to view "sprint" as the
| default baseline pace, seems a ludicrous abuse of language.
| butlerm wrote:
| It certainly implies developers recovering for several days
| between sprints.
| nsgi wrote:
| Obviously very good that Chrome was delivered without people
| doing lots of overtime. However, a lot of his argument seems to
| be about the age of the management, and surely ageism is illegal
| and it should be about the person's skills rather than being old
| enough to have school-aged kids or even how many decades of
| experience they have
|
| Edit: Okay, I guess the kind of ageism he is suggesting isn't
| illegal in the US, but it is in the UK and is still generally
| considered unethical
| kelnos wrote:
| He frames it in a way that kinda sounds age-ist-y, but I think
| it's less about age and more about experience (he was using age
| as a proxy for experience, which isn't always true, but is
| close enough, often enough).
|
| I had my first "senior software engineer" title when I was 28,
| and that was after I'd only been writing code professionally
| for a few years (in my early 20s I had a campus coding job at
| my university, and then I was doing a lot of open source work
| through my mid 20s, but not sure I'd call any of that
| "professional"). At my most recent job, I saw most developers
| making it to the senior in their late 20s, and many even making
| it to "staff" (one level above senior at our shop) by 30, or
| soon after. That's ridiculous. In my mind, most people should
| be hard pressed to develop the experience to really be "senior"
| in something before they're in their mid to late 30s.
|
| Now, I certainly don't mind (from the standpoint of prestige
| and salary) that I somehow ended up with the title of
| "principal software engineer" (one level above "staff") when I
| was 33, but... c'mon. When you've nearly tapped out your career
| ladder by the time you're 35 (unless you move to management),
| it feels like there's something not right there.
| jsty wrote:
| I won't try and read into whether or not there's ageism
| anywhere in the tweet stream, but certainly when talking about
| hiring the magic words are "find experienced engineers to run
| it". This is very much legal and ethical in the UK - we're not
| precluded from setting an experience-based hiring bar. I'm sure
| if a 25 year old had come along with two browsers under their
| belt they'd gladly have been hired into a leadership role too.
| olliej wrote:
| Seniority doesn't mean "senior", it's a product of expertise.
| Obviously there is a strong age correlation because generally
| going up seniority ladder is going to correlate with time at
| company, and domain knowledge/expertise is going to be
| correlated with time spent work in that field.
|
| But I know plenty of people my age (my vintage? :D) with higher
| and lower seniority, similarly I know people older, and people
| with more time at the company in the industry with
| substantially lower seniority, and vice versa.
|
| But also the companies I've worked at (FAANGs, so obviously
| large) don't treat "seniority" at the IC level as giving some
| kind of priority over lower seniority ICs. Obviously seniority
| factors into "how reasonable/accurate is their opinion" but
| that has never, in my experience, been a blanket override of
| lower "seniority".
|
| The primary real difference is compensation, which is why
| companies like to get rid of senior engineers. I assume for a
| competent company they're doing a trade off "how much do they
| cost vs. how much value do they add", but obviously where we
| see this is always poorly managed "get rid of all the expensive
| people, WCGW" policies.
| rvnx wrote:
| Maybe the secret is not really about the age or management
| skills, but rather that Chrome is an insanely profitable
| product (+ in a monopoly) so the pressure is rather low
| compared to a startup. Additionally whether a specific feature
| is ready or not for a specific cycle is not that important
| considering that there are releases every 6 weeks and even
| before for metrics gathering activities.
| gridspy wrote:
| There is currently ageism within the software industry (esp.
| startups). Older people (apparently) find it hard to get jobs.
| Part of the justification for that refusal is that young people
| will allow death-marches.
|
| His argument assumes you are aware of the youth bias, and is
| gently pushing against the ageism by pointing out that senior
| software engineers have a LOT of useful knowledge.
| kube-system wrote:
| I know that this is a real problem, but I also wonder if this
| perception is also perpetuated by selection bias.
|
| People with established careers in tech often change job
| through their established networks, and especially when they
| are highly sought after.
|
| So it may very well be that the strongest senior candidates'
| resumes never reach your inbox, while it's more likely that
| strong junior candidates have no other option.
| eterevsky wrote:
| What he writes about is seniority, not ageism. It's about
| whether to incentivize career paths in which senior engineers
| keep doing technical work.
| majormajor wrote:
| This thread really seems to be burying the lede which isn't just
| "we didn't have crunch" but the more specific claim that _it was
| engineers with at least a decade of experience having deep
| technical involvement that made the difference._
| wolfgang42 wrote:
| Worth noting, from the linked thread:
|
| > In light of all the responses, I really regret posting this
| tweet that mischaracterized reality:
|
| > In fact: The IE3 team did not have an unusual rate of divorce.I
| know of no broken families and only one divorce during the IE3
| project.
|
| > Here's my statement reflecting on this in greater depth:
| https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-recent-twitter-blow-up-had...
| [deleted]
| olliej wrote:
| I really don't understand the "sprints" approach to development -
| I've never worked on any project where it makes sense, either the
| things I've been working on take less time than a "sprint" or
| they take longer, and that's for any sprint length you can
| produce.
|
| Real software requires some degree of planning, and sprints seem
| to be more an attempt to avoid that planning. I don't mean to the
| level of gantt chart hell (I've experienced that as well).
|
| Sprints, at least as they actually occur in the real world, seem
| to actively harm any large scale projects, and increase the
| overhead for long term projects if you can get them to fit.
| zerr wrote:
| Off-topic: does 9-to-5 mean that 1-hour lunch break is considered
| as working time? How common is that?
| khazhoux wrote:
| 9-to-5 here is figurative. No one is tracking hours for
| software engineers at most companies. It just means: you start
| working in the morning, and you stop working in the evening. As
| opposed to working until late at night and/or weekends.
| zerr wrote:
| I understand that. 9-to-5 is a common term, but I wonder why
| - many mention clocking out at 5, does that mean they arrive
| at 8 in the morning? Or maybe some have lunch on the keyboard
| while continue working.
| koala_man wrote:
| It refers to "being at work", not "actively heads-down
| working on something".
|
| If you come in at 9am, do work, have lunch, make coffee,
| work more, suffer meetings, work, chat at the water cooler,
| work again, and leave at 5pm, you're working 9-5.
| khazhoux wrote:
| The most common (by far) schedule I've seen across every
| software company is: arrive at 9, ~45-minutes lunch, leave
| at 6.
|
| Lots of people arrive before 8 but it's not the norm. 8am
| meetings --before COVID-- were always generally frowned
| upon.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Many places give you that hour. 35 hours weekly.
| nicoburns wrote:
| In Europe a 7.5hr day is standard, so 9-to-5 can be
| literally 9am until 5pm, with a 30 minute lunch break.
| pmontra wrote:
| I live in a Southern European country where the standard
| for office work is 9-18 with a one hour break starting
| between 12:30 and 13:30. On my last job as employee we
| were more flexible. I was starting at 10 maybe with even
| a 90 minutes break but I was usually in office until 19
| or 20, which was OK because traffic was insane before
| then.
| morvita wrote:
| In my last two jobs, one in the Bay Area and one in
| Vancouver, my usual schedule has been arrive at 9, take a
| 45-60min lunch, leave at 5 and I've never had anyone tell
| me I'm not working enough or producing enough output.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| In the Bay Area I've always rolled in around 11 and left
| around 5. Maybe 6 if I really need to get something done.
| When I worked for a remote company I did maybe 20-25
| hours most weeks. Everyone's always been very happy with
| my work. I've gotten offers for seed funding from
| founders in exit interviews. Penny pinching your hours is
| a cargo cult.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| Software engineers are usually not tracked hourly. There
| are common exceptions such work done for government
| programs, or contracting. Even in these scenarios, hours
| are not usually tracked by any authoritative system. In the
| end, the only feedback you get is based on softer metrics
| like availability during business hours, or on time
| completion of work.
|
| In my experience, lots of engineers will show up far after
| 9 AM and leave well before they have reached a full day of
| work. Its a very privileged system that exists because it
| is so hard to hire engineers. At least for now.
| United857 wrote:
| Unlike IE, Chrome initially built off WebKit, so a lot of the
| work in writing a renderer was already done. Obviously a lot of
| work with V8, multiprocess IPC, etc. still went into the effort
| but still easier than starting from scratch like what IE did.
| ubercore wrote:
| IE started with Mosaic, no?
| kryptiskt wrote:
| It started with Spyglass, who were Mosaic licensees, but
| apparently wrote their own code. The story of Spyglass is
| told here https://ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html
|
| "Management made the decision to transition our business
| completely and pursue the market for web browsers. Tim
| Krauskopf, the founder and head of development, asked me to
| write a web browser. I started work on Spyglass Mosaic on
| April 5th, 1994. The demo for our first prospective customer
| was already on the calendar in May.
|
| I ended up as the Project Lead for the browser team. Yes, we
| licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA (at the
| University of Illinois), but we never used any of the code.
| We wrote our browser implementations completely from scratch,
| on Windows, MacOS, and Unix.
|
| We were not the first Mosaic licensee, but we were the last.
| Prior to us, a company called Spry took the Mosaic code and
| tried to sell "Internet in a Box". People still seem to get
| Spry and Spyglass confused because of the similar names."
|
| "Internet Explorer 2.0 was basically Spyglass Mosaic with not
| too many changes. IE 3.0 was a major upgrade, but still
| largely based on our code. IE 4.0 was closer to a rewrite,
| but our code was still lingering around -- we could tell by
| the presence of certain esoteric bugs that were specific to
| our layout engine.
|
| Licensing our browser was a huge win for Spyglass. And it was
| a huge loss. We got a loud wake-up call when we tried to
| schedule our second conference for our OEM browser customers.
| Our customers told us they weren't coming because Microsoft
| was beating them up. The message became clear: We sold our
| browser technology to 120 companies, but one of them
| slaughtered the other 119."
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| a lot of work with great UX as well
| ryandrake wrote:
| If there's one much-believed software industry trope I wish would
| die, it's this idea that building great software requires
| constant heroics, crazy hours, mandatory crunch time, living at
| the office, and sacrificing your personal life and loved ones.
| That's how undisciplined and/or disorganized clowns do it, not
| professional software teams.
|
| When someone says, "Wow, we worked nights and weekends, guzzled
| Mountain Dew, pulled 48 hour coding shifts, drained our mental
| health, and half of us got divorced, but the result was this
| kickass video game!!" it's not admirable--it's sad. That's just
| not how it's supposed to be done, people!
| shadowgovt wrote:
| If anything, that kind of behavior should give the outside
| world pause and raise questions about the sustainability of any
| product output.
|
| That mattered less in the days of one artifact software
| development (and still matters less in areas like video games
| where that is the case), but software development these days is
| a process and many projects are far more marathon than sprint.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > If anything, that kind of behavior should give the outside
| world pause and raise questions about the sustainability of
| any product output.
|
| It should give everybody pause, including software
| practitioners. A separate, but related pet-peeve is how these
| unsustainable heroics are often _rewarded_ at work!! Boss:
| "Look at Chris over there--he stayed up until 4:30AM and
| fixed that ship-blocking bug. What a champ!" Chris gets a
| $1,000 spot bonus and now the rest of the team looks up to
| him as an example of good software development. Incredible
| but it happens almost everywhere!
| khazhoux wrote:
| > it's not admirable--it's sad
|
| It's not just sad. It's often bullshit.
|
| I don't believe for one second when people say "I worked
| 120-hour weeks for 6 months!" Simple math tells you this is a
| farce. Even 100-hour weeks is not sustainable, unless people
| want to claim they literally did nothing but wake-commute-work-
| lunch-work-commute-dinner-sleep for weeks on end. Not buying
| it.
| TillE wrote:
| Oh yeah this is absolutely true. I've voluntarily done
| ~100-hour weeks, and even in my 20s it destroyed me, I needed
| multiple weeks to recover from even short periods of intense
| "crunch".
|
| The idea that you're living at the office and actually being
| productive is just laughable. It is absolutely not helpful
| except in brief emergency situations.
| blagie wrote:
| I've done 80-hour work weeks in blocks ranging from 6 weeks
| to 6 months. I did literally nothing but wake-work-sleep-
| wake-work-sleep, with time for food and similar necessities.
|
| I didn't have many blocks like that, but those were some of
| the most productive (and personally fulfilling) times of my
| life. They made my career. Those allowed me to level up each
| time in a very significant way.
|
| I also had long breaks after each of those -- they set me up
| to cruise for a while.
|
| I did that before kids. I couldn't do that after kids. After
| kids, though, I have a depth of knowledge that makes me
| applicable for other types of productivity and work.
| testing7787 wrote:
| it depends on the video game. people have been playing diablo 2
| for 20 years
| epolanski wrote:
| No it does not depend, even if it was released few months
| later it would've made no difference.
| EFreethought wrote:
| I have mostly worked at large companies, and in my experience
| this is due to the "business" people picking a deadline with no
| input from the people who actually have to make it happen.
| ttyyzz wrote:
| The quality of my code drops considerably if I don't take
| breaks or do something else for a couple of hours once in a
| while. Making up for it by coding even more sounds like a
| terrible idea.
| zbird wrote:
| For game developers/designers/artists, this does appear to be
| the case from what I can tell, but only because they are
| ruthlessly exploited. Otherwise it is indeed a ridiculous and
| pseudo-macho attitude that impresses nobody.
| [deleted]
| 88913527 wrote:
| If the business doesn't give you the resources and you take
| responsibility, it can seem as if there is no choice but to
| work long days. It isn't how it supposed to be done but I would
| clearly fail otherwise, as I sit here coding on a Sunday
| afternoon. These problems are often bigger than us and systemic
| to the organization.
| babyshake wrote:
| A sprint means to go as fast as you possibly can, and is
| associated with exertion to the point of exhaustion. There's a
| reason managers love the word sprint.
| twsted wrote:
| Understand all and Aaron, at the question:
|
| "You guys forked webkit which forked khtml, so you all had a nice
| leg up no?"
|
| says:
|
| "Yes. Just like IE started from Mosaic Spyglass. But a rendering
| engine (like WebKit/Spyglass) is not a browser. Certainly not a
| multi process, sandboxed browser. Chrome v1 was a 200 person year
| effort."
|
| but, come on, much work was already done and they seem not to
| remember this.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Also, Chrome was using WebKit long before they forked it. IIRC,
| for several years they used the exact same engine used by
| Safari, and both Apple and Google were contributing to it.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > _" I mean even at Google (on a different team) I was a
| "technical lead" in my 20s, and let me tell you, I had noooo
| business leading anything technical of any importance. But this
| is very common! We would never accept this in other fields. Would
| you live in a house built entirely by junior carpenters in their
| late 20s who built one or two houses that barely stood up? Would
| you drive cars designed and built by junior engineers?"_
|
| one of the strangest and most baffling things about the entire
| industry tbh. Like, would you ever expect a 25 year old guy to
| command a spaceship? Yet in software you have these weekly "I'm
| 40, is my life over" posts. In most disciplines people correctly
| acknowledge that there's a sweet spot of skill and experience
| that overlaps somewhere in your late 30s, 40s or even 50s, yet in
| software very often we recreate Lord of the Flies, leading to
| chaotic project management.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| There are 20 year olds who demonstrate fine leadership skills
| and maturity. There are plenty of 40 year olds who do not. Find
| the best people you can regardless of age.
|
| Also, often times the only way to get that experience in the
| first place is to be put into the positions of leadership to
| develop your skills.
| is_true wrote:
| You can get experience without being in charge of something
| mcculley wrote:
| There are exceptionally talented 20 year olds. There are none
| with significant leadership experience.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| The percentage goes up only marginally with age/experience,
| and that still doesn't keep cultures from hiring older
| people with zero experience into leadership roles. The
| culture specifically opts to select older individuals
| despite there being enough young people with natural
| leadership skills in contexts where both populations have
| no experience.
|
| Appeal to age runs deep in our species.
| znpy wrote:
| Uhm... I've seen the problems with people climbing the
| corporate ladder too fast.
|
| I used to work with this person in his early 30ies and they
| were in charge of the infrastructure. This person started as
| a developer and then was tasked with managing infrastructure,
| while not having never actually worked as a sysadmin and/or
| having done operations work.
|
| Well... after a while it became clear that the limitations of
| the infrastructure were a reflection of the limitations of
| this person's knowledge and understanding of infrastructure.
|
| Experience does matter.
| hobobaggins wrote:
| "The rise and fall of Ryan Howard" (The Office)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc35afiM2f4
| pvorb wrote:
| This is a nice example of the Peter Principle. This person
| climbed the career ladder until they were no longer good at
| what they were doing.
| saurik wrote:
| Ok, but what is the histogram on that? The point wasn't
| "someone young can't possibly do X" but a combination of "it
| seems strange that we have an industry built almost entirely
| of young people" and "somehow this industry believes old
| people can't do things". Maybe there is a good reason for
| this, but it is certainly strange: it is like we actively
| don't want experience that I would have thought should count
| for a lot (in architecture and planning) while demanding
| sometimes impossible amounts of experience in things that I'd
| think wouldn't matter at all (using the new, shiny framework
| or programming language that those truly experienced people
| are probably avoiding anyway unless it really really offered
| something they hadn't seen in their decades of development).
| bombcar wrote:
| Part of it was the speed of advancement of tech - at the
| beginning there wasn't anyone available _but the kids_ and
| by the time those kids were old enough to get into
| management /positions of leadership, they were graybeards
| and some new tech was the important thing and the only
| people using that were the kids.
|
| We're finally getting to the point where there's not much
| "new" each year or decade, so it's starting to slow down
| again.
| IshKebab wrote:
| 99% of software cannot collapse and kill you if it is built
| incorrectly.
|
| In fact, this idea that incompetent people have never built
| buildings before is just wrong. There are plenty of examples
| from history of unqualified people somehow being given the job
| of constructing something that then collapses killing dozens of
| people.
|
| There is _some_ safety critical software and I hope that that
| is written by experienced people. But basically all buildings
| are safety critical.
| bitwize wrote:
| Google "tofu dreg construction" to see just how bad modern
| construction can get.
| primer42 wrote:
| Humans have been on the earth for 300 millennia.
|
| If we're being VERY generous, we've consistently lived past 40
| for the last 2,000 years.
|
| So for 99.33% of human history the ONLY leaders we had were
| under 30.
| Kamq wrote:
| > If we're being VERY generous, we've consistently lived past
| 40 for the last 2,000 years.
|
| That's not... that's not how statistics work work at all.
|
| Life expectancy was 30 because half of all babies died, and
| on top of that childhood diseases took out a bunch more.
| Eliminating this has been the vast majority of life
| expectancy increase.
|
| If you made it to puberty in antiquity, you were pretty
| likely to make it to 60 or so. Y'know... assuming you didn't
| live in an area the Romans or Mongols wanted.
| drekipus wrote:
| Do you have any sources on that? It l that's an interesting
| way to look at it. I would have expected life expectancy to
| be way lower than you suggest by your calculations. (IE:
| 9/13 babies died*, with 60 as full life, meaning 18 yrs
| expectancy).
|
| * All I know is that humans used to produce a lot of babies
| because a lot of them would die, but my googling sucks
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Like, would you ever expect a 25 year old guy to command a
| spaceship?
|
| Genghis Khan was 20 when he started assembling his army. You
| can have leadership at any age. Some organisations such as the
| military bring in young people to directly be leaders. You need
| to look at people's ability, not their age.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| Temujin was a nothingburger of a warlord until he was nearly
| 40.
|
| What did he learn in those 20 years that made him Genghis
| Khan?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| apparently according to Google most Mongol leaders died in
| their 30s, the demographics in the Golden Horde were somewhat
| different than today. The guy who leads the Taliban in his
| 20s isn't exactly the Mozart of terrorism, it's just a
| dangerous job. More importantly comparing world historical
| figures to your average modern day senior project manager is
| kind of wild. Everyone in the software industry may think
| they're Alexander the Great, but they're likely not. Most
| senior military staff is also old.
|
| What I'm saying is obviously that _if you looked at merit_ ,
| on average, software teams should be older than they are, not
| that it's physically impossible to have a good leader who is
| young.
| endtime wrote:
| Being a "tech lead" at Google is nothing like commanding a
| spaceship. It's more like being partially responsible for a
| team of 3-5 mid-20s engineers building the dashboard and
| reporting for space shuttle wind tunnel test results (or
| whatever they do with space shuttles).
|
| Personally, I was a tech lead at Google pretty consistently
| from the ages of 26-35. I got better at it, and responsible for
| more, over time. It was a good learning experience for me and
| even when I was inexperienced at it, I was saving someone else
| some time.
| andreilys wrote:
| The constitution was signed by 20-somethings
|
| e.g. James Monroe (18), John Marshall (20), Aaron Burr (20),
| Alexander Hamilton (21), and James Madison (25)
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| First, those are the ages of those men at the signing of the
| Declaration of Independence.
|
| The Constitution was not ratified until nearly 15 years
| later.
|
| Second, none of the people you listed signed the Declaration.
|
| The average age of the Declaration signers was 41; only 3
| were younger than 30.
| butlerm wrote:
| I am afraid you have an unreliable source. The Constitution
| was ratified by the states, not signed by delegates. At the
| time of ratification, the average age of the delegates was
| 42. James Madison, for example, was born in 1751 and was 36
| years of age in 1787. Alexander Hamilton was born four years
| later and was 31 in 1787. There were only four delegates in
| their twenties.
| _gabe_ wrote:
| > I mean even at Google (on a different team) I was a "technical
| lead" in my 20s, and let me tell you, I had noooo business
| leading anything technical of any importance. But this is very
| common! We would never accept this in other fields. Would you
| live in a house built entirely by junior carpenters in their late
| 20s who built one or two houses that barely stood up? Would you
| drive cars designed and built by junior engineers?
|
| I find this kind of funny, because this is what happens right? I
| was under the assumption that architects typically design the
| building plans and do all the engineering, and a construction
| crew (which can consist of people mainly in their 20s) will build
| those plans under the supervision of the lead
| engineers/architects.
|
| So, in the same way that many senior software engineers don't
| write much code, don't architects/civil engineers typically
| refrain from using power tools to build the actual building? If
| this is the case, then software engineering is very akin to other
| engineering disciplines in this regard.
|
| I feel like the author of this tweet is conflating craftsmen with
| senior leads. A craftsmen is somebody I would expect to have been
| working with the medium for 10+ years, and continues honing their
| craft throughout the years. Whereas engineers and architects are
| typically more concerned with the abstract ideas and overall
| outcome. An engineer/architect can be a craftsman, but I don't
| believe they need to be synonymous.
| jmyeet wrote:
| > I mean even at Google (on a different team) I was a "technical
| lead" in my 20s, and let me tell you, I had noooo business
| leading anything technical of any importance. But this is very
| common!
|
| So these big tech companies have a caste system. And no I don't
| mean the Indian caste system, which obviously has its own
| controversies. The caste system is really a form of social proof.
|
| Did you go to MIT, Stanford, UW, Waterloo or CMU? Ok, you're in
| the club. You can join TI (Technical Infrastructure). Out of
| college you'll be L5 in 2-3 years (the same level an external
| hire with 10 years of experience will have). You will find
| yourself on the better projects with more promotion prospects.
|
| This kind of premature promotion is to find the 1 in 20 of these
| people who are truly talented enough to continue getting promoted
| to L6-8+.
| google234123 wrote:
| Is TI really regarded better than search? Do they typically
| promote faster?
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