Hacker News Reader

Any large company is going to have those same mistakes. There is really no way around it. Especially the part about only the big sexy project got recognition and not the little grungy tasks. In a company of 20,000, unless you have a 1:5 manager to employee ration at all levels you can't avoid that. If these are Google's biggest mistakes then I would happily go to work for them.

View on HN

I think that it is possible to build a culture where the grunchy unsexy work becomes much less un-thanked. Microsoft at its best did it: Raymond Chen was much celebrated for his heroic efforts at preserving backwards compatibility in Windows. In fact, when the Raymond Chen camp lost its political battle, Microsoft got Windows Vista, which arguably cost it billions. I think the stakes are very high in exactly this sort of political battle, and it is worth while for top engineers to spend their time fighting for precisely this sort of culture shift.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com