Hacker News Reader

Comment by fareesh | Hacker News Reader

Can the teams at Google experience processes where they talk to their customers, iterate, talk to customers, iterate again and move fast and break stuff - releasing at each step of the way and measuring their intended A/B/C tests?

I suspect a company like that has committees and subcommittees and review processes and 100 layers of bureaucracy before anything even gets done

I bet there are projects that reached a production version and never saw the light of day because of this very reason

View on HN

I went from waiter -> self-educated SW engineer founding own startup -> sold startup -> Google. (Been on 3 teams, all of which shipped to match HW deadlines)

The only thing noteworthy about Google is _there is no process_.

Hell, just last week, a coworker and I finally resolved a year-long difference of opinion when it clicked for him that there wasn't a defined system, insomuch as there was one I was defining it, and I was thrilled to have someone else help with that.

Can you explain that better? Basically in a nutshell they don't have worthless agile processes?

Overall picture: Google recognizes it's a large company that has an extreme diversity of teams with idiosyncratic goals and personalities, and doesn't prescribe _anything_

Dollars to doughnuts, there's multiple teams doing extremely prescriptive Agile, but I've never seen one in 3 years in a 2,000 employee office.

By far the most organized team I've been on merely kept track of bugs using an internal web app that renders bugs from the internal bug tracker as post-it notes arranged in columns, with each column representing a bug status (ex. assigned/started work/code in review/done).

This alone caused a ton of grumbling, meanwhile I'm sitting there gobsmacked that Scrum and Agile aren't proper nouns that everyone has highly detailed opinions on.

The team you are referring to is highly likely to be using kanban. Kanban is the destiny of agile.

Nailed it, that's the name of the internal web app :) I always hesitate to call it Kanban because my relative that's a university professor is obsessed with Proper Kanban and it's nigh-unrecognizable to me beyond the post-it notes and status

Using prescriptive and agile means you are not actually doing Agile DSDM RAD or what have you in any way.

The teams I have worked on at Google have no process on a team level. We just copied the mandatory things like code reviews and automated testing, other than that people just figure out what to do on their own. The main motivation people have to work is so they have something nice to put in their biannual performance evaluation, so everyone is very eager to try to solve problems. Of course if you bite off more than you can chew and totally fail then you have nothing, so people try to pick sensible projects which will actually succeed.

Did you read the Quora answer or are you replying to the title?

GSuite does an incredible amount of talking to customers, because it’s easy to know who your target customer is. But who does a Billion-user consumer app talk to? For that we rely on internal testing and reporting feedback from family/friends.

People do read your in product feedback, btw. But it takes quarters for anyone to triage and act on it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com