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Comment by 908B64B197 | Hacker News Reader

Selective cargo culting is great.

I recall talking to someone who was very very happy to brag that his company was doing "everything just like Google" and following the exact same practices he read the company did on various engineering blogs.

I asked him what was the compensation like and how he managed to get kids from Stanford to work at his company instead of their startups and he just gave me a blank stare. Said something about how they were not in Silicon Valley and paid median salaries and that he had "no trouble finding Google caliber talent in the local market." and that "it's not really the local market's customs to give stocks to coders".

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I don't understand your point, you don't need "kids from Stanford paid in stock" to run a monorepo, k8s (borg), bazel (blaze), SRE and whatever else you can read on the blogs. That's literally the point, to spread ideas around the industry so everyone can try them out.

Now I would understand the complaint if that company had the same hiring hoops as Google but a dud of TC but that's an orthogonal issue.

I think the point the author was trying to make was that the example company was doing “everything like Google” EXCEPT being as picky about who you hire, paying as much, and aligning employees with stock options.

If you try to bake a cake following a recipe, but only using half of the ingredients listed, you are going to get an odd cake.

I guess I disagree. Yes, you need a high class talent to move the field forward but once the new frontier is conquered, it ceases to be a frontier and everyone else can enjoy the fruits. Regular engineering practices of today are cutting edge of yesterday.

And still all initiatives to clone SV successes failed ( The Netherlands is full of Valleys, we have a Food Valley, an Energy Valley etc )

Cargo culting only by name.

Without massive, cheap investment money combined with massive simple integrated market, one cannot replicate conditions of Silicon Valley :/

EU might have more population, but USA has population that speaks single language and largely zero trade barriers for typical SV product.

While your argument is hard to prove wrong because the US ranks third in population as a single nation, I am skeptical that there is somehow a market population threshold that allows Silicon Valley in a country of 3X10^9 but not, say, 1.2X10^9 (Japan).

It should be 10^8 :)

The argument there is that America has sufficiently exported enough culture via traditional means that using American products is not that strange.

Japan has a lot of cultural exporting, but certainly has its differences. And is not exactly known for being internet-forward. Korea is internet forward but is similarly culturally niche; kpop stans are pretty much in their own bubble, one that’s big enough to cause havoc in international music charts but still a bubble. And China’s Internet is double different because of the insulation of the Great Firewall.

Of course, how much stock one actually should put into this is up to the reader.

Israel seems to do pretty well, by which I mean Tel Aviv. They always go US or global first for obvious reasons but there’s no a priori reason Europe couldn’t have a genuine startup hub.

Does the Netherlands even have hills and valleys?

It actually has these. Mostly in the extreme south east and in some other places where the boundary of the ice was in the ice age. Highest point in the Netherlands is about 300m above sea level.

But that's what we call a mountain :-)

Is Silicon Valley actually a valley though? Isn't it a plateau? We have plenty of those.

At this point I think we have moved quite far from the OP's acquaintance's comment. It's quite clear they meant operation day to day. The procedures Google follows and processes they have developed are out there and quite publicly available. Anyone can follow them with even a mediocre engineering team.

When Google builds all their super duper stuff, then they hire a bunch of people use that stuff (not create it), and pay them a lot.

That's good and fine but is not the same thing as operating like Google

Google didn’t follow a recipe.

It’s like the difference between a chef and a cook. You can make good food by following a recipe, but your aren’t going to get anything unique.

I used to work for a CEO who was always going on about "we're going to be the google of x". No 20% time, no food provided, low pay, horrible management and would hire any random contractors that applied, but we had an xbox we were allowed to use after work "just like google". Half a billion dollars later they failed to be the ask jeeves of x.

The other big cargo cult you often see is agile. Press an "agile" company on what agile practices the follow and more often than not you'll just get "we do daily stand ups". Ask them what they think the most important rule in the agile manifesto is and you'll get blank stares, they can't even read the cults literature.

Well, isn't that the magic of picking the right tooling? You then don't need superstars to operate the system. That sounds like a productivity coup. It is, natural, of course that the productivity accrues to capital rather than to labour in this relationship.

In fairness, cargo culting can be good in very targeted ways.

My company didn't have a clue on what to purchase for software development equipment or how to organize it. As a result, they observed what Google did and copied it to the best of their ability as their pocketbook would allow. Although it's not perfect and they have no idea why it works, it's certainly better than anything they could organically have come up with.

Are you talking about computers or chairs and desks?

Those are all the same class of tools. The other side of that "or" is datacenters and networking infrastructure.

> software development equipment

You seem to be talking about production equipment.

At least I have never needed a datacenter to develop software. But hey, that is just anecdata of course.

I thought it was software, but I'm a bit confused because isn't most good software infra open source (eg postgres, Linux, most web servers).

Does your company maintain operating systems, compilers, web browsers, libraries for cryptography, machine learning, compression, etc?

Do you have services used by billions of people that process petabytes of data every day?

If not, you do not need Google caliber engineers. You need common sense.

Google also makes a bunch of webapps and phone apps.

...that serve billions of people.

And are pretty buggy..

And most end up in a graveyard...

Not really. Google docs, Gmail, Google maps, Google translate work pretty well for me.

In fact, they work faster and more reliably than competitors. Office 365 web sucks, for example.

I think for most cases "google calibre talent" is overrated. Most companies run fine on 87 octane.

"coders" is just such a red flag here

I'm reasonably certain you're describing a delusional or deeply ignorant person--not someone who actually follows meaningful Google-esque practices of any sort. "We use Guava and are looking into Go"-level overlap with Google and not much more.

If it's selective then it's not cargo culting.

Micro cargo culting.

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