Comment by fivedogit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fivedogit | Hacker News Reader

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> the authors are confusing causation and correlation... they are all consequences of Google’s success. For example the authors write: “Their plan for creating that great search engine... Hire as many talented software engineers as possible, and give them freedom.” Well, this worked because the search was already successful enough to fund that freedom.

This is the key point and the clickbait-y headline notwithstanding, it's a very valid point. People look at Google and say "wow they have super-smart engineers and let them work on whatever they want with 20% of their time" and tons and tons of products sprung up all over the place.

But after a while, management seemed to back off of that philosophy quite a bit. In 2011, Google killed off many of its less successful projects, including Google Labs, and I read in some nook or cranny of the Internet that the 20% time has been quietly deemphasized over a number of years.

So the idea that you can just hire smart people and magic will happen, though often copied and lionized, is not all it's cracked up to be. <Insert quip about monkeys, typewriters and Shakespeare here.>

For an even more dramatic example, look at Valve. Great company to work for, no doubt, and open allocation which makes 20% time look like a death march. They can fund this because of the money fountain that is Steam.

But improvements to the Steam client are underwhelming and come at a snail's pace, if they come at all (e.g. Steam has been delaying my shutdowns in Windows now for two years). They are about a year behind now with SteamOS, and have pissed off most of their potential partners with SteamBox delays as well. And, of course, Half Life 3, which should be renamed Half Life Pu-239 based on when we should expect it to be released. (How is episodic gaming working out?)

"Freedom" certainly makes a place nice to work for. It might even get you some really good technology. And it probably can, eventually, indirectly, maybe eventually manage to achieve some of a company's goals. But if it is the most efficient way to do this, I am struggling to come up with any good examples.

Conversely, neither Valve nor Google are digging their graves, like much of the rest of the industry does over time. See the prior post about Dell. Look at Microsoft.

Focus helps, but good people make a bigger difference. The overhead, be that 20% time or whatever else, is peanuts in comparison.

Interesting. One might go further and postulate an inverse relationship between the focus of a company and it's ability to attract 'good people'.

It's tempting to argue that the kind of long-term vision usually shared by the best researchers is at odds with having pressure from management to compete. To be sure, companies with focus also fund pure R&D, but non-monopolies won't usually be able structure an an entire corporate culture around the research mentality.

If the criticism here is that Valve isn't sufficiently focussing its employees' efforts on revenue-earning activities then I don't think that's the case. Aside from Steam, they're raking in money from the monetisation of Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike:Global Offensive, and above all Dota 2 right now. The open-allocation system is apparently backed up by a peer-review system which distributes bonus money in proportion to how much money you've contributed to the profits recently. If anything they seem to be too focussed on chasing monetisation opportunities at the expense of boring and non-lucrative bugfixing.

If you're Valve, a place where tons of people want to work and that has a solid revenue stream, I don't see why you can't have your cake and eat it too. Why not have a team of people who will do the boring, less-glamorous work with the aspiration of making it to the "A" team that gets to pursue whatever they want? Heck, I'd do it. That's how law firms work (i.e. making partner after a number of years and solid performance), but maybe software engineering doesn't work well that way.

> And it probably can, eventually, indirectly, maybe eventually manage to achieve some of a company's goals.

The odd thing about this claim is that it depends fiercely on the question, "What are the company's goals?" I recently heard about a company whose primary priority was, "Maintain jobs," which I find quite reasonable.

Google's claim is about "organizing the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"; Valve used to be about "making great games", but it doesn't look like they have a mission statement posted anywhere on their webpage or employee handbook. By both of these measures, I do not think that their employees' freedom is doing any kind of disservice to achieving company goals.

Google's goal of "organizing the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" seems static to me, by which I mean that it's all about organizing existing data. I think that will lead to a company that is increasingly focused on defense.

Think about, say, street view. It's a huge project about getting that 'existing' data about the world into a digitized form, usable by a wide range of people and other projects. Data collection is a huge part of the problem space, with lots and lots of room for growth....

I get that, but the question is: how much money are they making from it? Would Streetview survive as a stand-alone business? I think that was the point of the original article.

No. It wouldn't. The point of Streetview isn't to be an independent business. The point is to support other Google businesses.

At the end of the day, it's all about being the go-to places for local information so you can sell local ads.

As other posters note, I think you're somewhat confusing what you (and I) want to see - HL3, for example - with Valve doing the things which are actually making it money.

Valve have been doing plenty, and what they've been doing is pretty clearly focused on monetization.

The HL3 example was partly tongue-in-cheek. The other stuff was not.

If SteamOS and SteamBox are important for company's long-term health and even survival[1], then what happens if not enough people at the company are interested in working on that stuff? Valve does stuff which make it money in the short term and get people their bonuses, but I don't see a lot of well-executed strategic moves coming from them. And, they might need some, if they want to stick around. Perhaps I'm not looking at it correctly though - I'd love to be proven wrong as I very much want Valve to stick around.

[1]: Which is to say, if it's necessary to circumvent Window's stranglehold on PC gaming to prevent Microsoft from cutting Valve off from the package gaming money fountain - the jury is out on this.

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