
From Google News to the Chicago Tribune: Observations after a month - yanofsky
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/tribnation/chi-google-news-to-chicago-tribune-20130123,0,4503590.story
======
zellyn
Having made the opposite transition, I can say that there are pluses and
minuses on both sides.

I certainly enjoyed being around reporters, and the programming team was one
of the most fun I've ever been on. The computer science wasn't terribly deep
(we joked that we mostly take, store, sort, display strings), but it was fun
to be able to point people at interesting things you built[1], complex or not.
And I do miss working with mostly industry-standard tech.

We got re-org'ed out of the newsroom a year before I left, though. Unless
you're a huge newspaper with a commitment to the flavor of reporting that
requires programming, a dedicated programming team doesn't make sense: better
to consolidate at some central, non-newsroom location where you can build
common applications for multiple newspapers and radio/tv stations.

On the other hand, I now work at YouTube, which is an exceptionally exciting,
fun, dynamic (both culturally and pythonically) place to be. The scale makes
things very interesting, and we affect people the world over. Oh, and San
Francisco.

I should probably write a more carefully written blog post...

[1] <http://projects.ajc.com/names/list/>

~~~
knowtheory
Just to add to that, there's been a huge uptick and interest in developers in
the newsroom. The focus on data driven journalism has just kept increasing
over the past couple years (full disclosure, I work for a non-profit that does
tech training for investigative journalists).

I agree that the industry hasn't shaken totally free of the fucked up
financial straights they got themselves into, but as it stands, there are way
more developer jobs working on actual journalism projects (not building or
maintaining CMSes) than there are developers to fill them (just see
<http://www.newsnerdjobs.com/> for some examples).

But ultimately you're absolutely right, there are tradeoffs, and working for
an insolvent company is one of the ones you have to watch out for, although
that's true out in startup land as well. Depends what you're looking for i
suppose!

I'd be curious to hear more about what you worked on over at AJC (some of my
coworkers were investigative reporters there a few years ago).

~~~
zellyn
This brings up an important point I should have made earlier: I left the AJC
three and a half years ago now, and Cox Media Group digital (if you're in
Atlanta and want to work on Python/Django, you should definitely check them
out) just under two and half years ago, so I am no longer current.

------
stingraycharles
Over here in the Netherlands, years ago, there was a (humorous) commercial by
a toilet freshener called Toilet Duck: "We, of Toilet Duck fame, recommend
Toilet Duck". It's a phrase that's still occasionally used when someone
notices a clearly biased self-promotion, and applies to this story: a
newspaper reports that working at a newspaper is more fulfilling than working
at Google. Call me unimpressed.

~~~
swah
I would love to know how many votes your nice comment got, but in new HN I
can't...

~~~
muyuu
And I think it's a lot better like this.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Indeed, no more karma rubbernecking and bandwagoning, the scourge of social
news.

------
hammerzeit
This headline is a little misleading, in that it suggests Abe went from being
an engineer at Google to being an engineer at the Tribune. My memory is that
Abe was in a technical specialist role at Google -- deeply involved in
technical things, writing code sometimes -- but not in the formal engineering
organization.

None of that harms his points, which I think are quite sound, and the actual
article does not imply Abe was a full-time engineer at Google, but the HN
title does seem to connote it.

~~~
knowtheory
Neat, that's useful to know, could you maybe describe the difference in a
little more detail?

~~~
abrahamepton
Well, as the Abe in question, I can explain a bit :) I was a tech specialist
on the News team. I worked with a team that managed the publications included
in Google News, and specifically I worked on the technical side of the
publisher inclusion process. It was nowhere near the kind of crazy-impressive
engineering being done by the folks technically in the engineering
organization, but I was writing code and maintaining infrastructure.

------
msandford
Obviously the paper isn't going to let him write a hatchet job on how terrible
the paper is. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have some good points. If it
takes months to get code pushed out at google and hours or minutes at the
paper it would seem that google is slowly losing one of their big competitive
advantages: innovation brought on by rapid iteration and public feedback.

~~~
archangel_one
Why is innovation brought on by rapid iteration and public feedback a
competitive advantage of Google's? Not only can anyone do it, but if anything
I'd guess Google does less because there's more pressure to succeed at launch.

~~~
msandford
Because for a long time they did precisely that: get stuff into beta really
quickly and see how it does. As organizations get bigger there tends to be
pressure to stop tinkering with stuff and start Doing Things Right (tm).

I think Google used to have a corporate culture which encouraged this and from
what this writer says (so it's just an anecdote, not data) they might be
losing that culture. Doesn't mean Google will fail but having that kind of
culture is an ongoing job and it's non-trivial. Seems like they might be
letting bureaucracy creep into the organization.

~~~
abrahamepton
That's really not what I'm saying, actually. I think Google continues to be a
fabulously innovative place. I loved my time there, and fully expect it to
continue being revolutionary and transformative.

But the constraints of keeping a billion people's needs in the back of your
mind are real, and they impose limitations on what you consider worthwhile. It
just wouldn't make sense for Google to study Chicago Public School utilization
data, for instance - it's waaaaay too small a focus - but I find it deeply fun
and meaningful, and not having to make something bulletproof for 1/6 the
planet to potentially use just means it gets out the door quicker.

~~~
msandford
"not having to make something bulletproof for 1/6 the planet to potentially
use just means it gets out the door quicker" is exactly what I'm referring to.
As Google's market share grows, so does the bureaucracy. It's one of the
inevitable problems of scale and it takes a very strong conviction on the part
of the company's management to actively avoid it. I don't think Google's
management is actively resisting the forces to bulletproof things and as a
result progress slows down.

But your point about working on fun projects that are too small to matter to
the world at large is very well taken.

------
danso
This is a great exchange program...Newspapers are strapped for resources and
mired in bureaucracy that makes it hard to produce digital-age news
products...but give some techies more domain-knowledge about civic data and
they may be able to overcome the constraints of the average newsroom
developer.

I say this as a former newsroom developer...One of the major impediments is
the lack of digital literacy by the non-developer journalists. That is, before
you can build a cool app based on their reporting and notes, you are going to
spend a lot of time writing software that converts their reporting/notes into
usable, parsable data...a problem that could be avoided if more reporters knew
basic concepts of delimitation and data types...one workaround I've suggested
is to take notes in a spreadsheet, instead of creating a folder of variably-
named text files, i.e. "INTERVIEW WITH J.SMITH 9/5/12-Tuesday.doc"

------
Zimahl
Well, not everyone at Google is going to get to work on the glasses or the
self-driving car. Someone has to work on GMail or Maps - and not the new
features but the boring parts like bug fixes. Just like there are pilots on a
Navy aircraft carrier, there's also a guy who is spending his 4 years as a
janitor.

------
epaulson
There's a lot of overlap between the open data/gov2.0 world and the journalism
world. On a whim, I went to the main data journalism/"Computer Assisted
Reporting"/newsroom developers conference last year (I had family in town so
it was really cheap) and it was a great time.

It's up again at the end of next month:
<http://ire.org/conferences/nicar-2013/>

They're also one of the friendliest communities I've ever met. I've been to
many tech and academic conferences, but nothing's ever been as open and
inviting as a journalism conference.

------
yanofsky
Title via <https://twitter.com/palewire/status/294460000728907776>

------
nopal
If this appeals to you, you owe it to yourself to check out Northwestern's
Knight scholarship program:
<http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/knight/default.aspx>

You can get a master's of journalism from one of the nation's best journalism
schools at a greatly reduced price.

------
redwood
TLDR: Basically working in a journalism organization is more exciting than
aggregating journalist organization's work.

------
OGinparadise
_Googler: Coding in a newsroom more fun and fulfilling than working at
Google._

To each his own, but why is this news? I like coding without wearing any socks
but I don't see NYT writing about it

~~~
cglee
The Society of Barefoot Walkers may include it in their next newsletter,
though.

~~~
robotmay
The Society of Barefoot Programmers would probably have quite a significant
membership base. It's so damn comfy.

