
What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team - skrish
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html?_r=1
======
bootload
previous best (of 5 submits), 4 months ago ~
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174399](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174399)
worth re-reading this because it is a timeless problem.

~~~
eitally
And also as mentioned in previous threads where this link was posted, all the
other stories in this "The Work Issue" are equally high quality.

------
Touche
Got through the first 3 paragraphs where the title hadn't even been
acknowledge, let alone answered, and stopped reading.

Increasing I find storytelling in journalism to be less and less tolerable.
Don't get me wrong, there is absolutely a place for long form non-fiction. If
this were titled in such a way that it were to be a story and not a fact-piece
I would probably have less of a problem with it; I could have filed it away in
a to-read-later bookmark.

But when the title elicits that there is information to be had; I want that
information, and nothing else.

~~~
joelg
That's really unfortunate and naive. Not everything, particularly the subtle
dynamics of human interaction, can be succinctly distilled into an abstract-
style paragraph. Oftentimes it takes great writing skill to set right
perspective, context, and background for the information to make sense or
"click" \- perspective which I find to be more valuable than the raw
"information" or study results.

Storytelling is sometimes the only way to properly convey information.

\- slightly edited for clarity -

~~~
tgb
No, I'm with Touche here. Too many articles hide the actual story under a
"human angle" aspect where we have to learn about someone's early childhood
growing up in Soviet Russia, or their first failed business, or that time
their father said Something Memorable to them. I've read so many of those now
that I start to fall asleep before the article begins talking about whatever
it is talking about. The naivety on display here is the journalists sticking
hard-and-fast to the rules we're taught in middle school English class: you
have to have a "hook" so that the audience get's caught! But those hooks are
artificial and repetitive - let the content speak for itself. If it can't,
then the article isn't worth my reading.

Anecdotes are still relevant. But using them religiously as the opening turns
me away.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's especially annoying since journalists should know better! It's them who
have "golden standard" of the "inverted pyramid". I.e. a headline should be
the "tl;dr" of the article. Then the first paragraph should be a little longer
"tl;dr" of the article. The reader should be able to recursively learn more
details, but also should be able to walk away with all the core facts after
the very first paragraph.

------
tswartz
Here is a high-level summary...

After studying over 180 google teams they didn't find any evidence that the
composition of the teams mattered (i.e. friends outside of work, male/female,
introverts, extroverts, intelligence). Instead what they focused on were the
“group norms” or unwritten rules of how the groups interacted with each other.
There were two norms that were most important to a successful group.

1) Members spoke in roughly the same proportion, what the researchers call,
‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’

2) Members all had “average social sensitivity”. They could understand how
other team members felt based on non-verbal queues. The underperforming teams
had low sensitivity amongst the team members.

~~~
adekok
My guess is that teams which have members with high sensitivity didn't do
well, either. If you're afraid of speaking up because someone will get upset
at you, you're only a superficial member of the team.

Both of these criteria amount to different facets of the same thing: teams
have to work together as a _team_. That sounds stupid, but practical criteria
as given above help to define that simple statement.

~~~
humanrebar
> high sensitivity

I agree. That is probably the wrong term for the phenomenon. There are
elements of forthrightness and trust that aren't captured by the word
'sensitivity'. On top of that 'sensitivity' carries negative connotations to
many.

~~~
ricksplat
I think this is what's called Power Distance Index (PDI) in Hofstede's
cultural dimensions theory. It's a fairly well established set of sociability
measurements that's been around since the 1970s and is quite well established.
Interestingly it also emerged from another (perhaps the original) large
multicultural global technology organisation: IBM

    
    
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_distance

------
bitL
This continuous Google worshiping is really tiring. When you talk to Googlers
nowadays, they seem to be pretty depressed as interesting projects dried up,
and demoralized by seeing people spending 90% of their time playing office
politics and backstabbing getting promotions. Compare Google in 2006 with the
one in 2016 - would you really like to work there these days? If you are
smart, you can build a core of your business and then let yourself be
acquihired by the big players if you wish to, why bother with employment at
Google unless it's your first job outside university?

~~~
delroth
> If you are smart, you can build a core of your business and then let
> yourself be acquihired by the big players if you wish to, why bother with
> employment at Google unless it's your first job outside university?

Because if you care more about tech than about building products, startups
suck. It's a whole culture based on wasting money with inefficient technology
( _cough_ cloud) at a ridiculously small scale, both in usage and in
complexity.

I've had 20% projects at Google that I spent a few weeks working on and likely
handle more traffic than a whole batch of YC backed startups.

~~~
Normal_gaussian
Depends on the startup

Not everywhere is a joyful money incinerator.

------
gerad
tl;dr​ - teams are most effective when people feel psychological safe to
contribute equally. Creating psychological safety can be accomplished through
conversational turn-taking and empathy. In the best teams, members listen to
one another and show sensitivity to each other’s ideas feelings and needs.

~~~
ricksplat
See Asimov's ideas on creativity - it is essential for the production of new
ideas that team members feel they are in an environment where "stupid" ideas
are not mocked. For every 1 good idea it's fair to imagine there might be 10
daft ones. The more ideas in circulation the better - and it also gives people
with daft ideas an opportunity to have them challenged in a constructive
fashion - which may lead to them developing the kernel of their idea that
might not be so daft.

    
    
        http://www.openculture.com/2014/10/isaac-asimov-explains-the-origins-of-good-ideas-creativity.html

------
xchaotic
As other are saying, so many words, so little content. tl;dr: you can't rely
on data alone to build optimal teams (sometimes it's about experiences and
such) and Google pretty much did nothing to optimize teams (in spite of
spending years on it)

------
mknocker
What I get from this article is that working collaboratively is a lot more
efficient than working in a spirit of competition. Specially, if you have
members with different backgrounds among your team. Working collaboratively
requires a trust bond between each members and usually it takes time. As we
build and dismantle team sometimes at a fast pace it may be difficult to
attain this state in today'S work environment.

------
hathym
I am really tired of long articles. how hard is it to provide a few bullet
points or a two lines summury for people that do no afford to read the entire
page?

~~~
overcast
I was playing around with this idea at Abbreviated Press.
[http://abbr.press](http://abbr.press) \- Pet project because I was sick of
reading long articles, and just wanted bulleted format as well.

------
compiler-guy
The day my manager takes me to an offsite and requires personal self-
disclosure to my coworkers is the day I quit.

I like my coworkers--some of them quite a bit, but I have boundaries. And my
personal life is not material for my company to improve its efficiency.

------
aminok
I don't want Sakaguchi to die!

------
LionessLover
While reading that article the page changed its font-size by at least 150%
five times (thus far). No I did not press any buttons. There is some detection
Javascript running that gets confused. Maybe my touch screen (laptop)? Page
zoom does not change, CTRL-0 does not reset the size, so it's not me.

As for the article... I'm amazed this is so popular (given the attention
previous submissions here already got). Well, I guess it's nice to have a link
to point to for all the things that _do not_ matter.

This sentence scares me:

> Rozovsky and her colleagues had figured out which norms were most critical.
> Now they had to find a way to make communication and empathy — the building
> blocks of forging real connections — into an algorithm they could easily
> scale.

And this is a surprise:

> ‘‘By putting things like empathy and sensitivity into charts and data
> reports, it makes them easier to talk about,’’ Sakaguchi told me. ‘‘It’s
> easier to talk about our feelings when we can point to a number.’’

and

> And thanks to Project Aristotle, she now had a vocabulary for explaining to
> herself what she was feeling and why it was important. _She had graphs and
> charts telling her that she shouldn’t just let it go._

Really? I have to crunch some numbers how I feel about this.

.

.

PS: figured it out: When I just touch the screen the font-size changes. There
are three steps. It takes a double-click with the mouse - but only a single
touch with the finger on the touchscreen. I can't imagine this being useful
_anywhere_ \- especially since when you have a touchscreen you can also
already do a two-finger zoom if you want to.

