
Joel Spolsky: A Visit to Microsoft and Google - twampss
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090601/joel-spolsky-a-visit-to-microsoft-and-google.html
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brown9-2
I think there are some interesting comparisons between Microsoft and Google
that Joel left unsaid: First, perhaps only a company with 90,000 employees
(i.e., bloated) has enough spare resources to built a custom wifi
authentication system with temporary passwords, color brochures, etc.

Second: Google's meeting with Joel was put on YouTube, and Microsoft's
was...off-the-record? I think this one speaks for itself.

And seriously how can anyone get any real work done with all those meetings
all day long?

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SwellJoe
Google is not immune to those all-day, every day, meetings. Many managers and
directors and veeps are very much booked all day every day. It just happens on
the business campus which is a few blocks away from where I guess Joel
visited.

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rayvega
Printer friendly version: [http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090601/joel-spolsky-
a-visit-to...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090601/joel-spolsky-a-visit-to-
microsoft-and-google_Printer_Friendly.html)

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absconditus
"At Google, some developers suggested that we create an enterprise edition of
Stack Overflow that large organizations could use internally to share and
organize important information."

I'm somewhat surprised that Google doesn't offer something like this already.
They have more resources than Stack Overflow and organizing information is
supposed to be their forte.

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alexgartrell
This won't be a wide spread thing. In most corporations, people won't want to
piss off the boss-man by voting his answer down. Reputation is ego and ego in
the work place gets ugly.

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absconditus
Such a system doesn't necessarily have to involve voting.

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smanek
Yes it does. The whole point is to separate the good answers from the bad
answers.

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rw
No it does not. Editors can pick the best answers, replacing the voting
mechanism.

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euroclydon
Companies don't want their employees to connect to the guest WiFi. Google
might have configured the WiFi connection manager on their employee
workstations to not allow connections to the guest network, and maybe MS
though THAT would be a "waste of time," hence the different tact.

Microsoft also probably doesn't want employees to connect their personal
devices the the guest WiFi -- very normal behavior.

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rcoder
More importantly, the Federal CALEA wiretapping law basically _requires_ any
ISP (including corporations, colleges, and other organizations that provide
'net access to their community) to record the identity of anyone given access
to their network so that law enforcement agencies can gain access to usage
logs.

The fact that Microsoft chose to conform with the letter of this law is to be
expected; rather, the fact that Google's lawyers somehow decided they didn't
have to do the same is surprising, at least to me.

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seiji
Google public access has a captive portal requiring you login using your
google account.

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litewulf
Google public access is NOT the on-campus Google Wifi.

On campus theres some Wifi network that is open and unrestricted. The public
access one has a public portal (and vastly lower coverage in Mountain View
last time I checked.)

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hunterjrj
I've never had a private office with a door. Does it make a difference? I can
get into the zone easily enough in the space I share, so I am curious as to
what others have found?

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edw519
I prefer to sit with my users. As you can imagine, this concept is met with a
bit of resistance in corporate America.

I want to dwell with them and be a part of their lives. I want to hear them
bitch about their apps, their customers and vendors, their bosses, and each
other. I want to know what they go through all day every day.

When I sit and suffer with them, the resulting software is _always_ better.
All the meetings, prototypes, demos, specs, etc., etc., etc. have never been
able to deliver the same knowledge needed to develop their apps.

OTOH, I _don't_ want to sit with other programmers, unless we're working on
the same thing at the same time. I don't care about your problems, I have my
own.

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hunterjrj
Interesting point of view. I've had the... luxury... of sitting with end users
and I certainly agree with your statement that it produces better software.
However, I couldn't see sitting with them all day long, unless the projects
themselves were fairly small. I fear that I'd never get anything done, because
once the users figure out that you can magically make the software do whatever
it needs to, they'll be asking for the moon. Pushing back would only get you
so far, I think.

I sit in an office with a pretty fantastic programmer and I've certainly
benefited from his knowledge, though I can certainly relate to "I don't care
about your problems, I have my own."!

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rayvega
I found it interesting that, unlike Microsoft (and Joel's own company), Google
does not give their developers their own private offices.

Are developers at Google as productive as they can be even sharing an office
with 3 other people? Does it not matter if you are a certain caliber of
programmer that shares an office with others of the same or similar caliber
and level?

Perhaps those who work at Google have greater self-discipline and awareness to
know when collaborating starts to cross the line into interrupting someone so
the need for private offices is not as necessary as with other companies.

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michael_dorfman
The "need" for private offices for developers is based on an evaluation: the
cost of interruptions vs the benefit of improved communication among the
staff. I doubt there's a "slam-dunk" case to be made for either side.

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DenisM
In PeopleWare authors pose that productivity is the best when people working
on the same project sit together, is average when people sit alone and is the
worst when people with unrelated tasks sit together.

Ergo, if you are willing to move your "location" as often as you change tasks
it's best to sit together.

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snprbob86
And Google makes this pretty easy because your home directory and all of your
work lives in the cloud.

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enneff
Can we please say "on their intranet" instead of the misleading "cloud"
buzzword? (FWIW Googlers call it the "intranet" too.)

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snprbob86
I was a Google intern...

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andreyf
Oh, well, then buzzword away, o holy Gintern?

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sayrer
I liked the section where he considered stepping back and expanding to
different subjects. Reputation and voting systems have added so much to our
culture--it seems like a principal advantage of the Web. Google, Twitter,
StackOverflow all reward it.

I don't think this has ever happened with Email or Usenet... but wow, imagine
that. If Gmail could see which mailing list posts had been starred by other
readers, it would save a ton of time.

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bts
Anyone have an idea of where he's getting the figure for the number of
employees at Google? He says 10,000, but Wikipedia[1] has it at 20k.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google&oldid=2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google&oldid=295375723)

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listic
I think he either didn't bother to err.. google the number of employees, or
just "rounded" to the number of employees that Google had back in the day. Or
both.

Very unscrupulous on his side, I must add.

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brezina
i cant believe inc is running such a blatant ad for stack overflow. I haven't
done an in-depth analysis, but i'd wager that 40% of the content of that post
was promoting his product. Joel is amazing at leveraging the PR/Marketing
value of his writing. Go Joe!

(speaking of Go Joe, that new GI Joe movie looks amazing. I can't believe it
is 2 months away)

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mynameishere
It seemed like joel was pimping his website. That's true. I mean, it actually
seemed obvious to the point of being tacky.

~~~
JulianMorrison
Getting asked to MS and Google to pimp your website is a valid excuse to crow
about it, IMO.

