Say it again

Scrapbook: "Good Engineering and Good Products"

by Christopher Adams

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People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.

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This conflict-based approach works only if it is managed by a single decision-maker who owns the deadline and will break a tie. Often there is too much data, or the data is inconclusive. When that happens, people can debate for hours, a time sink that often ends in mediocre compromise and always incurs a hefty opportunity cost, since there are always better things for smart creatives to be doing than rehashing a decision for the umpteenth time. There is a point at which more analysis won't lead to a better decision. This is the most important duty of the decision-maker: Set a deadline, run the process, and then enforce the deadline. It's like the kids on the playground at recess; they will play forever, but when the bell rings they know they have to wrap it up and head back to class. (Hopefully employees are better behaved and less prone to hogging the monkey bars.) The decision-maker gets to decide how long recess lasts, then ring the bell.

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As Larry [Page] spoke, it dawned on Jonathan the the engineers he was talking about weren’t engineers in the traditional definition of the role. Yes, they were brilliant coders and system designers, but along with their deep technical expertise many of them were also quite business-savvy and possessed a healthy streak of creativity. Coming from an academic background, Larry and Sergey had given these employees unusual freedom and power. Managing them by traditional planning structures wouldn’t work; it might guide them but it would also hem them in. “Why would you want to do that?” Larry asked Jonathan. “That would be stupid.”

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Even though Fog Creek, Trello, and Stack Exchange are now three separate companies, they are all running basically the same operating system, based on the original microprocessor architecture known as “making a company where the best developers want to work,” or, in simpler terms, treating people well.

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It started out with me sharing an office with Loren Carpenter, and him being an expert with fractals. Well, we were wondering what would happen if we could somehow incorporate that on a small computer. And then the game scenario came out of that, and went in that direction. So in that case we came up with the graphics idea first – the game came out of the graphics routine.

Tags: fractals x | lucasarts x | product from engineering x |