About 20 years ago, the buzzphrase "The Information Superhighway" became all the rage. Soon, it was prophesied, ambitious people wouldn't have to move to expensive places like Silicon Valley or Route 128 outside Boston to get ahead in the cyberspace business. They could just log in from anywhere!
Now, the technology developed spectacularly, but the geographical prophecy turned out backward. Rather than two, three many Silicon Valleys, even Route 128 withered, leaving Silicon Valley as all conquering.
This is not a unique development either. Instead of the Internet empowering people all across the landscape, real estate trends suggest that instead, power is centralizing. Ambitious young white people are pouring into Washington D.C.. The financial industry sprawls no farther than just across the Connecticut border.
As judged by relative real estate prices, who you know matters even more than what you know than it did 20 years ago.
Various theories have been suggested to explain this:
Engineering Serendipity
By GREG LINDSAY
WHEN Yahoo banned its employees from working from home in February, the reasons it gave had less to do with productivity than serendipity. “Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings,” explained the accompanying memo. The message was clear: doing your best work solo can’t compete with lingering around the coffee machine waiting for inspiration — in the form of a colleague — to strike.
That same day, Google provided details of its new campus in Mountain View, Calif., to Vanity Fair. Buildings resembling bent rectangles were designed, in the words of the search giant’s real estate chief, to maximize “casual collisions of the work force.” Rooftop cafes will offer additional opportunities for close encounters, and no employees in the complex will be more than a two-and-a-half-minute walk away from one another. “You can’t schedule innovation,” he said, as Google knows well, attributing the genesis of such projects as Gmail, Google News and Street View to engineers having fortuitous conversations at lunch. ...
ONE reason structural holes persist is our overwhelming preference for face-to-face interactions. Almost 40 years ago, Thomas J. Allen, a professor of management and engineering at M.I.T., found that colleagues who are out of sight are frequently out of mind — we are four times as likely to communicate regularly with someone sitting six feet away from us as we are with someone 60 feet away, and almost never with colleagues in separate buildings or floors.
And we get a particular intellectual charge from sharing ideas in person. In a paper published last year, researchers at Arizona State University used sensors and surveys to study creativity within teams. Participants felt most creative on days spent in motion meeting people, not working for long stretches at their desks.
Depends upon who you are meeting, I suspect.
Or, at least, chatting is more fun and makes you feel creative.
I'm sure there's some truth to this, although I have a somewhat different perspective.
First, my experience is that I'm most creative when I stop socializing and finally apply hands to keyboard, usually late at night, all by myself. But, that could be an idiosyncrasy.
What I think is a more general truth is that much of what gets called creativity is actually more influence. People pay more attention to and are nicer to the people they meet in person.
Consider the prominent theorist of the "creative class," Dr. Richard Florida. He is widely viewed as brilliantly creative in his insights, despite a track record of written work that belies that notion. But, he has been relentless at getting his handsome face and his pleasing message in front of other influential people -- in person. Malcolm Gladwell is an even more well-known genius who regularly wows sales conventions.
In contrast, I'm a homebody. Business travel wears me out and makes me less creative. I get bored too easily to bother honing a single presentation that I'd do over and over. I'd rather come up with something new. Since I don't get my face out there much, it's easy to assume I'm a terrible person.
" The financial industry sprawls no farther than just across the Connecticut border."
ReplyDeleteIt's also sprawled just across the Hudson to Jersey City, NJ. But yes, your larger point is valid.
"Or, at least, chatting is more fun..."
Um, not to nerds. And most new ideas come from nerds.
"What I think is a more general truth is that much of what gets called creativity is actually more influence."
I fully agree.
This is rather unfortunate, since, broadly applied, the idea that people can and should work from home would tend to reduce support for immigration.
ReplyDelete"Move to another country? Why would you do that? I rarely even need to leave my home!"
The thing about these software companies (yeah, I think of google as another one) is that they really aren't doing anything groundbreaking or innovative.
ReplyDeleteStuff like Facebook, GoogleMaps, Streetview, etc is all pretty obvious. All you need is enough server farms and programmers to throw at the problem.
Just my two cents, but I just haven't seen too much lately that seems like it has legs for want of another word.
Nothing Google has done can't be duplicated by the Chinese for one. And it's not like there isn't a roadmap for it out there, or they can't hire Google employees.
All they have to do to duplicate Google (or Facebook) is throw enough server farms and programmers at the problem.
And they have lots of both. Really if they wanted Google's action they could have that. Making it pay and eating into an established entity in the market in question is another problem.
Though there is a huge collection of internet users in China and Asia that use Chinese versions of the Internet activities we talk about so much, and it is a world most US people don't know a whole lot about.
Just an opinion, but I think Silicon Valley's days as "Silicon Valley" are numbered.
Most people are extroverts, and they don't feel right working with you unless they can look you in the eye and shake your hand once in a while. In 1995, I was doing contract work for a nationwide company that spent wads of money putting state-of-the-art videoconferencing systems in their main locations. They never got used, and executives and engineers kept flying around the country, because it just wasn't the same for them.
ReplyDeleteWomen especially see the office as a social function, and Casual Fridays and Dress Like a Pirate Day aren't much fun if everyone spends them at home.
Most of the geeks who do the serious coding to build tech companies would probably be more productive at home, or at least in a locked room where no one could disturb them for hours at a stretch. You get in sort of a mental zone while coding (I think Paul Graham has talked about this), where the longer you stay at it, the more you're able to hold in your head at once and the faster you go. Perhaps writing and other mentally creative crafts are the same way.
But when tech companies get big, as Yahoo and Google have, they accumulate customer service departments, multiple levels of managers and program directors and other buzzword jockeys, HR flacks, PC hardware techs, and so on. The code itself grows until most of it's no longer about creating brilliant programs, but about making sure the cog you're building follows all the rules so it'll work with all the other cogs, which can be done by any code monkey. The brilliant coders who made the company take off -- and who would be more productive in a locked room where no one could push birthday cake at them -- are now a tiny minority of the company, if any remain at all. Everyone else probably does need to be there to be productive, just as they do at non-tech companies.
In most jobs you need both "cenentration time" and "interaction time".
ReplyDeleteYou can still get "concentration time" in an office setting. You just have to be willing to shut your door and turn off your phone for a while.
I've worked in offices and at home and the difference is that at home, you never have "interaction time"; it's all "concentration time".
Talking of faces, Steve, your new pic resembles that of Australian cricketer, Allan Border.
ReplyDeleteI think that interaction is important, since everyone has blind spots and discussion can be stimulating; but so is the ability to go somewhere and concentrate undisturbed. The sum is greater than the parts. The most effective workplaces give workers the opportunity to experience both.
ReplyDeleteRisto
Face-to-face, open offices, shoot-from-the-hip all-hands meetings, etc. are the pet rocks of the echt-extrovert.
ReplyDeleteFor a radically different approach, check out Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain.
Here is her TED talk - one of Bill Gates' top ten faves.
Working at the office has become less pleasant and less productive over the course of my career because there's been a steady decline in floor space and privacy. I've been pretty successful but I (and my senior colleagues too) have gone from having my own office, to sharing an office, to a cubicle, to a desk with low partitions on maybe one or two sides, often with our backs to a busy corridor or next to a poorly insulated conference room with a loud speakerphone.
ReplyDeleteNon-work-related chatter is everywhere. Interruptions are frequent. It's ok for cut&paste programming and simple debugging. Terrible for careful thinking and real creativity.
I suppose the Indians are ok with it, having come of age hanging on to the outsides of trains and wading through dense human biomass.
Anyway, this might help explain some of the attraction to working from home.
Is Dr. Richard Florida Scots Irish?
ReplyDeleteThis is not a unique development either. Instead of the Internet empowering people all across the landscape, real estate trends suggest that instead, power is centralizing. Ambitious young white people are pouring into Washington D.C.. The financial industry sprawls no farther than just across the Connecticut border.
ReplyDeletePower centralization is the mistery of the modern American life... Washington, DC is now the wealthiest city in America, NY have the banks,media and some parts of Cali have media and information.
Detroit, Philly and other Big US cities are now irrelevant.
"Nothing Google has done can't be duplicated by the Chinese for one."
ReplyDeleteExcept for the peculiar fact that no Asian culture has ever been able to do software of the sort done regularly in the West.
The Japanese are the best, doing something reasonably interesting with games and some mobile apps (both pretty narrow in purview). But nothing has ever gone global and entrenched itself.
Europe has certainly done some very interesting and influential software (think of SAP, Linux), but what of similar significance has arisen from Asia?
Some of the better software engineers I've worked with had the attitude that the workplace was for socializing, writing code was for 3 AM at home.
ReplyDeleteThat Silicon Valley real estate: Overheard at a Wendy's near Cisco, circa 2000: "It was a lot smaller than we wanted, but it was only $680,000, so we went for it".
@Cail: "...where no one could push birthday cake at them..." Lol!
ReplyDeleteYesterday was Casual Friday at my work place. It was also birthday celebration time at 3:00pm for one "Budget Production Specialst" turning 33 y/o. Oh well, we'll do it again on her 34th birthday, with about a dozen more before then.
@Cain: "HR flaks" usually have nice, private, quiet offices, but are the ones pushing all others into bullpens.
ReplyDeleteMy counter-point to this is that power isn't concentrating. Wall St is more diversified in it's power than ever in terms of actual power structures. Gone are the days when a few robber barons (like JP Morgan) controlled it all.
ReplyDeleteNow you have so many hedge funds and similar stuff - most of them not even on Wall St to begin with. And let's not forget Warren Buffett, who isn't even close to NY most days.
As for Silicon Valley.. I guess. But Facebook was created in a dorm room at Harvard. SV is more like the place where you go once you made the initial hurdle.
The real estate there is now so expensive that it isn't like it used to be back in the 60s and 70s when you could just do whatever in a garage. Now SV is a step-up, but not the launching pad for most companies (unless it's a serial entrepreneur).
And as for Richard Florida etc.. I mean you've always had people who are essentially charlatan. Just think of the fitness coaches of the 80s or the diet gurus and so on. The personality cults were stronger back during those decades, when the world felt like a much smaller place.
You may know about Richard Florida, but the vast amount of people don't. Now you got gurus for small sub-communities instead. Everything's far more decentralized.
Economic power has been concentrated, however, but that's mostly along racial and especially class lines.
And as for the office stuff.. flex work today is far easier to get ahold of than, say, in the 1950s. Kickstarter is a good example of how you can crowdsource things in a way you couldn't do effectively pre-internet.
So no, I disagree with the general premise for the most part.
I get bored too easily to bother honing a single presentation that I'd do over and over.
ReplyDeleteThis creates another problem you have: you need to concentrate all your best insights into a book. We tend to deprecate books in the age of google, but that's bullshit too. Blogs are the worst things in the world for looking up a person's older writings. Combine that fact with another fact, your writings are scattered all over several sites like Vdare and Taki's, and the situation is abysmal. The blog format is made to be forgotten.
Cail Corishev:
ReplyDeleteMost people are extroverts, and they don't feel right working with you unless they can look you in the eye and shake your hand once in a while
Most powerful people - bosses, politicians, jocks, cops - are extroverts. They are the ones making the rules, and looking out for your health and welfare by their limited knowledge of it. Industrial productivity, business success, and the world in general would function much better if the extroverts actually asked the introverts what would make them happy and healthy. It is one thing to assume, and dictate based on those assumptions.
"All you need is enough server farms and programmers to throw at the problem."
ReplyDeleteNope. The "Chinese army" attempts at coding in which a lot of low-talent coders are thrown at a problem in human wave attacks tend to not work. You get big, complex applications that can't adapt. The really groundbreaking applications tend to be written by teams of maybe up to a ten people in their initial release. Afterwards they tend to accrete a bunch of support, marketing, admin, human resources, and finance types to monetize it.
That Silicon Valley real estate: Overheard at a Wendy's near Cisco, circa 2000: "It was a lot smaller than we wanted, but it was only $680,000, so we went for it".
ReplyDeleteThat's overpopulation for you.
Yahoo! sucks.
ReplyDeleteI assume you've followed the recent tribulations of this company, the CEO turnover, etc. There's this from the new boss just lately. Yahoo! appears to be the Lindsay Lohan of the wired world.
This seems like precisely the kind of company that would, as a cutting-edge measure, embrace the managerial mood ring fads of 15 years ago. Open offices, constant interaction, endless meetings. Yes, that's innovatory. [/sarcasm]
I'm no stockbroker, but examine your long-range position in Yahoo!
"This creates another problem you have: you need to concentrate all your best insights into a book."
ReplyDeleteDisagree, waste time on form rather than content.
I'd suggest copying Cochran and Harpending, collect all the blogposts as is and put them out as a collection of ebooks on Amazon - just the blog-posts with maybe a few notes added here and there where you changed your mind later.
Calling it influence rather than creativity is closer to the mark, but not close enough. I think a lot of this stuff is nothing more than bureaucratic power games. The best explanation why the new CEO at Yahoo banned telecommuting is simply to make her mark. She wants to show her power. Along with this is that all of the people who resent this new policy will quit and find other jobs. Then she can hire people who will work for her rather than her predecessor.
ReplyDeleteI really think there is nothing more to this issue.
With regards to Wall Street, the internet and information technology had a far more trans formative effect on investment banking than almost any other industry. Investment banking is mostly about M&A, IPO's,and trading. IPO activity is nearly dead today and the commissions on M&A have declined steadily since the 1980's. Trading is by far the majority of what constitutes investment banking today. Since this is purely a decentralized internet based activity, there is no reason for a place like "Wall Street" to even exist anymore. Yet, it does.
I suspect the reason for this is because all of Wall Street trading and business is based primarily on insider knowledge, which is illegal. This makes the entire Wall Street scene a criminal milieu. Such milieus are based on a familar face-to-face culture where everyone knows each other personally so that everyone can know who to trust and not to trust in order to avoid SEC regulation.
CC said
ReplyDelete>The brilliant coders who made the company take off -- and who would be more productive in a locked room where no one could push birthday cake at them -- are now a tiny minority of the company, if any remain at all.<
Yup. But those antisocial villains are obsolete, according to this.
The bright new future is twentysomething job-hopping part-timers sitting asses-to-elbows on the floor* and being evaluated by how many FB friends they have.
I said it before. Doomed.
Time to get out and open a diner, a hostel, a whorehouse, or a laundromat in another country, while we can.
* Last year I was offered a job where they sat shoulder-to-shoulder at a very long table of PCs. It was like musical chairs to get a PC. When you lost, you simply had to do some other part of your job elsewhere. "Where is my desk?" I asked. "Just sit on the floor," was the answer of management. Anyone who feels this would be "fun!" has an empty socket where most people have brains.
I wonder if this about maintaining tighter control over potential intellectual property rather than fostering employee innovativeness.
ReplyDeleteThere was a book written on this a while back, I believe this one:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.forbes.com/sites/troyonink/2012/05/22/the-new-geography-of-jobs-where-you-live-matters-more-than-ever/
An important observation made in the book is that employers like labor markets that are "thick". Detroit has a lot of automotive engineers. Houston has a lot of geologists. Sillicon Valley has a lot of EE's and comp. sci. graduates. This has led to a centralization of those industries, that has become only more pronounced with time.
"The blog format is made to be forgotten."
ReplyDeleteIt's just like articles, whether mass periodicals or academic / specialist journals. Without something like Google Scholar, you can't connect much of anything together unless you make it a research project.
Books are more visible, concentrated, and memorable, but it takes longer for a good book to be put together, especially of the magnum opus type.
Seems like the right balance is "articles" to come up with and refine ideas, then a book afterward to condense it all.
During the '90s internet hype, teenagers thought that they'd be able to make friendships or romantic relationships across vast distances.
ReplyDeleteThe rude awakening set in pretty quick: after a few sessions in an AOL chatroom, you learned that all this would amount to is a never-ending "age / sex / location check". Borrring.
There's a little more substance now on comment sections and forums, but still mostly at-arm's-length correspondence rather than close personal relationships. And social networks keep getting more closed-off; now it's only the people you're already really close to who look at / comment on your Facebook.
"First, my experience is that I'm most creative when I stop socializing and finally apply hands to keyboard, usually late at night, all by myself. But, that could be an idiosyncrasy."
ReplyDeleteThis is me too, to a T. I find that my best ideas come when I am alone and take the time to look at a problem from all angles, and particularly question all assumptions that the conventional solutions make. When I have been forced into a group (e.g. at school) and don't get the opportunity to do this, I get frustrated. Typically what happens is that there is no time to devise a solution that solves all or even most of the current disadvantages with the conventional solution. Often the loudest and most pushy person assumes a leadership role, often to the detriment of the project.
This occurs much less in engineering classes where there is an IQ floor. Still, it have found it useful to collaborate with individual people whose intelligence and creativity I respect, especially when the problem domain has elements pertaining to their speciality, interests or hobbies.
I imagine that Steve's comments section is something like this for him. Because he reads everything, he can synthesize all the good ideas he comes across into his current understanding.
As for office architecture designed to maximize collisions or whatever -- that sounds like a rationalization of the overall trend toward open floor plans. It's not just offices that are so wide-open compared to the cozier '80s workplace, but the McMansion floor plans with their Great Room.
ReplyDeleteIt's yet another repeat of mid-century culture. Their offices were wide-open, as shown in the hive-like place where Buddy Boy grinds away in The Apartment:
http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/apt4.jpg
The dominant type of domestic architecture in the mid-century was the ranch house, which had a very wide-open floor plan, where only the groupings of furniture served to mark off what function this or that space was for. The opposite of the cozier bungalow that dominated the Jazz Age.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_NjFpppCHqBE/SMFjFR3EIOI/AAAAAAAAASY/4eMNaK7hSlk/s400/1950S+HOME3.jpg
http://top-interior-design.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Interior-Design-Ideas-for-The-1950s.jpg
http://images.quickblogcast.com/112243-104805/1950sInterior5.jpg?a=83
Why are floor plans so open in falling-crime times? Low trust, it seems like. Everyone has to be able to keep an eye on everyone else, and feel keenly that everybody else is watching you. Heighten their self-consciousness so they don't feel like rocking the boat.
So if anything this stuff about "maximize collisions" is more stultifying than stimulating. It's just hard to see that in the context of high tech because they're still enjoying a long secular trend, up, up, up since the Industrial Revolution.
The fact that the rest of the culture looks pretty inertial and conformist during the mid-century and Millennial eras means that these design choices are just what they appear to be, notwithstanding their hype.
"Seems like the right balance is "articles" to come up with and refine ideas, then a book afterward to condense it all."
ReplyDeleteThere are some very good books written by journalists that have been created in this fashion - a compilation of "best of" articles on given topics. I'd say do what works for you.
Europe has certainly done some very interesting and influential software (think of SAP, Linux), but what of similar significance has arisen from Asia?
ReplyDeleteExactly. In theory, as Sunbeam said, there's no reason China (or India) couldn't create a Google. There's nothing that complicated about a search engine. Google's big concept which changed the search engine game was PageRank -- ranking a page based on how many pages linked to it and the PR of those pages. That was big, because previously ranking was done mostly on how prominently the search terms were used on the page, which was easy to game. People figured out how to game PR too, but it took a while, and Google rose to the top. That wasn't their only advantage; they also hired good people and got out of their way.
People familiar with open-source software know that an enormous amount of high-quality software has been created in the past couple decades by people working on it in their free time, usually for no reward beyond the respect of their peers and the satisfaction of a job well done. Most of the Internet runs on such software, and there's probably a good bit of it in your phone and other tech devices. Nearly all of these creators have been American or European. I know of a couple open-source projects created by Japanese, but none from China or India, despite those countries supposedly being filled with smart, tech-oriented minds who will overtake us Any Day Now.
It's not like "China" as a nation has to throw billions of dollars and thousands of programmers at a project to make it happen. DuckDuckGo, an impressive challenger to Google, started as one guy's weekend project. IIRC, Yahoo was something a couple college students put together for fun. Linux was Linus Torvalds until he had a working system others could help with. Most innovation starts from teams of 1-3 guys and only grows later once it catches on; so now that these other countries are wired up, why aren't we seeing cool new products coming out of their dorm rooms and basement offices?
Until I hear a better reason, I have to assume it's because they just don't do innovation.
My guess is that it is hard to create team loyalty between people who do not interact face to face.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand Boeing and perhaps the whole US aerospace industry, for example F-35, is decentralizing.
The 20somethings at Apple or Google that are 6 feet away are still texting or typing rather than actually talking to each other. Hogwash it is about work.
ReplyDeleteTelecommuting works great if you already have a spouse. Otherwise, it's a good thing you can eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the Google cafeteria at any time of day because it makes it possible you might find a mate. The nerds, male or female, aren;t going to find a suitable mate by going to a bar in SF.
The 20somethings in the valley don't yet have spouses, and the singles decided to concentrate in one area rather than half a dozen. after they pair up, the 128 loop or Sea-Tac/Redmond or Durham, NC is often as or more desirable than fighting for that home in Suunyvale.
You really think Google was innovation?
ReplyDeleteThe only thing innovative about it was that they were able to persuade investors to fork over all that money to create a big database and search engine that anyone could use for free, with no clear way to make money off the whole thing.
I'm not privy to how Google runs behind the scenes. Maybe they have some really great algorithms, and some really tight code. Maybe they found some new search that is more efficient somehow.
I kind of doubt it. I'm sure everything is well written, and they use the best methods they can find to implement things.
But in the end, Google (and Facebook) is a BFH.
Guys there are already Chinese alternatives to Google and Facebook out there running as we write. And they have been going on for a while now. Whether they ever spread out of the Chinese language market I do not know.
But I personally don't see any reason they can't, other than it was be a monumental effort to get people to switch at this point. I think it could be done though, expensive as hell, for a dubious reward.
I'm not going to quibble about how good Oriental (Chinese in this case) programmers are.
But I've heard all this shit before, about Japan and Korea with the chipmaking and automotive industries. "Japtraps," "Junk," "They make the low end chips, we'll always make the high end stuff."
I'm not buying it this time.
And what is this about the Chinese not doing innovation? For God's sake you have a hard time finding some piece of technology that wasn't done in China ages before it was done in Europe. Gunpowder, Paper, drilling for natural gas, repeating crossbows, magnificent ships, etc.
I'm not a Sinophile (that the word?), and I don't have Yellow Fever. I don't have anything against the Chinese, but have to say any world they have a big hand in running is probably going to have a major case of the suck.
But calling things as I see them, I think there is a lot of overconfidence in the way a lot of people here view them.
Sunbeam:
ReplyDelete"The thing about these software companies (yeah, I think of google as another one) is that they really aren't doing anything ground-breaking or innovative...
Nothing Google has done can't be duplicated by the Chinese for one. And it's not like there isn't a roadmap for it out there, or they can't hire Google employees."
Have you ever created any software yourself? You ought to read "The Mythical Man Month" and "No Silver Bullet". To get there first one needs both the intelligence, creativity and the guts to take the risk in the first place. Even if the example is there, it is often not trivial to create a copy that works as well. Throwing people at the problem won't necessarily work any better either.
As long as the network effect continues to work, I think Silicon Valley will continue to do well.
"Encourage creativity".
ReplyDeleteI can't think of too many world changing ideas really that have come out of Silicon Valley. yeah I can fb from anywhere there's a data connection, but we're still one extinction level event away from the end of humanity. Google/yahoo/fb's entire modus nowadays seems to be 'how can we infiltrate everything you do so that we can sell your information to corporations/governments?'. As someone pointed out a few months ago, we think we've technologically progressed because our entertainment is more intense and overarching throughout our lives, but in reality when was the last major engineering marvel since the Hadron Collider? I'm probably going to get ragged for saying this, but it seems like its purpose is to find proof of a proof of a maybe and settle pissing contests between top tier physics professors. Not really something with actual tangible benefits.
I find what SpaceX is doing to be much more fascinating than fads like 'wearable tech' while Zuckerberg brags about how they control the flow of information in the immigration debate.
E. Rekshun said...
ReplyDeleteCain: "HR flaks" usually have nice, private, quiet offices, but are the ones pushing all others into bullpens.
Just like public school educrats and principals. They're the ones pushing everyone else into BULLYpens.
Product start-ups in India are hampered by the lack of a mature ecosystem ... http://www.livemint.com/Industry/Jf8bBjbY369HALOPIWJJKN/Indias-fledgling-startup-sector-seeing-exodus.html There are plenty of startups in the US led by Indians.. but few that were completely developed in India (other than service companies)
ReplyDeleteFace-to-face?
ReplyDeleteHmmm...
As a blog commenter this could cause me to have a life.
Great Blog Steve,
ReplyDeleteI disagree with you slightly about creativity and influence. I have a low paying blue collar job and I am regularly offering ideas to make the place run smoother. I can't outwork my coworkers(they actually work pretty hard) but sometimes, I hope, I can out think them. I am a much dumber version of that computer guy you hired from the Navy and about as popular to boot. Anyway, it is a great thrill to see one of your ideas somehow survive the corporate lethargy and be used. This is really the only way to know if it is a good idea worth implementing. If the idea is implemented it can generate more ideas(I should have added that!). Many people say why doesn't the company do this and then tell me some dumb idea that it would take a genius programmer to code. Without formally presenting your idea or at least talking to people it is easy to believe your own hype. This is why influence is so important. Slightly off topic but I have grown to dislike the open door policy. I used to barge into my managers office and tell him about my ideas. I slowly realized he didn't have the enthusiasm but more importantly the energy to push any ideas through. In short, I wish I had an extroverted manager who at least, occasionally, was interested in what I was thinking and I like birthday cake.
"I think that interaction is important, since everyone has blind spots and discussion can be stimulating"
ReplyDeleteYes. There's a reason why people work better in groups. To quote "Curtains" (Kander & Ebb): "When you're writing a song, with a partner, the room is filled with jokes and chatter...But when you're writing a song wtihout a partner, that's a completely diferent matter. No one tells you, 'That's not funny'...No one makes you better than you are."
Interaction drives people to create. Hermits don't create much, popular delusions aside.
"Europe has certainly done some very interesting and influential software (think of SAP, Linux), but what of similar significance has arisen from Asia?"
ReplyDeleteDon't discount the language barrier and the world-wide position of English.
Back in the late 1960s and early 70s the Japanese (Hitachi and Fujitsu) reversed engineered (cloned) IBM mainframe hardware (370s). They could build the hardware. They could write software for the Japanese internal market, but they had no prayer writing software for other language markets. So they resorted to just stealing IBM OS code.
The FBI busted them. I think Hitachi got caught red handed with IBM tapes in silicon valley. IBM sued each of them for about a billion dollars and won. I think in the end it may have worked out alright for them because they somehow got IBM to license IBMs software to them. ('We didn't know it was stealing if it was software, honest, how'd you like to make some money?")
In areas where the language barrier did not exist, the Japanese seemed to do about as well as anybody. For instance, in embedded systems. For a long time members of their TRON operating system family did well. ITRON, used in early cellphones, among other places, was the largest selling OS in the world, in terms of pure numbers.
ITRON, the most successful part of the umbrella TRON project, did resemble DEC's RSX-11 quite a bit, if it had been optimized for Hitachi microprocessors...
If anyone remembers the once-vaunted Japanese Fifth Generation Project (which at one time in the 80s was always just about to take over the world by delivering working AI), it was apparently mostly about overcoming the computer interaction language problem.
Hum, maybe that Japanese AI stuff worked out and maybe then it all went bad and computers became evil. Maybe that's what mangled my link? Or maybe I just can't type:
ReplyDelete"The Most Popular Operating System in the World", Jan Krikke, LinuxInsider:
"ITRON, the first in a series of open-source specifications for the TRON architecture, answered a pressing need for Japan's electronics firms, which traditionally have written their own software for embedded systems."
Steve, what has happened is that Bombay (I refuse to call it "Mumbai") has killed Silicon Alley, etc. Cheap and dirt cheap programming labor killed a lot of the places in the US.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, London, Copenhagen, Helsinki, a few other places are small but growing hotbeds of niche stuff that get big fast. Best example Rovio and Angry Birds. Charleston South Carolina and Austin Texas are also places where some stuff that is fairly niche is being done. Mostly App development, other things.
Other than Facebook, there isn't anything big and hot and new coming out of the Valley. Amazon is in Seattle.
The flip side is MIT's EdX, Stanford's program, a few other are killing right now lower tier universities, they just don't know it. Why get an Accounting Degree from State U when you can get one from Stanford or MIT, at the fraction of State U's cost. This applies to foreign students also. MOOCs are killing off the lower tier universities. This is why both Pearson (FT's parent) and News Corp are investing in them.
Sunbeam -- Google was largely forced out of China, to protect local Chinese oligarch owned search firms, the same is now happening to Apple (its forced "apology" was in the news).
ReplyDeleteYes Silicon Valley is acutely aware of this. Which is why Apple is making a few things back here in the US; they are scared about their dependency on Foxconn and the notion that China could ban them and just seize their intellectual property.
The whole point of Marissa Mayer's dictum to work at the office was to get longer hours out of people. Google and the like spend an enormous amount of money on perks and goodies at work, and expect people to easily put in 80-100 hours there.
ReplyDeleteThat's not sustainable, the problem is people burn out, they have families, the older people (>30) who have accumulated experience such as "that's stupid -- lets not do it" drop out. And the Valley constantly turns over and over and over again, repeating the same 20 something coolness.
Mr. Sailer:
ReplyDeleteYou are very good and extremely creative person.
Your truly, F.r.
The cyberspace bit came true to a small extent - it works for freelancers and some small businesses. I've worked with freelance software developers in Texas, upstate New York, and Maine, for example, in addition to shops in NYC and San Francisco. The fellow I worked with in Maine stopped doing freelance work when one of his own apps got big, and he ended up hiring his own staff.
ReplyDeleteBut for venture- and angel-backed startups, Silicon Valley is where it's at, with NYC now a distant 2nd, supplanting Boston. The main reason seems to be the availability of willing money. The sort of folks willing to throw the most money at startups are often those who made it big in a startup themselves. A lot of them become angels, and some (such as Marc Andreessen) become VCs.
The founder of a robotics startup based in Texas wrote on a tech industry site recently about why he was moving his co. to Sillicon Valley. He said he could find robotics talent in Boston (MIT) or Pittsburgh (Carnegie Mellon) as well as in SV, but he could only raise the money he needed in SV.
Re buildings designed to spur collaboration, I think the pioneer of that was Paul O'Neill at Alcoa. I think you're right that the claim it spurs creativity is dubious. I think the main idea is to simulate a college environment to trick their techies into working longer hours.
"The thing about these software companies (yeah, I think of google as another one) is that they really aren't doing anything groundbreaking or innovative."
ReplyDeletei don't agree with this in google's case. they are doing some wildly creative stuff even now. they have several projects that impress me. for instance, you're trying to say reverse image search is "pretty obvious"? then why did it not exist until just recently? previous pathetic attempts were crap compared to google's version. tineye, for instance, was pure garbage. google cracked the object recogniition problem for small 2D images.
now when i find a random image, i can just drop it into google image search and 90% of the time it can actually tell me what it is JUST BY LOOKING AT IT. then tell me other places where it exists on the web, and point me to related photos. you can drop a random photo of an unknown person in there and most of the time google can tell you who they are.
google reverse image search is a revelation, and completely changes the web, yet again. saying it's totally obvious sounds like how a fax machine is totally obvious. it didn't exist before it existed, then after it did, it's oh that's obvious.
natural language processing is "obvious" yet we don't have it. just like the self driving car, or general purpose robots. it's HARD. it's definitely not obvious how to crack the several various problems which prevent it from existing.
ReplyDeletesometime in the future, we'll be able to talk to our computers and televisions and just tell them what we want to see. "Show me all the sports that are happening right now" and the television just goes directly there and shows you a 3x3 grid of 9 sports events happening on 9 channels and you say "Go to the Lakers game" and it goes full screen. no clicking around, no messing around trying to find all the different stuff happening across 200 different channels, was the Yankees game on TBS or CBS or ESPN or NBC Sportsnetwork, can't find it, wait is it on this channel but they went to commercial, just find it now...damn it i'm missing it...
old people, technically unsavvy moms, and little kids will just be able to say "Show me cartoons" or "find me all the cooking shows on right now" or "show me soap operas" and BAM they're just there, on the screen. teenagers can just say "show me all the movies playing now" instead of clicking around, watching 2 minutes of taken, then 2 minutes of avengers, then 2 minutes of the dark knight. middle aged guys can just say "Any documentaries about world war 2 or space aliens or time travel?" and wham they come up.
if you doubt we could use stuff like this, just imagine how clumsy some of the old people you know are when trying to use the computer to send a simple email or check some recipes to print off. what if they could just tell the computer what they wanted to do instead of fumbling around for 10 minutes.
the remote control will become obsolete, like the wall mounted telephone from 1980 where you had to actually remember people's phone numbers, and if they called and nobody was there to pick up the phone, you missed the call. or the VCR where you had to, lol, physically move the tape medium around to find the part of the video you wanted to watch. be kind, rewind? your kids won't know about that.
try sending the terminator back to 1890 to kill james naismith, then tell me basketball is totally obvious and just plain anybody could have come up with it. steve laments all the time "we need new sports!" yet coming up with a good new sport is a near impossibly hard task. africans, who hold hoops nearest and dearest to their hearts, more than anything else in the world sometimes it seems, sat around in africa for 50,000 YEARS without coming up with it.
over the years every innovation in the game - cutting out the bottom of the basket, the shot clock, the 3 point line - was a non-obvious white guy created improvement.
"Europe has certainly done some very interesting and influential software (think of SAP, Linux), but what of similar significance has arisen from Asia?"
ReplyDeletenothing, unless a japanese guy actually did create bitcoin. which he probably didn't, and satoshi nakamoto is a fake name the actual creator used. from what i've read it was most likely created by 1 of 3 guys, all of whom are white.
although the main bitcoin exchange is in japan.
the japanese do program their own original video games though. as do the koreans now too.
i don't agree with this in google's case. they are doing some wildly creative stuff even now. they have several projects that impress me. for instance, you're trying to say reverse image search is "pretty obvious"? then why did it not exist until just recently? previous pathetic attempts were crap compared to google's version. tineye, for instance, was pure garbage. google cracked the object recogniition problem for small 2D images.
ReplyDeleteI'd say the idea of reverse image search is very obvious, yes. How to do it, not so much.
I have no idea if Google actually did it, or if they just read a paper, like the game industry seems to do, so I have no idea how much of the greatness is Google's.
google reverse image search is a revelation, and completely changes the web, yet again. saying it's totally obvious sounds like how a fax machine is totally obvious. it didn't exist before it existed, then after it did, it's oh that's obvious.
Again, it sounds like you're saying the concept itself wasn't obvious. It was totally obvious. I was waiting for years for the tech to finally make it possible. It seemed inevitable, given the constant talk about and refinement of facial recognition and machine vision.
natural language processing is "obvious" yet we don't have it. just like the self driving car, or general purpose robots. it's HARD. it's definitely not obvious how to crack the several various problems which prevent it from existing
Yeah, see, now it sounds like we're agreeing.
Matthew said
ReplyDelete>>"When you're writing a song, with a partner, the room is filled with jokes and chatter...But when you're writing a song wtihout a partner, that's a completely diferent matter. No one tells you, 'That's not funny'...No one makes you better than you are."
>Interaction drives people to create. Hermits don't create much, popular delusions aside.<
When did Beethoven's name change to Popular Delusion?
Jody said:
ReplyDelete"i don't agree with this in google's case. they are doing some wildly creative stuff even now. they have several projects that impress me. for instance, you're trying to say reverse image search is "pretty obvious"? then why did it not exist until just recently? previous pathetic attempts were crap compared to google's version. tineye, for instance, was pure garbage. google cracked the object recogniition problem for small 2D images.
now when i find a random image, i can just drop it into google image search and 90% of the time it can actually tell me what it is JUST BY LOOKING AT IT. then tell me other places where it exists on the web, and point me to related photos. you can drop a random photo of an unknown person in there and most of the time google can tell you who they are."
I've got a question for you, one that I don't think you will have the information sources to answer.
Was this something totally developed in house, like Bell Labs used to do? Or did they take something someone worked on at Berkeley, Stanford, or Cal Tech and throw enough resources at it to make it workable?
Besides, problems can turn out to be a lot knottier than they look, but you can't think of several ways to attack this problem?
How versatile is it? What are the limitations? If I take an image, change is from a .gif to a .jpg, will it recognize it? If it actually processes the image that is one thing, just recognizing that it is a file is just more of what they have been doing.
But what stops a hypothetical Chinese concern from doing the same thing? Particularly if it is just an implementation of some academic's work somewhere?
"...it's a good thing you can eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the Google cafeteria at any time of day because it makes it possible you might find a mate."
ReplyDeleteYes.
I have been on teams that have consistently lost the youngest unmarried members to places down the road like Facebook and Google. I think a good bit of their secret, some of the silicon valley "secret", and perhaps the real advantage of campus design for "in the halls interaction" is simple.
It's sex. Vibrancy. Young women visibly around. There may not be that many female engineers (there probably are more than just about anywhere else), but there are lots of young female digital artists, marketing types, user interface specialists, etc.. Young Marissa Mayer herself types.
So it makes the place a lot more sexy if all this is visible like a university campus. A lot easier sell to young 22 year old nerd just-out-of-school male engineering types. It probably does create a more naturally competitive/creative place, in a subtle non-discordant natural way, than if everyone is isolated in well-protected offices or telecommuting.
It deliberately recreates some of the vib of a hip coed top-notch university environment. Money is important, but you've got to normalize it to daily access to desirable members of the opposite sex. After awhile a company just gets known as a happening place, like a good bar.
"Non-work-related chatter is everywhere. Interruptions are frequent."
ReplyDeleteI have to wear headphones all day to block the noise out.
Everything about corporations is unpleasant. First, you have the pc garbage where you have to watch everything you say. Then you have all the irritating people around making noise.
I haven't even mentioned clueless management yet.
"I haven't even mentioned clueless management yet."
ReplyDeleteI hear the role of management in the new world global order is to make companies go out of business as fast as possible, while capturing as much wealth as possible. It's creative destruction, the secret of capitalism! It can be a very hard job, there's a lot of destruction in some large successful long-established companies.
The Japanese case is interesting. Sometimes individual Japanese are very innovative scientists, engineers, artists, etc.. The modern open source world probably owes a lot to the Japanese. (I think open source would have happened anyway; software originally was pretty much open source and it was the proprietary model that was unusual; past a certain point the model failed.)
ReplyDeleteAfter the debacle stealing IBM code, the Japanese were interested in anything that could take system software "off the table" (a lot of the rest of the non-IBM world was as well). Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) founded a $125 million dollar project to re-work Unix to become a Japanese platform, with ATT's cooperation.
A fellow named Kouichi Kishida had led a project "to build a Unix amusement park for the software industry." He played a role in MITI's big project, later writing that it "failed beautifully". He wrote a position paper called "Managing Megaprojects: A Free Form Approach" in which he described something that sounds a lot like modern open source: "... a free city is the appropriate symbolic image for a large-scale software project. The project does not exist only for... management... it also facilitates cultural exchange among the participants. This enables people to grow, and new concepts and technology to evolve."
Richard Stallman's initial announcement of the Free Software Foundation noted that their first large donation (from Japanese software company Software Research Associates) was due to Kouichi Kishida. "SRA joined FSF, Free Software Foundation, as the first founding member from Japan providing technical support for the GNU Project."
These tech companies have a lot of East Asian employees. If you look at Nobel Prize winners and other various prestigious awards the vast majority of East Asian winners did their award winning work alongside white or Jewish people. Very few East Asian winners did the work alone and even fewer did it alone in East Asia. These tech companies might have seen that their East Asian employees couldn't produce on their own, that East Asians need the interaction, intelligence, and creativity of Caucasian colleagues to produce anything.
ReplyDeleteFirst iSteve post I've read displaying any fraction of attempted humility. Checking outside for winged hogs aflutter right now
ReplyDeleteI'm in Silicon Valley but at a satellite office of an American, very old line, heavy industrial company. They opened an office here 5 years ago and I was one of the very first hires.
ReplyDeleteOne look at the layout and I was appalled. Tiny cubicles with absolutely no room for collaboration - only one person could fit unless someone sat on someone else's lap. Noise was a continued problem as two people could not talk on the phone within a 20 person radius.
The VP came through early on to shake hands and he asked me while on his tour what I thought. I was honest and told him the layout suxed.
My boss later told me it didn't matter, he didn't care what I thought anyway.
Maybe the open campus layout is overboard but the teeny tiny cube is bad in its own way.
Yea, let me play ideas off my colleagues, the more the merrier, but keep them out of my hair and my mind when I need to concentrate.
No doubt Bach hung around the water cooler waiting for other composers to give him good ideas.
ReplyDeleteThen again, if Google was staffed by Bachs, they probably wouldn't need the water coolers.
What this goes to show is that really smart, intellectually quick people still aren't geniuses.
I agree that creativity usually flows most when someone is working alone without interruptions. The issue, however, is more about the communication of that creativity. It is massively time consuming to accurately convey a truly new idea without some face-to-face communication. No matter how well you express yourself, there are still things the other party is not going to get, and a good back-and-forth will tease out those misunderstandings. Furthermore, however brilliant an idea is, it usually needs some constructive criticism to become truly valuable and workable.
ReplyDeletePeople generally approach a different idea with their own preconceptions and fill in a whole lot of blanks with those preconceptions. For instance, let's say an average person arrives by chance at iSteve and happens upon some novel discussion of school achievement gaps. The gap filling goes something like this: "this is a story about race = racism is evil = iSteve is evil = point, sputter, run away."
Now imagine if Steve sat down in a cozy cafe with some of those respectable center-left TED types, and just had a pleasant conversation with them. While most would prove highly resistant, some would find themselves thinking in new and different ways, at least much more than if they were to just happen upon his website and run away shrieking in horror after reading the first paragraph.
I felt a frisson of regret reading this after driving home from a long weekend in Vermont and passing the old Polaroid building on 128, which is being torn down. The end of an era.
ReplyDeleteEdwin Land, Ken Olson, Ed DeCastro, etc. How can people be so visionary and so wrong at the same time?
"for instance, you're trying to say reverse image search is "pretty obvious"? then why did it not exist until just recently? "
ReplyDeletereal time. though I'm not sure which one is it for google, better algorithm or better hardware.
http://www.theopavlidis.com/technology/CBIR/PaperB/vers3.htm
older pixar movies would have taken days to render on a PC farm for a single frame, now you could get that quality in real time. Of course, pixar quality has gotten even better. check out some PS4 trailers, in a few years expect photorealism on consoles.
>the real advantage of campus design for "in the halls interaction" is simple. It's sex. Vibrancy. Young women visibly around.[...] A lot easier sell to young 22 year old nerd just-out-of-school male engineering types.<
ReplyDeleteThanks for this good point.
The problem for companies is that there are two kinds of people who want to work alone at home: those who would be more productive away from the office distractions, and those who would sleep all day. Any decent manager should probably be able to tell which a person will be, and if not, a trial run should soon reveal it.
ReplyDeleteOf course, that assumes the person is doing some sort of productive work that can be measured, and that the manager understands it well enough to measure it.
I once did work for a pager company that was right in the middle of the pager boom. They had several engineers who were brilliant guys; most had patents on things they had designed. Some of these guys only really worked 1-2 hours a day, but the work they did generated loads of money and provided jobs for a lot of factory workers and others. They spent the rest of their time exploring this new thing called the Internet, writing programs to download and decode all the pictures from alt.binaries.pictures.erotica every day, and things like that. They wrote add-ons for the software they used in their jobs, and passed those on to others.
When you put tools like computers in the hands of certain kinds of people, they just start inventing and building things (as long as you don't prevent them). They don't even need a monetary incentive; as long as they've got food on the table from somewhere, they'll spend free time playing with their tools, making better tools and new stuff and giving it away. That happened at that company, and it's happened at thousands of other companies, bedrooms, and dorms across the USA, Europe, and to a lesser extent, Japan.
If that's a universal human tendency, the same thing should be happening at the code factories in India now, unless someone stands over them and makes sure they don't do anything extracurricular and chases them out when their shift is up. It should just happen.
Software is often the final stage of deeper technical developments/inventions. In that Asians currently contribute as much as anyone else (They mostly do so in America.. even Europeans do the same; elite American tech programs are staffed to a large extent by foreign born scientists including Europeans). Two examples : http://www.csail.mit.edu/user/881
ReplyDeleteand the head of MIT's edX : http://people.csail.mit.edu/agarwal
Stanford's coursera is also lead by an Asian, Andrew Ng. And Udacity is founded by a German.
I agree that creativity usually flows most when someone is working alone without interruptions. The issue, however, is more about the communication of that creativity. It is massively time consuming to accurately convey a truly new idea without some face-to-face communication.
ReplyDeleteIt's a trade-off, though, because face-to-face communication is often massively time-consuming even (especially?) when nothing creative or productive is happening. I've worked in companies where you'd send someone a simple question by email, and instead of responding with a one-sentence answer, he'd wander down to your desk and visit for 15 minutes. Maybe one day something useful would come out of that conversation, but most days it just meant worked stopped while you talked about the ballgame.
It's mostly the difference between introverts and extroverts. Extroverts should all come to the office and spend a lot of time meeting face-to-face and generating energy and ideas in each other, while the introverts work at home (if they can be productive there) or behind closed doors. The problem is that the people in charge (usually extroverts) want everyone to work the same way they do.
Jody, even with hindsight, nothing about basketball strikes me as obvious. I still can't figure out why people find it appealing. Bouncing a large ball while you walk or run? I still see it in a "WTF?" kind of way. It has no appeal for me as a participatory or spectator sport.
ReplyDelete