they have quietly, steadily built the infrastructure behind the world’s most successful companies. When they leave — as they have places like Netscape, Sun, and Yahoo — the firms they leave behind wither and die.
Reminds me of one Korean woman I knew in South Carolina. She would start cooking at a restaurant and it would flourish. Then the owner would alienate her, and she'd leave and the restaurant wouldn't be so popular anymore. Eventually, she started cooking Korean food at her husband's cuban sub shop and the sub shop became one of the most popular places to get Korean food. Seriously, the place was often packed with Korean students from the university.
However, the sort of insider culture described in the article makes me think of the insider culture portrayed in the beginning of "Moneyball." I suspect that, given more open statistics, the industry would benefit from a more quantitative evaluation of technical people, as opposed to the stone age reputation mechanisms of Homo sapiens at play during shop talk. (Which work pretty well, but we can do better.)
This is one place where large companies currently have an advantage over the market at-large, as they can gather this sort of quantitative information about their own population of employees, with a uniform set of standards to enable measurement.
An organization like Y Combinator could do something similar. Even better, startups and incubators in worldwide could start doing this.
I've advocated "guilds" here in the past, and HN members have downvoted me. Really, that's just poor marketing, as what I was advocating wasn't anything like a medieval guild. What the industry needs more of are 1) mentoring at levels above the "pop-culture" of programming 2) better and more open quantitative measures.
Really, 2) is the same thing as pro athlete's stats or MPG figures on a car's sticker. Better flow of information would result in a better market.
The thing about moneyball is you're evaluating a player based on a few thousand iterations of the same thing: Up to bat, get a hit, walk, strike out, or fly/ground out.
Every software project tends to be different. Lots harder to quantize.
Comments
they have quietly, steadily built the infrastructure behind the world’s most successful companies. When they leave — as they have places like Netscape, Sun, and Yahoo — the firms they leave behind wither and die.
Reminds me of one Korean woman I knew in South Carolina. She would start cooking at a restaurant and it would flourish. Then the owner would alienate her, and she'd leave and the restaurant wouldn't be so popular anymore. Eventually, she started cooking Korean food at her husband's cuban sub shop and the sub shop became one of the most popular places to get Korean food. Seriously, the place was often packed with Korean students from the university.
However, the sort of insider culture described in the article makes me think of the insider culture portrayed in the beginning of "Moneyball." I suspect that, given more open statistics, the industry would benefit from a more quantitative evaluation of technical people, as opposed to the stone age reputation mechanisms of Homo sapiens at play during shop talk. (Which work pretty well, but we can do better.)
This is one place where large companies currently have an advantage over the market at-large, as they can gather this sort of quantitative information about their own population of employees, with a uniform set of standards to enable measurement.
An organization like Y Combinator could do something similar. Even better, startups and incubators in worldwide could start doing this.
I've advocated "guilds" here in the past, and HN members have downvoted me. Really, that's just poor marketing, as what I was advocating wasn't anything like a medieval guild. What the industry needs more of are 1) mentoring at levels above the "pop-culture" of programming 2) better and more open quantitative measures.
Really, 2) is the same thing as pro athlete's stats or MPG figures on a car's sticker. Better flow of information would result in a better market.
The thing about moneyball is you're evaluating a player based on a few thousand iterations of the same thing: Up to bat, get a hit, walk, strike out, or fly/ground out.
Every software project tends to be different. Lots harder to quantize.