Bill’s Blog

I had a great opportunity that fell in my lap a few weeks ago.  I was invited to speak at Stanford about the value of foreign education and experience.  The event was yesterday.  For my part, I was on a panel with three other folks.  Two of us spoke about our experiences hiring and working with engineers from outside the US.  The other two folks represented big Indian outsourcing companies and spoke mostly about their hiring process built for volume (~25k people a year).

It was cool to be invited and I was thrilled to go.  The attendees were a mix of academics and industry folks.  May were professors studying similar topics.  A few folks from the GAO were there.  Several attendees came from far flung places like India and New Jersey.  There were ~30 people all in all.

The meeting was in an ornately decorated room on campus.  I don’t think I’ve seen so much wood paneling ever.  There was a massive fireplace at one end.  But they had a great sound system, a dedicated AV guy, and comfortable chairs.  The whole time I kept wondering if anyone there twittered?  I still don’t know

For lunch they had arranged for lunch at Google.  It was my first time there, so I jumped at the opportunity.

The day was a nice change of pace for me and I enjoyed every part of it except for getting up at 4:30 to catch the flight down there.

This past week I attended the Society of Information Management’s monthly get together at the invitation of my friend Aaron.  The featured speakers were a couple of guys from Google, Brian Kemler and Steve Benson.  Their topic was innovation.  I found the discussion interesting and took a few notes.  Read on if you’re interested.

- True innovation means both technical innovaton and business model innovation.  They said Page Rank was an example of technology innovation while Text Ads on search pages was business model innovation.

- 50% of the employees at Google are engineers.  From what they said I could also add “and doing engineering work”.  I don’t know what the percentage is elsewhere, but I thought this was a great formula for success.

- When they talked about resources, they talked about people and machines.  I found it interesting that they didn’t talk about money.

- Google uses a 70-20-10 model for where they focus.  70% of their resources focus on core businesses like search, ads, and apps.  20% focus on adjencies or related businesses, and 10% of their resources are focused on exploratory type work.

- Flat management structure.  8 layers from bottom to top. (this is flat?)

- Hire for culture fit (one person I spoke with later in the week said he had 24 interviews when he was hired.  I also learned that Larry Page still reviews every single hire before an offer is made.)

- Dedicate time for inovation.  All engineers can spend 20% of their time on anything they want.  Though this guy did say that that 20% time usually means 120% time meaning that a lot of the innovation work is done after hours.  I asked him how they manage the 20% time.  I was met with a blank stare.  He eventually said that they hire smart, passionate people who want to work on interesting things, so the 20% wasn’t a problem.

- Experiment and realize that some things won’t work.  He gave an example of the electrical substation in The Dalles data center.  The power company was going to take a couple years to build it so Google decided to do it themselves.

- Encourage people to act on new ideas

- Big Award culture.  Their founders awards are in the millions (wow!).  They have Executive awards in the several hundred thousand dollar range.  Smaller awards are ~$1500.  They also have spot awards that anyone can give.  These are $175 or so.  One thing he said about the big awards was that they provided good incentive for people to not leave and work for Facebook or Twitter.

- locate engineering centers near the International Colleagic Award Contest Winners (or something like that – think very smart people)

- managers have up to 50 people reporting to them.  They don’t have staff meetings, but instead do weekly snippets.  They are stored in an internal, public db (as is everything at Google).

- TGIF meetings Friday at 4.  The execs answer employee questions.  When the company got too big for this to be done in person, they started a system where employee questions are submitted electronically and voted on.  They most popular wind up at the top of the list.  He said that isn’t always comfortable, as some of the questions can be difficult to answer.

- iterative design, constant improvement.  They release early and release often.  They must have metioned cloud computing and its advantages 100 times during the presentation.  This was one of them.  Cloud computing allows them to add or remove features anytime they want.

- crazy “org” chart.  not top down, expect people to do the right thing.  don’t dictate technology.  can use macs or pcs, ppt or google docs.

- Internally they use search for everything.  They don’t bother to organize information.

- External sites all run gubuntu, GFS, and Big Table (their DB).  This horizonal platform, purpose built hw, and their massive scale is used by all google apps.  Also, there are UI guidelines but no hard and fast rules.

- They talked about customers not being locked in.  They felt they had to earn people’s trust and their business.  They view competition as a good thing.

- Internal tool called Ideas.  New ideas are entered into the system.  Peopl vote on their favorites.  Engineers work on the top ideas.  Many thigns at google seem to work this way.

- budget time not money

- “cool” projects get the engineers

- when they kill projects they kep them alive for the existing users

- they turn features off if users don’t use them

Since you’ve read this far, I’ll give you a bonus.  Later in the week I had lunch at the Google campus in Mountain View.  I was in a small group meeting with Ivan Ernest, the Head of Global HR, Engineering and Operations. There were a few additional things he shared.

- you can put yourself in for a promotion anytime you want, even if your boss doesn’t agree with it.  They build a “package” of peer reviews of your work and have peers who don’t know you make the decision.

- new hires are often brought in as “MTS” – Members of Technical Staff.  After a year or so their peers provide reviews about them.  Then peers who don’t know them decide what level they should be.  It’s a strange culture for sure, though it seems to be working for them.

- Seems like many many things are voted on, or managed by peer reviews.  An example are their quarterly objectives and key results.  They are done bottoms up with very little tops down input.  Ivan said that Google’s approach was to hire the smartest people they could and then ask them what they should be doing.

A final note.  I had lunch in the Google cafeteria.  It is free for everyone, including me.  The food was great, there was plenty of variety, but there was a certain sense of disorganization to it all.  It was a wonderful trip.

One of my favorite podcasts is This Week in Tech.  Leo Leporte has a style that resonates with me.  He assembles some of the best pontificators around to talk about technology.  One of the regulars on the show is John C. Dvorak. John always has strong opinions about things.

On the show he’s shared that he and his wife have a deli in Port Angeles.  PA is right down the road from Sequim.  I asked Karen if she thought we could find it.  She googled it on her phone and soon we had the address.  I wanted to stop by and say hello and let whoever was there know that I was a fan of John’s work.  We showed up around 3:30 on Saturday.  Turns out they close at 3:00.  I took a picture just to say I was there.

If you happen to read this John, I am not a stalker.  I just wanted to come by and say hello.

As is our habit, we went out counting deer each day in Sequim.  Today we had a bit of extraordinary luck.  Let me explain.  Sequim is a rural town.  It is full of farms and wildlife.  A drive through the country will yield views of llamas, horses, cows, deer, occasional elk, eagles, and other animals.  For years, we’ve gone out in the afternoon looking for deer.  We consistently see them lounging in people’s yards, empty fields, and munching on local shrubery.  Because I’m me, I like to count how many deer we see each time.  Our previous record was 42.

Today we saw 101 deer!

54 Elk and a bunch of swans.

and cows

Our weekend in Sequim was full of sights, food, and fun. We went looking for a good bakery.  The Bell Street Bakery is new and looked promising.

We liked their breads and bought a nice loaf of french bread.  I was disappointed that there weren’t more treats like eclairs, cookies, and other sweets.  The bakery is in a new location though and appears to be growing.  I’m hoping it will add more treats soon.

Sequim is full of old barns, farms, and such.  Here’s one that caught my eye.  It was right next to where we saw a ton of elk, swans, and deer.

Sequim is right by the water.  It’s a truly unique location.  We stopped by the marina to look at some boats.  There was a coast guard safety inspection happening as well as a fishing derby.

I did find a funny sign with a serious message.  This is a great idea.

To celebrate our weekend here, we had dinner at the local mexican restaurant.  Emily took this picture of Karen and me.  She’s getting good at taking pictures.

and finally… we saw a house that caught our eye.  Not in the way you might think though.  This thing is… unique.  I’m starting to understand the need for CC&R’s.

I have a weather station in my back yard.  Its an Oregon Scientific WMR-968 wireless weather station.  It’s already connected to the PC and uploads data every few minutes to a web page and to weather underground.  It uses Virtual Weather Station software. which writes the data to a file, in addition to the internet upload.

I’d like it to twitter the weather every few minutes as well.   Does anyone have any insight into how to go about gettign the weather station to talk with twitter?

I’ve been thinking about a solar powered webcam project.  I’d like to put a webcam up on a hill where there is no power nearby.  When I looked into the project, it doesn’t seem that difficult.  I’d need a few things.

• Solar Panel: Sunforce 50032 15 Watt Panel
• Charge Controller: Sunforce 7 Amp Charge Controller
• Battery: I’m thinking of a motorcycle battery, but am not sure.  Any ideas?
• Webcam: Trendnet TV-IP110W
• Camera Enclosure: Trendnet Outdoor Camera Enclosure
• Inverter: TBD
• An enclosure for the battery: TBD
• Mounting Pole and Hardware

My thought is to have the solar panel mounted to the top of the pole, and the camera enclosure mounted to the same pole.  I’d put the battery and inverter in a waterproof enclosure mounted to a fence nearby.

What’s holding me up at the moment is how to mount the panel, what enclosure to use, and what battery to use.  Any input on this is appreciated.

Finally!  We’ve been meaning to get to Sequim for ages.  We finally made it.  I’m so glad we did.  I’ve mentioned it before but Sequim is one of my favorite places to relax.  This weekend we didn’t do much of anything, except relax.  We did manage to get out of the house one afternoon.  We drove around and counted deer.  We saw 24 of them during our short drive.

Another cool thing about our trip was that we got to try some new recipes.  Helen cooked some delicious food during our visit (she always does).  We now have new recipes for French Toast and Chicken Burritos (using Soup).  We’re planning on having some friends over to try them on.

So what about you?  Where do you relax?

I just hope these icicles don’t fall down and hit someone!