Re:We Need More ‘Useless’ Knowledge
by nostrademons on Monday March 06, 2017 @03:19PM
(#13805721)
I think it's somewhat unfortunate how people have come to associate "startup" with "pitching". Basically 0% of the great technology companies have come out of a businessman pitching a VC on an idea they just had. Rather, it's usually a technologist who builds something, gets a few hundred of his friends to use it, and then happens to meet a VC who says "Look, if you took our capital, your hundreds of users could be billions."
You do have to be really ruthless about what features you cut from v1 of the product for this to work, though, and you have to be somewhat unorthodox about problem selection.
As for freedom - you actually do have freedom to work on whatever you want at work, and this applies to most corporations, not just Google and its 20% time. Most employers would actually rather that you take full ownership of getting the task done, and give them a better outcome rather than blind obedience. The problem is that with freedom comes responsibility. As long as you do exactly what your boss tells you to, you can't be blamed when things go wrong. If you do something additional or contravene your boss's orders, they will usually not mind as long as it works out better than expected. Your boss will usually be happy to claim credit for it, and if you're lucky, you may even end up with a promotion & a raise. But if it works out poorly and your boss has to clean up the mess, you're going to get fired. As long as you're willing to take responsibility for getting fired, you can do whatever you want at work.
I feel like a lot of my effectiveness at Google (and that of many of the coworkers who I considered effective) was that I was willing to get fired. And when, after 5 years there, I felt myself getting a little complacent and hewing a little too closely to the party line, I quit. You still have agency as a human being, even in a big company.
You do have to be really ruthless about what features you cut from v1 of the product for this to work, though, and you have to be somewhat unorthodox about problem selection.
As for freedom - you actually do have freedom to work on whatever you want at work, and this applies to most corporations, not just Google and its 20% time. Most employers would actually rather that you take full ownership of getting the task done, and give them a better outcome rather than blind obedience. The problem is that with freedom comes responsibility. As long as you do exactly what your boss tells you to, you can't be blamed when things go wrong. If you do something additional or contravene your boss's orders, they will usually not mind as long as it works out better than expected. Your boss will usually be happy to claim credit for it, and if you're lucky, you may even end up with a promotion & a raise. But if it works out poorly and your boss has to clean up the mess, you're going to get fired. As long as you're willing to take responsibility for getting fired, you can do whatever you want at work.
I feel like a lot of my effectiveness at Google (and that of many of the coworkers who I considered effective) was that I was willing to get fired. And when, after 5 years there, I felt myself getting a little complacent and hewing a little too closely to the party line, I quit. You still have agency as a human being, even in a big company.