Amazon as experiment

Re:Amazon as experiment by eridius on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @03:46AM (#20572405)

> All of this reminds me of stories about early Google, and how the company systematically rethought everything from first principles. Sometimes this was just a painful waste of time, as it learned the lessons everyone else had already learned, but sometimes the result was Gmail or Maps.

Didn't Gmail start as someone's 20% project, rather than something that was "systematically rethought from first principles"?

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Re:Amazon as experiment by jasode on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @06:20AM (#20573039)

>Didn't Gmail start as someone's 20% project,

Gmail's creator, Paul Buchheit, said it was not a 20% project:

https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/

excerpt: >Gmail is often given as a shining example of the fruits of Google’s 20 percent time, its legendary policy of allowing engineers to divvy off part of their work hours for personal projects. Paul Buchheit, Gmail’s creator, disabused me of this notion. From the very beginning, “it was an official charge,” he says. “I was supposed to build an email thing.”

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Re:Amazon as experiment by irq on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @04:48AM (#20572654)

Why can’t it be both a 20% project and rethought from first principals?

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Re:Amazon as experiment by jimbokun on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @10:51AM (#20574840)

Isn't encouraging employees to systematically rethink things from first principles, one of the core motivations for 20% projects?

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