Michael, I don't mean to be disrespectful -- I've enjoyed your comments a lot on HN, and find them to be incredibly insightful -- but I feel like you're beating a dead horse with your Google vitriol.
If this was reddit, I totally would have posted "In b4 michaelochurch" when I read this article. His commentary on it was inevitable.
What I thought was interesting was that the blog post said that a sense of mission and personal autonomy was key, which sure sounds like it would feed into Michael's crusade for open allocation.
But then Googlers post here and seem to say that Google doesn't actually rank those traits highly. Which seems to back up his point.
I don't know the truth of it, and don't really care very much since I don't plan to work at Google, but it's an interesting discussion nonetheless.
The cultural war on closed allocation is the only trillion-dollar problem in the world that I have any power whatsoever to influence (not much, but I have a voice). Attacking Google-- exposing its closed allocation as a catastrophe that destroyed what could have been an amazing company-- is part of the campaign.
How to structure a software workplace properly is the only trillion-dollar issue on which I'm a world-class expert, and probably the only such one in my life. So yes, I do tend to be a bit overfocused on that problem domain.
Let's start with the fact that open allocation (not a concept I invented, but one that I've advocated with extreme vigor and, to a large degree, popularized; and I did come up with the term "open allocation") is in force or under active exploration at pretty much every company where the talented engineers want to work, and that closed-allocation companies fall into mediocrity and develop retention problems through a process that I've discovered and documented with extreme precision, including on my blog.
I'm sure there are a couple people who know more than I do-- perhaps the CEO of Valve and that company's chief economist-- but it's pretty obvious that I'm on the short list right now. When it comes to setting up the culture for a technology company, I'm one of the few people who actually knows how to do it right.
>How to structure a software workplace properly is the only trillion-dollar issue on which I'm a world-class expert, and probably the only such one in my life.
Kind of reminded me of Zuckerberg's quote: "I don't really need any money. And anyway, I don't think I'm ever going to have an idea this good again."
well, actually trillion dollar questions are a result of how the us economy works, not really a global statement(though the us wish it was). that aside i tend to agree.
