Google, Engineers, and Some Push Back
July 27, 2011
Frankly we love engineers. The more technical, the stronger our affinity becomes. We found the techno-pundit, Robert X. Cringely catching our attention with a write up called “Google’s Biggest Problem: It’s Too Rational.” Why so much animosity to the don’t-be-evil crowd?
Writer Robert X. Cringely points to former Google employee number 59, Douglas Edwards, who insists that management suffers a logical disconnect from the rest of the world that keeps them from effectively addressing, or even recognizing, problems. Edwards cites Gmail privacy concerns as an example.
Cringely isn’t just focusing on Google, though. He has similar gripes with other large businesses, like Facebook and Microsoft. He opines:
What do these companies have in common? They were all founded and run by engineers. . . . In my experience, engineers tend to divide the world into two camps: other engineers and everyone else. And the second camp doesn’t matter because they refuse to read instruction manuals. That’s the attitude Google, Facebook, and so on bring to the table. They know that the world is mostly made up of non-engineers, and they have to accommodate them — but they don’t like it very much, and they often don’t do a good job of it. That’s where these companies fall down.
On the other hand, Cringely believes that Apple has more successful customer interactions because Steve Jobs is not an engineer. Hmm. Does he have a point?
No, our view is that engineers have “won”. The losers are art history majors, failed journalists, and unemployed search engine optimization experts. Google and a handful of other companies have become monopolies because each of these favored outfits are where the action is. Other reasons why Mr. Edwards and other critics of engineers find life tough in the intellectual play ground of a company of the Google ilk include:
- If you can figure something out, you are a loser
- If you want to own a jet with a water bed, you need to look for the logical errors in Parallel Reduction in Resource Lambda-Calculus by Michele Pagani and Paolo Tranquiili
- If you expect to survive in the post-PC world, you better learn how to program. If you code in Assembler, you don’t need to comment your code. Google-types can figure it out.
The era of the digital amateur is upon us. The technically adept inhabit Mt. Olympus. Get over it and adapt. Then again maybe those popular kids in high school are going out Friday night? Nah, who cares? I have work to do.
Stephen E Arnold, July 27, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
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