Guido at Google

[Alex Martelli]

Bengt Richter <bokr at oz.net> wrote:

> On Thu, 22 Dec 2005 09:07:26 -0800, aleax at mail.comcast.net (Alex Martelli)
> wrote:
> 
> >Renato <renato.ramonda at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> all of the native administration tools of RedHat (all versions) and
> >> Fedora Core are written in python (system-config-* and/or
> >> redhat-config-* ). And even more importantly, yum (the official
> >> software package manager for Fedora and RHEL) and Anaconda (OS
> >> installer) are written in Python, too.
> >
> >BTW, Chip Turner (from RedHat, and deeply involved in those
> >developments) happened to start at Google the same day I did;-).
> >
> So is google about to determine how many luminaries can fit on the head of
> a project? ;-) Seriously, if you heavies do sometimes work on the same
> project, it would be interesting to know what modes of co-operation you
> tend to adopt.

Google's official position (per the article Hal Varian and Eric Schmidt
wrote recently) is that we are a "consensus-oriented culture".  I _have_
worked in companies with consensus-oriented cultures, such as IBM in the
'80s (where it sometimes paralized everything, since one manager's
"non-concur" was enough to block progress on a project), and I would
respectfully disagree (on this point only -- the rest of their article
is quite consonant with my personal experiences) with our beloved leader
and our most excellent advisor.  I would say we're a *results-oriented*
corporate culture... sometimes egos may get bruised, but we're all
supposed to have small-enough, resilient-enough egos to survive and
remain happy and productive anyway;-).  Check the xooglers' blog for
others' opinions...


Alex