>Let's ignore the underlying platforms that originally made them: search, ads, and arguably GMail for Google; and reaching critical mass on the social graph and ads for Facebook. Those were developed long before the developer culture we're discussing here.
Huh? Do you think they started out as straight-laced businesses with traditional project managers, and then arbitrarily decided to get rid of them after they became successful? Their cultures were always like this; did you see the recent story here on how Facebook was in its 30-person days?
Do you think they started out as straight-laced businesses with traditional project managers, and then arbitrarily decided to get rid of them after they became successful?
No, I think they each started out with one good idea that they executed well enough and I think each also had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time. They made great successes out of their respective founders' big ideas and their first funding rounds, but that was nearly a decade ago in Facebook's case and well over that for Google.
Today, these organisations have been considered among the most desirable employers for many of the best and brightest software developers of a generation. They have more money than they know what to do with because of those original successes, and they have thousands of very smart people working for them. No-one can credibly claim that they don't have vast and talented software development teams.
And yet, neither has produced an industry-shaking development in several years, never mind creating any new markets, and their original successes continue to bring in by far the lion's share of their revenues. I don't see how you can blame that on anything other than a lack of leadership and vision from the other parts of the organisation. The people who are supposed to be guiding and nurturing and co-ordinating just don't seem to be there, and it seems they're still trying to operate like that 30-person organisation, just scaled up by an order of magnitude or three.
Huh? Do you think they started out as straight-laced businesses with traditional project managers, and then arbitrarily decided to get rid of them after they became successful? Their cultures were always like this; did you see the recent story here on how Facebook was in its 30-person days?