innovation culture

But the choice of a main programming language is the most important signaling behavior that a technology company can engage in. Tell me that you program in Java, and I believe you to be either serious or boring. In Ruby, and you are interested in building things quickly. In Clojure, and I think you are smart but wonder if you ship. In Python, and I... See more

I once gave a talk to Disney executives about "new ways to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs". For example, set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. Demand golden coins from the geese rather than eggs. Demand platinum rather than gold.... See more

Notably, this theory completely omits the role of the real estate developer, who has a greater influence than anyone else in how a building comes together. Skyscrapers are designed by architects, but it’s the developer who conceives of the project, arranges the funding, hires the design team, and ultimately decides what the building will be. To me,... See more

FDEs tend to write code that gets the job done fast, which usually means – politely – technical debt and hacky workarounds. PD engineers write software that scales cleanly, works for multiple use cases, and doesn’t break. One of the key ‘secrets’ of the company is that generating deep, sustaining enterprise value requires both. BD engineers tend to... See more

What’s going on here is, fairly obviously, some combination of simple old-guy aesthetic NIMBYism (“those massive solar fields”) and right-wing culture wars. The latter has been caused by decades of Americans seeing energy technology as being fundamentally about climate , rather than about energy itself . In a post back in December, I wrote the... See more

As I note in that post, the successful examples of “socialism” that people cite — the Scandinavian societies of today — are actually social democracies. They achieved their mixed economies through a slow evolutionary process that was absolutely nothing like the revolutionary upheavals predicted and advocated by Marx.

Painting and sculpture are now free, inasmuch as anyone may produce any sort of creation and subsequently display it. In architecture, however, this fundamental freedom, which must be regarded as a precondition for any art, does not exist, for a person must first have a diploma in order to build. Why?

Everyone should be able to build, and as long as... See more