Evaluating the effectiveness of Google's “Testing on the Toilet” program [pdf]

[dang]

Scientific papers are gradually partaking from the stash of clickbait title tricks. We've edited the one above to make it less activating.

If you post in this thread, can you please check that it's about the interesting aspects of the article? Poop jokes get old pretty quickly.

[jedberg]

For those that don't want to read the article, it is about the program Google has to post little newsletters about programming tools in their bathrooms. They hang them over the urinals too.

I was at Google for an event recently and found it interesting to read as I used the urinal. It was about an internal tool though so it didn't mean much to me.

[btrettel]

At the University of Texas at Austin they have a "Lavatory Safety Update" that's usually posted at eye level above the urinals. It discusses lab safety related issues.

[birdyrooster]

Facebook seems to do this also.

[imafish]

Most of my best thinking at work happens on the toilet.

Don’t know exactly what I should take from that. Except that probably something is wrong about open plan offices.

[blarg1]

That and the shower.

[OneMoreGoogler]

I saw these during my 18 months at Google. They were never relevant to my work.

Working at Google you are bombarded with "nudges." The garbage cans have stop smoking signs. The plentiful candy is famously placed into jars to reduce consumption. There's signs telling you not to sit on the loo for too long. You'll get emails comparing your travel and server expenses to the average. All of this stuff is well-intentioned, but there's clearly part of the company seeking ways to manipulate its workforce.

[nine_k]

During my ~60 months inside Google, these nuggets sometimes proved to be useful, telling about a newly available tools (e.g screenshot diffing in UI tests), common pitfalls (like mixing up dates from different systems with and without timezone), common best practices (don't use `now()` in test, instead, imitate the flow of time using...). These are just off the top of my head after several years outside Google.

Nothing mind-blowing or earth-shattering. A number of useful things to learn at these 30-60 seconds when you can't read anything more interesting, though.

[ipsum2]

Another one is hiding the unhealthy drinks (e.g. soda) behind frosted glass in the fridge, so you can't see it. Kind of silly, in my opinion. Googlers are presumably adults, and can make their own decisions on what to consume.

[jrockway]

Yes, we must free ourselves from the oppression of writing unit tests and having a tool auto-indent our code! How brave to take such a noble stand on this controversial issue!

[quux]

I was at Google for 2 years and liked "Testing on the Toilet" plus it's spinoffs "Programming on the Potty" and "Localization on the Loo" pretty useful. Especially for someone like me who came from much smaller companies where a lot of best practices or tools they wrote don't exist.

[jdoliner]

This is the closest we're going to get on HN to a shitpost. Speaking personally: I know one developer who discovers lots of new tools on the toilet: me.

[benbristow]

I used to work in the head-office of a well-known car dealership firm in the UK. In the bathrooms they had a quote along the lines of 'the best ideas come when we least expect them'.

I found that I ended up thinking more about that quote than coming up with ideas. Kind of counter-intuitive.

[lez]

I understand we're all different, but I prefer to clear my mind on the toilet.

[SmellyOnions]

All I'm imagining right now is some posters promoting some tool/library beside those mental health awareness posters you usually see in the stall...

[madengr]

I miss bathroom humor scribbled on the wall, such as:

What are you laughing at? The joke is in your hand.

[m3kw9]

You misspelled Stools

[imhelpingu]

The title is "Do Developers Discover New Tools On The Toilet?" but an overbearing mod changed it because he thinks he's Etiquette Secretary of the Internet, and probably also so he can plausibly pretend this isn't a website dedicated to Alphabet's PR.