You have to careful with this. Really really careful. The status reports can be sign of a broken company - and in a broken company they are used for politics and other gains in the worst possible way. And sometime reports will make a good company into a broken company (I saw it with my own eyes).
Furthermore, please understand that for many types of positions the snippets will not work very well because work on hard problems is then discouraged (causing low quality code).
In short, I don't think TPS reports are the key of Silicon Valley's productivity...
It's basically formalizing what happens naturally when you still have a small, physically colocated team. (Of course, most methods are.)
And like all formalizations, it's not so much the method but the people and how they deal with it that determines its success. All formal methods, no matter how lightweight, can become sheer bureaucracy if they become detached from their original intent, and I'm already seeing anecdotal evidence (including from inside Google!) in this discussion that "snippets" is no different.
It's all about communication. If your no longer deliberately communicating something and getting valuable feedback, alarm bells should go off. Always keep asking "why?".
I always kind of assumed that most developers who work at these Google-level places automatically reflect without a specific process to force it, but maybe I'm just projecting.
Personally, I have a hard time stopping myself from reflecting on the code I've just written and the code I'm currently planning to the point where it is almost a social problem. (eg. my girlfriend will be telling me about her day and in the back of my head my brain is rewriting some code I actually wrote in an editor earlier to be simpler and more efficient... great for my productivity, bad for my relationships).
We do this at Xamarin. Every employee sends an email to the entire company first thing Monday morning, containing their A&Os (Achievements and Objectives).
We're a very distributed team and A&Os are one of the ways we keep everyone in touch.
Also, doing this Monday morning is pretty important -- it means people focus on planning the upcoming week, instead of just summarizing the week that ended. Having a time every week where you set goals for yourself, and then communicate them to all your peers, seems to be pretty effective. And one benefit of having these emails go out to the whole company is that everyone can read them and comment on what people are planning, before the work starts.
A missing ingredient here is that the snippet/update/whatever system needs to be policed by the CEO as the ONLY way such data can be collected. It doesn't work if eight levels of managers across three teams each decide they want the same "just five minutes per week!" updates in 16 different formats in constantly shifting docs/apps/styles.
Of course they don't mention how annoying writing snippets can be (although I agree they are a good way for an individual to remember what they've done). They also don't mention that you can tell who is 'in' at Google and who isn't by the fact that they haven't written a new snippet in over a year.
Can you elaborate for those of us who aren't Googlers? Why are they annoying? If you write new snippets every week, how can you not write new snippets for a year? Is it the "in" people who haven't written new snippets for a year, or the "isn't in" people?
Mondrian has a feature that lets you automatically generate a snippet e-mail based on the CLs you've mailed off, submitted, and reviewed in a given week.
In true "D'oh!" fashion, I didn't find out about this feature until a month before Snippets were discontinued.
I think that the article is identifying just one little secret, and not necessarily an important one.
There is a lot of reasons why silicon valley is productive, one for all is that most people with decisional power are also expert in the field.
Certainly if you plot the percentage of managers that are competent (with possibly degrees) in the field between silicon valley companies and startup compared to all the rest of the world, I'm sure that managers or CEOs with just MBAs are less present in the Silicon Valley than in other areas.
But I still think that the main reason for the productivity in the Silicon Valley is that the people are in general good and most companies and startups aren't just dinosaurs that need $M's a year in consulting services to make any changes or improve their results.
The consulting companies themselves are dinosaurs, which is one of the reasons there is a discrete number of startups that are attempting to create new ways of performing consulting.
It seems that this could be misused for politics in the worst possible way since ones measure of ones performance is inherently subjective (even writing a simple 'I did X' you might omit or forget collaborations with colleagues etc).
It could be that I'm Swedish but I'm not sure I'd enjoy this at all. At our shop we do weekly retrospectives. A session about 30 minutes to end fridays with where each team sits down (about 4 ppl/team) and talk through the week and their efforts and measurable ways to improve next week and long term. This then gets logged. Fairly standard scrum/agile stuff.
Of course this shifts the focus from individual to team, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing?
I really like this idea. Does anyone know of a project that implements this? I did an initial search but nothing turned up but it'd probably be easy to miss it. In a way it reminds me of Rands' trickle concept of keeping track of work done so that one's status/log is easily generated. It'd be pretty easy to link this into other sources to add details automagically as well(e.g. GitHub check-ins come to mind).
Hey, actually you can try our implementation at http://iDoneThis.com (author of the post here). We have a team thing we're rolling out and this post was in part to gauge interest.
I would be hard-pressed to believe that if some company in some backwaters place just implemented snippets, then they would be as productive as engineers in Silicon Valley.
What makes Silicon Valley is the whole package. There's a critical mass of technical talent. You run into techies everywhere; a techie here feels _at home_. You (the techie) are the "in crowd". This is your bastion; your playground. You are no longer a misfit, being picked on by jocks; here, _you_ are the mainstream. This is why techies love being here, and because they're happy, they are more productive.
That's the conclusion I've come to, after 6 years here.
Interesting, sending daily/weekly reports is default behavior at Japanese companies (where doing busywork is actually a good thing sometimes, since it seems that there are many zombie companies that get funding just for the sake of having people employed), so I'm surprised to see this practice considered so highly in the context of the Valley. Though I'm suspicious that this practice would be a secret itself, it seems so basic that it must be written on a textbook somewhere. e.g. "give importance to communication", "it's a ritual", etc...
I've always found this (daily update w/ tomorrow's plans) to be a great way to work as a contractor as well. You demonstrate that you're productive (usually much more so than employees) and future planning helps you uncover additional work to pitch to your client.
It's done elsewhere too, at least quite similarly. Where I experienced this heavily is quite far away from technology—I was a missionary for the LDS church in the Philippines.
Every day we have a daily planning session (30mins) at night where we set goals and make plans for the next day. Once a week we have a weekly planning session (2-3hours) where we set goals and make plans for the next 7 days.
The main thing that is similar to this story is that every week we would write a letter to the mission president (Basically, someone who is in charge of all the missionaries in one area, mine being three islands in the Philippines) where we wrote down how the week went, good things, challenges, if we achieved our goals, questions and what we planned to do next week.
The planning/organisation/goal setting/GTD I learnt have stuck with me since and I still do daily/weekly planning and goal setting for work, university study, personal projects, etc.
I remember Raph Koster (MMORPG designer) blogging years ago about something like this, where once a week - Sunday evenings, maybe? - he sat down with his child and made plans for what he wanted to accomplish this week. While it didn't go so far as to inform his team, it did encompass the idea of sharing it with someone else who'll help to keep you accountable.
That has even more value, perhaps, than the meta-cognition of thinking about what you need to think about.
http://Assembla.com offers this in the form of a StandUp report which provides a simple web-based form that you fill our for what you did last day/week, what you will do today/this week, any questions or road blocks that need to be addressed.
We use them daily to ensure that everyone is working on the correct priorities and to see if anyone has any roadblocks or questions that someone on the team can help with. Some companies do them once or twice a week. Either way, its a great way to simply know who is working on what and who needs help. These standup reports are part of the Assembla workspaces but they also offer them as a free standalone tool at http://offers.assembla.com/standup
The process of self-reflection multiplies my own motivation.
I noticed a big change in the way I work and how successful I feel after I started keeping a daily journal. My focus was not directly on productivity, but I wanted to see where my time had been going on the days where I have multi-hour lapses which seem to produce nothing.
On a typical day, I type 500 words to describe the 2 or 3 most significant moments / insights which happened that day. I also note ideas, people I meet, and more mundane things (ex. how much sleep I got) in less detail.
I write mine in the iPhone Notes app since it's already with me all the time. (I'm now designing an app which will extend the concept a step further to aggregate some of this info in more useful ways without sacrificing the convenience of one big text area for input.)
At previous jobs, I've always kept a journal.txt record of what I worked on from day to day, so translating that to snippets at Google wasn't really anything new or annoying (disclaimer: I've been here about 6 months).
Personally, I think it's great to get the automated email every week with what the rest of the team has been doing, and you can setup snippet reports for other teams you collaborate with as well.
These days, I'm using DayOne (http://dayoneapp.com) which make it trivial to type F5 + "met with Bob about new <mumble> for the <mumble>. He said it'll be ready on Friday". Then, at the end of the week (usually on the Friday afternoon shuttle), I just read through and cherry-pick the larger items for my snippets.
[+] [-] tlogan|14 years ago|reply
Furthermore, please understand that for many types of positions the snippets will not work very well because work on hard problems is then discouraged (causing low quality code).
In short, I don't think TPS reports are the key of Silicon Valley's productivity...
YMMV
[+] [-] rickmb|14 years ago|reply
And like all formalizations, it's not so much the method but the people and how they deal with it that determines its success. All formal methods, no matter how lightweight, can become sheer bureaucracy if they become detached from their original intent, and I'm already seeing anecdotal evidence (including from inside Google!) in this discussion that "snippets" is no different.
It's all about communication. If your no longer deliberately communicating something and getting valuable feedback, alarm bells should go off. Always keep asking "why?".
[+] [-] georgemcbay|14 years ago|reply
Personally, I have a hard time stopping myself from reflecting on the code I've just written and the code I'm currently planning to the point where it is almost a social problem. (eg. my girlfriend will be telling me about her day and in the back of my head my brain is rewriting some code I actually wrote in an editor earlier to be simpler and more efficient... great for my productivity, bad for my relationships).
[+] [-] natfriedman|14 years ago|reply
We're a very distributed team and A&Os are one of the ways we keep everyone in touch.
Also, doing this Monday morning is pretty important -- it means people focus on planning the upcoming week, instead of just summarizing the week that ended. Having a time every week where you set goals for yourself, and then communicate them to all your peers, seems to be pretty effective. And one benefit of having these emails go out to the whole company is that everyone can read them and comment on what people are planning, before the work starts.
[+] [-] gbhn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kragen|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostrademons|14 years ago|reply
In true "D'oh!" fashion, I didn't find out about this feature until a month before Snippets were discontinued.
[+] [-] spindritf|14 years ago|reply
As in who still works there? Who is really important? Or who is doing interesting projects? What does 'in' mean in this context?
[+] [-] RuggeroAltair|14 years ago|reply
There is a lot of reasons why silicon valley is productive, one for all is that most people with decisional power are also expert in the field.
Certainly if you plot the percentage of managers that are competent (with possibly degrees) in the field between silicon valley companies and startup compared to all the rest of the world, I'm sure that managers or CEOs with just MBAs are less present in the Silicon Valley than in other areas.
But I still think that the main reason for the productivity in the Silicon Valley is that the people are in general good and most companies and startups aren't just dinosaurs that need $M's a year in consulting services to make any changes or improve their results.
The consulting companies themselves are dinosaurs, which is one of the reasons there is a discrete number of startups that are attempting to create new ways of performing consulting.
[+] [-] akkartik|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irollboozers|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcusf|14 years ago|reply
It could be that I'm Swedish but I'm not sure I'd enjoy this at all. At our shop we do weekly retrospectives. A session about 30 minutes to end fridays with where each team sits down (about 4 ppl/team) and talk through the week and their efforts and measurable ways to improve next week and long term. This then gets logged. Fairly standard scrum/agile stuff.
Of course this shifts the focus from individual to team, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing?
[+] [-] SystemOut|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evmw|14 years ago|reply
We later ran across another implementation of snippets here: https://github.com/kushal/snippets
[+] [-] loschorts|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krakensden|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keeptrying|14 years ago|reply
At my previous company, where we had to give a report for the 8 hours of every day, my reports were one word in length and usually the same word:
"working"
If everyone in your company has to do this what ends up happening is no one reads these so people just stop putting useful info in these "work notes".
Whats needed is communication and FEEDBACK... thats wehere most companies get it wrong.
[+] [-] ajays|14 years ago|reply
What makes Silicon Valley is the whole package. There's a critical mass of technical talent. You run into techies everywhere; a techie here feels _at home_. You (the techie) are the "in crowd". This is your bastion; your playground. You are no longer a misfit, being picked on by jocks; here, _you_ are the mainstream. This is why techies love being here, and because they're happy, they are more productive.
That's the conclusion I've come to, after 6 years here.
[+] [-] jes5199|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] altxwally|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] richcollins|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dorian-graph|14 years ago|reply
Every day we have a daily planning session (30mins) at night where we set goals and make plans for the next day. Once a week we have a weekly planning session (2-3hours) where we set goals and make plans for the next 7 days.
The main thing that is similar to this story is that every week we would write a letter to the mission president (Basically, someone who is in charge of all the missionaries in one area, mine being three islands in the Philippines) where we wrote down how the week went, good things, challenges, if we achieved our goals, questions and what we planned to do next week.
The planning/organisation/goal setting/GTD I learnt have stuck with me since and I still do daily/weekly planning and goal setting for work, university study, personal projects, etc.
[+] [-] kylemaxwell|14 years ago|reply
That has even more value, perhaps, than the meta-cognition of thinking about what you need to think about.
[+] [-] adamfeber|14 years ago|reply
We use them daily to ensure that everyone is working on the correct priorities and to see if anyone has any roadblocks or questions that someone on the team can help with. Some companies do them once or twice a week. Either way, its a great way to simply know who is working on what and who needs help. These standup reports are part of the Assembla workspaces but they also offer them as a free standalone tool at http://offers.assembla.com/standup
[+] [-] tedmiston|14 years ago|reply
I noticed a big change in the way I work and how successful I feel after I started keeping a daily journal. My focus was not directly on productivity, but I wanted to see where my time had been going on the days where I have multi-hour lapses which seem to produce nothing.
On a typical day, I type 500 words to describe the 2 or 3 most significant moments / insights which happened that day. I also note ideas, people I meet, and more mundane things (ex. how much sleep I got) in less detail.
I write mine in the iPhone Notes app since it's already with me all the time. (I'm now designing an app which will extend the concept a step further to aggregate some of this info in more useful ways without sacrificing the convenience of one big text area for input.)
[+] [-] packetslave|14 years ago|reply
Personally, I think it's great to get the automated email every week with what the rest of the team has been doing, and you can setup snippet reports for other teams you collaborate with as well.
These days, I'm using DayOne (http://dayoneapp.com) which make it trivial to type F5 + "met with Bob about new <mumble> for the <mumble>. He said it'll be ready on Friday". Then, at the end of the week (usually on the Friday afternoon shuttle), I just read through and cherry-pick the larger items for my snippets.