Graham: Creativeness, Roles and Companies

Paul Graham is a great writer and has written many great essays. His most recent makes the argument that humans are "naturally" suited to not having bosses and not working in large companies (he talks about the difficulties of groups over 8 people). I agree that there are many downsides to working at companies and I could certainly write about the upsides and why I love what I'm doing at Google, but that wouldn't really be disagreeing with Paul. I don't take him to be saying that starting your own company is always better, just that you should be aware that organizations of greater than 8 people have a cost that should be taken into account. He talks about it as being a "restrictiveness" that takes toll on creativity and says that it is a particular problem for engineers. Which brings us to his dismissal of why others won't feel the pinch:
"The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things. Sales people make much the same pitches every day; support people answer much the same questions; but once you've written a piece of code you don't need to write it again. So a programmer working as programmers are meant to is always making new things. And when you're part of an organization whose structure gives each person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the tree, you're going to face resistance when you do something new."
I don't agree with this characterization of programmers as more creative than others. It is true that you never have to write the same code again (though how many times have you written authentication or a wrapper around an authentication class) but that doesn't mean that everything you write flows out of a brand new non-linear creative endeavour any more than a sales person's pitch is entirely new. Sales people sell services that have never existed (and then they get engineers to code this selling process into an online flow and move on to selling new stuff). Support folks get entirely new questions all the time (and then get engineers to code a system for responding to the easy stuff in an automated way). These folks that Paul singles out as being less restricted (or less "meant" to create) do all sorts of breathtaking new things too. I've seen support folks handle a very angry person with an issue with a brand new type of product by creating solution to the user's problem and explaining it in a way that is brilliant. I've seen sales folk come up with entirely new types of business arrangements or finding an elegant "in" to a relationship. It is certainly true that both of these groups do a bunch of work that is less creative, but so do engineers, even at startups (gasp!). These are the things that follow the creative move, things like debugging, unit testing, perfecting UI, etc. A good startup as well as a good big company, will value creation (and the stuff after the creation) in all of its people, not just the ones that are from Paul's chosen tribe.

No-Knead Bread

Wow. I've been trying to make really good bread for many years with only mediocre bread as a result. About two years ago I clipped a great New York Times article about a fabulous new bread recipe. Unfortunately I didn't get the time to actually try the recipe until this past Christmas. And it is everything many people have described it as. Easy. Magnificent. Hard to screw up. Tasty. Moist. Fantastic. Mmmmm.

Since Christmas I have made it about seven times and I continue to be amazed by it. Now I've begun to try some modifications, but it has been hard to improve on the original. The basic trick is to use a very straightforward recipe (3cups flour, 1/4tsp yeast, 1 1/2cups water, stir together, let sit for 20hrs, fold down, let sit for two hours and then bake) with lots of water (when you fold the bread it will almost run through your fingers) lots of time (the first "sitting" is supposed to be at least 18hrs, but I have had good results with 24-30hrs) and a preheated dutch oven to bake (you bake in a covered pot that has been preheated with the oven to 450F, covered for 30mins and then uncovered for 20-30mins). Really, really simple recipe. Total working time (other than waiting) of about 15mins (including cleanup). And, really really good.

You should try it too. It will change the way you think about making bread. In case you need more encouragement, here is a video and flickr stream showing the results.

Photo by Alex.Lines

Update: I diverge from the recipe in two small ways. First, I use a bowl with plastic cling wrap for both of the risings (not cloth, which I have found to stick to the bread even when coated with flour) and I use parchment paper under the bread in the last rising so that I can easily pick it up and toss it into the hot pot. I tend to put the parchment paper in with the bread, though that doesn't make much of a difference either way, I just find it easier.

Larry and Sergey Interview

A good interview of Larry Page and Sergey Brin (the two founders of Google) being themselves. I particularly like what I can only assume to be Larry making a "swoosh" sound to connote javascript and flash flying around at 16:03.

In Defense of Alpha Flight

My co-worker Mike slams the Canadian superhero team Alpha Flight as not ready for a feature length movie. Perhaps I am biased (being both Canadian and American and a big fan of the original Alpha Flight comics) but I would welcome an Alpha Flight film. That comic had depth and great characters. I'd also remind Mike that Wolverine, a part-creation of the Canadian government and one-time member of Alpha Flight, has already been seen in three X-Men movies (and those movies would have been much worse without him).

TSA "Dressing the Part"

Coming home from Emerging Technologies (great conference), saw this flyer at the airport. In case you can't read it, it says: "TSA [the Transportation Security Administration] Thanks you for packing smart, dressing the part and being set to go." I am curious about what the TSA means by "dressing the part." The flyer doesn't give any clues, it just lists some things to pack and not. A quick search for TSA and "dressing the part" on Google reveals a helpful hint from travel agents Carlson Wagonlit: "Appearance matters [-]
Dressing the part also helps as more expensive tickets often correlate to senior-level executives. Business casual attire is likely fine but not jeans."
I'm sure that's not what the TSA means by "dressing the part." But... what do they mean?

Law Firm Hell

This harrowing essay about NYC Big Law Firm life (or lack thereof) is a must read. Forman writes:

"The big firm I worked at was-- like all big New York law firms--a cultural oddity. It combined aspects of the boarding school I had attended in England with the political climate of the former Soviet Union. Like school it was a nightmare world of irrational hierarchies, institutionalized bullying, and overwhelming peer pressure. Like the bad old USSR it combined grotesque inefficiency with a culture of Orwellian surveillance, universal distrust, shameless sucking up, and constant dishonesty. High ideals were honored only in the breach. Capricious tyrants roamed the hallways, the terrifying reality behind the movie The Revenge of the Nerds. Those who flourished in the system were almost always monsters, twisted into Balzacian shapes by the struggle for power. The office was a petri dish for the growth of abnormal psychologies."

[via MyShingle]

Fred Raogers RIP

Mr. Rogers died today. On top of everything he meant to many former children, he was also not afraid to speak out against other powerful interests in his industry. Bernard Hibbits pays him good tribute by quoting from the Sony v. University City Studios, 464 U.S. 417 (1984) opinion:

Fred Rogers [is] president of the corporation that produces and owns the copyright on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. The program is carried by more public television stations than any other program. Its audience numbers over 3,000,000 families a day. He testified [at trial] that he had absolutely no objection to home taping for noncommercial use and expressed the opinion that it is a real service to families to be able to record children's programs and to show them at appropriate times. If there are millions of owners of VTR's [video tape recorders] who make copies of televised sports events, religious broadcasts, and educational programs such as Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, and if the proprietors of those programs welcome the practice, the business of supplying the equipment that makes such copying feasible should not be stifled simply because the equipment is used by some individuals to make unauthorized reproductions of respondents' works.

May he rest in peace

Klineman on Felten

“An awful lot of invention happens because of people messing around with stuff,” [Felten] says. “If you read a textbook about science or engineering, it presents a view that everything advanced in a fairly logical way from the beginning. It leaves out the tremendous amount of exploration, blind alleys, and messing around that actually got you there.”

Jeff Klineman (freelancer and prince among men) has an article about Ed Felten for the Princeton Alumni Weekly. You should read it.

Aggregator at blogs.law.harvard.edu

Dave Winer describes the new blogs.law.harvard.edu news aggregator. "So I spent some time yesterday creating a prototype for something that I'd like to add to Manila, as a gift, no need to pay me -- an aggregator at the community level. " Welcome to the Berkman Center Dave, this is what we do (and one of the reasons why you are a good fit).

In many ways, I think this project is as important as encouraging Harvard to blog. One of the incredible things about school is that there is a huge sense of cultural cohesiveness (meaning that we all have a shared context from which to draw) AND a sense of wonder at each other's differences. Aggregators really help there because the create an easier way of gathering a community's context. Also, because aggregators help present more tidbits per minute, they allow users to keep up on many different sites which might include many different points of view (though Andrew Shapiro may disagree). I aggregate many sites with which I do not agree and find the experience wonderful. As a story or meme breaks, commentary naturally occurs from many different points of view in my aggregator. Usually the commentary helps me to understand the story or meme. Often it presents me with a new way of seeing the story or meme.

Jurist Paper Chase

Yeah! I just noticed the Jurist, Bernard Hibbitts' Web Log (uPitt Law School), has an rss feed. That rocks. Plus, I am very happy to be on their list of best lawyer blawgs!

Tversky on Basketball

Stuart Buck puts Amos Tversky's and Thomas Gilovich's timeless hot hands article (here is a follow-up also by Tversky and Gilovich and discussing the same data in Chance) back in play at Stuart's great The Buck Stops Here web log.

Stuart says of a 17 in a row three-point streak he once shot:

Perhaps you could say that it was chance that all of those factors came together at that moment -- but still, if I had been in a game right then, my teammates would have been wise to pass the ball my way, Tversky notwithstanding.

And, that is precisely what Tversky is saying is not true.

My take on it:

1. People who believe in hot hands think that they can see Stuart's 17 3-point streak in progress and pass it to you. The most basic point Tversky et al are making is that that is not true in a statistical sense. No previous shot's success or failure better predicts the next over a player's overall success or failure.


2. Tversky et al are not making any comment on hot hands as a feeling you might get or even as a cause of anything in particular. It is possible that "hot hands" exists but is counter-acted exactly by some other phenomena.


3. Tversky (and Kahneman) are interested in how people make decisions and judgments under uncertainty. Subjective evaluation of probabilities is one of their focuses. (see 1).

This article always provokes good discussion, so let's have at it!