Comments on: Good Agile, Bad Agile http://pliantalliance.org/2006/09/28/good-agile-bad-agile/ Think. Evaluate. Change. Tue, 06 Jan 2009 06:04:28 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7 hourly 1 By: benoit http://pliantalliance.org/2006/09/28/good-agile-bad-agile/comment-page-1/#comment-206 benoit Fri, 29 Sep 2006 02:34:15 +0000 http://pliantalliance.org/?p=52#comment-206 What I find really interesting about this is that even though he goes on about how many incentives there are at Google and how that drives people to produce, I think the real strength of Google (and any "Google agile") is having the right people. If you have people who are in this business for the love of it, they are going to want to solve the hard problems. They are going to work on those problems as much as they can, and they will be solved as fast as they can. This is not something that is really easy to measure, plan for, or even track. This doens't mean that those people have to be coding all the time, but they will be the type of people that even if they are at home spending quality time with the kids, and doing a good job with the whole work/life balance thing, if they have a revelation about a problem in the middle of the night, they are at least going to write it down. I think the REAL thing that the monetary incentives do at Google is allow them to attract the type of people they want away from whatever it is they are doing right now. What I find really interesting about this is that even though he goes on about how many incentives there are at Google and how that drives people to produce, I think the real strength of Google (and any “Google agile”) is having the right people. If you have people who are in this business for the love of it, they are going to want to solve the hard problems. They are going to work on those problems as much as they can, and they will be solved as fast as they can. This is not something that is really easy to measure, plan for, or even track.

This doens’t mean that those people have to be coding all the time, but they will be the type of people that even if they are at home spending quality time with the kids, and doing a good job with the whole work/life balance thing, if they have a revelation about a problem in the middle of the night, they are at least going to write it down.

I think the REAL thing that the monetary incentives do at Google is allow them to attract the type of people they want away from whatever it is they are doing right now.

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