High output management (Andy Grove) is a classic that I've found a lot of value from over the years — written in the 80s and shows its age here and there, but otherwise good for the fundamentals: https://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/d...
This is (unfortunately) great advice for large companies like Google, MSFT, Meta, where the internal mechanics of vying for and achieving promotion tend to drive behavior. Promo packets, calibration sessions, etc. OTOH, this is not good advice for any organization that maintains the capacity to (1) recognize and (2) value great work on merit. Better to spend your mental energy on doing something you and your colleagues deeply value, towards some shared goal.
Peddl makes selling as easy as snapping a photo. With the push of a button, Peddl automatically prices and categorizes whatever it is you’re selling, creating an instant online storefront which accepts credit card payments. Peddl turns the mobile device into the most efficient tool for selling things to the people around you.
We’re a small team spun out of the MIT Media Lab set to change the way people think about buying and selling second hand goods online and we aren’t stopping until it’s done. Learn more about the founding team at http://www.terrarium.io
– Current Positions –
Back End Engineer:
We’re building a next generation transaction platform which brings insanely simple payment to the masses. We care deeply about both external and internal craftsmanship of our products and look for candidates that do too.
Android Engineer:
We’re looking for a talented front-end engineer to help us create best in class mobile apps for Android and iOS. We care about every pixel and look for candidates that do too.
Growth Hacker:
We’re looking for an exceptional marketer with a high level of exposure to technology and experience with code. We believe that marketing, product, and engineering work together to make the product market itself.
Intern:
We are looking for a handful of super smart, passionate interns who have serious interest in local marketplaces. If you’re interested in app development, the mobile web, and have a sense for great design, Peddl has a spot for you.
It's fairly plain to see that the "redesign" completely disregards any presence of advertisement. I'd say that would be a constraint failed to be considered.
I try to keep up with Khoi Vihn and Subtraction because I believe he always provides a balanced insight into respectable/high-design principals and the practicality of applying them to mammoth operations like the NYT and such.
In fact, his tone of decency and respect, despite the the off-the-cuff pronouncements made by Andy Rutledge is exactly the voice I've come to expect from Khoi. Which is awesome.
Also, this reminds me a lot of the Delta Airlines redesign fiasco brought on by another designer (http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html). It's really easy to sit back and critique the obvious flaws in design from within the ivory tower of photoshop, where you can arbitrarily remove advertisements and ignore the loads of user studies that entire teams have spent significant portions of their careers.
This is the kind of stuff that gives designers the MO of being 'decorators' who don't 'respect constraints' - operational or technical. As a designer myself, it's sad to see this behavior showing up again and again.
The handful of people I know at Google are from a variety of academic institutions, ASU, UW, Stanford, and MIT to name a few. Most importantly, they're all passionate, creative hackers who take pride in their work – not riding the prestige of their education.
The answer directly, if google decided folks from Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, MIT were not good enough while those from Princeton, Yale, Columbia, and Harvard were - then yes, I would count Google in my statement.
There are some 2,000+ four year colleges in the US, and "recruiters" are only interested in grads from 3 or 4 of them? I'm a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab, no one I know or work with is even interested in job fairs, recruiters, etc.
That said, any company that won't look at me because I'm from MIT and not Princeton isn't the kind of place I would want to work anyway. I'm sure this sort of discrimination makes for great internal culture.
I started losing interest when LinkedIn turned into yet another Twitter status stream. I enjoyed it much more when it was pure, and focused on professional relationship growth (debatable, yes). In the most egotistical sense, it is still interesting to see who has been viewing your profile.
We were just playing around with this specific app in our office. There were about 5 guys huddled together, spinning around with the person controlling the iPhone. Quite a sight.
Playing with the gyroscope myself, I realized there is actually a very comfortable degree of motion you can make holding the phone for added game input. I don't want to be spinning in circles trying to shoot bad guys, but some extra rotational movement is nice.
Also, for being an early game (maybe the first to adopt the gyroscope?) the spatial input was very intuitive, it took about 3 seconds to orient myself with the device and it was all blam-blam-blam from there.
Apple and Adobe have started a strange comparison war. Too much focus on what you can "make", not enough focus on "why" one direction might be better than the other. I really don't care about HTML5 checkers vs. Flash checkers vs. Java checkers; which is going to make my online experience better today, and more importantly, in the future?
When you consider a huge portion of the user base - especially the iPhone user base - the simplicity of 'deleting' an app is fairly dangerous. It's not totally impossible to remove an app in your pocket by accident. I'd hate to have to explain to my mother why her mail app was suddenly missing. That said, allowing for some sort of on/off toggle in settings would be welcome.