BlogSat

A screenshot that someone shared with me a few days reminded me of a conversation that drove me nuts about a year ago. I know - terrible start to a story, but play along. :-) The screenshot showed a bug (one visual element looked a little off) in a product I'm responsible for. I filed a mental note on it, but knew instantly I'll never prioritize fixing it - for a lot of different reasons (zero impact to functionality etc.), but mainly because the bug is on desktop - a platform that I know is not one where most new users our coming and one that I'm consistently prioritizing behind mobile. It was something I thought about for all of a split-second, and won't let anyone else waste engineering time on. What did this remind me of? A couple years ago, some folks on another team spent weeks trying to convince me to build something that was a desktop-only enhancement to the product I was working on at the time. They pushed really hard, despite confirming (again and agai...

I generally like to wrap posts up - to complete a thought - and since this is a topic I hadn't really completely made my mind up about, I've avoided writing about it. But this post  from Hunter Walk reminded me about something a good friend told me  Richard Thaler said to him in class about the kind of comments he wanted to hear: (paraphrasing a lot since its been ~8 years) "completed thoughts are uninteresting. The best discussions are around ideas still in progress and the act of discussing the idea helps it come to fruition". This week I was thinking about interviews quite a bit. I interviewed more candidates for Google than I usually do, and I ran into friends interviewing at different places who were discussing their experiences. At the end of one of these conversations, someone brought up the  Airport Test  and how important he believed it was to his process. For the last year, I've been interviewing about 1 to 2 candidates every week for Google, most...