A view of working in Amazon's IT group vs. Google

We have all seen when people have sent an e-mail that copied the whole company.  Thanks to social networking, you can now make same mistake magnitudes worse by sharing to the public vs. your company.

Here is a post by a Google engineer that has been published on another google plus site on his comparison of amazon vs. google.

Shared publicly  -  Oct 12, 2011
The best article I've ever read about architecture and the management of IT.

***UPDATE***

This post was intended to be shared privately and was accidentally made public. Thanks to +Steve Yegge for allowing us to keep it out there. It's the sort of writing people do when they think nobody is watching: honest, clear, and frank.

The world would be a better place if more people wrote this sort of internal memoranda, and even better if they were allowed to write it for the outside world.

Hopefully Steve will not experience any negative repercussions from Google about this. On the contrary, he deserves a promotion.

***UPDATE #2***

This post has received a lot of attention. For anyone here who arrived from The Greater Internet - I stand ready to remove this post if asked. As I mentioned before, I was given permission to keep it up.

Google's openness to allow us to keep this message posted on its own social network is, in my opinion, a far greater asset than any SaS platform. In the end, a company's greatest asset is its culture, and here, Google is one of the strongest companies on the planet.
Steve Yegge originally shared:
Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.
 
Steve responds well and adds another point on how wicked smart Jeff Bezos is.

Bezos is so goddamned smart that you have to turn it into a game for him or he’ll be bored and annoyed with you. That was my first realization about him. Who knows how smart he was before he became a billionaire -- let’s just assume it was “really frigging smart”, since he did build Amazon from scratch. But for years he’s had armies of people taking care of everything for him. He doesn’t have to do anything at all except dress himself in the morning and read presentations all day long. So he’s really, REALLY good at reading presentations. He’s like the Franz Liszt of sight-reading presentations.

So you have to start tearing out whole paragraphs, or even pages, to make it interesting for him. He will fill in the gaps himself without missing a beat. And his brain will have less time to get annoyed with the slow pace of your brain.

I mean, imagine what it would be like to start off as an incredibly smart person, arguably a first-class genius, and then somehow wind up in a situation where you have a general’s view of the industry battlefield for ten years. Not only do you have more time than anyone else, and access to more information than anyone else, you also have this long-term eagle-eye perspective that only a handful of people in the world enjoy.

In some sense you wouldn’t even be human anymore. People like Jeff are better regarded as hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs.

One Simple Reason why Open Compute Project works, An Executive Visionary - Frank Frankovsky

When you think of the technical companies in our industry you can’t help, but think of the founders - Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Larry and Sergey, Zuckerberg, etc.

Organizations that are trying to drive change in the industry that host conferences can be viewed in the same way.  The successful ones have founders as key figures.  Seybold Conferences worked because of Jonathan Seybold.  GigaOm works because of Om Malik.  Tim O’Reilly.

And, Open Compute Project works because of Frank Frankovsky.

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Where would Open Compute be without Frank?  Probably just an idea of what could be done.

Here is Frank’s opening keynote at OCP V.

Funny beats Serious, @sochiproblems 282k vs @sochi2014 175k

Whenever someone asks me about creating a viral marketing campaign I tell them that funny things almost always beat serious things.

Here is one example Twitter handle @sochi2014 has 282K followers, started on Feb 4 (3 days ago) with 193 tweets.

Sochi Problems

Sochi Problems

@SochiProblems

I'm a mess, and not prepared for you! Our athletes live like Kings!

Sochi

 

 

The @sochi2014 twitter handle has 175K followers, created long time ago, with 4,808 tweets

Sochi 2014

Sochi 2014 Verified account

@Sochi2014

 

sochi2014.com

 

 

Here is the story of the guy who is behind @sochiproblems.

@SochiProblems mastermind revealed: student Alex Broad

Popular Twitter account by Centennial College journalism student captures myriad of problems at Sochi Games

By Nolan N. White | Posted: Feb 7 2014 2:49 pm

Take an unusually slow day in a Toronto college journalism school newsroom, and a journalism student with a love of sports. Now add controversy over the 2014 Sochi Olympic preparations, and some social media.

What you end up with is @SochiProblems. The Twitter account is the brainchild of Alexander (Alex) Broad, 20, a journalism major at Centennial College in Toronto, and a contributor to the program’s newspaper, TorontoObserver.ca.

Alexander Broad, founder of @SochiProblems, digging out from Wednesday's snowfall in Pickering, Ontario (courtesy Alex Broad)

COURTESY ALEXANDER BROAD

Alexander Broad, founder of @SochiProblems, digging out from Wednesday’s snowfall in Pickering, Ont.

Broad himself was unprepared to see his creation, launched Tuesday Feb. 4, as a Twitter account called@SochiProblems, become so popular.  In only three days it has already attracted more than 240,000 followers ranging from ordinary Canadians, to well known personalities in the media, to athletes, current and retired.

 

 

Three lessons you can Learn From Seahawks that are good for Operations

Forbes has a guest post from SunGardAs’s Matthew Goche.  Matthew’s focus is security, but I think his points can apply to Operations in general.

What The Seattle Seahawks Can Teach You About Your IT Security Program

Matthew GocheMatthew Goche, SunGardAS
Comment Now

I typically enjoy the Super Bowl. We get together with family and friends to watch the game, laugh at the commercials, enjoy the halftime show, and place predictions on winners. What I love best is an exciting, competitive game. Unfortunately, this past Super Bowl did not live up to my hopes, mainly due to the Seattle Seahawks completely outclassing and crushing the Denver Broncos.

As I watched the game, it occurred to me that many companies’ IT securityprograms resemble the Broncos team, instead of performing like the Seahawks. This is not going to work in business (just as it didn’t in the Super Bowl) for three key reasons:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The three steps are 

1. Make fewer mistakes

Broncos: four turnovers. Seahawks: zero. For IT to prevent “turnovers,” change must be managed. Backups maintained. Security reviews conducted.

2. Have no heroes

Unfortunately, far too many organizations forget this fact. They choose to rely on IT MVPs and heroes: i.e., the one developer who knows what to do when a vulnerability is discovered, or the one network administrator who knows what to block when there is a potential breach.

3. Resilient from Top to Bottom

Before these playoffs, few casual fans could have named many of the Seahawks defenders. But everyone watching the Super Bowl found out that the Seahawks defense has almost no weaknesses. The defensive line is built on under-appreciated but high-quality players who are focused on team results, not personal glory.

The post closes with do you want to play like the Broncos or play like the Seahawks?

How do you want your IT security program to perform – like the Denver Broncos or the Seattle Seahawks? If you are the GM or coach at your company, you should focus on building a roster of IT security controls and security-focused IT providers that resemble the Seattle Seahawks.  By being prepared and validating all aspects of your program, you, too, can crush vulnerabilities and thrive in a complex threat environment.

Security is a bit easier when you have a team who works together.  Go Hawks.  Note my family, friends, one of who is a sheriff.

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Calif Gov't thinks a mandatory kill switch will deter crime, how about a IMEI registration system instead?

ComputerWorld reports on a technical proposal in CA for a mandatory kill switch.

California proposes mandatory kill-switch on phones and tablets

Proposed legislation part of an effort to slow rising smartphone and tablet thefts

By Martyn Williams
February 7, 2014 05:04 AM ET

IDG News Service - Politicians and law enforcement officials in California will introduce a bill on Friday that requires all smartphones and tablet PCs sold in the state be equipped with a digital "kill-switch" that would make the devices useless if stolen.

The bill is a response to a rise in thefts of portable electronics devices, often at knife or gunpoint, being seen across the state. Already half of all robberies in San Francisco and 75% of those in Oakland involve a mobile device and the number is rising in Los Angeles, according to police figures.

I’ve written about the issues created by the airplane mode that take your device offline and you can’t use a kill-switch when it is not on the network.

Another way is to enforce a registration of unique identification system that allows the tracking and ownership of a phone.  IMEI is a number used, but some thought could be put into how ownership of a phone can be determined.

International Mobile Station Equipment Identity

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
 

The International Mobile Station Equipment Identity or IMEI /aɪˈmiː/[1] is a number, usually unique,[2][3] to identify 3GPP (i.e., GSM, UMTS and LTE) and iDEN mobile phones, as well as some satellite phones. It is usually found printed inside the battery compartment of the phone, but can also be displayed on-screen on most phones by entering *#06# on the dialpad, or alongside other system information in the settings menu on smartphone operating systems.

The IMEI number is used by a GSM network to identify valid devices and therefore can be used for stopping a stolen phone from accessing that network. For example, if a mobile phone is stolen, the owner can call his or her network provider and instruct them to "blacklist" the phone using its IMEI number. This renders the phone useless on that network and sometimes other networks too, whether or not the phone'sSIM is changed.

The IMEI system is not perfect.

The IMEI number is not supposed to be easy to change, making the CEIR blacklisting effective. However this is not always the case: a phone's IMEI may be easy to change with special tools. In addition, IMEI is un-authenticated mobile identifier (as opposed to IMSI, which is routinely being authenticated by home and serving mobile networks.) Spoofed IMEI can thwart all efforts to track handsets, or target handsets for Lawful Intercept.[citation needed] Australia was first to implement IMEI blocking across all GSM networks, in 2003.[7]

And neither will be a kill-switch.  

Seems like this would be a good solution to have designed by the people who steal the phones.