I haven't heard about Google Plus since Google announced it was becoming optional last year. It seems certain at this point that it will fade into obscurity and then be quietly killed like so many Google products before it. At one point, Plus was Google's golden child. It was given enormous resources, basically every Google product was integrated or being integrated into it, and employee bonuses were even tied to its performance. Yet it still failed.
Many factors contribute to that failure, not least of which was trying to take Facebook on its home turf and failing to distinguish itself meaningfully. "It's like Facebook but on a different site" is a compelling value proposition for a small subset of the population, but basically meaningless to everyone else. Those arguments are fairly well-trodden at this point, but I think there's a factor that hasn't received as much attention: Plus was based on the Kitchen Sink model, and nobody wants Kitchen Sinks anymore.
There was a time early in the internet age when Kitchen Sink was the go-to model for all software. Netscape started with the first popular web browser, and ended up with a browser, calendar, e-mail/newsgroup client, groupware, push notification server, and a nasty case of irrelevance. ICQ, the first instant messenger, ended up as an instant messenger, sms gateway, news ticker, email client, game center, greeting card service(!) and a historical footnote. It was the inevitable progression of 90s software development: start doing one thing well, end up doing lots of things badly.
Those particular examples form part of the storied attempt to create the perfect Internet Suite, a kind of one-stop shop for all things internet. Today that sounds as ridiculous as saying you're going to create a "Food Suite" with all the foods anyone might want to eat. The internet does so many different things that having one particular software product to capture all of it is necessarily inadequate. And yet with Google Plus we see the same mistake again. They tried to roll up all of their products into one big Social Suite.
The problem with this isn't just that you end up stuck with stuff you don't want to use, or that mediocre products are propped up by good ones, though that certainly didn't help. The problem with the Social Suite is that people want to keep their online selves separate. From an engineering perspective, it seems super elegant that your accounts across all different services share data and reflect one single identity. From a human perspective, it's a complete nightmare of unintended consequences to everything you do.
Google is, mostly, an infrastructure company. Search, AdSense, YouTube, Gmail, Maps: all things you use because you want something else and Google provides the plumbing to get it to you. But they swapped it out for Smart Plumbing, where my search queries change my Maps results, and reviews I leave in Maps and comments I leave on YouTube appear in other people's Search results under my real name. That is immensely, profoundly creepy. I can't predict the consequences of my actions anymore. Anything I do on any Google product could end up anywhere on any other Google product, and I have no way of knowing what or where.
You might think Facebook presents a counterexample to this idea. After all, they are the quintessential Social Suite. But I think they are a temporary outlier. Facebook got a free pass because it so quickly exploded into popularity and has been riding the network effect ever since. However, in recent years people have begun migrating to smaller, more specific social networks. Facebook's answer has been to buy those networks: WhatsApp and Instagram were both acquired. SnapChat, Twitter and I'm sure many others got offers.
Yet there's something interesting about how Facebook has handled those acquisitions. WhatsApp and Instagram both still have their own separate identity, they didn't get rebranded. The userbases haven't been merged, and I don't think they will be. At least, not in the ill fated Google-YouTube "don't not click on this button to not leave your accounts unmerged" sense. I think Facebook recognises that people want an Instagram account and a Facebook account, and a sensible path for connecting the two in a way that the link remains under your control.
I believe that in the long term, even Facebook's current level of centralisation is unsustainable. Facebook is two things: a site that people visit to interact with their friends, and the social infrastructure that underlies it (and their other products). Facebook-the-site will inevitably fall out of fashion (and already has, for some groups). Facebook-the-infrastructure, on the other hand, can continue to exist as the backbone for whatever comes after Facebook-the-site. Facebook Messenger is an example of how this is already starting. I wouldn't be surprised to see more parts split out into their own identities.
Ultimately, I don't think there is any place in the future of the internet for a Social Suite. Google tried and failed. Facebook succeeded, but is already backing away from the idea. The truth is nobody wants everything they do online to be connected to a single identity. Individual services will slowly take marketshare from monoliths until the only monoliths left are the ones that implement individual services themselves. Kitchen Sink Social is dying, and I for one can't wait to see it gone.
It's no secret that most job interviews are basically seances with better lighting. Some studies indicate that you can predict a lot of the outcome of an interview from "thin slices" as short as minutes or even seconds. Of course, it's impossible that a slice that short could tell you anything important about job ability, so we're left with the conclusion that it's mostly a load of confirmation-bias-driven woo.
In recent years, the tide at technology companies has been turning, though. Google have slowly reformed their famously Byzantine interview process that mostly relied on whiteboard algorithmic pressure tests and clever gotcha puzzles that were mostly for showing off how clever the interviewer is. Apparently their internal data showed their interviews were almost completely unpredictive of job performance, and to their credit they acted to get rid of the bunk and replace it with better-validated methods.
More recently, companies have begun to to hone in on a technique where you interview based on actual work performance. As in, after a certain point in the process you just pick some relatively newbie-friendly task that actually needs to be done and pay the candidate to do it. It's a refinement of the idea of work sample tests, where you use a fake task that's representative of the work they'll be doing. But, hey, why not cut the fakery and just use real work? Apparently it's very predictive.
The whole thing makes me think about a glorious endgame: could you just make a job offer to the whole world? Congratulations, everyone, you're hired. Your job starts whenever you want, just let us know when you're ready and we'll give you a task to do. The rate will be based on how well you've completed previous tasks, which means for the first one it'll be pretty low (but also a very small task). If you do it well the next one will be much higher as the error margin on your pay grade goes down.
Of course, the kind of company structure required to make something like that work would have to be pretty sophisticated. You'd have to have a predictive engine with human oversight that could assign and update expected values on task-person pairs very quickly. You would even need special tooling so that tasks could be broken down into very small chunks, which in the case of software would almost certainly mean some kind of programming language-level support. The hurdles are pretty big, here.
But, still, it seems like it could be a truly fascinating and innovative way to run a business. The entire hiring pipeline and all of the complexity and bias that goes with it only makes sense if there's a meaningful distinction between hired and not hired. Maybe there doesn't need to be.
Plans don't always work out. It's been said that no plan survives first contact with the enemy – or, in the words of Mike Tyson, getting punched in the mouth. Sometimes your plan is too optimistic or misses some important details that become apparent later on. Sometimes early failures make it clear the rest of the plan isn't going to work. Sometimes it only takes a little bit of time to realise that, actually, your plan was just a bad plan.
There's nothing wrong with that, no shame in cutting your losses and saying, well, this plan is no good. In fact, stubbornly sticking to a plan that doesn't work is far worse than jumping ship. You make a plan for a reason, and if those reasons are no longer relevant, or your assumptions about how to achieve them were wrong, then continuing to follow that plan is just pushing on nothing.
However, having no plan is also a mistake. Sometimes the temptation when things go wrong is to just say "ah, what the hell" and give up on plans entirely. But without a plan you're left just doing things and hoping they work, purposeless actions with no intention behind them. Having no plan might be better than having a bad plan, but not much better. You made a plan for a reason, and that same reason necessitates a new plan.
So the two steps work together: ditch the old plan, make a new plan. Maintaining this rhythm seems crucial to me; it's the two-stroke engine of robust planning. A misfire in either half of the cycle and you get stuck, either with a bad plan or no plan at all.
Conventional wisdom is that a teacher should be someone who knows a lot about the subject, which on the face of it seems pretty sensible. But experts have a very different context to novices; they don't have the same kinds of problems or make the same mistakes. They tend to focus on the high-level ideas when novices are still struggling with the mechanics. Or they teach mechanics that are obvious and miss the ones that are actually difficult. Not because they're bad teachers, just because they don't have the novice context anymore.
On the other hand, how can you possibly teach people the material without knowing the material? Embedded in that idea is an assumption about learning: you learn because someone tells you things, the words enter your brain and then turn into knowledge. Of course, there's no reason to think that this is actually how learning works, and in fact very good reasons to think the opposite: you learn when you build associations, and you build associations by doing things.
So what does a teacher do in a system where you learn by doing? You can't just give students knowledge, you have to encourage them to explore ideas in order to discover knowledge on their own. From that perspective, knowing a lot about the subject is useful only in as much as it tells you which ideas to explore in which order. Actually knowing the answers is only useful to the extent that it allows a student to be confident that they're on the right track and not wasting time.
Ideally, you would want someone who has the novice context, and approaches the problems and knowledge in a studenty way, but who doesn't lead you down the wrong path and get you stuck for days or weeks figuring that out. How can we have such a thing? Hollywood's magical time dilation. A student could record their experience of learning the material, making the mistakes, learning from the mistakes, and slowly working their way towards understanding. When they get there, they just go back and edit out the boring bits.
The end result would be something less like a knowledgable expert dispensing wisdom from on high, and more like an older sibling in concentrated form. You can see the path they've walked and the mistakes they've made, but you don't have to make those same mistakes yourself to learn from them.
When you're busy time suddenly starts to seem more valuable. The big looming deadline or barely manageable workload makes every second seem important. Any interstitial preperatory rituals go out the window. Anything that's not relevant or necessary gets cut because you just don't have time. You might not get many chances to unwind or relax, so whatever there is had better be super relaxing. Free time becomes the most valuable commodity you can find, and you fantasize about how you're going to spend all of it when the crunch is over.
Then your time frees up again and what happens? Freedom reigns, the days stretch out ahead of you, and you've got nothing but time. Suddenly, all that time stops seeming so valuable. Whether or not you're doing things efficiently isn't so relevant when you have lots of time to do them in anyway. Fifteen glorious minutes stolen away with a coffee and a sunset gives way to hours of some leisure-like activity that isn't really that fun. You go from free time to spare time, and finally to wasting time, a notion that would have been unthinkable not so long ago.
But the funny thing is, your time doesn't really change in value just because you're more or less busy. Sure, it may seem locally scarce, but you're still provided with 24 hours of it every day, and you can still turn it into money or fun or creative output at a given rate. An hour's worth of reading is always going to be an hour's worth of reading, whether the surrounding hours are filled with work or nothing at all. Pending some kind of immortality breakthrough, there are a fixed number of total hours assigned to your life, you can spend them how you choose, and being busy or not busy doesn't really change that.
So should you act like you're busy all the time? Not exactly. When you're busy you also get stressed, cut corners, make bad decisions, and generally hurt your creativity. I'm not an advocate for being busy, but the one aspect I think is good is the appreciation for the value of time. It's that appreciation that I think is worth carrying with you. If you wouldn't do something when time is scarce, maybe it's not worth doing when time is plentiful either.