A preview of Gmail's new look - <AUTHOR> http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/preview-of-gmails-new-look.html?utm_source=twitter <comment><USER2> I'm a pretty huge fan of all the new Google designs. Plus, gmail, the top bar, fonts.... They've kept things minimalistic while making things just feel cleaner and crisper. Whoever is leading this redesign is doing a fantastic job.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. And according to Steven Levy[1]'s Wired article[2], it's Andy Hertzfeld, who was on the original Apple Macintosh team.

[1] Who wrote _In the Plex_.

[2] [http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/inside-google-plus- so...](http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/inside-google-plus-social/all/1)

<comment><USER4> Andy Hertzfeld did the Circles editor in Google+. The site-wide redesign is done by Google Creative Labs, which I think is behind the Search On advertisement series and the Parisian Love Superbowl ad. It's also had significant input and direction from the individual teams, eg. most of the Search UX team was involved in the websearch portion of the redesign.

<comment><USER3> You're right, I apologize for the inaccuracy. Here's Hertzfeld himself on the subject: [https://plus.google.com/117840649766034848455/posts/FddaP6je...](https://plus.google.com/117840649766034848455/posts/FddaP6jeCqp?tab=mX)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really hope they preserve the Classic view. I can't stand how spaced out everything is. I went from being able to see 10 or so contacts in Gchat without scrolling down to just 4.

Edit: That's with the "Dense" view. Regular is even worse.

<comment><USER6> Way too spaced out for my liking.

I go from seeing 34 messages per page to 24. And about 20 letters of the message summary are dropped.

<comment><USER7> Maybe they want you to search.

<comment> mh- ironically, they need to improve the quality of the gmail search feature for that to be a viable direction in which to push users; the responsiveness and the lack of wildcards immediately comes to mind.

<comment><USER8> The lack of stemming is pretty bad, too. If I have a message with the word "dog" but I search for "dogs," I won't get any results. A search for "dog" will return the message, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the old Gmail interface, my eye goes straight to my inbox. In this new interface, it goes straight to the bold blue "Search Mail" in the header—which is proportionally much larger than necessary.

The new look for Google is a huge step up overall, but that's a huge usability violation to me.

<comment><USER10> Seems consistent with "search not sort".

<comment><USER9> Sure, but not "search not read your emails."

<comment><USER10> Very true!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just wish they would get rid of the invite widget. It served a purpose when Gmail was invite only but now it just wastes space.

<comment><USER12> I still use it all the time to convert people to gmail. In the past month alone I have converted 10+ people, mostly non-tech (ie. parents, brothers, godparents etc.)

Google are very analytics driven in product design, if it wasn't being used and wasn't serving a purpose, I believe they would have removed it already or freed up that real estate for something else

<comment><USER13> If Google was that analytics driven they would get rid of it for people that don't use it. I haven't used it since gmail was in beta, I definitely haven't used it for at least 5+ years. And yet it's still there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Holy ad batman. The new themes move the small text ad to the bottom of the page....but then it floats as you scroll.

That's one way to increase clicks.

I'd try the new theme if it wasn't for that...it's very distracting when scrolling down.

<comment><USER15> I didn't notice due to adblock, but Gmail has provided such a fantastic service for free over the years and really improved the quality of the webmail experience. I don't think I could complain much even if they put more adclick spots in Gmail — it still beats all the alternatives in my book.

<comment><USER16> Which adblock are you using? AdBlock Plus (on Chrome) still shows the yellow bar and the non-link text.

<comment><USER17> I'm not the OP, but: AdBlock on Chrome and subscribed to Adblock Custom and EasyList lists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I just can't get past the black bar. After years of it being white, black just feels imposing.

<comment><USER19> Speaking of which... am I crazy or is there a new black bar at the top of HN too?

(edit: removed second sentence after finding out actual reason)

<comment><USER20> I think it is because Robert Morris passed away recently.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2712469>

<comment><USER21> Thanks for mentioning this. I thought it was a Google joke.

<comment><USER16> Oh, I did too. Now I feel insensitive :(

<comment><USER22> I thought the same thing. Now I feel a bit bad. :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone with an Apps account have the ability to preview the theme(s)? I don't, in my apps account.

Yet another example of Google treating apps customers as 2nd class citizens. See also: account/login issues and lack of profiles (which means no Places, no Google+, and other products). Google is effectively ignoring what are often their best/most enthusiastic customers in by doing things like this. Very puzzling.

<comment><USER24> Theme is on for both mail and calendar in my apps account.

<comment><USER23> Thanks for the reply. Odd that themes are available for some accounts but not others. I did find this help thread that originated in 2008(!) where others describe having the problem also: [http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google%20Apps/thread?t...](http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google%20Apps/thread?tid=57924f37281864bb&hl=en)

<comment><USER25> In domain management, there is an option to turn on themes for e-mail users.

<comment><USER23> Indeed, there is. I'd looked for it yesterday, but couldn't find it. Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> There's a lot more white space in the new design - enough vertical space is lost for about seven conversation entries. Not sure I like this change for that reason...

<comment><USER27> Did you see that there's a separate "Dense" version of the new theme, which reduces the white space back to around its previous level?

<comment><USER26> Yes, the non-dense one is even worse :)

<comment><USER28> Try shift-refresh(!), especially after switching Standard->Preview->Preview(Dense)

I had assumed Gmail wouldn't need this, but it made a big difference. Looks like they have a slight caching problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wow...Google is on FIRE! That shake-up at the top, seems to be bearing fruit.

This is exciting.

</comment><comment><USER30> Interesting that they're adding additional details of the person you're conversing with to the right above the ads. I wonder what that means for Rapportive.

<comment><USER3> That's called the people widget, and they added that a while ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2589119>

Rapportive responded quite well: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2613101>

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It looks like Google has somewhat abandoned the Google Colors for a black blue and maroon(?) color scheme.

They really want people to notice these changes, it creates more publicity for Google+.

<comment><USER32> Really disliking the red, it stands out way too much and implies urgency. Seems like a really bad UX choice to me?

<comment><USER33> I'm inclined to disagree. They're using the color sparingly to call attention to the most important parts of the interface. Coloring compose with the standard gray for the other buttons would mean it is lost in the interface and difficult to see. I like it quite a bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> My biggest complaint about the way Gmail currently looks is that it lacks structure - different features and components run right into each other. It's messy and feels cluttered even though it isn't over-designed. (That's a complaint that holds true for most Google products.) This new design looks like a real step in the right direction. It looks much cleaner and more structured. Big +1 from me.

</comment><comment> DanI-S I'm happy to see Google taking as much care and pride in the visual engineering that goes into their products as they do the back-end.

<comment><USER35> Something I'm surprised about is that after all the testing google was doing this spring, this seems completely out of the blue. I wonder if they did test this on a larger scale and I just missed it, or they are winging it? If so, kudos to them for taking a huge risk.

As an aside, I just realized that the new design reminds me heavily of Ubuntu with the dark gray and orange highlights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Things are a little too spread out perhaps, but I already love that the top action bar (archive, spam, delete, etc) follows you down the page. As someone who's never quite mastered gmail keyboard shortcuts, I was constantly checking items then scrolling to the top or bottom to manage them. Nice little timesaver.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm going to be honest here and say that I think it looks horrible. The ALL- CAPS on buttons looks amateurish, and I want my separators and selected-mail- box background highlighting back.

The non-dense theme also is _too_ sparse.

I suppose this is just because I'm used to how it looks, but hopefully they'll keep the old themes around.

</comment><comment><USER38> Google's UI upgrades have me really excited. What I really like about Google and all their products is how utilitarian they are. Their products are not about looking pretty, but about giving me the most useful features I need. What I like about the new UI look is that they are thinking about the aesthetics of design more. Gmail used to look like a bland data grid from excel, and it was very dense with information. Now there are more pixels in between rows and columns in the new Gmail, giving the layout visual space. The color changes also make the UI more interesting to look at and quicker to navigate. But the best part is the dark navigation bar at the top. Love that.

</comment><comment><USER33> Really liking the work. I'm really looking forward to what they have in store for Reader.

<comment><USER39> I think Reader need a complete re-design, tweaks on line of Gmail won't help. I have some 1400+ items in my subscription list. And it is not comfortable to read all that stuff in google reader's current avatar. So for now feedly has rescued me. Google reader should offer a feedly type opt-in view. Or it can have a two layouts one for power users and another for people with two digit subscriptions.

<comment><USER40> If you use folders to keep things separate and take advantage of the compressed view (accessed by pressing "2"), I find that Reader is extremely usable for dealing with large numbers of feeds - I'm at 116 subscriptions right now. Admittedly, that isn't anywhere near the 1400+ subscriptions you claim (how do you have time to deal with all of them?), but I feel that Reader would scale well if I did increase to that number. I probably wouldn't be able to deal with it, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> But why is the top bar charcoal gray instead of the black seen on all the other sites?

</comment><comment><USER41> This interface would be much more suited to tablet-sized screens.

Apart from information-density (which should be more forgiving on the tablet form factor when compared to PCs), the spacing also makes this a touch- friendly alternative to the Ajax-laden tablet interface.

For a PC screen, however, I'd say 'power users' quite like the higher information density on the current UI. It's much more efficient if you think about how far the eyes need to move and how much one needs to scroll to get to an element on the page. Navigation is not much of a problem currently with a precise device like the mouse and with keyboard shortcuts.

</comment><comment><USER42> Although I appreciate the clean design, I find it blinding, I'm going to use it for a few days and see how I get on but for now, the plethora of white space seems to hurt my eyes!

</comment><comment><USER43> I like it a lot. It reminds of Whistler and Windows Mobile (yes, that's a good thing). The only thing I would change would be to tighten up the outside margins by about 50%.

My instant reaction to the lower visual density was negative, but after using it for a little while, I think it's dense enough to be usable but sparse enough to be calming. It's amazing what the removable of a few borders and shaded areas does to the feeling of apprehension about email.

</comment><comment><USER44> I actually don't kind much how it looks but speed is important. UI performance is an important UX. Hopefully the new GMail UI is faster than before.

</comment><comment><USER45> I, for one, don't welcome the new look. The old overal Google look given an air of unrefined, raw 'geekness'. I liked the feeling that I was using something designed and made by scientists rather than enterpreneurs. This is, saldy, finally going and Google is becoming one of many.

Of course look is not all, the quality of service they provide is uncompared. I'm still a fan, but I really prefered the old days.

</comment><comment><USER12> so they added padding to everything?

<comment><USER46> They have a "dense" theme, too that's more like regular Gmail.

<comment><USER47> It's closer, but it still increases the screen real-estate used by some elements significantly - for example, the line item for each email displayed in the inbox has grown from 23px tall to 29px tall in the redesign. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I prefer higher information density.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Wow, definitely keeping as my new theme. I had to disable the "Right-sided chat" lab feature but works great other than that.

</comment><comment><USER49> When I first saw Google+, I felt that it looked a lot like [Helvetireader](<http://helvetireader.com/>) to the point where I thought that they may have been (heavily) inspired.

With the new Gmail interface, this can't be a coincidence.

Credit where credit is due? Hell, are we talking about a blatant rip-off?

<comment><USER50> I don't think they look more similar than any other two random webapps from the recent school of design thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Perhaps it's because I'm used to using the darker "Shiny" theme, which I've had on for many years, but the colors of the Preview theme are way too bright for my taste. I think they should come up with a more subdued version of it that doesn't feel quite so loud. Functionally, though, it's great.

</comment><comment><USER52> Hm. I'm actually quite happy with the design Gmail has right now. A customer in a situation like this wonders, if any change to the interface doesn't just mean more costs for me as the user (like the change of "open in new tab/open in new window" between FF3 and FF4).

</comment><comment><USER32> I really like the new apps and search interface, but the use of red is really bugging me. Surely this is basic UI that urgent things are made red like alerts etc. I fail to see why the 'compose mail' and 'create' calendar event buttons need to be a glaring red?

</comment><comment><USER53> Hmm two issues that google needs to resolve with this. The new ad bar at the bottom is constantly obstructed by waiting for mail.google.com ajax request, so it is effectively useless. The color of the compose mail button needs to be changed asap.

</comment><comment><USER54> It's just spaced out more, I don't see anything removed.

I hope I can change the vertical line density back.

<comment><USER55> There is a 'Preview (Dense)' variant of the theme which does exactly this. It's still not as dense as before but I'm finding that to be a good thing.

I like this one a lot better than the classic which had way too much intrusive background colour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Just a few tweaks and a general tidy up. We'll barely notice it after a week or so of use.

</comment><comment><USER57> The new theme looks good but the boundaries between the elements doesn't seem well defined, giving a floating appearance to them. Also the background is kind of glary.

</comment><comment><USER58> It almost looks like the "html only" view of gmail which is originally meant for slow connections. Nevertheless, lighter is better and it is definitely soothing.

</comment><comment><USER59> Gmail now gives YOU the benefit of the doubt, dropping that pesky 'Report' and putting 'Spam' right up there with all the other important verbs of our time.

</comment><comment><USER60> I'm going to complain about the amount of padding in the messages list per message, but praise the rest. The redesign of most of Google is a welcome change.

</comment><comment><USER61> I prefer a stronger contrast between read and unread messages. While the new look looks great for search, maps etc. I find it less useful in GMail.

<comment><USER62> There are other contrast problems in this design. Colorblind people have a hard time seeing what's selected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Looks like they took some of the design ideas from their mobile version and migrated them into the main one. Square(er) buttons being one example.

</comment><comment><USER64> It does look good and yet the only think I can think off is "cover fire", from one of Spolsky's classic.

Google+ looks like a real improvement though.

</comment><comment><USER65> What happened to the Priority Inbox? I still see the add or remove priority buttons, but there doesn't seem to be a proirity inbox?

</comment><comment><USER16> I like that Google's new UI designs are using more buttons instead on text links. This is easier to see at a quick glance.

</comment><comment><USER66> Am I the only one who was instantly reminded on <http://calvetica.com> ?

</comment><comment><USER67> After using it for a couple weeks, the bright red Compose Mail button is really annoying. I hope they change that.

</comment><comment><USER68> The article describes the new look as "modern". I hear that all the time. What the hell does it actually mean?

<comment><USER27> Its use here may connect to the Modern movement in design and architecture, strongest in the mid-twentieth century, which emphasized simple shapes, lack of ornamentation, and clean lines:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_architecture>

(Aside: Why does the Gmail preview use almost the same header style as the new Google Calendar/Search/Maps/etc. theme, but with the colors and sizes slightly altered? It's a minor difference, but distracting when switching tabs between Gmail and any other Google site.)

<comment><USER69> I find it hard to believe they are saying it is a more modernist design. Modernism was a very specific aesthetic, I believe they mean contemporary.

<comment><USER27> I agree -- the designer here is maybe not consciously referring to Modernists like Frank Lloyd Wright. He might just means that it "look more contemporary." But twentieth-century modernism had a huge influence on why our culture thinks some designs look more "modern" than others, and also helped make "modern" one of the values on which we judge aesthetics in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> This may actually have me switch to using a site-specific browser for gmail instead of mail.app!

</comment><comment><USER71> Looks great! So glad Google finally has some design talent instead of just smart engineers.

</comment><comment><USER72> That big red button is distracting, the rest is awesome. same with calendar

</comment><comment><USER73> I love the new design theme. Clean, minimal, elegant. Well done Google.

</comment><comment><USER74> Hate the new back button. Loved the simple hyperlink back to Inbox.

</comment><comment><USER75> Basic White is still the best gmail theme.

</comment><comment><USER76> Looks like they got rid of Buzz?

<comment><USER77> In the blog post it's gone, in the preview theme it's still there. I think it means very little, since you could always turn it off in the settings.

It would make sense for them to discontinue Buzz though, since they now have Google+.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> anyone else has the top bar in white even with the new theme ?

<comment><USER79> After reloading the page it became dark-grey.

<comment><USER80> Yeah, strange that it isn't pure black.

<comment><USER81> On my Gmail, it's a dark grey which I like, but in Calendar it's pure black. I think the pure black is pretty jarring but the grey nicely transitions from the browser bar.

<comment><USER82> It is also pure black in greader.

<comment><USER78> yeah, I guess eventually it'll be the same pure black as in g+ everywhere. Also they should have it as a built-in in Chrome !

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> While the extra white space requires more scrolling, it makes it easier to read, for me at least. It also makes it easier to click a message.

From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_space_(visual_arts)>: _White space should not be considered merely 'blank' space — it is an important element of design which enables the objects in it to exist at all, the balance between positive (or non-white) and the use of negative spaces is key to aesthetic composition._

Most people actually seem to be liking it which is suprising to me since it's such a dramatic change: <http://www.wepolls.com/r/1012846/Gmails-new-look>

<comment><USER79> "Most people" as in 11?

<comment><USER38> I remember for all the big Facebook updates the backlash was intense, but now most embrace those changes as an improvement (700 million users testifies to that). Google's changes seem to be embraced by many, I don't sense the extreme backlash. I for one love the changes.

<comment><USER79> Me too, but I was referring to the link to his own website with the poll, based on which the parent comment claimed that "most people" love the changes, but it was a sample of only 11 people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Yawn! I'm on TB, so don't care.</comment>


The other half of "Artists Ship" - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/artistsship.html

<comment><USER3> I think this can be generalized to say that start-ups have a different cost- benefit analysis - one where losses are capped at the (relatively small) value of the company. On the other hand, large companies _have_ to be risk-averse because the worst-case is several magnitudes worse. When you're working at ConEd or AIG, the "tiny probability/worst-case-loss" factors start to matter, because "worst-case" can include investors losing life savings, federal investigations, and jail time for your boss's boss.

<comment><USER4> Funny that some of those large companies you mention didn't seem to get the memo about being risk-averse... ;-)

<comment><USER5> During their executive retreats they decided to be risk seeking instead.

I wonder if the problem at the recently troubled companies (AIG, Merrill, Lehman etc) was not enough checks in place or not enough power allotted to the employees who knew something was wrong.

<comment><USER6> From memory: the Excel bug that caused Moody's to give high ratings of mortgage securities (one of the probable causes of the whole mess) was known, but management decided not to fix it. So, greed can override checks and balances.

<comment><USER7> The bug wasn't in Excel. It was Moody's own fault, not Microsoft's.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, I didn't express myself clearly. I meant a bug in an Excel spreadsheet made by Moody's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This past summer I worked as an intern for a big company. On the first day of orientation the head of the legal compliance department said very flatly to us that any individual could do far more harm to the firm than good.

This mentality, reenforced by the company's bureaucratic change management system, really did not sit well with me.

Fortunately for my summer experience, my "buddy"/summer mentor and I found a loophole which we used to "hack" the change management system so that once we got our initial approval, we could propagate changes to prod without running through the whole process again for each change (which otherwise would have been required).

<comment><USER9> For large companies with a valuable reputation, that's almost guaranteed to be true. Most people won't generate a million dollars worth of value in a given year, but nearly everyone could do that amount of damage to their company's reputation in just a few minutes.

<comment><USER10> Sure, yes, if e.g. the customers' health or safety was at risk. But I don't think the average bug in a web app would damage a company's reputation significantly. GMail occasionally shows me a message saying "Oops, an error occurred." It doesn't make me think any less of Google.

<comment><USER11> You aren't a typical non-early-adopter user. I've had people make loud, public complaints about such trivial matters as a new logo being too tall, or a text box being too wide, or an _optional_ WYSIWYG editor feature ruining the "text- only flavor of the community". These on websites far smaller than GMail.

Look at some of the major Web2.0 kerfuffles in recent years. Off the top of my head, I can think of:

\- The HD/DVD mutiny on Digg

\- Public suicides on both JoelOnSoftware and Justin.TV

\- Reddit storing passwords in cleartext and them getting stolen off a laptop

\- Ariel Waldman and the Twitter harassment fiasco

\- The Flickr censorship debate here: <http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/40074/page3/>

Yeah, you could argue that those services are all still around, so obviously they haven't been hurt too much. How much management time was wasted in dealing with them? How many non-users decided not to become users because of something they heard 3rd-hand about how it's a terrible company?

(And I don't think the solution is to never innovate. I can understand why a middle manager at a big company would think so, though - a PR disaster is by definition public and disastrous. In the short run, it always makes more sense to not mess with success, it's just that this doesn't lead to success in the long run.)

<comment><USER10> None of these were the kind of bug that comes from releasing code with insufficient testing. The only one that even involved code was the Reddit password problem, and that was more a design mistake than a bug.

<comment><USER12> A culture of testing is a lot more than just verifying functionality. Code reviews with experienced engineers would have caught that design flaw before it was released. Or made it a high priority to fix.

I've dealt with the security teams at large companies. They end up implementing sometimes draconian policies, but it seems that programmers refuse to learn to write secure code any other way. I have to admit that, if you consider the large company as being a legitimate entity, they're doing legitimate work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Some things that PG didn't make explicit: web applications can have an extraordinarily tight feedback loop between customer and coder. Multiple revisions per day are easy, especially if any single user's data is rather low-value. Many a startup of this kind has zoomed past its corporate competitors simply by iterating faster. If your product is embedded firmware for a home security device, this strategy is just not available.

But here's another twist: when you start working for a giant company that provides myriad services under the same login, suddenly everyone has to move as slowly as the slowest part of the business. It doesn't matter if you are just doing Yippee! Backgammon, because who knows -- maybe you could somehow accidentally expose the data at Yippee! Payment Solutions.

This is a completely rational consequence of being a giant company and delivering multiple web services under the same login. It is possible to have slightly different authentication policies for each service. But I wonder if OpenID providers have thought about this enough.

<comment><USER13> _Some things that PG didn't make explicit: web applications can have an extraordinarily tight feedback loop between customer and coder._

He has made that point in other essays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> _"...not only wouldn't these guys have broken anything, they'd have gotten a lot more done."_

I don't think the claim that they would not have broken anything can be backed by facts.

If you look at Microsoft, for instance, their programmers used to write very buggy code, but with the introduction of better processes, like their Secure Development Lifecycle, they saw a substantial improvement in code quality (as measured through security and reliability metrics).

The damage done by not following a quality assurance process and writing buggy code was so big that Microsoft's image will be affected for a long time, even though they have now improved the code quality.

<comment><USER10> I meant these particular guys.

<comment><USER14> My point still is valid.

Even these particular guys certainly would have written buggy code. A QA process could correct it.

<comment><USER15> I worked without testing for 2 years and released a single bug into production. In that specific case I thought something might have been wrong but they needed it ASAP so I said who cares. My father once had a tester say "Ops I stopped testing your code over a year ago" when he released a fix to some buggy code someone else wrote which still had a few bugs. After adding a formal QA process I stopped double checking how buggy my code so I could get more done but I have ended up releasing more bugs.

So I have little respect for formal QA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think the costs of safety checks can be more pronounced in software than in other areas of business. It's not just that good hackers are particularly irritated by them -- they're irritated for a reason.

A two-week release-process lag is so much worse than it might sound. If you can ship instantly, you can get feedback and make improvements rapidly, over and over. Sure, without a careful release process you might occasionally break things, but when you do you can fix them in minutes rather than weeks. When you insert release-process lag into that cycle, improvements that might have been made in a rapid series of releases over a day or two can take months. Sometimes those improvements just never get made, because no one is motivated to keep working on them for so long.

In software, "stable" often means "unchanging", but only rarely means "high- quality".

</comment><comment><USER17> Some thoughts:

As companies grow big, they like to _emulate_ larger companies, and hence the people they like to hire are from larger companies since they _understand scale_ \-- this comes with a lot of baggage ofcourse. This in turn, most times, brings with it a culture of people who are worried more about not screwing up, covering their own ass, and thinking about getting promoted rather than doing what's right for the company or the business and screwing up as a byproduct of making quick decisions.

 _Re Joel Spolsky:_ The cost of the sale is not only the cost of the product, but what an organization would pay for a software/service, and what they would value it at. This is why most companies have a sales force, and don't advertise their prices on their website. As Joel mentions, for a lot of companies, charging less than $50k is a rounding error and not worth their time.

The flip side of people at big companies buying is based not entirely on the _performance_ of the service or the product. As long as the service/product is reliable & ok, and it doesn't screw up in any major ways, they won't get fired for making that buying decision, rather than looking at ways of maximizing/optimizing the _performance_ of the product -- yet another reason committees make buying decisions.

 _Re SOX:_ I like what founder's fund + facebook is doing -- letting early employees cash some of their equity out, thereby increasing the time early employees will stay with the company.

I also like Fred Wilson's thoughts on a secondary market for startup stock (similar to what goog does), this would in some sense, I guess let you be a private company, and not deal with the challenges associated with SOX compliance and at the same time not raise a highly dilutive Series D, in addition there is some sort of liquidation event for the investors.

PS: _(std. Buchheit comments about Limited Life Experiences + Overgeneralization = Advice apply)_

PPS: Say hi to the reddit guys for me ;-)

</comment><comment><USER18> There's an excellent prototyping policy in effect at Maxis:

 _In terms of time, they have a policy of permission vs. forgiveness. You need to be prepared to fail early – but that's okay! If a prototype takes less than two days, don't worry: just go ahead and do it. It if takes more... you should probably have permission._

<http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=11628>

</comment><comment><USER19> We used to do releases whenever we wanted. After this took the site out one too many times, we moved to at most daily releases with an hour of QA.

This actually made things worse. Aggressive releases were often the result of a decision further up the chain that something was "critical" and needed to go out right then and there. We'd got into the pattern of expecting to be able to do this at the drop of a hat.

So now, everyone was rushing to get the "urgent fix" into the daily release. This is an effective way to ship buggy software. Extra emergency releases were frowned upon, and so it introduced a level of panic that "Oh shit, this better not screw everything up". Ironically, with anyone releasing whenever they wanted, there was less panic because you could always make a quick fix and put it out without too many people noticing or caring.

We felt as a team that we'd prefer a more relaxed schedule that also allowed testing and accountability.

Frequent releases were a result of bad management, and unrealistic stakeholder expectations, we as developers didn't necessarily care that our code wasn't being put out immediately. Obviously, it needs to go out at some point, and we've been equally demoralised by mammoth projects that have gone on for months without a release, but that's a different end of the spectrum. The important thing is _regular_ releases, not frequent ones.

We've now decided to move to releases every 2 weeks with a 1 week QA period. We made this decision as a team of developers, it wasn't handed down from above, it just became a necessary check for the scale of our company.

I personally feel a lot more productive as a result, less panicked by the quick fix you need to drop everything to fit into the daily release, and less worried that a release will take out the site.

But sure, it comes at a cost. There's now a lot more going out with each release and more variables that could combine to cause issues, but these issues highlight deficiencies in our QA process that can be fixed. Also, getting our team to work according to this 2 week schedule has meant some significant costs to adopt better development processes, namely SCRUM, but I feel our team has benefited enormously from it. It all depends how well your team can adapt really.

So yes, there are costs associated, but it doesn't necessarily lead to demotivated developers. You need to be sure that the checks are introduced properly with their own test suite. This itself has a cost but can be extremely worthwhile. A half arsed and arbitrary change to your release schedule with no process changes can destroy you, but with a little training, the right team and the right managers, you can make things better for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER20> Having never had a "normal" job per se (okay, I bagged groceries for a year when I was younger), I still find it hard to believe that it can take two weeks just to get something deployed. Maybe one day I'll finally _truly_ believe all the stories I've heard -- two-week deployments, meetings about future meetings, etc. For now, some part of me still believes it's simply implausible and everyone is engaging in hyperbole...

<comment><USER21> It's not abnormal. In rails I have deployed to a customer in 12 hours, starting from scratch. I was using my own framework though. In gwt, I have done this in ~24 hours. These weren't simple apps either, not just scaffolding, but had complex user interfaces.

<comment><USER20> I wasn't referring to task difficulty, just the extreme time delay between when something is ready and when it is put into production.

<comment><USER21> I was referring to development & production deployments in both examples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I would add that in addition to having to show the cost of any new checks that one should have to show how the check will actually prevent the problem it proposes to prevent and the likely-hood of that problem occurring or re- curring. A major problem I've seen with checks is that they just become CYA material rather than anything truly beneficial or preventative and people will work around them.

</comment><comment><USER23> One problem is that the cost of checks is only visible in the aggregate. The marginal cost of each new check seems to be pretty low.

I wonder if there's a way to limit the total cost without hard-and-fast silly rules.

<comment><USER24> Is "one in, one out" a silly rule?

e.g. you can only add a new step to a process if a step is removed from another.

<comment><USER25> _Is "one in, one out" a silly rule?_

Yes. ;)

When do you institute the rule -- on day one, in which case it is functionally equivalent to "do not have any checks"? On day 13? Day 7386?

What is the quantum of a "check"? Is Sarbanes-Oxley one "check" or a collection of hundreds of "checks"?

Does the limit apply department-by-department or company-wide? Your sysadmins will naturally tend to employ a lot more formal checks (most of which are hopefully enforced by tiny Perl scripts) than your R&D prototyping team. Do you force the sysadmins to compete with the accounting department for a quota of checks? Do you incentivize sysadmins to evade checks by getting tasks reassigned to the R&D prototyping team, which (alas) can't afford to have any checks?

The last thing you want to do is encourage teams of lawyerly meta-checkers to run around enforcing rules about rules. That's costly, _squared_.

<comment><USER24> "When do you institute the rule?"

When you realise you have a (potential) problem. It stops it getting worse.

"What is the quantum of a 'check'?"

More tricky, certainly. That's a potential big problem.

"Does the limit apply department-by-department or company-wide?"

Whatever makes sense.

The idea of the exercise would be basically to:

\- build an appreciation throught the organisation that checks have a cost

\- provide a (albeit imperfect) mechanism for exercising some control over it

Something doesn't have to be perfect to be of use.

"The last thing you want to do is encourage teams of lawyerly meta-checkers to run around enforcing rules about rules. That's costly, squared."

That's just ISO9001, isn't it? :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is what I call "playing defense" instead of "playing offense". By nature, the people at large companies are more concerned with risk aversion than innovation. This is also how managers like to "hold power" over the real innovators by controlling the change management process. What makes a manager more qualified to deploy to production than the programmer?

<comment><USER27> Their higher up position gives them [the potential for] a better view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> To "make something people want", you need to know your customer's value system: what's important to him and what's not. This can be hard for startups, especially ycombinator types which may be very low budget, because their own value system is so different. Startups start with a company worth about $1 and want to turn it into a company worth about $1,000,000. Therefore startups value the ability to change rapidly -- that's why they want good programmers.

Big companies on the other hand, start with a company worth $100,000,000, and want to turn it into a company worth $150,000,000. They value steady process improvement that doesn't risk their existing revenue -- that's why they want good managers.

It's important to know this if you're trying to sell to a big company as well as if you're trying to compete with a big company.

</comment><comment><USER29> _In fact, the acquirer would have been better off; not only wouldn't these guys have broken anything, they'd have gotten a lot more done._

That's where you lost me. Sure, there are companies who add checks without thinking of the consequences, but as a company goes from a startup that is not making money to a more mature company that is making money, the cost of breaking things becomes very, very high. That is why most post-startup companies add more checks, to protect their revenue stream. And any company making decent money has a revenue stream that far outweighs the amount of money that the programmers would be willing to pay to have a faster release cycle. And the risk of the company losing their revenue stream for any significant amount of time far outweighs the risk in losing decent programmers because they aren't happy with the length of the release cycle.

You seem to say that these particular programmers would never have broken anything, but I find that impossible to believe unless they are working on something that is not at all complex or is inconsequential to the revenue stream. Every programmer, even the best programmer in the world writes code with bugs in it. The more complex a system is, the more likely there are to be bugs in it and as a company grows and makes money, the more complex their systems will become.

As an example, let's say that you were responsible for a web application that brought in a million dollars of revenue a day and you had these supposedly perfect programmers that never made mistakes who were responsible for the code. Would you let them just throw out whatever code they wanted onto the servers because you trusted them to not make mistakes? Or would you be more reasonable and put some checks in place first to make sure that the application worked correctly?

Obviously there needs to be a sane balance between the risk of breaking the application and the opportunity cost of not updating the application and the frustration of slowing down development is one of the costs that should be weighed, but to say that there shouldn't be any checks added as a company matures is almost laughable.

</comment><comment><USER30> _Whenever someone in an organization proposes to add a new check, they should have to explain not just the benefit but the cost. No matter how bad a job they did of analyzing it, this meta-check would at least remind everyone there had to be a cost, and send them looking for it._

To me that's the most important paragraph here. That takes you from "let's make sure this never happens again" to a cost-benefit analysis. The issue is not whether or not to have checks, as much of the discussion here assumes. It's about realizing that not all checks are equivalent, and using that knowledge to get the greatest safety at the lowest cost.

</comment><comment><USER31> _"... Steve Jobs's famous maxim "artists ship" works both ways. Artists aren't merely capable of shipping. They insist on it. So if you don't let people ship, you won't have any artists ..."_

Steve Yegge has had the unenviable luck of working on 3 products all of which have not shipped (cited as business reasons) yet he still works for Google ~ <http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/10/podcast-25/> So it seems there is something else going on that keeps programmers on board. Is it money, having the freedom to talking about it the process? I don't know.

<comment><USER20> I spent 3 months at the end of recent deployment furiously developing an (arguably) game-changing app for the Army's secret intranet. I knew in advance it wouldn't actually get deployed, despite everyone up to the Task Force Commander loving it and touting its importance. The day came when it was "done" (of course I had become attached and there were a million things I wanted to add) and ready to be deployed... then the red tape tied it up until it was time for us to go. As is generally the case, our replacements weren't planning to do things our way (the country has gotten much worse since we left, imagine that) so the project was basically sunk.

I worked on it because I love programming and trying new things. Everything I was doing at the time was new to me so it was fun, engaging, and a learning experience. Plus, it beat the hell out of anything else I could have been doing in that wasteland ;)

<comment><USER31> _"... I worked on it because I love programming and trying new things. Everything I was doing at the time was new to me so it was fun, engaging, and a learning experience. Plus, it beat the hell out of anything else I could have been doing in that wasteland ;) ..."_

Good explanation.

I put it as a question as I'm wasn't conclusively sure why people would sign on to assignments that have a probability of failure. But I've since found that smart organisations allow pursuit of training and learning as a reason to keep staff and motivation. I figure the USF know a thing or 2 about motivation. Hope your putting the lessons you learned into some hack your working on :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Paul,

Surely if the costs of checks could be "discontinuous," "non-linear," "step- change," or however else you would like to term it, then perhaps the potential cost to the company of NOT having the check in place could also be the same. Larger companies potentially have more to lose by having recurring lapses in supply, or in the ongoing case of your essay, software service. Of course, software/coding may also be a special case. Additionally, it's true that your "committee" example represents a discontinuous change in bureaucracy for that firm, which would make it much more reasonable to expect an equivalent affect on cost.

</comment><comment><USER33> There is a related concern I have about costs piling up due to corporate or managerial mandates. I have the impression that people above us only think about what will make their jobs easier -- what else do they need for us to supply them with so that they will be able to achieve predictability, manage or reduce costs, and generally manage the company better. When they come at it from this angle, it always seems reasonable that they ask us to do more -- provide more reports, track time against projects, report metrics -- when in fact most of what they ask actually interferes with us being able to get real work done. Since they/we do not have adequate productivity measurements in place already, the resulting reduction in productivity is never noticed, hence an invisible cost has been added without a conscious decision or cost/benefit analysis. Since I think most individual contributors recognize that this is taking place, it acts as a disincentive.

In the end I think the solution to both the article's and my concerns are the same: It is always better to ask the members of the team that experienced the problem firsthand what they think the solution would be or what they would do differently next time to avoid the problem. Especially if you phrase it as "what could you or your team have done differently to improve the outcome" and urge them to avoid proposing major process initiatives if at all possible, the improvement will be more practical and lower cost in all senses.

</comment><comment><USER34> _Programmers are unlike many types of workers in that the best ones actually prefer to work hard. This doesn't seem to be the case in most types of work. When I worked in fast food, we didn't prefer the busy times. And when I used to mow lawns, I definitely didn't prefer it when the grass was long after a week of rain._

 _Programmers, though, like it better when they write more code. Or more precisely, when they release more code. Programmers like to make a difference. Good ones, anyway._

Salesman like it best when they can sell more. When I used to sell used cars, I loved it best when I could keep pushing cars out of the lot.

Writers like it best when they can write more. They like it best when their imagination can produce thousands of stories.

The difference is that coders usually know what they will tackle and have a strategy so it is easier for them to get to the end point. Also they are almost sure they will hit the end point of a certain problem.

With other professions you cannot predict much. Your next customer is not guaranteed, your next story just does not want to show up in your brain etc....

That being said, Yes, a lot of programmers I know work hard.

<comment><USER10> Writer are like hackers, yes. But the reason most salesmen like to work hard is that they're paid on commission. That's very different.

<comment><USER35> I suspect that what is really going on here is that _workers who love their job actually prefer to work hard_ AND _good programmers love their job_. So it is probably true that _good programmers actually prefer to work hard_ , but that is not the whole truth...

Also, since _most workers don't love their job_ , it is probably also true that _good programmers are unlike many workers_. To say that _programmers are unlike many TYPES OF workers_ we'd have to believe that a higher proportion of programmers love their job than do workers in other types of work. From what I have seen on HN (albeit sample biased) I'd say that is true.

<comment><USER36> Yes. I've worked in fast food, and as a cashier at a convenience store, and in both cases, those who were better at the job preferred busier times ("It makes the day fly by, doncha think?").

<comment><USER37> Summary:

People like to make a difference. Good ones, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I found this particular paragraph to be not right somehow:

Programmers are unlike many types of workers in that the best ones actually prefer to work hard. This doesn't seem to be the case in most types of work. When I worked in fast food, we didn't prefer the busy times.

Who are the people who are "best at" fast food? I think perhaps you mean that people who build things get enjoyment out of building -- perhaps more precisely, of seeing their built item in action. I think programmers in particular are used to having short feedback loops between building and trying out, and that pattern of building up and testing as you go until a larger problem is solved is a strong motivation.

I guess I'm claiming that harder-working isn't really the issue. The issue seems to be who is having more fun. And in that sense, your claims still make sense. Part of the fun of building is a short feedback cycle. More checks in the process make the feedback cycle longer, therefore less fun. That explains why teachers' like their jobs. You can see it in someone's face when they learn something new.

</comment><comment><USER39> I disagree with the claim that harm to the U.S. IPO market was "not the intention" of the "people who wrote" Sarbanes-Oxley.

I have two pieces of evidence.

First, it was well-known and easy to see that Sarbanes-Oxley would be extremely expensive. It was well-known when passed that its costs fall disproportionately on small public companies. Because IPOs by definition are small public companies, the costs fall disproportionately on them. Thus, it must have been known when enacted that the bill would harm IPOs.

Second, suppose in fact it is the case, as Graham seems to advocate, that Congress "inadvertently" harmed IPOs. His argument is that Congress just accidently happened to overlook the harm of the bill to IPOs. In that case, when the harm to IPOs became factually clear, the bill would have been changed or amended. The fact that the law was not amended even after the harm to IPOs became clear proves that it was Congress' intention all along to harm small public companies (the companies most dangerous to the large corporations who have the most lobbying pull).

</comment><comment><USER40> Very nice - I think another reason why companies overpay - is because they don't negotiate, they don't check out the hot companies, they allow their employees to make decisions and most have never hired a company - so they go with the best name so they can say they hired them - it looks good on their resume - companies don't realize that most executives - director level and above are doing nothing more than building their resume - and their projects go unchecked, unaudited and bascially the company gets screwed - and frankly it is the company's own fault. Once a company loses it's founding partners, the transition team runs wild with all the changes they want to make and not looking for those things that made the company successful - spending is at all time high, brand suffers because the new team is too busy spending that they lose sight of what is important - the customer - gosh does that sound like AIG?

</comment><comment><USER41> Another interesting read. I'd like to note that (while it wasn't the focus of the essay), many of the expensive "checks" aren't there for monetary reasons, but rather human safety and the dire consequences of a poor decision.

Working at Motorola on cell phone code could be a great way to give everyone in the modern world a cool new feature - or accidentally break 20+% of all phones out there. A terrible Mickey Mouse movie could destroy a brand. Take it a step further to NASA, vehicle engine design (and safety), oil pipelining and refining, etc. and the cost could be human lives.

That said, I'm very interested in the cost of these "checks" on those industries. Not monetary costs (although important), but rather the cost in stifled future innovation.

Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER42> I guess so many _checks_ in a big company could be considered the biggest _mistake_ of all?

<comment><USER43> Well, as companies get larger they can afford less and less to make mistakes. If I'm running a start-up company, I can get away with changing things abruptly, because I have a smaller base of users and I have fewer people relying on my running at production-level. Also, chances are I'll be able to look at user feedback effectively.

Once you get large, and your company is providing sustenance for all your employees, people rely on your product, and you've got too many users for effective feedback-checking, you _have_ to close up, take fewer risks. Because suddenly, people want you to move slowly. They don't want you constantly skyrocketing ahead with their playing backup. Look at any big company - <USER2> Google, which was once famous for moving quickly - and you'll see that part of what gives a big company a good reputation is its being "solid." They have to give things up for an advantage.

It's why newspapers are so relied-upon. Of course, now it's what is hurting newspapers the most. They're being beaten by the flexible Internet. But even there, we're seeing a trade-off. Look at the quality of stories by the top writers online and by the top NY Times writers, and the online writers are much more amateur. They're faster, occasionally they're more interesting, but the Internet is thus far not retaining a high level of professionalism among reporting. Similarly, start-ups are much less reliable on the whole than large companies - look at Twitter and its problems, for instance.

So I think that PG's article is right. You can't restrict people and expect them to do as well. However, too much freedom leads to less stability, so it becomes a trade-off. Everything in moderation.

<comment><USER44> This thinking has always kind of confused me. Why are customers/users at a big company more important than those at a startup? Just because there's more of them, now you can't make mistakes?

If you have the agility to make rapid production changes, you also have the ability to rapidly rollback. So the argument that larger companies require more checks and testing than startups isn't really valid, especially when you consider the costs.

<comment><USER25> _If you have the agility to make rapid production changes, you also have the ability to rapidly rollback._

This is just not true. Rollbacks are always more expensive than changes, because you can't rewind time to undo the consequences of having your software be broken for minutes, hours, or days. Worse, in the absence of "checks", the cost of making a production change tends to be roughly constant as the company grows -- it takes the Amazon sysadmin no more time to type "make deploy" than it does me -- but the cost of a rollback scales directly with the size of your company's customer base.

Within a few seconds after Amazon.com breaks S3, thousands of companies begin to lose money, and they lose money second by second until the rollback happens. Even if Amazon is only down for a minute, that's one minute of downtime multiplied by its number of customers. The larger the customer base, the larger the stakes.

And, unfortunately, the cost of downtime is nonlinear. If Amazon goes down for a mere two minutes, hundreds of peacefully sleeping system administrators will get emergency pages from their uptime-monitoring systems. They will get out of bed. They will check their logs and their failover mechanisms. They will lose a lot of sleep, and soak up a bunch of overtime pay, and a lot of their good will towards Amazon will dissipate like the morning dew. Once you lose your reputation for quality it takes a lot of work to get it back.

This is why larger companies have more controls. The controls are in place to try and pass the ever-increasing cost of a rollback back to the team that causes the rollbacks. The reason it seems so gosh-darned expensive to add a trivial feature to your flagship app is that it _is_ expensive: If the average rollback costs $1m in revenue and every new feature is only 95% reliable, every new feature costs the company $50k to deploy.

The secret here is: If you want to deploy changes rapidly, don't work on a product that has a lot of uptime-sensitive customers! Start a different product line, or start a beta program, or found a smaller company.

<comment><USER44> S3 is a really bad example because they provide infrastructure. Their customers actually see their entire site go down. Those kinds of companies are the exception. I hope Heroku has rigorous testing and scrutinizes every change, even though they are a startup.

Let's say I own a video site and I want to add threaded comments. If I have 5 users and the site goes down for 5 minutes, those 5 users will get 5 minutes each of annoyance. If I have a million users, each of those users will get 5 minutes of annoyance each also. There is no difference to the user there. So, by adding more checks to make sure the site doesn't go down for 5 minutes when you have more users, you're saying the more users you have, more the important each user becomes. I think that's a strange way of thinking.

(The same is true here of an infrastructure service-- if S3 had 5 users and were more cavalier about their release schedule and broke something, those 5 users would exact the same net effects of downtime as if S3 had 5 million users.)

The awesome benefit of getting threaded comments developed, tested briefly, and pushed in one evening is worth the risk of 5 minutes of downtime compared to the 2 weeks of rigorous testing and approval-by-committee. No matter how many users you have.

<comment><USER25> I used an infrastructure site as an example because the value proposition is easy to understand when you use a site that has a clear and simple monetization strategy. Video sharing sites are arguably an even worse example than S3, because the value of uptime is so hard to perceive or compute. It's likely that even Twitter doesn't understand the true value of a customer-hour of Twitter uptime, because the site isn't monetized and so much of the value is concentrated in the brand. Measuring that is like voodoo, only less empirical. ;)

 _If I have 5 users and the site goes down for 5 minutes, those 5 users will get 5 minutes each of annoyance. If I have a million users, each of those users will get 5 minutes of annoyance each also. There is no difference to the user there._

No, but there is a big difference for you! If a user is worth a dollar per year, the five-user site is worth five bucks per year, but the million-user site is worth a million bucks. If each patch to your code causes 0.1% of users to abandon your product (a number which depends on the odds that a patch will cause a rollback, and on the odds that a rollback will annoy a user enough to make them leave), patching a 5-user site costs you half a cent per year on average (most likely it has no perceptable cost, since odds are no users will leave) but each patch to a million-user site costs you $1000 per year in revenue. And that's just the _linear_ cost. There are nonlinear consequences: one or zero annoyed users is nothing to worry about -- unless that user is Michael Arrington -- but a clique of 1000 annoyed users is potentially a _movement_ : a critical mass of people who will all start complaining about your company on Twitter on the same day, potentially costing you your next 10,000 or 100,000 or 1 million users while simultaneously empowering your competitors, who may begin building the site that will take you down by poaching those dissatisfied users.

This is just the flip side of scalability. As a programmer you enjoy mighty economies of scale: Running a site with a million users is more expensive than running a single-user site, but it is _much less_ than a million times as expensive. But this leverage also applies to your mistakes: a mistake that costs you a dollar when your site is small might cost you $1,000,000 when your site is big. And it's the same mistake! Typos are just as easy to make on big sites as on small ones.

Obviously, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't ever change the site. Presumably each and every one of your patches is valuable, and will _bring in revenue_ to pay for its own insurance premiums. Right? :) But you do need to think about that calculation, because you do occasionally make mistakes. As your userbase grows, you may wish to test each patch on a subset of users to be sure they will _really_ like it, and that the additional revenue is really going to be there. You may wish to institute tests and internal audits that lower the risk of rollbacks, or failover mechanisms to lower the cost of rollbacks. And before long, lo, you will be that which you deplore: A company with a bunch of annoying internal controls! But at least you'll have revenue to console yourself with.

<comment><USER5> But I think what Dustin is saying (correct me if I'm wrong) is that the multiplier applies both ways. And that the total cost of making a 5 minute downtime mistake, even to a million users, could easily be outweighed by the benefits of releasing a product/feature/site 2 weeks early. In most cases, I think large companies are risk adverse instead of risk neutral to situations like this.

I agree with both of you that it varies considerably based on what the site does (infrastructure, videos, games, etc).

<comment><USER25> _In most cases, I think large companies are risk adverse instead of risk neutral to situations like this._

I'm not going to argue with that. Just because a certain increase of caution is rational doesn't mean that caution isn't being overapplied in many cases, just as PG suggests in his original post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> How about a check immunity system?

For example, competent people who knows their own weaknesses well and often check their decisions with others should be immune to checks

Good programmers often let other good programmers check their codes. Good writers often let other good writers proof read. Good managers often discuss his decisions with his employees before deploy them. They should be check immune.

You can even pass out check-immune badges to encourage non-check-immune people to be more critical of themselves :)

Of course, this system itself is a check. Who decides who will get check- immunity? What's the successful-decision-ratio threshold? I think it's possible to implement a light-weight system little cost.

</comment><comment><USER46> Yes, startups make their job better than big companies. But I think that it is a part of a more general rule: people work productively in OPEN systems, and the open systems themselves encourage working hard. Open source projects are developed more rapidly, because it is hard to imagine the system which is more open. Both users and developers control the system, and every user can become a developer. In startups we have a limited number of people who can control the process of development, but they still controll it. In other words, the system is open for founders and employees. Big companies work unefficiently because they are too closed, and a great number of checks is only a part of it.

</comment><comment><USER47> Nice writeup on half an idea. Now, time for some release engineering. How do you give good coders free (enough) reign while keeping tabs on the stupidities of the lesser ones?

In a startup, it's acceptable for service to be accidentally down for short periods while the geniuses running the show fix their latest cockup. In large companies, it isn't. How do you get the best of both worlds?

It is not by removing all safety interlocks. Sysadmins, especially good ones, can tell you in excruciating detail why not. Most programmers are not very good sysadmins, or at least not as good as they might like to believe. Coincidence?

</comment><comment><USER48> This would be interesting as a concept to develop past the circumstance of programmers at work.

I would call it part of institutionalisation. You have a need to be effective via policies, checks, procedures & such. This replaces the shoot from the hip of small groups.

I think you can apply this to schools that need to teach approved courses with approved grading. Then it gets worse when they need examinations that are to be applied across an entire country.

I'm sure there are principals that can be extracted & applied to lots of places. The costs can be very serious.

</comment><comment><USER49> My experience is that extensive procedure comes because the small company start up approach doesn't scale to large companies. Every one I have worked at that has transitioned from from 10s to 1000s of people was failing because it tried to continue as if it was 10 wizards at it. The wizardy actually hindered others because it was opaque to them.

Interestingly the biggest company I worked for actually ran the best because perhaps its roots being 80+ years before any of the others would allow the significant difference to be tracked.

</comment><comment><USER50> When I was an automotive engineer the industry instituted a Japanese "check" called Design Failure Mode Effects Analysis. For every component the engineers would have to predict the ways the design could fail in testing and what steps would have to be taken to fix them. Time spent doing DFMA's added significantly to the cost of producing a new part and worked counter to weight optimization. Do you think, twenty years of DFMA's later, that automotive design is more efficient?

</comment><comment><USER36> "The purpose of the committee is presumably to ensure that the company doesn't waste money. And yet the result is that the company pays 10 times as much."

Well, only if they still buy every product, which would defeat the purpose of having a gatekeeper committee. If, instead, the committee approves only 1 in 25 products that would otherwise have been bought, the committee saves them money (leaving aside the cost of the time of the committee-members).

</comment><comment><USER51> " And you know what? It would have been perfectly safe to let them. In fact, the acquirer would have been better off; not only wouldn't these guys have broken anything, they'd have gotten a lot more done."

My experience as a manager of a team of programmers for many years is that for sure they would love to be able to write and release w/o a QA process, they do in fact take the site down when this is allowed!

</comment><comment><USER52> Checks have a cost, for sure. What about Eric Reis's split-testing axiom? If in a startup the developer/coder is basically the customer of the enterprise because the cost of the check is paid by the rising frustration of the coder, then should split-testing be looked upon as a check? Even if it is, the idea of an available metric to backup claims of efficacy is really compelling.

</comment><comment><USER53> For me this is all about "Mental Poisons".

Mental Poisons are ideas that harm people, life and the universe. They are remarkably common.

Paul expresses this one very well. There's a lot more out there too.

Fossilised heirarchies and thought-free-rule-driven organisations are great for the student of poisons.

</comment><comment><USER54> Thanks for this article Paul. Now i really know the why behind the what i observed working for a big company

[http://computinglife.wordpress.com/2008/11/14/hands-free- or-...](http://computinglife.wordpress.com/2008/11/14/hands-free-or-hands- bound-mouth-loose-3-mouth-loose/)

</comment><comment><USER55> Two weeks seems a bit much, but once you have a significant client base of paying customers, you simply must have some form of production control and QA. Even good developers make mistakes, and letting everyone just push their changes to prod over lunch is a recipe for pissed off clients.

</comment><comment><USER56> As a previous startup coder who was acquired by a much larger company, I can truly say you've hit the nail on the head. I never minded working 70 hour weeks before, but now I have a hard time punching the clock 35 hours a week. I hate my new higher paying job.

</comment><comment><USER57> Oh, wow. Yes. I've often thought that a lot of this process is just to keep the lowest common denominator from messing things up. I want to spend my life surrounded with people that don't need this, because then we could do so many more worthwhile things.

</comment><comment><USER58> It seems that checks affect journalism too. "Citizen journalism" allows people to report much more quickly than traditional media. Bloggers don't have to submit their posts to editors and fact-checkers, the way broadcast and print journalists do.

</comment><comment><USER59> Hi Paul

I'm surprised you didn't tie this in to due diligence checks done by VCs, and its impact on startups, etc. The parallels are strong, and you've commented on that impact before (at FOWA in 2007, I think).

Regards, Terry Jones

</comment><comment><USER60> I'd say that the reason for bureaucracy in large organizations is that central management doesn't trust middle managers. Whereas in a startup there are a total of three bosses, and all trust each other.

</comment><comment><USER61> The cost of the checks should balance the cost of the risks. Those are not always determinate or exactly estimable, but, statistically, that would be a simple basis of a rational approach. Wouldn't it?

</comment><comment><USER62> Small side node:

I think it is very cool to have the comments here instead of his website. It is nice to have them consolidated and not some comments here, some there.

</comment><comment><USER63> The movie "Meet the Robinsons" makes a point to children that we make the most progress when we are free to fail. Thanks for making the same point for grownups.

</comment><comment><USER64> This is exactly why we don't respond to RFPs any more.

</comment><comment><USER65> pg worked in fast food?

<comment><USER10> Baskin Robbins, in HS.

<comment><USER22> What was your favorite flavor?

<comment><USER5> When PG worked there they only had 7 flavors :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I guess the best check (and benefit) for startups are commit mistakes early, commit mistakes often.

</comment><comment><USER67> in Russian [http://spring.jumpidea.com/2008/12/paul-graham- artistship.ht...](http://spring.jumpidea.com/2008/12/paul-graham- artistship.html)

</comment><comment><USER68> i love the last paragraph of that post Paul. so true.

</comment><comment><USER69> Wonderful. Well thought, researched and valuable for large and small companies alike. <http://wildwildeastdailies.blogspot.com></comment>


Public universities have "really lost our focus" - <AUTHOR> http://hechingerreport.org/public-universities-really-lost-focus/ <comment> semi-extrinsic There is a great quote from 1906 by J.J. Thomson (discoverer of the electron, that atoms have isotopes, etc.) on the funding of research:

"If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do no come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it."

<comment><USER2> It's a valid POV, but consider all of these advances made without these salarymen.

Where would we be in the computer industry is the university of California and others didn't get DARPA and other funding to do their work on Unix. Ditto Bell Labs.

<comment><USER3> The old-school research parks like Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, Microsoft Research, etc. actually reinforce the GP's point. The researchers at these places were given a LOT of "leisure time" AKA free reign to choose their projects. Not unlike 20% time in the glory days of Google.

A viable counter-point might be the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, AKA where senior scientists like Einstein go to live out their days in leisure without contributing anything of value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A lot of public universities have been hijacked by elite career administrators and they've raised the price of tuition well past what most middle/working class families can afford. Then there are the Universities of California that turn away local citizens so they can charge out of state and foreign students a premium. Meanwhile the local applicants are funneled into less prestigious UCs like Merced and Riverside. It feels like a public resource has been stolen from the public and turned into an institution for the elite.

Look at how UC Davis's Chancellor had university police pepper spray peace student protesters, while she sat on the board of Devry, King Abdulaziz University of Saudi Arabia, AND a textbook publisher--clear conflicts of interest. The chancellor then spent university funds to try and hide the search results of her actions. Then after all this, she still leaves with her pension:

>Under the settlement, Katehi will remain on administrative leave for a year as chancellor emeritus, receiving her $424,360 annual pay with the promise that she will return as a faculty member. If she should choose not to return for at least a year, she would forfeit the chancellor's salary payment, Klein said. Her faculty pay would be decided by UC Davis campus officials.

The UCs and other public universities are run by crooks.

<comment><USER5> The amount of public (i.e., taxpayer) funding for public universities has dropped by more than half in the past few decades. The money has to come from somewhere, so many public universities have resorted to increasing the number of out-of-state and foreign students because they pay higher tuition rates. In effect, the out-of-state students now subsidize the in-state students.

<comment><USER6> Or they could cut the administrative bloat and return to affordable staffing levels. These institutions were able to run on a fraction of the head count that balooned after the advent of Corporate U.

<comment><USER7> [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent- the-m...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-main- reason-tuition-is-skyrocketing/)

Also, a lot of the increase in administration is essentially legally required. Universities can't get rid of their title IX offices, after all.

<comment><USER8> Universities are required to abide by title IX only if they accept federal funds, fwiw.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> They have to pursue prestige signaling, because business fetishizes prestige.

</comment><comment><USER9> The changes the interviewee described happened in part because the conservative movement has been pushing for them for many decades.

From the beginning, modern conservatives have seen the university as a cesspool of atheist marxism. Indeed, one of the founding books of the modern conservative movement was <i>God and Man at Yale</i> by William F. Buckley. So conservatives, especially at the state level, have worked to change the mission of the university from free inquiry to profit-making and supporting corporations, and they have largely succeeded.

<comment><USER10> I won't disagree about the effects of oversight at the state level - but the system usually isn't changed that much by this. The disciplines have their own literature and mores.

I don't think the conservatives have anything to do with it. For one, most of the conservatives I've read work from within the academic system. For another, an original conservative might have been someone like Edmund Burke, who died in 1797.

What changed was - there was rather suddenly a lot of money. There was the mandate that "(nearly) everybody needs a degree." When you go from 5% of the population to 50%, things will be different. Take UT Austin - its endowment is sufficient that they need never charge tuition, but they do to keep capacity matched to demand.

What's really changed is just galloping careerism. Nothing else is needed to explain this.

<comment><USER9> I agree that other causes were involved. But as for the need for more money, this happened when conservatives were taking over one state house after another, and a large part of their agenda was cutting state budgets, and one happy consequence of this, from their perspective, is that it forced public universities to become much more like corporations. And when this happened, they did nothing to stop it, and just sat back and smiled.

As to conservative academics, ask them and they will tell you American academia is overwhelmingly liberal. It is the conservative politicians who brounght about the change, not the academics. Also one thing the conservative movement did in response is set up a vast network of think tanks to give brainy conservatives alternative employment.

And remember, there are two sides to this. On the one side, they force universities to become more like corporations by cutting funds. On the other hand, conservatives are pro-corporate and so are happy that, in order to get the needed cash, they had to do the corporations bidding.

As to galloping careerism, that begs the question of why, for the first time in history, ambitious people go into university administration, when that has always been a poor-paying job for people who were basically academics.

<comment><USER10> There are lots of different kinds of universities. If funding to universities was (relatively) cut, it was because demand surged. The California system had free, taxpayer supported universities but that wasn't sustainable due to demographics. Of course the story is different everywhere. It's not like universities are poverty pockets.

Conservatives are not uniformly pro-corporate. There may be a central tendency towards "free markets" ( or some caricature thereof ) but that's not a central tenet. I follow the Arnold Kling model; conservatives are primarily concerned with perceived barbarism. People who work steadily are seen as less barbaric. Corporations hire people.

Think tanks are an artifact of an expanding media system. I watch a lot of CSPAN, and they are a lot on there. There are similar liberal institutions, and varying degrees of conservatism even among AEI or the like. Much of that is simply exploiting the business model created by Wm. F Buckley.

I know nothing of who goes into university administration. but the tendency of people to go into administration in general should be apparent in the larger culture.

<comment><USER9> As to different types of universities, the private ones still have boards of directors that tend to be dominated by businessmen, and of course the money in their endowments mostly come from rich businessmen. And as to the problem of demographics, as others have pointed out they should have handled this by remaining lean in expenses but instead went the opposite direction.

You're right there are different types of conservatives. But the conservative politicians are almost all strongly pro-corporate. That is partly because that is where they get a lot of their campaign contribution.

Conservatives who don't make the free market central I think should instead be labeled traditionalists.

<comment><USER10> There's only so much lean you can do. At some point, you will need to predict a growth pattern and steer towards it, and you'll be wrong.

IMO, the most succinct way to explain education now is: we subsidize it. That which you subsidize, you get more of, and it costs more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> He says that this has been happening since the '1970's' \- but historically, most Universities were effectively private, or run by the founding charities, i.e. Churches etc..

Queen's University in Kingston Ontario was founded in the early 19th century and run basically by the Presbyterian and United Church until the 1950's - when Ontario reorganized how public Unis would be funded.

Which I think is ballpark similar to how things operated in other countries.

I'm not making a point for or against - other than to say that this idea of 'government funded directly secular education' was kind of an anomaly in the history of higher education.

Worth noting.

It'd be nice to have a way to truly judge the merits of research ... so hard ...

Even harder in 2016 when everything 'must be measured' ...

<comment><USER11> Also - to note - only 1/3 of people realistically go on to 'higher education' ...

What about the other 2/3s?

Those 'with degrees' seem to be doing ok, overall.

This without - not so good.

Germany has a 'vocational' system that enables/empowers those who don't want to go off and study Math or History, and it seems to work well, though it's very deeply entrenched into industry, into culture - and maybe somewhat unfair as it is kind of 'class perpetuating' ... by the time kids are 14 they are already being slotted into one stream or another (richer parents = more likely to go upstream).

I'll never speak out against 'more college' but America actually does put more than anyone else through college, and spends more $ and more $/capita than any other nation.

It'd be great to figure out a way to put the other 2/3's into the economy in a meaningful way. Nobody seems to want to speak for them ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Take an old warehouse, subdivide it, fill it with chairs, whiteboards, and some audiovisual. Hire 20-30 Ph.D.'s, an administrative assistant, and a custodial person or two, and you have an institute of higher learning. Students can live at home and brown bag it.

If I had the time and money, I'd start a university on this scale. The modern university in the U.S. has become a bloated monster, with more (and higher paid) administration than faculty, boutiques and fancy dorms, slick marketing departments, billion dollar sports facilities, medical clinics, etc. Ridiculous.

Obviously, my little thought experiment is rather simplistic; you're going to want to spend some money on labs for scientific research and instruction, and there's that pesky accreditation hoop to jump through, as well as accounting and legal expenses.

But still... we have lost focus. The mega campuses with huge layers of administrative fat do not serve their constituents well.

</comment><comment><USER13> The real issue is why public education charges tuition at all. Education through high school is (for now) free. It used to be that a high school diploma was considered perfectly adequate to prepare a student to be a responsible citizen. Society benefited by funding that baseline.

Now the mantra is that "college is the new high school" \-- if you don't have a postsecondary credential you're essentially unemployable. If that's the case, should't society's calculus extend to the public funding of a solid undergraduate education?

It's no different from public funding of preventative care (e.g. inoculations) and fixing the roads.

</comment><comment><USER14> There is a fair bit to unpack here, so lets go through it, keeping in mind this article is written to help jive up interest for the book:

"It's a cycle in which colleges spend more and more money chasing research projects, building luxury dorms and academic centers to attract wealthy students, and engaging in activities that compel them to compete against each other, rather than focus on their own students."

This has to do with federal student loan subsidies.

"Families suffer, of course, but the long-term impact transcends that. "The converting of public funding into higher tuition focuses the student on assuring her future income to cover higher costs and debt," he writes. At stake, he believes, is a citizenry that sees college not as a place for in- depth learning and inquiry, but as a means to economic security, forcing colleges to conduct themselves more like a business, and less like a public good that all students can afford."

I think that ship sailed back in the mid 1990's. I really don't know of many students these days that are there to 'just learn', most are there because they know they need to have a diploma to have any realistic chance in the job markets. Again, this issue stems from federally back loans in part.

"But I think some of it is just that it was more important to have a kind of a national profile than it was to do really good regional service. Shifting from regional service to national profile created competitive costs; you just tend to duplicate a lot of things that other people have. Then later, in the 1990s and 2000s, when you're starting to compete for blue chip out-of-state students, the arms race in facilities accelerates, and just re-accelerates after 2008."

Here he is talking about the US News rankings, something that I remember hearing about while applying to college, but not really ever reading. I don't know what the faculty are seeing and hearing, as I am not one, but are those ranking really _that_ important to prospective students? I was under the impression that they just applied to schools, see what came back, and then chose, though that may have been just me. Many schools have an application fee, but can they really be garnering that much money on the fees as to justify all these amenities? I guess that I am saying that using US News as a scapegoat is ... fishy to me.

"Undergraduates and academic graduates students became more of an afterthought at the senior management level. They were kind of the revenue source, in terms of tuition and general funds per capita, but then, after that, they were not at the center of policy. We really lost our focus."

Sing it from the mountains, Brother!

"Rebuild high-end cognitive skills, so that these folks don't just go down the street to the machinist shop that's still open if they lost their factory job. They can be eligible for a whole range of jobs, or build jobs and businesses on their own with these skills."

The sentence is a bit confusing, but is he saying that a machinist job is a default one? Wouldn't he just say a barista or a Target checkout person as a default type job? I think that the author's words here may have been somewhat mis-typed.

All in all, the author's book adds yet another piece to the jeremiads of countless academics. The core issue, it seems, is the money. We all idealize this gilded age era of Harvard and Teddy Roosevelt, but forget that those were the scions of America, with near limitless credit if not money outright. My father once told me 'if the office is a mess, then the secretary is stealing'. The author may be on to something when it comes to this mess. Perhaps there is a lot of corruption going on that is responsible for this very large issue of funding problems.

<comment><USER15> > The sentence is a bit confusing, but is he saying that a machinist job is a > default one? Wouldn't he just say a barista or a Target checkout person as a > default type job?

No. Barista or checkout cashier are unskilled jobs. This sentence is talking about skilled blue collar jobs. If you are a factory worker, you have the same set of skills that would be used in a machinist shop. The author is arguing that "technical skills" only qualifies you for a narrow set of jobs, but "high-end cognitive skills" qualifies for a broader range of jobs.

<comment><USER16> This idea that Barista is an unskilled job is the discriminating factor between coffee shops I want to go to and coffee shops that I don't want to go to.

<comment><USER17> the boundary is fuzzy, but how much training does a barista require, and how much training is required to call a job unskilled? Even hauling rocks requires requires some training to perform safely and efficiently.

<comment><USER15> There are differing levels of skill for a barista. A barista at Starbucks might not need a whole lot of training. A barista at a more high-end coffee shop may need a lot more. It'd be like the difference between a fast-food worker and a chef at a fancy restaurant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The problem may have an even more basic core problem -- universities in general become ends unto themselves instead of means to an end.

<comment><USER19> I think the op would like the universities to become ends unto themselves. He specifically complains about university being viewed as a ticket to a career:

> At stake, he believes, is a citizenry that sees college not as a place for > in-depth learning and inquiry, but as a means to economic security, forcing > colleges to conduct themselves more like a business

FWIW, I agree with the op's sentiment.

<comment> at-fates-hands Don't you think that's a romantic notion that people go to college for "in- depth learning and inquiry"?

I went to college in order to get a "real" job with a salary and benefits. Oh sure, I had a few cool classes that made me think and be philosophical, but for the most part, I saw college as a means to get ahead and earn more than my peers who didn't go to college.

I've also seen first hand how many large corporations won't even interview you unless you have a four year degree. Doesn't matter if its relevant or not (I have a liberal arts degree and am a developer) they just want you to have a college degree.

You have to remember a lot of colleges are also prime recruiting grounds for the big SV companies and startups as well. In order to continue to get grant money and other perks from these companies, they are essentially forced to do the will of the companies they are in bed with.

While it would be nice to have colleges be truly "higher learning" places, I doubt it will change anytime soon.

<comment><USER19> > Don't you think that's a romantic notion that people go to college for "in- > depth learning and inquiry"?

I realize that it may not square with most peoples' motivations, but in my ideal world it would be. I also think that, on the whole, college students will lead better lives and have better career outcomes if they first focus on learning. The interviewee goes on to say:

> This has to be liberal arts and sciences. Rebuild high-end cognitive skills, > so that these folks don't just go down the street to the machinist shop > that's still open if they lost their factory job.

The "high-end cognitive skills" is the important part. What you learn at college isn't necessarily the material, but how to think. That skill will serve you well in any job you have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is caused by the realigning of university administrative structures along the philosophical lines of neoliberalism [0]. It's hard to find a definition of neoliberalim outside of technical political theory, but I think this source is a good overview and I've seen it cited by academics [1], for example this guy who contextualizes it within academia (some of his writing was accused of being neoliberal ideology) [2]. In short: "Neoliberalism is a philosophy in which the existence and operation of a market are valued in themselves, separately from any previous relationship with the production of goods and services, and without any attempt to justify them in terms of their effect on the production of goods and services; and where the operation of a market or market-like structure is seen as an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action, and substituting for all previously existing ethical beliefs."

Another source that examines the transformation of public education under the program of neoliberalism is Wendy Davis's Undoing the Demos. Here is a review by a mathematician who contextualizes her account in his own field [3]. It is a particularly touchy subject for me because I am starting to see mathematics departments cut down to size because they are not profitable (the latest one here) [4], and to see something so foundational and culturally important (to me, anyway) stripped away because it is not profitable is horrifying.

This is not just the natural course of the world. These transformations of our social institutions are deliberate and engineered. Whether or not you think it's a change for the worse, well, that's up to you. I personally think it will lead to a crisis of capitalist civilization and as a student of history I'm aware of what happened the last time capitalism was in crisis.

[0] [http://rohcavamaintenant.free.fr/CLE%20USBAICHE/USB%20KEY%20...](http://rohcavamaintenant.free.fr/CLE%20USBAICHE/USB%20KEY%20Fahriye/NEOL%C4%B0BERAL%C4%B0ZM/The%20Rise%20and%20Fall%20of%20the%20Neo- Liberal%20University.pdf)

[1] [http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/neoliberalism.htm...](http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/neoliberalism.html)

[2] [https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/neoliberali...](https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/neoliberalism- and-higher-education/)

[3] [https://mathematicswithoutapologies.wordpress.com/2015/05/08...](https://mathematicswithoutapologies.wordpress.com/2015/05/08/how- to-brand-mathematics/)

[4] [https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2016/09/disaster_at_the...](https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2016/09/disaster_at_the_leicester_math.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> Universities chase the rich because thats where the money is. The middle class doesnt have any real money to spend and governments have lost interest in education. (The anti-university rally crys here at hn are no help.) So they build luxury dorms and invest in prestige signalling because that is good busines. That keeps the ball rolling. Free to play games chase thier whales. Drug companies chase boomers. Real estate agents chase elderly widows. And universities chase the sons and daughters of the rich.

<comment><USER22> Harvard and MIT maybe, but there are thousands of mid range universities catering to middle income kids.

<comment><USER13> I don't know how well you know MIT, but at least when I was there I got the impression that the majority of undergrads' parents were middle or lower middle class.

My high school sent a lot of kids to Harvard and other Ivy League schools and those students were about 1/3 wealthy suburban kids and 2/3 city kids, many of whom paid no tuition at all.

At MIT I thought I was unusual for having attended a private school.

I think the small number of schools with huge endowments (mostly not huge schools) can afford to be less financially selective. It's the fat part of the bell curve that can't afford to take the same attitude that gives rise to the problems discussed here.</comment></comment></comment>