I'd like to read that book too... but "how to do a certain kind of difficult new thing" in their case involved more than solid execution. It also needed an owner/investor with extremely deep pockets and technical capabilities that vastly accelerated their work, who was willing to throw huge amounts of money at the problem for years, along with favorable economic conditions (zero-percent interest rates) for long periods of time, at the right period of time. I give Waymo tons of credit for their work here, but the conditions that enabled it aren't easily repeatable IMO.
The reason it's interesting (IMO) is that other companies that also had owner/investors with extremely deep pockets and technical capabilities have been throwing huge amounts of money at it in the same favorable interest rate environment, but with seemingly a lot less success.
I think their (apparent) success probably does have a lot to do with some combination of having the deepest pockets and (I think?) being a few years earlier to get started than everyone else, but still, it also looks like they had a better strategy, and I'm pretty curious how that worked.
It is fascinating how Google simultaneously provides a great lesson in how to leverage their primary competency of AI, as well as how not to (losing to OpenAI in LLMs).
I can highly recommend an episode of 99% Invisible [1] about the musician's strike of 1942, which was a fight about royalties from recorded music, but was in large part actually about the the loss of livelihood from music recordings. Very little new music was recorded for over a year, and the president of the musician's union was pushing for record labels to pay into a fund that would benefit unemployed musicians in order to end the strike. I didn't make the connection when I heard this, but yeah, it does feel analogous to what we're facing now.
Actually, it was only instrumental musicians being prohibited to record. So singers weren't affected and that strike hugely contributed music shifting from primarily instrumental (earlier jazz, swing) to vocal-focused (jump blues, rock and roll and so on...)
It's interesting because it's something which is around us every day but most of us don't know about it.:)
Oh man, you're bringing the flashbacks. My siblings watched that movie constantly when I was a kid, and some of those scenes traumatized me for years (I was a sensitive kid).
Modern Disney filmmaking (Pixar, WDAS) is much closer to the Miyazaki approach you describe than you'd think. It's very, very iterative; each film goes through 5-6 screenings, during which the story structure can and does change dramatically. People are very definitely working on the final product while the story is still being worked out. One pretty common pattern: with 8-9 months left to go until release, the entire third act has to be scrapped and reworked, and often big chunks of the first and second act reworked to match. Voice actors for the main characters are involved throughout, and often come in many times to record new pages of freshly written dialog.
If all this seems chaotic, it is. It leads to untold stress as the release date looms closer and closer and the ending still isn't figured out, which compresses the schedule for each department to deliver a finished product. Very very rarely, the release date is allowed to slip (see "The Good Dinosaur" for example) but that's really the nuclear option, as it involves shuffling the release schedule and incurs a ton of cost. This is a big part of why these movies cost so much: compressing the schedule means hiring tons of people and paying them tons of overtime.
Source: I worked the better part of a decade at WDAS.
I found it fascinating how the team was still developing key plot points (let alone dialog/animation) down to the final few weeks/days before the film needed to be completed!
It's no different to how the video games industry works, either.
It completely kills your employees though: all those crunches to scrap tons of good work and replace it with new ideas; tons of stressful overtime. Ugh.
Working on the new service, everything is involving independently while product is figuring out what they want to sell in reality. This out-of-order execution seems like a feature of modern production, while consistency is left behind and only synchronize when they absolutely has to.
I have no opinion on this however, can't think of a better way myself.
I have a few friends in the industry and their whole process just seems nuts. They earn good money from overtime but I'd just be so annoyed doing so much throwaway work even though a lot of it just seems like it could be avoided with planning, time management and more honest pricing when it comes to sub contracting.
The willingness to throw away work that, no matter how well done, is in service of a less enjoyable movie, is why some movies are great while others are, well, just movies. Producing 90 minutes of animation is a heck of a lot cheaper than producing 90 minutes of animation that hundreds of millions of people will cherish for generations.
Yeah. That amazing scene in terminator 2 with Sarah Connor's actor's twin sister is a great example. Just wasn't necessary to tell the story, movie was better without it.
It is chaotic compared to conventional film production. Most movies have a complete script before principal photography even starts, or at the very least all of the major story beats and set pieces planned out. Last minute rewrites and reshoots for big budget productions are a last resort if the studio feels the product just isn't shaping up into something that will put asses in seats.
Anecdotally: I don't have any smart home stuff, but literally every other member of my family does (parents, siblings, inlaws, etc). I've had numerous conversations in which they ask me why we accept an Echo or a Nest or something as a Christmas present, but my privacy concerns are always greeted with a blank stare. They just don't see it as an issue.
To them, the (perceived?) issue is how hard everything seems to setup and maintain. I haven't tried connecting any smart stuff lately, so maybe it's really easy for all I know, but all that stuff seems really advanced to them and they seem kind of afraid of it.
Man, does that thing bring back memories. I did my PhD in computer graphics (though I no longer work in that field) -- I've written several papers and read more than I can count. That bunny is iconic and still shows up in some absurd number, although it's considered a trivially simple model now. Even so, it can find ways to bite you; there are holes in the base can cause problems with some algorithms (sure you can find watertight versions... but that's cheating ;)
Me too -- I live in Sublime Text most days. Hard to argue that VSCode wins on dev features, and most of my fellow developers use it for that reason. But I can't get past the speed; Sublime Text does everything instantly, while in VS Code, everything is just slightly laggy.
To each their own, I guess, but given how much of my day editing text, it's hard to want to use a text editor that has noticeable lag. (Cue the usual rants about latency in 2021 on multi-GHz machines)
I've also got most of the shortcuts committed to muscle memory and configured just the way I like it. Sunken cost fallacy is where I am headed. But I've always loved this editor and will continue to support it as long as they continue to support it.
Pixar was founded in 1986. They started releasing theatrical films with Toy Story in 1995. Are you really saying there hasn't been a single good Disney animated movie in the past 25 years? What's the basis for that statement?
The history of the two studios is way more involved than what you're suggesting, and talent moves around between studios quite a lot. And 25 years is a long time; there have been entire generations of talent that have risen up since then, and trust me, they're not all at Pixar.
Source: I worked at Disney Animation for nearly a decade (and closely with Pixar during that time). I'm certainly not unbiased but probably way more informed.
I was in this exact position a few years ago! I led a group for a year and a half, with somewhat mixed success. We did some pretty great successes, but also some pretty embarrassing problems that were at least partially attributable to my inexperience. I learned a ton though! The below is my experience, and may or may not translate to yours, but believe me, it was learned the hard way.
Being a tech lead is only partly about the tech, and mostly about the lead. You'll ultimately succeed or fail based on your team.
Being an effective leader requires a completely different set of skills than being an effective engineer. This, as silly as it sounds now, took me by surprise. You may have a decade-plus of dev experience but still be starting from zero when it comes to people. (Or not; some people will be better equipped for this than others. I wasn't so much.)
Find a mentor. Someone you can be completely honest with, and who will be honest with you. Bonus points if they know your team well
too -they'll see things that you won't.
You may have to be pretty intentional about finding out what's going on in your team. Once you're in a position of authority, people won't always feel free to tell you.
Share as much context with your team as you can. They'll be more motivated if they understand why their work is important and has value. Even if you understand this... people aren't mind readers. They don't know what's in your head.
Part of your job now is to be available to people. This may mean you don't get to actually work on the tech yourself as much (or at all). It may mean you get interrupted more. That's may or may not annoy you, but you need to make the best choices you can for your team now, not (just) for you.
Share success when you can. You may find yourself in situations where people attribute your team's success to you... and while that's not wrong (you're the lead after all) it's also a great opportunity to share credit with those in your team. It's worth so much to people when you do this.
People are not interchangeable, and treating them as if they invites trouble. You can have great people, who still have a hard time working together for whatever reason. Be aware of inter-team dynamics; they can sink you. (Situations like this are why it's great to have a mentor.)
It's important to keep a close eye on how things are going, but don't confuse that with micro-management. Your best people are going to want some autonomy, and it's best for everybody if you find a way to give it to them. If things aren't going so well your instinct may be to tighten your grip... not necessarily wrong, but consider that may come across as a lack of trust on your part.
Above all: think of your job as less about being in control (though you may be) and more about fostering an environment where your team can do your best work. Get them what they need, shield them from the crap, give them what opportunities you can. Don't be selfish or mean. Be kind, be empathatic.
