Brian Tarbox ’81: how to make your company agile

Thursday, January 3, 2013

[Brian Tarbox ’81] Engineer at Cabot Research Brian Tarbox ’81 writes for The Pragmatic Bookshelf about “changing his company,” as he shifts from being one of 40,000 employees to becoming one of six.

“Most problems these days seem large, or at least most of the interesting ones do. Some of these problems are programming problems and some of them are problems about programming teams.

“‘How do I scale my architecture to the cloud?’

“‘How do I scale my team to four continents?’

“In this article we’ll look at a small project and a small team and see if we uncover anything helpful.

“Four months ago I left Motorola-Mobility and the world of video on demand. After my company was purchased by Google, I found myself one of over 40,000 employees, a staggering percentage of whom were lawyers. As a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, one of my primary job functions was to think up ideas to patent. We were scored on how many ‘disclosures’ we generated per quarter. I also served on a board that reviewed our use of open source software, ensuring that all the terms of all the licenses were adhered to. Don’t get me wrong, as the owner of two open source projects I’m in favor of following the license terms. However, it had become another large lawyer-driven part of the business.”

Read the full story…

Image: via Brian Tarbox.

Friendly URL: wesconnect.wesleyan.edu/news-20130103-brian-tarbox

Related links

[Facebook] Connect with Brian Tarbox on Facebook ➞