Stevey wrote a long post today on the development environment at google, and what “agile” means there versus the meaning of the “Agile Programming” methodology that is all the rage right now.

It’s a good post, and the comments section underneath is also a really good read (less the whiny Agile fanboys). He has a lot of good things to say, although it does come off a little bit like “They way Google does it is really fantastic and everyone else should do it too”. And he’s right, but as many people point out in comments, Google’s business model is a statistical outlier. They don’t deliver to customers (as my current officemate put it, “their business model right now is entirely ‘build it and they will come’”), and don’t deliver products of value (that’s not to say their products aren’t valuable, it’s to say they aren’t expecting anyone to pay for them, and thus all the requisite costing and management that would normally be present isn’t there), and they have oodles of money that make it possible to do two things: hire the very best of the very best of the very best, and incentivize them to be ever more creative and competitive.

A company like that comes along once a decade or so. Observe: AT&T (1970′s), IBM (1980′s), Microsoft (1990′s), Google(2000′s). Other companies that appeared and flourished along the same timeframes were Xerox, Apple, Sun, SGI, and a few others, but I think my point still stands. There’s only one best at a time – and each time they have a unique business model with a unique offering that they deliver and maintain successfully. Every other good company have these characteristics in varying shades of grey, but there is usually only one Google.

So what are the rest of the companies to do? It seems that “Agile” methodologies help give you artificially what companies like Google cultivate naturally. Ultimately it’s all common sense. There’s some truth to Stevey’s accusation that “Agile” is mostly window dressing intended to sell seminar seats and books – but what he didn’t really acknowledge in his insightful post was what I’ve pointed out above about Google’s uniqueness.

Even heard the phrase “practice makes perfect”? I suppose if you accept a number of assumptions and generalizations, you might consider this to be true.

Better, though, is the following phrase:

Perfect practice makes perfect

Practice doesn’t do you a lot of good if you’re practicing doing things the wrong way. If you spend 10 years playing piano with your wrists resting on the lip of the keboard, you’re not likely to be as good as someone who has spent 10 years holding their wrists up, just like Mrs. Old-Lady-The-Piano-Teacher told them to.

I think the same thing applies to experience. I’ve noticed that people assume that experience in creating software is valuable. Experience can be a valuable thing, but not neccessarily. Some people are highly experienced in creating software the wrong way. For those people, I’d say their experience is as much a hinderance as it is a help.