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by maxxxxx 2786 days ago
"What will be different will be access to a company that has been running for over 100 years and evolved over that time, at all levels. Facilities all around the world. Access to some of the scientists that you may have only read their papers but now can chat with via slack."

I have never seen this materialize in any big company. Different departments may as well be different companies. They never talk to each other.
1 comments
filereaper 2786 days ago
Maybe not departments, but this statement is true: "Access to some of the scientists that you may have only read their papers but now can chat with via slack."

I've pinged many folks over Sametime (predecessor to Slack) just by having their name, you could then lookup their Sametime Id.

Most of the time it was over simple details, i.e "Hey, I see you're the author of this RedBook. In Chapter Foo Paragraph Bar, did you really mean FooBar or BazBaz?"

But hey, details are everything in our industry.

It was really nice to get the answer straight from the source, no matter which continent they were on. Anecdotal, but wanted to provide a counterpoint.

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ChuckMcM 2786 days ago
Yes, this was what I meant. I'm not sure what two departments talking would look like, but I do know what people hanging around after a tech talk discussing the subject at hand and brainstorming interesting collaboration ideas looks like.

I'll grant you that the technology Blekko brought to IBM (the crawler) was something that a lot of people who were inside the company were interested in, so there were inbound contacts as well when someone said, "Hey we're doing X and wondering if you can do Y?" And that often lead to a discussion about what crawlers could and couldn't do legally :-) But it also lead to lots of great collaborations on various data sets and projects.

"Companies" are filled with people who talk. The only place I've heard where this is a huge issue (from former and current employees) is Apple where secrecy is pretty rampant. And while every company seems to have some "special" projects that aren't discussed, general conversations seem to be fine.

At IBM there are a lot of really really smart people who have done really cutting edge research which for me, was kind of like being a kid in a candy store :-).

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