Another thing that we did at Google that I thought was surprisingly effective and useful was strict coding standards. Before my time at Google, I was sure that coding standards were pointless. I had absolutely no doubt that they were the kind of thing that petty bureaucrats waste time writing and then use to hassle people who are actually productive. I was seriously wrong. At Google, I could look at any piece of code, anywhere in Google's codebase, and I could read it. The fact that I was allowed to do that was pretty unusual in itself. But what was surprising to me was just how much the sta...