41–50 of 282 posts
"in the early days Facebook made a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing." No offense, but hiring programmers for HR seems like a terrible idea. HR people's main capacity is to understand people and relationships, not exactly something programmers are known for being good at.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wouldn't say that Apple is dominated by a hacker culture at all. It's a mistake to say that. All the work that went into the LLVM/Clang, low-level development that's done OS X and iOS isn't something that you can do without hackers; neither are the algorithms used by Aperture or even iPhoto.
Oh, there are plenty of great hackers at Apple. That doesn't mean the company has a "hacker-centric culture", though. Does Apple make "a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing", like the article mentions about Facebook? No way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wouldn't say that Apple is dominated by a hacker culture at all. It's a mistake to say that. All the work that went into the LLVM/Clang, low-level development that's done OS X and iOS isn't something that you can do without hackers; neither are the algorithms used by Aperture or even iPhoto.
Oh, there are plenty of great hackers at Apple. That doesn't mean the company has a "hacker-centric culture", though. Does Apple make "a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing", like the article mentions about Facebook? No way.
"in the early days Facebook made a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing." No offense, but hiring programmers for HR seems like a terrible idea. HR people's main capacity is to understand people and relationships, not exactly something programmers are known for being good at.
* Processes, procedures and forms
* 401K, health insurance and other benefit programs
* Buying salary surveys
* Finding template bonus programs, performance evaluation programs and hire-a-friend programs. Adjusting them a bit to fit current organization.
* Employment and immigration laws
I've never found them to particularly understand people and relationships. I've worked for 4 years for a corporation where I never once managed to talk to an HR person. Everything was done through support tickets. But even in smaller companies, I found that HR folks are more of systems-people than people-people.
Rich Yahoo in 1999 overlooked the value of search. Rich Google in 2004 overlooked the value of social networking (both their in-house hit Orkut and outside services).
[edit: this thread has some insightful replies by others that are worth reading.] I'm sorry, this may be PG's backyard, but I've gotta call bullshit. Note: I am not a Yahoo employee or corporate shill. 1. "At Yahoo this death spiral started early." Apparently this death spiral took TWELVE YEARS (the WWW is 20 years old), and Yahoo is still #1 (or #2) in terms of total properties on the web. How is this a death spiral…
How is this a metric for success?
[edit: this thread has some insightful replies by others that are worth reading.] I'm sorry, this may be PG's backyard, but I've gotta call bullshit. Note: I am not a Yahoo employee or corporate shill. 1. "At Yahoo this death spiral started early." Apparently this death spiral took TWELVE YEARS (the WWW is 20 years old), and Yahoo is still #1 (or #2) in terms of total properties on the web. How is this a death spiral…
Also, Viaweb didn't get hosed after being bought by Yahoo. It prospered enormously. I don't bear them any ill will.
[edit: this thread has some insightful replies by others that are worth reading.] I'm sorry, this may be PG's backyard, but I've gotta call bullshit. Note: I am not a Yahoo employee or corporate shill. 1. "At Yahoo this death spiral started early." Apparently this death spiral took TWELVE YEARS (the WWW is 20 years old), and Yahoo is still #1 (or #2) in terms of total properties on the web. How is this a death spiral…
Yahoo is still #1 (or #2) in terms of total properties on the web. How is this a death spiral? How is this a metric for success?
Interesting statement. I suspect this process is well under way at Google these days.
But why does this happen? Is it just that once companies grow large enough, you need middle managers, (who then consolidate power and control)? Is there a more nuanced explanation?
In any conflict, there is always a risk of fighting the last battle. I see today many companies, inspired by the lessons learned from the first dot-com bubble, making the opposite mistake; thinking that they need to be a technology company when they're really a experience providing company.
Twitter is the refutation to pg's thesis. Despite their initial technical incompetence, they managed to attract a top-notch technical team because they managed to deliver a crawl-over-broken-glass experience (it's so compelling people are willing to crawl over broken glass to experience it, see also: craigslist, plentyoffish).
It was interesting attending the YC work at a startup day and seeing RethinkDB present. Their pitch, in not as many words was basically "Look, we're the only company here that is actually working on a problem that demands world-class engineers (in the non-debased sense of the term)". For most of the other startups, despite all their bluster, the technology platform they were using was commoditized and technology was not their differentiating factor.