The definition of hackers back in the 90's is (and should be) different than the definition of hackers today.
What Happened to Yahoo
211–220 of 282 posts
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#212PG: And without good programmers you won't get good software, no matter how many people you put on a task, or how many procedures you establish to ensure "quality"
IMHO truer words have never been spoken.
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#213The interesting thing is that Yahoo could have solved their problems by buying Google for a pittance.
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#214Funny. I made a similar comparison with Facebook. PG said that Yahoo was a de facto pyramid scheme, although ponzi scheme is a better analogy: http://blog.jperla.com/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme-0
>> By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto pyramid scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of "Eureka!" I was shouting "Sell!"
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it's not. That gets at the very essence of my original comment. One of the assertions in the article is that a hacker culture is a necessary ingredient for a successful technology company. I see Apple as a counterexample to this argument. And it's a counterexample that shouldn't be ignored. Apple is driven by design (industrial design, product design, graphic design). They think about products, not technology. Th…
One of the assertions in the article is that a hacker culture is a necessary ingredient for a successful technology company. No it isn't. I said that you either need that or to pay people a lot or to be in an interesting industry where there are no competitors who have hacker cultures. If Apple doesn't have a hacker culture, then it would probably be an example of the latter.
To respond to your "If", I think Apple clearly does have a hacker culture. Even if we say it's a cult of Steve Jobs, I don't think it's a far cry to say Jobs is a consumer product hacker and a bit of a market hacker.
Two essential qualities of good hackers is an abundant ability to synthesize elegant solutions from disparate details, and a desire to create great things. Jobs may not write code but he clearly has these two qualities. So even if Apple does not have an engineer-centric culture, a design culture driven by Jobs can be directly compatible. You see the differences of course, in the products Google and Apple make, but I think the point is that great hackers can work at Apple because they can get behind Jobs vision.
Contrast this with a "suit-driven" company where decisions are made by looking at statistics and market research, and executives strategize about how to maximize sales based on the superficial product understanding they have. Even worse, places where you actually have people in power who couldn't give a crap about the product as long as they have a $500k+ salary rolling in every year.
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
My sense from meeting Yahoo devs is that they are ok, in that they have the credentials, but didn't seem very passionate or excited about new tech. Can you bring up some examples where Yahoo is pioneering a new field? (search, media delivery, social etc, what ever Yahoo as a company is really excited and passionate about internally...)
Here are a few examples: http://trafficserver.apache.org/ http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/ http://github.com/yahoo http://yuilibrary.com http://developer.yahoo.com/yap/guide/caja-support.html http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/ http://developer.yahoo.com/hadoop/
And let's not forget the very useful and free Yahoo Pipes.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#217Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article. ...the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had. Is Apple a big winner, like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (the other companies he mentions repeatedly)? Bigger. (Check the last 1, 5 or 10 years on Google finance for the GOOG or MSFT comparison. FB is not public, but...) Do they have this…
Speaking of Apple. Perhaps for personal reasons PG omits to mention the business trajectory and the personality of the leaders.This includes the element of luck that is far greater component of success that a culture, even the hacker culture. This doesn't mean that the culture is not important but you cant have an argument about "what went wrong with Yahoo" without "what went right with Yahoo" or Google, etc. In case…
Eric Schmidt is a hacker... He even wrote lex.
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would a programmer go work in HR?
I don't know. The guy who called said he was working as contract recruiter for Google. Maybe it's due to bad economy or downsizing? I can imagine a software engineer who is suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome switches jobs from writing to keyboard to talking on the phone.
I'm reminded of JWZ's article http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/phones.html
One of the latest tactics that the headhunters have been using is to begin with a line like ``Hey, I used to be an engineer! But now I'm hanging out here doing recruiting, cool huh?''
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let’s make some other statements about as reasonable as yours (absent further supporting explanation): The Mughal India of the 16th–19th centuries was not the India of today. That India is long dead. The India of today is basically the British Raj, plus the branding, mix of religions and whatever else the British could salvage. The Republican party of 1860–1970 was not the Republican party of today. That GOP is long…
In the second Jobs era, Apple's CEO, central technology, and (in the early years) the bulk of their executive team were directly installed from NeXT. Dogs and smoking were banned from the campus, the icon garden was taken down, Apple's entire industrial design was dropped in favor of new directions, and almost all of their software technology was eventually abandoned along with the Newton and the traditional Old Worl…
By the way, CA banned smoking in the workplace in 1998. I don’t think Apple’s changing policies about that can be solely attributed to the takeover of NeXT culture.
Re: What Happened to Yahoo
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Down that road lies that 'hackerly' finally becomes redefined as 'everything we consider a good thing'. It's OK for Apple to not be 'hackerly', while still being able to develop great products and software. My girlfriend studies industrial engineering and knows quite a bit about innovation and product development. If I combine everything I've heard from her with everything I've heard about Apple, then I conclude that…
Well, here's what I mean--pg's essay criticized Yahoo for putting product managers in charge of dictating specs to programmers, instead of the programmers being able to think for themselves. I don't get the impression that's the case at Apple.
Agree 100%. Just adding:
The "dictating specs to programmers" practice seems to stem from the silly notion of applying manufacturing processes to software development. In the view of companies with this notion, programmers are little more than unskilled translators - the parallel of line workers in manufacturing jargon.
In my experience, one of the worst abusers of this "square peg/round hole" paradigm are internal IT departments.
I read a study in IEEE Computer sometime in the Summer of 2001 or 2002 that showed how bad the application of Waterfall was for software development. Does anyone know of a study on the application of manufacturing processes to software development?