241–250 of 282 posts
"Most technology companies eventually get taken over by suits and middle managers." 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?
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I think the implication was that Apple is a counterexample--- a company that does things basically the opposite of Google, and is very ambivalent about being a technology company rather than a media company, yet is very successful. (One difference is that Apple seems to be very good at selling media/entertainment/image, whereas Yahoo was never a superb media company.)
Doesn't Steve Jobs always refer to Apple as a software company? A company that's "passionate about making great software". Even though they make great hardware, his position seems to be that its the software that delivers the product experience.
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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 thes…
Exactly. Apple isn't really about winning or losing; they're rewriting the game. Does it really get more "hackerly" than that?
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How about Hadoop? Sure Google released the Map/Reduce paper, but it was Yahoo who wrote 90+% of the current industry standard. What about Node.js? That's pretty en vogue right now. We are currently hiring Node.js engineers and have a number of core contributors in various parts of the company. YUI and our other front-end work at Yahoo! is world class. People like Crockford are considered leading experts in doing qual…
I was just commenting to a friend of mine recently how Yahoo is doing all sorts of cool stuff but doesn't seem to get any credit or credibility out of it.
http://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-web-services-group-at-Yahoo...
Disclaimer #1: My job is technology evangelist for Yahoo! So refuting this is probably the definition of my job. Disclaimer #2: This is my own completely unsanctioned opinion and does not necessarily represent Yahoo!'s views or opinions. I'm obviously biased here, but I have a great respect for HN and PG so I wanted to talk about this. PG accuses Yahoo! of two things right at the very top of the article and the rest…
I have trouble defining "hacker culture", but surely it's about more than just the engineers working at a company.
If Yahoo's engineers work on these great projects, but no one hears about them - then it's probably because the culture at Yahoo isn't "hacker-ish" enough to motivate marketing to drive awareness for the projects.
In my time, I've heard and seen an number of non-software companies choke, stumble, and even become acquisition targets because of bad software. Budget car rentals was one that immediately comes to mind that I can actually talk about. For awhile I had a spate of bad customer service experiences where the reps explained that "our system crashed."
If PG is right, all companies are going to need a hacker-centric culture!
Another takeaway from the article: Bogosity kinda works, but only on shorter timescales and for a minority of participants.
"But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example."
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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 I…