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Steve's Google Platform rant

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Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#161

Post by Jun8 »

Isn't this the second highly public data point (that I know of) of him slashing and burning G+ and Google and then backtracking and saying how Google is the best place to work for (the previous one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811818). That one, he claimed, was a misunderstanding, this one is a late night permissions error. I am sorry but for someone of his caliber these sound like made up excuses.

I think he sees the problems, goes off the deep end, then either sobers up or is muzzled by Google's PR machine. Or Google may be thinking any publicity is good publicity.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#162

Post by aphexairlines »

TruthPrevails wrote: post #152

Hello All, I was an intern at Amazon this summer and they extended a full time offer. I read Steve's rant with great interest. Since many people in comments have confirmed the points raised by him about Amazon, I am not feeling good right now :( I still have 18 days to accept the offer. I am currently interviewing with Microsoft. I have applied to Facebook just now. Sadly, I screwed up my Google phone screening last…

Well, what did you think of your internship?

Personally I find Amazon a great place to write software.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#163

Post by munin »

phillmv wrote: post #143
peterb wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing about "A players hire A players and B players hire C players" is that every company I have worked at that uses that mantra is full of B & C players from the top down.

What I don't get about that rule is what prevents A players from hiring B and C players, and what prevents B players from hiring A players. I'm more than capable of recognizing someone who is smarter than I am, and as a rule of thumb I prefer to work with people who are smarter than I am.

proponents of the mantra would say that this means you're an "A" player.

there is some research that shows that your own competence directly affects how good a judge you are of your/others relative competence, i.e. people who are low competence will rate themselves routinely as 9-10 / 10 but people who are high competence will rate themselves 5-6 / 10 ...

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#165

Post by Cushman »

VonLipwig wrote: post #150
pitdesi wrote: post #120

It now 404's so I've posted it here: Stevey's Google Platforms Rant I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one.…

He took it down for a reason. I can't help but feel reposting it is bad online etiquette

Who downvoted this? We should probably have a real conversation about it.

Personally, I'd like to think that if I posted an essay or especially a rant that I later thought was a mistake, and decided to retract it, other hackers would respect my decision and not reproduce it. Sure, it's still cached somewhere, and assholes on 4chan will repost it just to fuck with me. If you really want to, you can probably find a copy. But I'd like to think that our community is classier than to spread it around deliberately, knowing it's something I'd rather not put my name to.

What's the benefit to the community the other way, aside from voyeurism?

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#166

Post by jsnell »

0x12 wrote: post #91
mattmanser wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean this in the nicest way, but there's probably a good reason he took it down and it's his work. So do him a favour and delete the copy. Out of respect to a great writer.

Steve is a smart guy, and I'm pretty sure he realizes that copies have been made and will be available forever and then a bit longer still. The bit that I don't get: Even if Steve's release was accidental, if you write something like this even when it is for internal use only, you can still count on it being reposted in a public place. 'All of google' is a large number of people, all it takes is one copy and the geni…

There must have been thousands or tens of thousands Google-internal blog posts, Buzzes, emails and now Plus updates about people's perception of what's horribly wrong with some aspect of Google. AFAIK none of those leaked widely. Why would this be different?

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#167

Post by revertts »

TruthPrevails wrote: post #152

Hello All, I was an intern at Amazon this summer and they extended a full time offer. I read Steve's rant with great interest. Since many people in comments have confirmed the points raised by him about Amazon, I am not feeling good right now :( I still have 18 days to accept the offer. I am currently interviewing with Microsoft. I have applied to Facebook just now. Sadly, I screwed up my Google phone screening last…

If you did an internship, you're in a better position than anyone else to decide if the company's a good fit...

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#168

Post by david927 »

0x12 wrote: post #147
david927 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the very few times I've seen Steve back-off of a provocative statement; whatever made that happen does not bode well for Google and I think my point stands.

It may have been a case of not wanting to embarrass his former employer, Amazon.

That absolutely could be. I shouldn't judge. Apologies.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#169

Post by bnr »

aangjie wrote: post #135

Hmm.. Great level of detail in steve yegge's post for a rant....Infact one of my pain points with google+ is not being able aggregate(#tags) and publish feeds from my blog. slightly OT: does anyone else think there seems to be a trend of ranting recently, i mean Ryan Dahl,ted dziuba, and now steve yegge??

It is my understanding that Yegge basically invented ranting.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#170

Post by Jun8 »

pitdesi wrote: post #120

It now 404's so I've posted it here: Stevey's Google Platforms Rant I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one.…

Although the etiquette of posting it here is debatable this post is gold, it is not (totally) an ordinary disgruntled coder rant. It's worth reading even for the small list of problems that he gives that Amazon faced when trying to go to an all-services architecture.

But if I had to summarize the main point, I would choose: "The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything." You can't just bolt it on later." Start with the platform. This is so obvious, yet a lot of middle and higher managers ignore this either because (i) they are totally ignorant (see Peter's Principle), sadly the case that I usually face, (ii) they pragmatically ignore it, because they are doing greedy optimization for the next 6mos-year and developing the platform is just a "waste of time", or (iii) they ignore developing and making available the platforms they already have because they think it's their "competitive advantage".

The way I read his post, Google's case seems to be (iii). They have great internal tools and platforms for many years now, why they wouldn't develop good APIs around these and make them available is a mystery to me. Wouldn't they have eaten AWS for lunch if they platform-atized their Map-Reduce tools, say around 2004?

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