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Steve's Google Platform rant

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Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#221

Post by mdaniel »

nirvana wrote: post #7

I worked at Amazon from before Steve left to sometime later. I remember being excited when Larry Tessler was hired, and dismayed at the way he was treated. Everything Steve says about Amazon is true, only, it was much worse. Amazon was, by far, the worst employment experience I've ever had. I'm not saying that lightly, I worked for a dozen startups, a couple of which crashed hard in the most gut wrenchingly painful w…

It's rare that you can find candid descriptions of what it's like to work somewhere.... since Steve felt free to be candid, I figured I'd share my experiences.

FWIW, I believe this is the exact kind of thing that glassdoor.com wants to hear.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#222

Post by RobPfeifer »

thurn wrote: post #140
maxwin wrote: post #82

"Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don't get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measl…

Facebook doesn't even come close to eating their own dogfood. They extensively make use of private APIs, and their commitment to platform developers is legendarily poor. I do agree that Facebook's success going forward will be increasingly dependent on their platform, however.

This. The fb platform is fine for small start-ups who don't have any expectation of SLAs, or huge partners like Zynga who drive their profits or traffic. But I'm at a $600m ecommerce company and we've found their platform to be a disaster. APIs don't work, questions are answered months later by interns who know next to nothing. I know they spend a ton of money/time on it, but it's seems mostly internal facing at the moment.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#223

Post by [deleted] »

herdrick wrote: post #199
nirvana wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought a lot about this. In part because, you can't generally say anything bad about Amazon without being attacked. "You must be disgruntled" etc. I only made my post because I had the cover of Steve Yegge saying very similar things (Though I went into more detail.) Most people believe Amazon's press releases. In 2006, they said that AWS powered Amazon.com. It was a flat out lie. But how could I prove it? Fortu…

AWS was pirate operation That's amazing to me. I thought such things were never done in software anymore because: why not leave the company and do the same thing in your own startup? Same hard work, high risk, etc, but with giant upside. Was it because of something wrong with Seattle's startup culture?

[deleted]

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#224

Post by marssaxman »

herdrick wrote: post #199
nirvana wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought a lot about this. In part because, you can't generally say anything bad about Amazon without being attacked. "You must be disgruntled" etc. I only made my post because I had the cover of Steve Yegge saying very similar things (Though I went into more detail.) Most people believe Amazon's press releases. In 2006, they said that AWS powered Amazon.com. It was a flat out lie. But how could I prove it? Fortu…

AWS was pirate operation That's amazing to me. I thought such things were never done in software anymore because: why not leave the company and do the same thing in your own startup? Same hard work, high risk, etc, but with giant upside. Was it because of something wrong with Seattle's startup culture?

Why leave the company, giving up your health insurance and guaranteed paycheck, if you can work on the same project internally? You get all the satisfaction of building something awesome with far less risk: sounds like a win.

Some people are motivated more by technical challenge than business success.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#225

Post by zippy »

sethg wrote: post #187
phillmv wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe the theory is that the A players, secure in their own skills, want to be able to delegate work to people who are as competent as they are, whereas the B players want to surround themselves with people who make them look good by comparison.

A prospective hire who is an A (in whatever field) wants to work with their kind, and so is less likely to sign up at a company full of B-level people.

Also, as mentioned above, it is harder for many B-level people to recognize and value an A level person in the hiring process. An A may come across as arrogant by describing things as good or bad to a B when they're simply knowledgeable and confident because of that.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#226

Post by redwood »

The unmentioned take-away here is not simply the focus on Platforms, but the reminder that 'Circles' are a weak feature to build a social network on. Why? because user's had already build organic circles across multiple social spaces (e.g. professional-only on Linkedin, perhaps family or college-safe on Facebook, close social on gmail, etc).

What's the advantage to multiple platforms for multiple circles? you don't accidentally post your internal company rant to the whole world. You don't post pictures of red cups and beer bongs on Linkedin and you don't talk about work on Facebook. This is how users were operating before G+ launched, and is precisely why users aren't diving in.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#227

Post by vogonj »

yarapavan wrote: post #11

So, there is a platform rule now - A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.

if you consider SMTP+IMAP/POP3 to be APIs, then this is a simple corollary to Zawinski's Law. the reduction is left as an exercise to the reader.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#228

Post by Jun8 »

cbs wrote: post #176
Jun8 wrote: post #161

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…

>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 No its not, because thats not what happened this time. He is pretty clear that he likes google and but sees some flaws. Did you even read the post? Hes not backtracking, he was just being critical about something to an audience he thought…

I read the post a second time much more carefully and it seems clear now that he did target an internal Google audience from the tone, i.e. it was a genuine mistake. So I take my previous comment back.

As for your comment about thrashing a product but loving the workspace: Yegge's criticisms run deep, they are not just about a stupid feature in a product; rather they are about the company's DNA.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#229

Post by cphang »

davedx wrote: post #83
potatolicious wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, the way Amazon treats their employees does harm them substantially, they just haven't paid the price visibly to the public (or quite as hard as they will, eventually). Attrition at Amazon is at horrific rates. I know the actual number, though I'm pretty sure that'd violate my NDA to reveal. It's high. It's really high. Guess a really truly terrible number. It's probably higher than that. The stream o…

Haha it's so sad when companies can't even buy decent equipment for an employee they're spending 30-50x that much on per year. I'm currently spending half my time at this job developing enterprise Java in a VirtualBox instance on an old Windows XP machine with 2GB of RAM. I'm just hoping they pay for the JRebel license before my demo license expires.

You can try to use https://social.jrebel.com
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