Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Steve's Google Platform rant

plus.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 418 posts

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#261

Post by andrewljohnson »

This document offers no solutions at all, it's hard to follow, and it was played in the wrong forum.

1) No solutions - What exactly should Google do? What string of thought should we start with to make any sort of improvements?

2) Hard to follow - Yegge shocks you by seeming like he's insulting Amazon, he tells you some anecdotes to give himself creedence, and he starts to get to his point about accessibility and platformification a million paragraphs in.

3) Wrong forum - Why is this on the public internet? If it wasn't, Yegge wouldn't need to spend the first half of the article establishing his credibility. If he would talk to his peers, then they could discuss the meaty technical and strategic issues without meandering around in a nostalgic haze for thousands of words.

Yegge is not Bill Gates, and this is no Internet Tide Wave memo. It would be an embarrassment for Google to have this out there, if it weren't instead just an embarrassment to the author. It sounds like Yegge is more interested in stirring the pot and publishing unrefined thoughts than working on actual solutions.

Rant indeed. Get some sleep bro.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#263

Post by TruthPrevails »

tybris wrote: post #215
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…

Amazon changes faster than any other company I know. In Amazon years, Yegge left centuries ago. In addition, your Amazon experience depends mostly on what team you're in. You should base your decision on your internship.

Yes, this is something even I observed as an intern. Amazon environment is very dynamic and chaotic (at least the group I interned in was).

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#264

Post by potatolicious »

bilalaijazi wrote: post #257
nirvana wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, I think when I was hired, I went from 3 weeks of vacation to 2 weeks... and I didn't even think about it, because I was too busy dealing with the fact that they didn't want to pay me anywhere close to what I was making before. Which was, by the way, a below market salary paid by a startup, to begin with! I finally got them to meet it with a "hiring bonus" that would match my previous salary for the first ye…

According to "Showstopper!", Microsoft would allow developers to go MIA for a bit after completing a tough project. That seems like a fair policy if you have a mature set of developers who deliver on their commitments.

There are significant parts of Amazon where this does happen - but it really varies from department to department, and manager to manager.

The depressing thing is, when you do get some time off after pulling long hours for a tough project, it's all done under the table. Amazon is extremely cheap when it comes to off-time, so managers essentially have to put their ass on the line to let their reports get well-deserved downtime.

Kudos to the bosses that do it, but one of the reasons that eventually convinced me to leave was that... things like this shouldn't have to be done with a nudge and a wink.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#265

Post by paddy_m »

dpritchett wrote: post #260
paddy_m wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did some interviews with amazon, when they told me that their devs get a 22 inch monitor, I almost dropped the phone. They said that they wanted to keep a "lean startup environment", bullshit. That alone stopped me from going further along in the interview process with them.

Forgive me for being dense, but is 22" insufficient or were you just suggesting that you didn't believe Amazon? Here in Memphis I've seen devs work on setups ranging from 13" to 24" depending on the team.

I have had a 30 inch at home for the past 3 years, I'm looking to upgrade to twin 30s. At work I have a 30 inch, it's all so inexpensive, that its not really worth discussing.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#266

Post by potatolicious »

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?

There are a lot of really great products that simply cannot be built by a scrappy startup, and require the ginormous scale of a place like Amazon to pull off.

Not only for deep funding pockets, but also for existing relationships. Say you had an idea that would dramatically improve online retail - you can either develop a white-box solution and try to shop it around (and have them clone it out from under you), or you can build your own online retail empire (good luck), or you can join one.

It's part of what got me to stick around AMZN as long as I did. Myself and some colleagues were very much of the internal-entrepreneurial mindset. We developed lots of prototypes, some of which received rave recognition throughout the company. I left after I realized my management chain (can't speak for others) had little to no real interest in turning them into products. They were more than happy to give lip service, trophies, and have me put together presentations on how innovative and scrappy we were, though.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#267

Post by wazoox »

Cushman wrote: post #165
VonLipwig wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cop…

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

It's one of those fantastic, really wonderful Stevey's rants, on a par with "the emacs problem". I'm really incredibly happy to have had a chance to read it. So yes, it's probably bad etiquette, but OTOH will it hurt Google in any way? Certainly not. So, hey, thanks for the mistake M. Yegge, and continue the good work.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#268

Post by potatolicious »

nirvana wrote: post #124
look_lookatme wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't have told them to fuck off, but I'd have thought long and hard about the politics of the situation and what sort of edge I have (if my situation was as dire as yours was made to be). It seems like that could have been your moment. You don't like politics, but it seems like at some point you have to come to terms with the necessity of politics to effect change in a situation, that is to say if it's worth it…

I think in a healthy, functioning, company there is some politics. The thing about amazon is, it doesn't matter to anyone that I had pointed this out months ago. From my boss up to the person who reported to Bezos, every one of them would be embarrassed by it, but what could I do? Threaten to tell Jeff Bezos? He doesn't care. He was in the ticket and they were all pointing the finger at me. Me coming back and say "Bu…

> ""But, I pointed it out months ago"... would result in "therefore its your fault because you weren't persuasive enough!""

And then this would get noted in your performance review.

Weakness: bias for action.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#269

Post by nostrademons »

lamnk wrote: post #247
nostrademons wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that. The procedure for open-sourcing Google-owned code is very easy: you e-mail Chris DiBona and he almost always says yes. There've been a bunch of major pieces of the Google infrastructure open-sourced (eg. cTemplate, Closure, Protocol Buffers, Guice). The problem is really technical. Because of the open codebase and "edit anything" culture, basically every piece of infrastructure at Google, unless it was…

Ugh, I think you are mistaking between open source and being a platform here. A platform need not to be open source.

But all the same issues apply, i.e. if you can't disentangle your code from proprietary interfaces enough to open-source it, you probably will not be able to put a service API on it that third-party programmers will be able to use without a lot of handholding. (And Google doesn't do handholding, as just about everyone knows by now.)

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#270

Post by potatolicious »

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…

Like others have said, decide on the merits of your internship.

I left recently (a few months ago) and much of Yegge's rant rings true - but like all big companies, it is not universal. My main caveat when others ask me about working for Amazon is - know exactly which team you'll be on. That will be the difference between a hell on earth scenario vs. a pretty sweet job.

From your internship, you have much more information than most people coming into the company. Use that.

And even if it does turn out to be the wrong decision, the golden handcuffs are only on for 12-24 months. Amazon on your resume is incredibly powerful and opens a lot of doors, so you won't really have suffered in the long run for it. Towards the end of my tenure I had recruiters banging down my door, so your options even if Amazon turns out to be a bad fit are, well, pretty limitless.

Post reply on HN