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Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant

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Re: Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant

#141

Post by yuhong »

potatolicious wrote: post #12
simondlr wrote: post #3

Well written! Is Jeff Bezos really like he paints him to be?

I've presented to Bezos once. It went about the same as Yegge's experience, except I didn't have his balls to laugh in my CEO's face ;) The whole thing felt like I was meeting the President - layer after layer of aides and executive assistants, tons of security, and briefings on where to sit, where to not sit, where to stand, where to not stand, look him in the eye when you shake his hand, etc etc. It was kind of sur…

I think a good skill for a big company CEO would be doing debugging to see what is exactly happening here. If Bezos did that, they would have noticed what was happening and fixed the problem.

Re: Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant

#142

Post by loumf »

gaius wrote: post #97
stonemetal wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are probably a million different ways for it to go bad. There is a theory that gets posted here from time to time that As hire As and a few Bs that get through the filter, Bs hire Bs and a few Cs get through the filter, and so on down the line until you have hired people you really shouldn't have. The other theory is promote until incompetent. My guess is much more mundane, when you hire middle management they…

The theory is usually stated as A's hire A's and B's hire C's (because they are afraid of being usurped)

Also B's can't tell the difference between A's, B's and C's.

Re: Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant

#143

Post by jarek »

skizm wrote: post #80

Steve Yegge just might help g+ steal some market share from facebook yet. Every time he releases something like this on g+ I end up spending a few minutes on the site that I would not have otherwise.

I'm actually seeing a significant amount of longer-format posts (especially from technically-minded people) on Google+. It's a mix of a Facebook status update and a Facebook note and it's pretty easy to write and publish. (Steve's privacy setting slip-up notwithstanding...) In a way Google+ seems to be doing to Tumblr (and in lesser degree Posterous) what Facebook did to Myspace.

Re: Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant

#144

Post by statictype »

iy56 wrote: post #134
statictype wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same way that television shows are all about advertising and the acting/stories/dialogue are just to 'feed the beast'? You're confusing what Google's main product is with how they make money. That's a bit insulting to the engineers at Google that make Search so good.

It's perfectly reasonable to decline calling something a "product" if it doesn't make money. A widget company might produce a lot of memos in its daily operation, and might have its own cafeteria that produces food for its employees. But I think most people wouldn't count lunches or memos among the company's "products," no matter how good they might be.

Not even close to being the same thing. Google does search. That's what they are known for. Advertising is how they monetize search (which incidentally came long after they launched their search engine). Only us geeks with an axe to grind would associate Google with advertising before search. Would you call a site like Daring Fireball a site that specializes in thoughtful essays on technology? Or a site that tries to sell the customer's eyeballs to sponsors and advertisers?

Re: Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant

#145

Post by rbonvall »

harryf wrote: post #11

I wonder if Steve needs to move to marketing? He's done an awesome job here of highlighting one massive difference between GPlus and Facebook - that you can really publish publicly to the whole world, the way the web was intended.

Steve once gave a talk on programmers knowing marketing:

http://blip.tv/oreilly-open-source-convention/oscon-2007-ste...

Re: Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant

#146

Post by wnight »

ovi256 wrote: post #51
knowtheory wrote: post #19

My apologies for straying near politics but i think Yegge's just defined the best characterization of the 1% :P > In some sense you wouldn’t even be human anymore. People like Jeff are better regarded as hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs. The difference between this description and Yegge's later description of Bezos as being like the Dread Pirate Roberts of Princess Bride fame, is t…

Sorry, but you're way over-optimistic if you think the 1% has the kind of intelligence (and I'm not talking pure IQ) and focus Bezos has. Bezos is more like 0.01%. And I'd venture to say that the OWS movement wouldn't have much against Bezos. They're more against fratboys that rose to prominence and wealth through connections. And finance. Yeah, definitely finance. It's there that they sense some kind of unwarranted…

I dunno. The whole one-click patent thing. Abuse of government privilege to derive a monopoly.

Sure, he/they are just one of many, but if you don't hate the players the game continues.

There are many people in many positions who have a free ride because they got some doddering politician to introduce their legislation without thinking past the immediate benefits. This isn't how good laws are made and any business, lobbyist, or lawmaker even tangentially related to this stuff is a valid target.

Re: Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant

#147

Post by wanorris »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #112
knowtheory wrote: post #19

My apologies for straying near politics but i think Yegge's just defined the best characterization of the 1% :P > In some sense you wouldn’t even be human anymore. People like Jeff are better regarded as hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs. The difference between this description and Yegge's later description of Bezos as being like the Dread Pirate Roberts of Princess Bride fame, is t…

What is with this class war against the "1%"? The wealthiest 1% of the population are just human beings. Some of them are smart, some of them are hard working, some of them are lucky, some of them are all three. Some of them abuse the system for their advantage, some of them don't. Does it make any sense to lump all of them into a single group based on an economic percentile? That seems hugely prejudicial to me.

It's the media-comprehensible proxy that people have come up with for the way the very rich and powerful have seemingly been able to skew the system so that their power and wealth are self-perpetuating, while the population at large gets poorer and gets worse benefits every year.

Is it that simple? Of course not. But simple and resonant ideas are mediagenic, while complicated and more accurate ones are mediapathic.

(For anyone preparing an angry reply, please note the use of the word seemingly in the first paragraph. It's not there by accident.)

Re: Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant

#150

Post by lurker17 »

brown9-2 wrote: post #110

I'm curious how these "Jeff Presentations" go. Powerpoint presentations are banned, instead you have to write your arguments as an essay. So is the meeting essentially Bezos reading your writing, with the rest of the room waiting for any indication about the emperor's mood? Or does the presenter read from the prose as a script? Can any Amazon-ers give any insight?

Standard practice at Amazon is to quiet read the materials at the start of the meeting. I think the logic goes that you want to make sure everyone reads the material, so you may as well have everyone read the material at the same time, and discuss it when it is fresh in mind.

As a related effect, it encourages people to write tightly focused documents that can be read in 15 minutes.

It's not a horrible practice.

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