Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by wanorris » Fri, Oct 21, 2011, 8:37 PM UTC

statictype wrote: post #144

iy56 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A product is something you sell to a customer.

IMO, Emacs is one of the best pieces of code that the FSF makes, but there's an important sense in which it's not accurate to call it a "product" of theirs.

Google sells advertising space to advertisers, while they give away search and maps to the users to facilitate the selling of said advertising. (GMail is an exception because they offer business products built out of GMail.)

The fact that search might not be considered a product need not reflect a value judgment. Either way, it is a very nice service they provide.

But when people refer to Google as an advertising company rather than a search company, they are correct from a business standpoint. Likewise, many media companies -- whether like the New York Times or like Daring Fireball -- have always "really" been in the advertising sales business. (Though some, like the Times are also in the content sales business.) Those companies obviously take great pride in the content they produce that draw the eyeballs to those ads, but it wouldn't be a viable business if the content was all they did.

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

#152

Post by cookiecaper » Fri, Oct 21, 2011, 8:46 PM UTC

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #100

gaius wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a good leader end up with a bad team? That's worth understanding.

Even the best managers are led by the incentives. If you want a project to succeed, make sure incentives are lining up. If you have a project outside the incentive structure, plan on it failing.

Indeed. The whole job of a manager is to keep whatever metrics are used looking good for his department and/or team. If your metrics don't correlate well to a given project, it will be almost impossible for it to work unless you have a command structure that's aware of this potential dissonance and can send down the edicts necessary to fix it for a given situation.

Middle management is really dangerous for this reason. Managers effectively are stuck with blinders; their one and only job, and often the only thing they know how to do (frequently through surreptitious or less-than-stellar means), is to keep their team and/or department sitting pretty in terms of normal company metrics. This correlates both to the resource allocation given a team and the rewards allocated specifically to the individuals that comprise that teams (including the manager, of course), which is why people appreciate "good" managers, until something unanticipated comes up and is killed by this rigid process.

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

#153

Post by georgemcbay » Fri, Oct 21, 2011, 8:56 PM UTC

jisaacstone wrote: post #106

edw519 wrote: post #99

Hey Steve, lots of Hacker News readers are just as smart as Jeff Bezos. Some of us may even be smarter. You may remove every third paragraph for him, but you can remove every third word for us and we can fill in the rest with our giant brains. Here goes: Last week accidentally posted internal rant service platforms my public account. It somehow viral, which nothing short stupefying given it was massive Wall Text. The…

That was surprisingly legible! And I don't think it is because of my 'giant brain', considering how long it took me to understand Taylor Series in university.

The hmuan barin is gerat at mtahcnig colse-eonguh pttarens.

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

#154

Post by basicxman » Fri, Oct 21, 2011, 9:12 PM UTC

edw519 wrote: post #99

Hey Steve, lots of Hacker News readers are just as smart as Jeff Bezos. Some of us may even be smarter. You may remove every third paragraph for him, but you can remove every third word for us and we can fill in the rest with our giant brains. Here goes: Last week accidentally posted internal rant service platforms my public account. It somehow viral, which nothing short stupefying given it was massive Wall Text. The…

Taking a look at Amazon's past user interface and experience choices, I'd say they skipped every third idea to make the site simple and user friendly.

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

#155

Post by bmj » Fri, Oct 21, 2011, 9:54 PM UTC

gruseom wrote: post #109

bmj wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because at some point, the team gets so big, it's harder to weed out bad managers. Additionally, managers are human, and will make mistakes. Often it's like the frog-in-the-pot story--you don't notice the little mistakes, only the sum of their results.

So why does the team have to get so big? Isn't that the mistake right there?

Honest question: can a company manage $34.2 billion a year in sales with a small management team?

I suppose the answer is "yes," given that MS seemed to manage with a minimal number of middle managers, at least based on the Joel Spolsky story shared elsewhere in this thread.

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

#156

Post by polymatter » Fri, Oct 21, 2011, 9:57 PM UTC

iy56 wrote: post #133

linuxhansl wrote: post #131

Whatever. Jeff might be super smart, but apparently he is not smart enough to instill some happiness in the people he works with. I cannot help it, but I have little respect for people who do this, especially if they are super smart.

Why is that a necessary quality for smartness? Amazon seems to be doing quite well in spite of it.

"Smartness" itself is a nebulous and subjective concept.

But in my book, a smart boss can motivate you without repeated verbal abuse or destroying your self esteem. Of course you can still be a successful boss otherwise.

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

#157

Post by philh » Fri, Oct 21, 2011, 10:20 PM UTC

borism wrote: post #102

edw519 wrote: post #99

Hey Steve, lots of Hacker News readers are just as smart as Jeff Bezos. Some of us may even be smarter. You may remove every third paragraph for him, but you can remove every third word for us and we can fill in the rest with our giant brains. Here goes: Last week accidentally posted internal rant service platforms my public account. It somehow viral, which nothing short stupefying given it was massive Wall Text. The…

if there is such thing as too smart, then HN is the place to find it.

This seems like a difficult case to make. How do you know that none of the many places you're not familiar with aren't smarter on average?

If I wanted to find too-smart, I would go to Less Wrong, (who seem to be smarter than HN on average; that might just be a side effect of the discussion topic) and ask them where they would go to find too-smart. And repeat. I don't think HN is where I'd end up.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/ub/competent_elites/ suggests "hedge fund managers" for step two.

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

#158

Post by chad_oliver » Fri, Oct 21, 2011, 10:48 PM UTC

throwawaysnipe wrote: post #58

chad_oliver wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve accidentally made an internal memo public. Oops, but luckily he was just the butt of jokes all week. To make up for telling everyone how bad amazon was, steve talks about Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos is super-smart, and giving a presentation to him will either go really well (unlikely) or really terribly (much more likely). Therefore, when presenting: assume Jeff knows the subject really well (because he does) and th…

Don't encourage the laziness of those who ask for tldrs. While your intentions are good, ultimately you're still an enabler.

While your intentions are good, I think the requester gave a good reason for wanting a tldr. The post is now deleted, but I'm pretty sure he said he was looking after kids at the same time. I'm all for encouraging people to spend time with kids rather than reading long articles.

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

#159

Post by j_baker » Fri, Oct 21, 2011, 10:56 PM UTC

iy56 wrote: post #133

linuxhansl wrote: post #131

Whatever. Jeff might be super smart, but apparently he is not smart enough to instill some happiness in the people he works with. I cannot help it, but I have little respect for people who do this, especially if they are super smart.

Why is that a necessary quality for smartness? Amazon seems to be doing quite well in spite of it.

Just because you can be financially successful being an asshole doesn't make being an asshole ok.

I think there's a subtle (but important) distinction. Smart people can get away with having poor people skills: accidentally offending people, putting their foot in their mouth, and forgetting about the human element in technology. That can be forgiven, and may even be an advantage.

At the same time, there's a difference between having poor people skills and being an asshole: intentionally offending people, putting others down so you can get ahead, and willfully ignoring the human element make you an asshole. I think this often (but unfortunately not often enough) hurts people more than it helps.

Bezos sounds like a bit of a grey area. However, I don't think you can make a decision on this based on the performance of amazon. He's certainly successful at what he does, but there are any number of people who have created success at too high a cost: demoralized people, broken laws, and ultimately a bigger burden is placed on society than the gain that made them successful.

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

#160

Post by varelse » Fri, Oct 21, 2011, 11:37 PM UTC

I worked at google for a couple months this year. My experience of their so-called open corporate culture was a bizarre mix of elements from William Gibson's _The Belonging Kind_ and Robot Chicken's _Our Newest Member, Calvin_. It was one of the loneliest and depressing experiences of my adult life (but with really good food).

That said, it turned out that way because I was stupid and naive and let myself get flung into the russian roulette of their blind allocation process. This put me on a team doing work for which I had no real relevant experience and working under a manager who promptly forgot I existed for 3 months.

I'd call my experience an outlier, and it all turned out well in the end when I fled the place for a better offer doing work far more relevant to my previous job experience, except that I keep running into others that had almost exactly the same thing happen to them.

Amidst the hooplah of Larry and Sergei's Montessori for overgrown gifted kids, there's something very rotten, elitist, and ineffective going on at the googleplex and the initial frustration in Steve's rant hinted to me that deep down he knows this too. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I had such high hopes for the place and they were utterly dashed on the rocks.