Live data from Hacker News

Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant

plus.google.com

101–110 of 178 posts

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

#101
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.

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

#102
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.

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

#103
I hate fear-driven cultures where presentations/meetings/casual talk with the CEO are treated as a gladiator match. In addition to Bezos, of course Jobs and (from what I read) Gates created such cultures. Another interesting, lesser known example was Col. Robert R.MacCormick, the editor for the Chicago Tribune for long years. He was described as "remote, coldly aloof, ruthless aristocrat, living in lonely magnificence, disdaining the common people... an exceptional man, a lone wolf whose strength and courage could be looked up to, but at the same time had to be feared; an eccentric, misanthropic genius whose haughty bearing, cold eye and steely reserve made it impossible to like or trust him." [Interesting anecdote: He had all the walls of his penthouse office at the Tribune covered with dark wood, including the door, so that after your meeting ended, you would have great difficulty finding the door to get back out, suffering under his humiliating gaze.]

That doesn't mean that such draconian cultures are unsuccessful, just the opposite. The problem is, success becomes very much dependent on the quality of the leader(s), e.g. compare Libya and China; the performance becomes very brittle.

The main paradox of humanity, of course, is why people continuously create such fear-driven, hero-worshiping hierarchies, although it causes great personal stress to them. Belief in a strong, super-genius, infallible leader that we can never equal and/or please, may be ingrained in our brains, be it religion or, as in this case, CEO worship.

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

#104
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…

I'm sorry if this was intended to be facetious, but I think Yegge's point was that you need to remove some of the information so that Bezos can fill it in himself and not get bored. I don't think the implication is that this quality is unique to Bezos, but it certainly is uncommon.

At any rate, removing every third word removes less informational content than every paragraph: an idea can often be recovered in your case, whereas it is quite difficult to recover an idea if it has been removed altogether.

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

#105
post #38

> That is: assume he already knows everything about it. Assume he knows more than you do about it. Even if you have groundbreakingly original ideas in your material, just pretend it’s old hat for him. Write your prose in the succinct, direct, no-explanations way that you would write for a world-leading expert on the material. So if he knows everything, why am I writing for him?

Because he doesn't know everything, obviously.

But by the time you've given your presentation, in which you've thoughtfully omitted the long winded explanations that you'd give to someone who knows nothing about the subject, he'll have deeper insight into what you've presented than you do. And that's the true mark of intelligence.

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

#106
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.

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

#107
post #101
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.

Normally I don't upvote humor on HN, but that was great.

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

#108
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…

[deleted]

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

#109
post #93
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

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

#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?

Post reply on HN