91–100 of 282 posts
"Most technology companies eventually get taken over by suits and middle managers." Interesting statement. I suspect this process is well under way at Google these days. But why does this happen? Is it just that once companies grow large enough, you need middle managers, (who then consolidate power and control)? Is there a more nuanced explanation?
"I suspect this process is well under way at Google these days." What's your basis for this speculation?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it's hackerly...
No, it's not. That gets at the very essence of my original comment. One of the assertions in the article is that a hacker culture is a necessary ingredient for a successful technology company. I see Apple as a counterexample to this argument. And it's a counterexample that shouldn't be ignored. Apple is driven by design (industrial design, product design, graphic design). They think about products, not technology. Th…
No it isn't. I said that you either need that or to pay people a lot or to be in an interesting industry where there are no competitors who have hacker cultures. If Apple doesn't have a hacker culture, then it would probably be an example of the latter.
I think there's something to be said for focusing on what the market rewards, and clearly the market wasn't rewarding yahoo for having great technology in 1998. Nor did it reward Google for having great enterprise search. You can't fault Jerry and David for not seeing search when the market had clearly supported banners with no basis for search as a viable model yet.
I disagree. Where were those banners shown? Search results pages. The reason people went to Yahoo! was to find stuff. That's the reason Yahoo! became Yahoo in the first place. The Yahoo founders made an invisible, scatterbrained web accessible by giving some sort of list index to it. Google later improved the sorting of the index, but Yahoo was first to build a large, searchable index.
[edit: this thread has some insightful replies by others that are worth reading.] I'm sorry, this may be PG's backyard, but I've gotta call bullshit. Note: I am not a Yahoo employee or corporate shill. 1. "At Yahoo this death spiral started early." Apparently this death spiral took TWELVE YEARS (the WWW is 20 years old), and Yahoo is still #1 (or #2) in terms of total properties on the web. How is this a death spiral…
When pg writes "Microsoft is dead" (and the outroar over that from MS apologists sounded a lot like your comment, angry capital letters and all) or "Yahoo is in a death spiral", he's talking about potential for growth, not necessarily short term feasibility as a profitable business. Yahoo is irrelevant to the Valley because by and large their stuff is old hat used by middle aged soccer moms in Nebraska. Lots of compa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it's hackerly...
No, it's not. That gets at the very essence of my original comment. One of the assertions in the article is that a hacker culture is a necessary ingredient for a successful technology company. I see Apple as a counterexample to this argument. And it's a counterexample that shouldn't be ignored. Apple is driven by design (industrial design, product design, graphic design). They think about products, not technology. Th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, there are plenty of great hackers at Apple. That doesn't mean the company has a "hacker-centric culture", though. Does Apple make "a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing", like the article mentions about Facebook? No way.
One caveat: best technical recruiters are former programmers (it's an automatic plus if a recruiter tells me "I'll take your LaTeX resume, I used it a lot in grad school").
I got called from Google during 2006. The HR guy screened me on the phone with all TCP/IP questions. I was amazed because he knew so much about TCP/IP and UNIX socket. It turned out that he was a former software engineer in Bell Lab/Lucent. It has been the best initial phone screen that I ever have.
"Most technology companies eventually get taken over by suits and middle managers." Interesting statement. I suspect this process is well under way at Google these days. But why does this happen? Is it just that once companies grow large enough, you need middle managers, (who then consolidate power and control)? Is there a more nuanced explanation?
"I suspect this process is well under way at Google these days." What's your basis for this speculation?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it's hackerly...
No, it's not. That gets at the very essence of my original comment. One of the assertions in the article is that a hacker culture is a necessary ingredient for a successful technology company. I see Apple as a counterexample to this argument. And it's a counterexample that shouldn't be ignored. Apple is driven by design (industrial design, product design, graphic design). They think about products, not technology. Th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it's hackerly...
No, it's not. That gets at the very essence of my original comment. One of the assertions in the article is that a hacker culture is a necessary ingredient for a successful technology company. I see Apple as a counterexample to this argument. And it's a counterexample that shouldn't be ignored. Apple is driven by design (industrial design, product design, graphic design). They think about products, not technology. Th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what will Facebook overlook? Maybe location? Was Facebook's failed acquisition of Foursquare like Yahoo's non acquisition of Google?
Privacy, perhaps.
It is, however, true that Facebook is unlike Google in that, while nearly everyone wants to find information, not everyone wants to share information with other people.