I'm sorry you didn't have a good interview at Digg. My goal, then and now, is that even people who don't get an offer should leave feeling okay about the process. I clearly didn't live up to that with you, and I apologize for it.
We never made a no-hire decision based on one answer, and nobody ended an interview after one question, unless there was some sort of emergency. Site outage, fire alarm, that sort of thing.
> He went on to ruin digg.com (the rewrite everything guy)
I didn't ruin Digg. Ruining Digg was an all-hands-on-deck multi-year team effort. I wasn't involved in the decision to rewrite it and didn't agree with it. I don't know for sure who was, or what pressures were at work behind it.
What I do know is that our VPE came to me and said that we were going to rewrite Digg from scratch, and do it in six months, because the code was a mess and it took too long to do anything. Which was true.
I told him it was a terrible idea and we should figure out the end point we wanted to be at, then incrementally refactor our way towards it.
He said we'd tried that and it didn't work, so we were throwing away everything and rebuilding it from scratch. In six months.
I said that if we wanted the slightest possibility of success, we'd have to cut features to the bone and ship a minimal version we could quickly iterate on. I suggested cutting the ability to comment on stories.
He told me he didn't think we needed to do that, and we were going to ship a feature-complete version of Digg in six months, from scratch.
It was a completely bananas project, doomed from day one, and I wasn't shy about saying so — I told anyone who'd listen that I gave it a 50/50 chance of destroying the company. The promises made about what would be delivered & when were completely unrealistic and unreasonable. There was nobody articulating what we were supposed to be building, or to say no to what shouldn't get built. Into that leadership vacuum flowed a torrent of well-intentioned but (in my opinion) misdirected ideas for what the thing should be, which ate that first six months in the blink of an eye.
We never made a no-hire decision based on one answer, and nobody ended an interview after one question, unless there was some sort of emergency. Site outage, fire alarm, that sort of thing.
> He went on to ruin digg.com (the rewrite everything guy)
I didn't ruin Digg. Ruining Digg was an all-hands-on-deck multi-year team effort. I wasn't involved in the decision to rewrite it and didn't agree with it. I don't know for sure who was, or what pressures were at work behind it.
What I do know is that our VPE came to me and said that we were going to rewrite Digg from scratch, and do it in six months, because the code was a mess and it took too long to do anything. Which was true.
I told him it was a terrible idea and we should figure out the end point we wanted to be at, then incrementally refactor our way towards it.
He said we'd tried that and it didn't work, so we were throwing away everything and rebuilding it from scratch. In six months.
I said that if we wanted the slightest possibility of success, we'd have to cut features to the bone and ship a minimal version we could quickly iterate on. I suggested cutting the ability to comment on stories.
He told me he didn't think we needed to do that, and we were going to ship a feature-complete version of Digg in six months, from scratch.
It was a completely bananas project, doomed from day one, and I wasn't shy about saying so — I told anyone who'd listen that I gave it a 50/50 chance of destroying the company. The promises made about what would be delivered & when were completely unrealistic and unreasonable. There was nobody articulating what we were supposed to be building, or to say no to what shouldn't get built. Into that leadership vacuum flowed a torrent of well-intentioned but (in my opinion) misdirected ideas for what the thing should be, which ate that first six months in the blink of an eye.