Battelle asked about the highly critical memo from a Google engineer that was mistakenly made public. Gundotra's talking point on this: "Larry and Sergey have fostered a culture that allows open debate. The outside world got a peek into what it's like to work at Google. That's why we didn't fire him."
Brin was less diplomatic about the memo. "I stopped reading it after the first 1,000 pages or so," he said. "If you want to get a point across, limit it to a paragraph or so."
Are we ever going to have a social network run by people with sufficient diplomatic skill to host a simple birthday party?
Having said that: Rather than analyzing these clunker quotes any further I'd note that they are a journalist's paraphrase of what may well have been a gotcha question asked by the very same journalist. That's a notoriously treacherous process. So I'd like to avoid piling on. Let's just say that, if the journalist was the one who pulled and slanted these quotes to make them read like a barely-veiled public threat and a not-at-all-veiled peremptory brush-off, that journalist did a fine job.
If I were a Google recruiter I'd be prepping a better response right now. A pity that the company blew the chance to deliver a kind human response from the podium, but you can't fix history.
> Are we ever going to have a social network run by people with sufficient diplomatic skill to host a simple birthday party?
No, because engineers run social networks, and many engineers are ironically socially lacking.
But that's besides the point. I thought Brin's response was HUMAN! Consider that he could have gone the PR route with "we value all our employees' opinions and are looking into the matter". I vastly prefer honesty over PR; and I think many engineers do too.
I vastly prefer honesty over PR; and I think many engineers do too.
It is a mistake to equate "honesty" with "blurting out the first thing that comes into one's head, no matter how rude, and no matter who is listening".
And it's one thing to take your employee aside for a blunt conversation, and another to broadcast your criticism from a public stage, a stage where the employee's pride is at stake and yet the realities of politics, PR, and media ecology leave the employee effectively unable to respond in kind.
There's nothing dishonest about the phrase "no comment", just as there's nothing dishonest about concealing your body by wearing clothes. It's about privacy. Some things are appropriate for a press conference, some things are appropriate for an all-company email, some things are appropriate for a one-on-one with an employee, some things are appropriate for close friends, and I'm afraid some thoughts are just inappropriate -- there's no shame in having them, but you should show some restraint in sharing them.
And it's true that many people grapple with these principles in the way that one grapples with a strange foreign language, and that engineering culture has evolved to cope with that reality. But Google's not trying to build a social network for engineers. They're trying to build a social network for the world. And if appealing to people beyond the Google culture is business-critical for Google, then politeness is business-critical for Google.
I don't think that's what's going on here. Steve Yegge is notorious for his overly-long blog posts. I got a chuckle at the comment, and I think that kind of offhand joke is what Brin intended.
This looks like an inside joke pulled out of context by the reporter. Maybe Brin made an error in speaking to his audience, but I don't think this comment was as damaging as you're making it out to be.
The Internet peanut gallery has decided that any number of people are notorious for any number of things. That doesn't make it OK for someone's employer to berate them about it on stage.
Me too! And a bit funny. I can't think of a better way to handle this mess than to (a) not fire Yegge, (b) poke back at him a bit publicly and playfully, (c) address Yegge's concerns internally.
And if not re-contextualized by the reporter, then also clearly shows him being a dick.
I've been at huge companies, I've written Yegge sized rants to the VP of engineering, and that VP actually red my rant of frustration, ALL of it, and did something about it. And this was at one of those boring giant East Coast tech companies that still have their roots in the old DEC and IBM company cultures.
And, except that you are hiding behind pseudonymity, your post shows you being an even bigger dick. Maybe you ought to think about what you are writing before you post it.
Am I the only one that interpreted as a light-hearted sarcastic remark? In the same interview he admitted to being very sarcastic when supporting key features of g+
I'd like to hear the audio to check out his inflection and the full context.
I was surprised by Vic ending with "that's why we didn't fire him." The thought of firing Yegge over a rant would signal extreme shortsightedness to me...
Well, others had discussed whether he'd get fired, but I think the consensus was that he wouldn't because it'd be a bad PR move.
However, I don't think it's correct to say that they would have been firing him "over a rant". They would have been firing him over a lengthy, detailed, public (intentional or not) criticism of the company that went after the most senior company executives by name.
I don't think he should have been fired, but I think something like that would be considered at least a "fire-able" offense at pretty much any company.
Nonsense. I'm a big fan of long-form literature, short stories, essays and plays, but if all you want to do is get a point across, you'd better use something else.
I think that's a pretty unfair summary. Brin didn't suggest he disapproves of everything longer than a paragraph, and Yegge's post wasn't art or literature. In the context of a question whether an executive has read something an employee has written, it's a much more reasonable statement.
You have no idea how many jokes he makes about the length of the Android source code. They're hilarious too.
He was just trying to be funny. I don't know why one comment about a post that wasn't even intended to be posted to the public is being nit-picked to such detail.
Sergey is just a normal guy like all of us. Sure he's the CTO of a very important company, but it'd be cool if he were treated like a normal person too. Why should he have to be held to a higher standard of political correctness at all times, even when commenting about something fairly insignificant (in both mine and probably his opinion).
I don't want to argue about the importance of Steve Yegge's post, but let's just assume that we've already made the assumption that it isn't too significant.
With great power comes great responsibility. Once you are the CTO of the #1 web company you have to expect that you're going to be held to different standards than J. Random Blogger.
The fact that you consider it 'fairly insignificant' is probably what drives your view of this more than anything, consider the possibility that you are wrong.
Yegge is anything but dumb and when people like that speak up, publicly or otherwise and you employ them to further the goals of your company the smart thing to do is to listen.
Nobody is all knowing.
If you hire such people to ignore them do them and yourself a favor and don't waste their time. After all, what's the point of having talent like that on board without at least hearing it out. Verbose or not.
Yegge already knew what Brin thought of his post long before Brin made that comment. You can't seriously think that this wasn't dealt with internally. The only reason that Brin is making jokes about it is because it is 100% water under the bridge for them.
Well, then maybe he should have said something to that effect. The problem with speaking in public is that people will actually hear what you say. If you don't intend to come across as flippant don't be flippant.
Brin is not the CTO of Google: "Sergey Brin co-founded Google Inc. in 1998. Today, he directs special projects. From 2001 to 2011, Sergey served as president of technology, where he shared responsibility for the company’s day-to-day operations with Larry Page and Eric Schmidt."
I should have verified that I guess, but it doesn't really matter either way. Brin is very visible as co-founder of Google and can expect his words to be quoted. And typically those quotes will come out in the worst possible way so when you make a public statement you try to do so in a way to minimize the possible damage.
By no means did I mean it was dumb. I meant that this kind of thing happens almost every week inside of Google. There is a ton of discussion going on all the time and Google is known to be a company where every employee's voice is heard.
Steve's rant was a bit longer than usual rants, and he was just pointing that out in his kind of lame way. What would be a satisfactory answer anyway? "I thought it was a good idea, we are going think about making all of Google into platforms right now"? Or, some no-op response that most CEO/CTO's tend to give to things like this?
You can't argue that Amazon is kicking their asses in regards to AWS versus Google's App Engine. The lame joke I'm seeing here is GAE.
And I think Yegge has a good point - Facebook IS different for each individual because everybody has their own preferences in regards to how they use it and that's because while Google was making lame experiments with Buzz forcing Gmail users to use it, Facebook was busy becoming a platform.
And Android is popular not because it's a better / more polished product than iOS. It isn't, not by a long shot. Instead Android is a better platform.
Why does everyone seem to miss that Brin is right? If you want to get the CTO of a company the size of Google to read a memo, you do make it short and to the point. It took me like half an hour to read it, it was a good read, but if I was an executive I'd much rather read "this guy says we need more APIs and interoperation and a couple of other smart guys agree."
Short and to the point is not what Steve Yegge was doing, it's not what Steve Yegge generally does, and it's fine because I'm pretty sure he didn't write his post aiming at the C-level and expecting them to read it.
I'm not sure you're right. There are at least two reasons for expecting people to read long forms:
1) Sometimes you need to tell a story to get people to see a point. Merely stating the facts won't do it. You need to slowly lead them somewhere, while drawing a landscape, pointing out some of the pitfalls they would have pointed out, telling them how you avoided them. You need time to draw people into your line of thinking let something sink in
It's much like with security issues: if you report them, nothing happens. If you extract the details of a thousand customers and present those, people get upset and take action. The first approach is short and to the point, but does not achieve the goal, but the goal is inherently inachievable by short-and-to-the-point approaches.
I know I've been persuaded by stories where short factual statements didn't succeed, because I didn't take the time to turn the facts into the story for myself.
2) If short reports are good enough for the CTO, any manager between you and the CTO will think short reports are good enough for him as well. You will never get the chance to make a subtle point that requires some paragraphs, because nobody will read it.
There is a general complaints about a cultural change in this direction that the internet supposedly induced, but I believe it started much earlier, with the growth of megacorporations where people were expected to consume more information than they could possibly handle.
To cope, they started to consume summaries by supposedly smart advisors that they trusted. However, they also get to randomly disregard such summaries when they feel like it (out of intuition if we're being generous), because they can always say "well, it's actually complex" and they get to excuse themselves in the same way. Short reports often actually aren't good enough at all, but we've learned to live with it, because some wrong decisions are better than no decisions at all.
There is a way in between, where you sometimes, when the issue is important enough, do read the long form. Even top-level CEO's may be interested in an 800 page book on 'The better angels of our nature'. Yegge may be important enough, and his subject matter may be important enough, that Brin should actually read it entirely.
I smiled with the first line because I did knew about Steve's lengthy rants. I understood the second line as an explanation for an audience that might not catch the first one.
Also, the rant has no mercy with Jeff Bezos. The dismissive tone and the "that's the reason he wasn't fired" phrase might be just a way to say that Google, as a company, doesn't subscribe the views of an employee.
I don't pretend to be a comedian, but it seems to be just reinforcing his first assertion (which he was kidding about). I actually think he's referencing something internal related to having to make certain descriptions shorter.
So, I should probably also mention that Sergey is known for making /lame/ jokes.
"Sure he's the CTO of a very important company" ....
... and Yegge's criticism was squarely about Brin's area of responsibility. So it's natural that Brin would be a little pissed about it, because Yegge was effectively saying that Brin's doing a half-assed job in some critical areas.
"Services should be composable or sooner or later we'll get a competitor that gets this who will kill us."
I hope that accurately summarizes the essential bits, if you disagree or can shorten it further feel free to correct.
If there was one thing that pre-saged the decline of any large entity then it was probably the management being surrounded with people that agree with the management, and having their ears closed to the rest.
Someone that disagrees with you, even if it is verbose is worth 10x more of your attention than someone that agrees with you. Why? Because in disagreement you will find knowledge, alternative viewpoints and advancement, in agreement only confirmation.
Worst case he could have asked one of his underlings to summarize it for him and hope that nothing of the message got lost.
Sergey Brin doesn't matter any more. He's been off in his own little world, making acquisitions and having them report directly to him. They don't get integrated into the normal engineering environment, and they wind up in more buildings which normal badges won't open. Look up building 1489 for an example.
When I heard about this non-integration, my interpretation was that normal eng is where things go to die, so they were keeping the new things separate so they would not die. Then I realized, hey wait, if the core engineering area is sufficiently broken to where one of the founders is purposely keeping his own toys away from it, what does that say about us?
I'm also a non-Googler, although of the Xoogler persuasion. After nearly five years I finally said "enough" and left earlier this year, although after trying in vain to get people to realize just what was happening.
On the outside world, Buzz was seen as a joke, and it was for individual accounts. However, on the inside, corp Buzz was lively, and there were a great many Yegge-rant-type posts flying around earlier this year. They didn't get much done, given that G+ launched with the whole real names fiasco, even after an unprecedented amount of push-back from inside.
You might find some of my writing on these topics enjoyable. A URL to them is in my profile, and there is a contact link on those posts.
Battelle asked about the highly critical memo from a Google engineer that was mistakenly made public. . . . Brin was less diplomatic about the memo. "I stopped reading it after the first 1,000 pages or so," he said. "If you want to get a point across, limit it to a paragraph or so."
Considering that Yegge seemed to make a compelling case, that peremptory response doesn't reflect well on the Google executive team.
Brin doesn't come off well. He criticises a well received and thought provoking article calling it too long. How the hell would the guy squeeze what he wrote into one paragraph?
He could have done it by cutting off all the material at the beginning about Amazon and Jeff Bezos. It was interesting but not relevant to his point. He certainly could have cut down the article to a more manageable length - he just chose not to because it's not his style.
He could have made it shorter but I agree. Maybe someone should write an executive summary of it and send it to Brin, because there is no doubt Google (and many other companies) should be paying attention to the key points that are made.
"We need to start building Google into a platform. This piecemeal approach is not going to work in the long run." And then a short anecdote about his experience at Amazon and a short explanation of how it guides his views. Maybe not one paragraph, but not more than three or four.
Short pieces of 3-4 paragraphs are useless, unless the guy writing it holds enough power within a company. People should also start taking medication for their ADHD symptoms, if nothing else works ;)
This piecemeal approach is not going to work
in the long run
Yeah, whatever, have you filled your time-sheets yet?
That kind of hubris always presages the fall. The failure of Wave, Google+, and things like this: Brin's flippant, cocky response to a valid criticism means that if I had Google stock, I would slowly start to sell.
They aren't new users though. None of them are new to google.com, and most already have Google accounts. They are simply activating another Google service.
It's a whole different thing if you launch a startup like Dropbox and get people to use it.
So by that metric, if every gmail user used G+ it would still be a failure? If it captured 70% of the online population, it wouldn't be that impressive because those people originally used search?
Wave was a failure, and it had plenty of Docs and Gmail users to draw from. G+ strikes me as a very different beast, and one that has already found its niche. It may not displace facebook, but it certainly seems to have eaten into Twitter's niche.
Please, please don't make comments to the effect that there are hundreds of such postings within Google and that the management cannot read all of them. Steve Yegge is not a hot shot new engineer with some cool ideas, when he talks about SOA you listen. Just as if Peter Norvig (ever) rants about how AI and/or NLP is handled in Google Search you listen or when or when Andy Tobin talks about Android or when Matias Duarte talks about how UI is handled, well you get my point. So the comment that Yegge's is just another comment is PR-speak.
It seems Brin and others want to diffuse the situation with jokes, etc. It would have been much better if Brin would have said "Look, I don't agree with Yegge and here's why..", giving strategical and technical reasons why they are not doing what he's suggesting. In its place we get a sad, half-jokey response that would have come from a peppy MBA-type.
Had it appeared in the HN discussion for Yegge's post, I would have downvoted Brin's response, because it doesn't bring anything useful. Others probably would have done the same.
Sergey has a dry sense of humor that doesn't always come across well in quotes. My sense is that plenty of execs and other people in Google read Steve's post and gave it a lot of thought. Steve's post was long, but he made a ton of great points.
I'm never sure. I've been literally dismissed by execs for a six-page reason written by multiple senior engineers why they shouldn't spend $20 million buying another company with "this is too long. Bring it back under a page and we'll read it."
I'm not going to try to parse Brin's response, but realistically, if Yegge had just written a page-length summary of his argument on this subject no one would have paid attention. Short-form writing lacks the scope to argue a point on factual arguments. It tends to rely on the author's personal credibility. In a large company, it's hard for people outside senior management to have the personal relationship with the CEO that's required to be persuasive with a short memo.
Engineering reports and academic papers get around the problem by including an abstract. It's not really the style to include them in informal business memos, but it might help in a situation like this.
It's foolish to ignore input in any form, but few people (even very bright, successful people) have the verbal bandwidth necessary to discuss important things solely via the written word. I tell people "business emails should be one short paragraph at most". (unless you are sure the other person can handle it).
I've noticed it in big and small companies alike. I think it's b/c when someone is checking email his/her mind is not in the proper state to pause and type a detailed reply to a 10 paragraph message.
It's purely a consequence of all the demands on peoples' attention and the ambiguity with which most people write/think. Face to face or even telephone interaction allows for ongoing verification of mutual understanding. For an example of how long and detailed emails sent/read by smart, capable people can create much confusion, ill-will and chaos, check out LKML :)
Yegge's articles are interesting but they are also ridiculously long. He writes a thousand words when a hundred will suffice.
There's nothing wrong with that - Neal Stephenson has made a name for himself using that technique - but it's not for everyone.
I can imagine a lot of people who have a full inbox may not have time to go through every article written about them or every complaint made by an employee.
Yeah the benefit is that Yegge's a good, humorous writer usually gets a large audience. "Hardened interface" still cracks me up. His point is usually fairly clear, and odds are good that plenty of other people will be capable of providing the executive summary.
I find his "points" muddied by all of the extra words. His typical essay starts out on a tangent and then slowly winds through some analogies tenuously related to a main theme. Sometimes I don't mind the long-winded essays, but I think almost all of his writing would be improved with a summary paragraph or two at the top.
Journalists edit quotes and mention them out of context. The "1000-page" comment surely wasn't completely serious.
Here's a 1-paragraph summary:
"Our current approach to building products closes them off from each other, and from the rest of the net. That limits their usefulness to only what our product managers could predict and our engineers could build. This is a serious issue that will cause the products - and the company - to die. The alternative is to start thinking of products as data and functionality sharing platforms, let them interact, let outside devs play, and let the ecosystem grow. Growing an ecosystem this way is worthwhile: Amazon did amazingly well out of it even though implementing it via Bezos-mandate sucked in so many ways. Let's do that, and do it better."
Everyone seems to assume that he meant this in a serious fashion, but for all we know he meant it in jest and had a huge grin on his face while he said it. It's easy to jump to conclusions, the internet being what it is (the biggest 24/7 news network on the planet), but without at least the audio, and preferably video as well, we shouldn't be so eager to take up pitchforks and torches.
Based on the comments on Steve Yegge's post, hundreds of non Googlers read it and appreciated it, I am not sure why a Google founder did not find it worthwhile to go thru it.
On the one hand they mentioned that Google has an open culture and on the other hand they are dismissive of his ideas and seemingly refuse to acknowledge them.
> I am not sure why a Google founder did not find it worthwhile to go thru it.
Because a Google founder and current executive doesn't have half an hour to devote every time an employee writes a long post about the company. That's what underlings and assistants are for.
edit: I see by the downvotes some of you disagree regarding workplace organization. Fair enough, but consider: if someone at Apple had emailed a letter this size to Steve Jobs, and he had responded with a trademark "don't write it that way if you want busy people to read it," would you disagree? And this post wasn't even aimed at Brin directly.
Because a Google founder and current executive doesn't have half an hour to devote every time an employee writes a long post about the company.
I'm not downvoting you, but I disagree. If somebody took the time to write something that long, there's probably a reason. Taking some time to suss out that reason might just be a good idea. There's quite a bit of management literature that advocates "managing by walking around" and that hammers home the point that the "rank and file" actually have more knowledge about what needs to be done, than the high-ranking execs, exactly because they are closer to the problem(s) on a daily basis.
OK, granted, if every employee is writing manifestos that take 30 minutes to read, and doing so on a daily basis, then it would be hard for the CEO / CTO / etc. to keep up. But is that really what we're talking about here?
> That's what underlings and assistants are for.
I'd argue that underlings and assistants don't (necessarily) obviate the need for the CEO to read things himself... maybe they should act as a filter, but if the "underling" reads something and realize "Oh, shit, this is good stuff" then he/she should probably hand it to their boss and go "You really need to read this."
It's depressing, for someone considering working at Google, that all Brin can do is attack the form of a well-respected team member's rant. He should have said something like, "We encourage open debate at Google. Right now, I think that developing everything as a service will restrict the independence of teams and slow down our quick development cycle." Instead he says, "TLDR".
If there's one thing that Google should not let any of their higher-ups do, it's talk in public. They are really, really bad at it.
So you're saying he should have made an empty PR statement instead of something with more character in it?
It's funny how that works. On one hand, when someone says 'We value your inputs and are looking into the matter' we dismiss it as PR speak. When someone comes out and says something a little less politically-correct we jump on him for not running it through the PR department.
I just find it to be mean. If he said, "this rant is dumb", that would be fine. But all he said is "if you want to say something, make it shorter".
Maybe good advice, but you look like an idiot when everyone who reads social news site made it through Yegge's rant, but your couldn't bother reading your own employee's letter.
Really? I would have considered 'this rant is dumb' to be meaner than 'make it shorter'. 'Make it shorter' is, on the whole, pretty good advice for anyone who's trying to get their point across.
If Steve Yegge put an executive summary at the top of his posts, I doubt I'd find them half as entertaining. Part of the joy is always trying to figure out what exactly it is that you're reading. Gets particularly good when he just puts a random piece of creative fiction on his blog.
Definitely agree. If anyone else wrote rambling posts that are as long as his I'd end up giving up part way through, but his rants/articles are a real joy to read and they usually give you real food for thought.
Most of the time I do give up part way through, and I don't find his articles a joy to read at all.
Yegge needs to learn brevity. He makes good points, and still even I feel like I'm wasting my time reading his articles; I can only imagine how Brin feels.
I think Sergie Brin comes across as cocky in this interview and Steve Yegge's memo about Google's failure to create platforms is more valid then ever- Brin himself has treated Google+ as an afterthought and I don't think that bodes well for the service.
Not entirely true. While there was a lot of skepticism on AdSense and Gmail within Google, Brin was really enthusiastic about both products. If I recall correctly, Brin was even the promotor and driver of AdSense ("Let's get this puppy launched", a famous quote by Brin on the launch of AdSense). Both Page and Brin were also the first users of Gmail and tested the product intensively within the company after Buchheit got approval for launching Gmail internally.
I feel pretty bad for Yegge because he always talks about how excited he is to work at Google and this is the kind of response he gets for being progressive.
You have to think that Brin was sort of 'stung' by Yegge's airing Google's laundry in public like that so he's zinging back, but still, he's had time to process it and come up with a more politic response. If he'd softened it with ' ... but he raises some good points and it's provoked discussion ...' it'd be ok but as it is it's a blowoff and diss. In Yegge's place I might leave.
We know how he feels about Amazon ;) Somehow I don't think MSFT is going to be a fit for him either.
Oracle? Perish the thought.
Facebook? Maaaaybe.
There are precious few companies out there who give the amount of freedom to engineers that Google employees enjoy. For all its problems, Google is still one of a kind - unless Yegge wants to play the startup game for a while.
He can always start or join a startup. He's a well known and well respected engineer. His name on the corporate letterhead guarantees at least a years funding if not more.
Also, if you looked in the comments of his G+ page there was no shortage of job offers there.
It might even have been a missed opportunity. Brin (or better yet Page) could have posted a public reply that said, to the effect of:
Yegge is absolutely right, I've been thinking along similar lines recently, and now is a great opportunity to do something about it. I'm issuing the same edict as Bezos - every Google product must expose its full functionality via public API. From today, Yegge is in charge of coordinating and making it happen. etc etc
One of the issues that Google seems to face is that a form of technical debt is catching up with them. They've had the same three officially approved languages for a decade now - C++, Java, Python - with Go on the way to becoming a fourth. But that rules out interesting new ones like Scala, Clojure, Erlang, Haskell that might 1) be good tools for particular projects, and 2) attract great developers.
Requiring all their products to interact via published API only might enable increased polyglot programming and a more diverse and interesting tech ecosystem.
Must take issue with one point - whatever technical debt they may have amassed has little to do, I suspect, with holding on to the same boring old programming languages too long.
The shareholders should fire Brin if he suggests re-writing boring old "legacy" code in a sexy new language!
Haha, I certainly didn't mean to imply any of Google's current stuff should be rewritten. It's all very high quality, performant. Rather, I was thinking of new projects that might benefit from other languages or platforms.
I was only referring to the other statement in the article that they didn't fire him because of some reason (forgot - maybe because nobody can realistically be expected to figure out what is being shared with whom on G+).
No value statement about holding a job at Google was intended. Although he repeatedly claimed it was his dream job.
In Brin's defense, Yegge is very wordy and prone to go off on tangents. Although I got through the leaked G+ post, I stopped reading several of his blog posts less than half way through, and I am much less busy than Brin is. Also, unlike me, Brin probably already knew the facts about Amazon revealed in the G+ post.
this is either hilarious (if he's just kidding around for PR's sake, and in reality he read the thing and took it to heart) or tragic (if he's really as dismissive as he suggests.)
"But I was being sarcastic at the time," Brin said.
One thing the Google founder and the Google+ VP do agree
on: the Circle feature. "I love them, I have dozens of
circles," Brin said.
Somehow I don't think Sergey takes this very seriously.
Seems bizarre to me that he would be so dismissive, I didn't think Brin had that kind of attitude. Even as an outsider I found the memo compelling enough to read all the way through.
But it also brings up a point about Google+ that it seems to encourage long posts like this - most of the Google+ posts I come across tend to look like huge walls of text.
Brin is simply alluding to something that's annoyed me many times about Yegge's posts, however insightful they sometimes are: Steve Yegge loves to hear himself write.
This whole fiasco is just a standard example of the mismatch between the sales/marketing/pr view of a product that the world normally sees and the what engineers think of it.
PR people talk about what's good about a product all day. That's their job, and it's whose words you normally read in the press. Engineers' jobs are to focus on what's bad about the product and to improve it. People saw Yegge's post and it was an engineer's view and they're flipping out. If Brin has ever talked to an engineer in his life he knows it's no big deal.
I personally have seen sales people who have been touting the virtues of a product for months have a single meeting with the engineers and come back absolutely devastated that things aren't all roses and unicorns.
I've also seen engineers brought into sales meetings and then talk about everything that's wrong with the product he's supposed to be helping to sell. (The engineer typically then gets his ass handed to him by the senior salesperson as soon as they're out of the customer's earshot.)
Cnet's article calls the memo "highly critical" but it seems pretty clear that he wasn't trying to rant so much as issue what he sees as a clarion call to action at a company he loves... and he took care to begin by praising Google for doing "everything right" and end by apologizing for any ruffled feathers or misrepresentations he might have made.
He might not be too comfortable at work right now, but his post did have the intended effect: people are still talking about it, and his company management is getting asked about it. And Sergey Brin is cracking jokes about it. And here we are talking about it.
If anyone is entitled to get their feathers ruffled by all this, it is Amazon. He really pulled no punches with them. My favorites were the description of his former employer as a "dirt-smeared cube farm" and the characterization of his former CEO as "Dread Pirate Bezos" who "makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies". That is some good material there.
Early in my programming career, my team leader took me aside and explained how to write an effective and persuasive memo that would get through to management. It was valuable advice as the rant I had written got nowhere. And management is not the only target audience with short attention spans; same-level colleagues have been equally challenged by having to read an E-mail longer than 1 paragraph, even when it concerns technical details of the project they're working on. Consequently, I dumb down E-mails in an effort to get the attention of as many of the recipients as I can. Condescending? No. Realistic? Yes. (Given my druthers, I'm normally prone to writing Yegge-length E-mails and memos; I've just learned that less is better when trying to through to the most people.)
It speaks well of Google's openness that Brin's response is a quip about how long it was, not a serious comment about how such discussions should stay internal.
If Google were to fire Yegge, it would be for (voluntarily) deleting the post, not for accidentally making it public. When he publicly posted it, everybody was talking about what a great work environment Google must have for people to be able to talk so openly. After he deleted it, lots of people inferred censorship and Google's reputation suffered.
That illustrates the hazards of speaking off the cuff. If he integrated that into the earlier sentences it would have sounded a lot better, e.g.: "Larry and Sergey have fostered a culture that allows open debate, not a culture where people get fired for things like this."
Yeah, I don't want to foment yet more fake controversy. I think you're right about what he meant to communicate. I'd just suggest not joking in public about firing people.
And isn't that weird? That you're not allowed to criticize the company you work for? It's like that company is saying to you: "Of course we believe in free speech - but please practice it elsewhere from now on."
Such behavior resembles totalitarian dictatorship rather than what most of us would consider ethical.
The same reason, to a lesser degree, that in a marriage you try and work through problems before you get a divorce. Nobody and no company is perfect, but Yegge apparently feels strongly that 1) Google is a good company, by and large, and that 2) by talking about a problem, it may get fixed.
Probably not at a startup though. People with an expansive skill set like Yegge would be an ideal startup hire. I'm guessing he just likes politics at big companies.
What do politics have to do with it? He clearly cares about Google, or he wouldn't have bothered to write his post. Also, there are classes of problems that can realistically only be solved at a big company.
LOL, Brin was right on target. I ask myself how on earth can I guy write SO MUCH of a blog post and still have time to get things done. If Yegge is not not able to summarize his POVs in one page or two then it's better not to try at all.
Now, instead of talking about the points that Yegge raised, everyone is talking about how cool Google is for not firing. But for me the important thing is the content of his rant...
Finally! Yegge has some fine points and I would like to learn about them - but not for this price. And by the way - I really hate his strategy of flattening CS graduates by adding something about how real programming requires writing a parser a year.
In pg's Hierarchy of arguments http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html , "I stopped reading after x pages" is "DH2: Responding to Tone" and therefore always unconvincing.
If you read the entire library of Babel, you will find an elegant counter-argument to this. Please don't dismiss this argument until you are done reading it, or your dismissal will be unconvincing.
Maybe, but I enjoyed reading all of Steve Yegge's rant. It was informative and funny. And I don't even work for google. And it wasn't really even 10 pages long. The criticism of its length is fatuous and flippant, and not substantive.
Brin was less diplomatic about the memo. "I stopped reading it after the first 1,000 pages or so," he said. "If you want to get a point across, limit it to a paragraph or so."
Are we ever going to have a social network run by people with sufficient diplomatic skill to host a simple birthday party?
Having said that: Rather than analyzing these clunker quotes any further I'd note that they are a journalist's paraphrase of what may well have been a gotcha question asked by the very same journalist. That's a notoriously treacherous process. So I'd like to avoid piling on. Let's just say that, if the journalist was the one who pulled and slanted these quotes to make them read like a barely-veiled public threat and a not-at-all-veiled peremptory brush-off, that journalist did a fine job.
If I were a Google recruiter I'd be prepping a better response right now. A pity that the company blew the chance to deliver a kind human response from the podium, but you can't fix history.