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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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...
Who cares what Brin thinks? He's a stupid rich douchebag with no credibility in the public mudhole square. Just because he can pee on yegge's healess corpse doesnt make him any more deserving of attention than the piece of poo that he is. He's just some guy that gets paid for opressing other engineers. Get over your fascination with his money cock.
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.
152 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadConsidering that Yegge seemed to make a compelling case, that peremptory response doesn't reflect well on the Google executive team.
It's a whole different thing if you launch a startup like Dropbox and get people to use it.
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.
(Not that I have first-hand knowledge - I read this in "In the Plex")
No value statement about holding a job at Google was intended. Although he repeatedly claimed it was his dream job.
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.
Also, if you looked in the comments of his G+ page there was no shortage of job offers there.
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.
Just speculating on all this, but I do wonder...
The shareholders should fire Brin if he suggests re-writing boring old "legacy" code in a sexy new language!
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.
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.
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-...
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.
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."
Such behavior resembles totalitarian dictatorship rather than what most of us would consider ethical.
And, with that, Sergey Brin invalidates the entire human race's history of long-form literature, short stories, essays, and plays...
... and his company's own Android launch yesterday, which I suspect was more verbose than a few paragraphs.
Steve Yegge's blog is called "Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants" and not "Stevey's Key Points of Great Ideas" for a reason.
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.
So, I should probably also mention that Sergey is known for making /lame/ jokes.
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.
That's just my personal interpretation anyway.
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.
http://books.google.com/books?id=kaJZkwhVRYEC&pg=PA293&#...
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.
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.
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?
Gundotra was diplomatic and used the question as an opportunity to brag about Google's culture of openness. Brin used it as an opportunity to either:
A - crack a badly worded joke
B - slam Yegge
One can only hope it was option A, though given the way it's worded I don't doubt there is some venom in there.
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.
Personally I loved Steve's rant and he nailed it.
That said, he (Yegge) does have a good point and I bet the top brass at Google really did pay attention to what he said.
I suspect this is Brin just trying to be funny.
"We talked with Yegge and dealt with the matter internally, and besides, I didn't read past the first thousand pages"
gets quoted as...
"I didn't read past the first thousand pages..."
http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/execs.html#ser...
... 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.
;-)
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...
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.
Only for insecure managers.
Here's the basic structure:
1. "I worked at Amazon, they introduced company-wide platforms. Microsoft and Facebook have these too."
2. "Now I work at Google. We have no such platform."
3. "Platforms are awesome and we should have one."
aaaaaaand the rest is details.
So, Sergey, you need things in a paragraph or less? Here you go:
If you're going to put the Google name on a product and release it, try doing it in a manner that's not half-assed.
Sorry to be so curt, Sergey -- but I didn't want to lose your interest.
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."
Your summary is much more graceful than my own. I blame Brin for my forced brevity, lest I lose his interest.
"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.
A poor choice of words perhaps...
The question about Steve Yegge's post gets asked here http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
The naymzwars question immediately precedes it.
The page isn't redirecting properly
Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.
Does anyone have a copy of Brin's post?
EDIT: Works now for me, too.
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.
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?
As a non-Googler, I would love to hear more about this... if you won't write the blog post, mind if I interview you so I can? :)
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.