I'm actually more interested to read this, for several reasons:
Much of the "Steve Jobs story" is quite public already - it's stuff that you just can't help knowing. Reed, Wozniak, kicked out of Apple, Next, Pixar, etc... I'm sure the bio will have some new details, but the basic plot is pretty well known.
Jeff Bezos, OTOH, is someone I know relatively little about. Also, given that my nascent LiberWriter business deals with Kindle formatting, decisions those guys are making have a very real impact on me.
I have no relevant experience with anything, but my impression is that usually people who gush on about the superhuman abilities of an individual just have a skewed perspective. I've been on the receiving end of that kind of gush a time or two and I don't really feel that it's accurate in my case, and I don't believe that it's accurate in any other case. The people that talk just can't see the inadequacies and the common weaknesses that are visible from a better-informed context.
Jeff Bezos may indeed be smart, and he may indeed come up with things that "domain experts" haven't yet thought of, but the explanations are usually much more timid and general than "Jeff is practically a giant-brained alien".
On a much smaller scale, my company's founder and CEO is viewed as one such super-intelligent alien. And for sure he is very smart and has an incredible memory. But I can guarantee you that he doesn't know "everything" at all, but this is how he is perceived by many.
I've had that same experience -- that people exclaim how certain CEOs are so incredibly brilliant ("cerebral" was one comment that stuck in my memory), but when you meet them they just seem like any other smart person who has studied a domain for a long time.
I've presented to Bezos once. It went about the same as Yegge's experience, except I didn't have his balls to laugh in my CEO's face ;)
The whole thing felt like I was meeting the President - layer after layer of aides and executive assistants, tons of security, and briefings on where to sit, where to not sit, where to stand, where to not stand, look him in the eye when you shake his hand, etc etc. It was kind of surreal.
I haven't presented to any other big-corp CEO other than him, so I can't really draw any comparisons.
One thing Yegge brought up that I also felt the same about walking out of that room: Jeff is really smart, like really, really smart. I was warned about this beforehand and spent two weeks poring over every single detail, potential feature, everything about the idea I was presenting. He still managed to come out of left field with relevant questions that none of us had even thought of. So I can corroborate that side of the story.
The comparison to Liszt also seems apt - before we were even done presenting, he'd already grokked it to a surprising degree, and was already expanding upon the idea in out loud. You could hear my manager scribbling like a madman trying to get all of this down. This might not seem especially amazing, but the Director and VP level people I presented the very same idea to had not the same depth of insight. I remember being very impressed on the spot.
I'm no longer with Amazon, and I don't particularly want to go back - but that's not due to bad top management, IMO Bezos is one of the keenest tech CEOs around. He might be the closest thing we have left to Jobs.
To balance it out a bit and not make this seems like a complete Amazon love-fest: Jeff loved our idea, he gave us the green light right away. We left that room ecstatic thinking we were about to change the online retail experience forever.
Then middle management showed up. There was political infighting about who owns the project - it straddled multiple disciplines (hence why it was so groundbreaking), and there was a mixture of both hot-potato-oh-god-you-take-it and this-is-amazing-we-need-the-credit-on-this.
The teams that were interested were unwilling to yield to other teams that (rightfully, given their expertise and domain) wanted in, and some teams we needed support from kept punting it since it wasn't in their yearly plan (put together, well, a year or more ago). The project would have provided very powerfully tangible, very high-profile benefits to the customer, but said benefits weren't part of the metrics on which our department was getting judged, so at the VP level the willingness to devote resources was almost non-existent. There was lots of lip service given - especially about how a few people were able to hack together this thing and make it all the way to a Jeff Presentation.
But ultimately the project froze. It was, actually, probably the main reason I decided to leave Amazon for a smaller, more agile startup, where if the CEO wants something done, by golly, it's gettin' done.
That's a good illustration of no matter how brilliant the leader is, a bad team under them and/or poor execution can lead to failure.
Even with this infighting and whatnot going on Amazon is still doing amazing things. I'd be interesting to see what it'd look like if they were able to execute everything well.
It seems that's also a crucial role of the exec - if they see something that needs to be happening and it's not, they need to get in there make the necessary changes.
There are probably a million different ways for it to go bad.
There is a theory that gets posted here from time to time that As hire As and a few Bs that get through the filter, Bs hire Bs and a few Cs get through the filter, and so on down the line until you have hired people you really shouldn't have.
The other theory is promote until incompetent.
My guess is much more mundane, when you hire middle management they act like middle management. Which works as long as Their sphere of responsibility and control is well defined. When you need to cross cut concerns middle management actively fights against it. All most like using inheritance for code reuse and having deep inheritance hierarchies.
Since classifying people appears to be so trivial it can be boiled down to one character, does being bothered by the use of apostrophes in pluralization make me an A, a B, or a C?
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.
Honest question: can a company manage $34.2 billion a year in sales with a small management team?
I suppose the answer is "yes," given that MS seemed to manage with a minimal number of middle managers, at least based on the Joel Spolsky story shared elsewhere in this thread.
Even the best managers are led by the incentives. If you want a project to succeed, make sure incentives are lining up. If you have a project outside the incentive structure, plan on it failing.
Indeed. The whole job of a manager is to keep whatever metrics are used looking good for his department and/or team. If your metrics don't correlate well to a given project, it will be almost impossible for it to work unless you have a command structure that's aware of this potential dissonance and can send down the edicts necessary to fix it for a given situation.
Middle management is really dangerous for this reason. Managers effectively are stuck with blinders; their one and only job, and often the only thing they know how to do (frequently through surreptitious or less-than-stellar means), is to keep their team and/or department sitting pretty in terms of normal company metrics. This correlates both to the resource allocation given a team and the rewards allocated specifically to the individuals that comprise that teams (including the manager, of course), which is why people appreciate "good" managers, until something unanticipated comes up and is killed by this rigid process.
I think a good skill for a big company CEO would be doing debugging to see what is exactly happening here. If Bezos did that, they would have noticed what was happening and fixed the problem.
It's "professionalism". An ideology — an ism — that means not questioning/criticizing certain things. (At least not publicly, and often not even mentally either.) Yegge has a questioning mind and is communicative, but understands the limits that the ism places on him.
I don't know if I would describe the previous entry as "tearing him apart" because at the end of the day Bezos has still accomplished far more than just about anyone else we're likely to meet.
No one is perfect and it is really our ability to play to our strengths and our weaknesses that defines our ability to succeed in life.
I think that is a good way to approach anything in life. Prepare hard for it but accept that there'll always be people smarter/better than you. That way, you will worry less about bombing out during presentations, and be more receptive to constructive criticisms.
By the way, the most important part of the post is where he says that Google is following through on the problems he pointed out. I'd be curious to see what (if) will come out of this - if they will expose their internal services to third parties, that will be great news.
No, that was just polite talk. This isn't new -- this has been a glaring issue for a while.
And if they were serious about it, Brin wouldn't have replied so flippantly. Google is just a one product company (with Gmail being the exception that proves the rule) lacking the humility and gravitas to be more.
While I assume they meant the one product was search, it would probably be accurate to stay that the product is advertising and that they rest exists to feed the beast. But I doubt that was the innuendo of their rant.
It's perfectly reasonable to decline calling something a "product" if it doesn't make money. A widget company might produce a lot of memos in its daily operation, and might have its own cafeteria that produces food for its employees. But I think most people wouldn't count lunches or memos among the company's "products," no matter how good they might be.
Not even close to being the same thing. Google does search. That's what they are known for. Advertising is how they monetize search (which incidentally came long after they launched their search engine). Only us geeks with an axe to grind would associate Google with advertising before search. Would you call a site like Daring Fireball a site that specializes in thoughtful essays on technology? Or a site that tries to sell the customer's eyeballs to sponsors and advertisers?
IMO, Emacs is one of the best pieces of code that the FSF makes, but there's an important sense in which it's not accurate to call it a "product" of theirs.
Google sells advertising space to advertisers, while they give away search and maps to the users to facilitate the selling of said advertising. (GMail is an exception because they offer business products built out of GMail.)
The fact that search might not be considered a product need not reflect a value judgment. Either way, it is a very nice service they provide.
But when people refer to Google as an advertising company rather than a search company, they are correct from a business standpoint. Likewise, many media companies -- whether like the New York Times or like Daring Fireball -- have always "really" been in the advertising sales business. (Though some, like the Times are also in the content sales business.) Those companies obviously take great pride in the content they produce that draw the eyeballs to those ads, but it wouldn't be a viable business if the content was all they did.
It's not meant to be insulting, the reason why they can make any money with advertising at all is because search is so good that it brings in the eyeballs.
True, although Chrome (which I neglected) was developed in-house. Also, calling Android an acquisition ignores the massive changes it underwent after the launch of the iPhone, and since. They acquired the basics, but you can't really compare the current product to what they bought, unlike, say, Youtube or Maps which have been streamlined but are largely the same products.
And you are jumping to this conclusion based on your interpretation of one remark by Sergey? It was clearly a joke you know. And Google is not a company where Sergey dictates everyone. Engineers are empowered to just get things done as well as follow the general direction the company has decided to pursue.
I'm sure Sergey doesn't dictate, but he does set direction, and that's what is called for here.
Also, I don't care if he was joking, it was inappropriate considering it was such valid criticism. Nothing is intimating that they get this at a high level and his joke just underscored that.
I wonder if Steve needs to move to marketing? He's done an awesome job here of highlighting one massive difference between GPlus and Facebook - that you can really publish publicly to the whole world, the way the web was intended.
Notes have been around for 5+ years and I've never seen them linked as news stories. In contrast, I've seen Google+ updates consistently submitted as news to HN and other sources. There is a significant difference between Google+ updates and Facebook Notes and it's worth thinking about why. I suspect it has to do with the fact that status updates and public posting in Google+ are the same interface. For Facebook, status updates are character limited and you have to click into the Notes tab in order to write something longer.
While I agree those differences are important I think culture also plays a large role.
Facebook started primarily as a website for college students to share privately with their friends.
Google Plus started by emphasizing that you can choose who you want to share with (including the public) and shipped with a "subscribe-like" feature that allowed technical people to add many of the same tech celebrities that they were following on Twitter. Since it takes awhile to convert one's friends to a new service, for many tech people, reading public posts by these other tech people became the prominent way they use the service.
You can mostly do the same things on each site (albeit at different levels of convenience), but their beginnings help shape how people think about and use the sites.
You may be wondering why your comment got down-voted. It's not that we're a community of jerks, I promise. People just really prize a high signal-to-noise ratio here, and while we appreciate that you enjoyed the link, a better way to express that without adding noise is to up-vote the comment.
In general, you should post comments here only when the comment will provide value to someone else. That's largely the rubric by which it will be judged.
Lou Gerstner and Meg Whitman are two examples from the technology world. Both came into their jobs at IBM and eBay with zero tech experience, but got up to speed very quickly. Of course, had they failed to do so they would have been out within a year or two.
And this is the real truth of the matter. The above posters are correct, you do need knowledge of something to run it, but understand that business knowledge and experience is ALSO that "something".
Once you obtain certain scale, you can't do everything. It's equally ignorant to think an engineer can run a business top to bottom as it is to think an MBA can fully run an engineering company.
I so often read here MBA used pejoratively, but remember that most small businesses fail because they're run by people who have skills but no idea how to run a business. A major corporation needs both (and more!) skills.
Amazon has continued to grow in simplicity and coverage, including ease of purchase with third-parties (eBay's dealer market). Meanwhile, buying on eBay is still a huge pain, with no integration between eBay and its own subsidiary.
Me too. Except that in Joel's piece Bill G seemed to ask an entirely relevant question and in Steve Yegge's piece Bezos seemed to ask about something quite secondary.
Like Bezos has an arsenal of nasty questions up his sleeve and BillG actually knows what the f he's talking about.
My apologies for straying near politics but i think Yegge's just defined the best characterization of the 1% :P
> In some sense you wouldn’t even be human anymore. People like Jeff are better regarded as hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs.
The difference between this description and Yegge's later description of Bezos as being like the Dread Pirate Roberts of Princess Bride fame, is that Roberts is a clever human putting on a very clever show to develop a reputation which does work for Roberts.
Bezos on the other hand, by all accounts, actually does make people walk the plank. Whether he does it because he's a super-human alien intellect, or some other reason, doesn't change the fact that he's built up a climate of fear around him. If anything, describing him as a super-human alien disturbs me more than if he were acting out of the same motivation as the Dread Pirate Roberts.
Sorry, but you're way over-optimistic if you think the 1% has the kind of intelligence (and I'm not talking pure IQ) and focus Bezos has. Bezos is more like 0.01%.
And I'd venture to say that the OWS movement wouldn't have much against Bezos. They're more against fratboys that rose to prominence and wealth through connections. And finance. Yeah, definitely finance. It's there that they sense some kind of unwarranted self-worth and wealth.
I dunno. The whole one-click patent thing. Abuse of government privilege to derive a monopoly.
Sure, he/they are just one of many, but if you don't hate the players the game continues.
There are many people in many positions who have a free ride because they got some doddering politician to introduce their legislation without thinking past the immediate benefits. This isn't how good laws are made and any business, lobbyist, or lawmaker even tangentially related to this stuff is a valid target.
> > In some sense you wouldn’t even be human anymore. People like Jeff are better regarded as hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs.
> I think Yegge's just defined the best characterization of the 1%
"she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human" - William Gibson, "Count Zero", 1986
What is with this class war against the "1%"? The wealthiest 1% of the population are just human beings. Some of them are smart, some of them are hard working, some of them are lucky, some of them are all three. Some of them abuse the system for their advantage, some of them don't. Does it make any sense to lump all of them into a single group based on an economic percentile? That seems hugely prejudicial to me.
It's the media-comprehensible proxy that people have come up with for the way the very rich and powerful have seemingly been able to skew the system so that their power and wealth are self-perpetuating, while the population at large gets poorer and gets worse benefits every year.
Is it that simple? Of course not. But simple and resonant ideas are mediagenic, while complicated and more accurate ones are mediapathic.
(For anyone preparing an angry reply, please note the use of the word seemingly in the first paragraph. It's not there by accident.)
Although it was a great read, to me it lacked a kind of authenticity.
The first Yegge post felt real, authentic, natural and fully charged. This second one although better formatted and edited, lacked something. It just seemed obigatory and bland.
It is rather amazing that you can feel emotions through words.
I think it was probably more considered but I'm guessing that everything he's written since THAT post has been more considered - it would be a completely natural reaction to having accidentally laid yourself bare. After all whom amongst us having accidentally forwarded an e-mail to the wrong person hasn't got a little more careful about what we say for a while afterwards?
But I still think it sounds genuine and honest, just a little more polished.
The first time I noticed this was when I listed to the original and then studio version of 2 Pac's "Hit 'em up". In the first he was really and truly angry and you could feel it. The second version was 'just there'.
When actors and actresses get "into character" it is really clear. They mean what they act and it seems natural.
let us just say he was "in character" in the first post but not in the second.
The problem is that anger often sounds more authentic but anyone who has ever been angry will testify that what you say when you're angry (or even just irritated) doesn't necessarily reflect your actual view, just one facet of it.
Yegge's original piece was making a specific point and he came out with examples that supported that but that doesn't mean that those examples represent Yegge's overall view of Bezos and it's reasonable that he might want to throw out the other side of it.
In terms of whether it's honest - from both pieces I think it's fairly clear that Yegge doesn't believe that Bezos gives a shit what Yegge thinks so I see no reason why Yegge wouldn't be being truthful.
But even if Yegge was toning himself down, I don't have an issue with that.
I think that among some in the tech community there is a feeling that "honesty" and "truth" tend to trump everything. While that's great in theory the baggage (usually personal offence) that comes with it has to be considered.
Ultimately life is about getting stuff done and for most of us who aren't Jobs or Bezos level genius where brutal honesty will be forgiven, a "polished" truth will often get us better responses from others than it's more brutal counterpart.
If that's the case we all have to ask ourselves do you want to be right, or do you want to get things done?
Note: I'm not talking about lying here, I'm just talking about how you present the truth.
So how do you suggest you convey true emotions through words while being diplomatic? As we both agree 'considered' posts can eliminate the true feeling.
I do not think only anger can be conveyed.
I am not being specific about this very situation. And I agree that being diplomatic can be more effective most times.
I don't think considered posts do eliminate the true feeling.
They eliminate the visceral, immediate reaction but that's only one part of the truth. If you're angry (or happy) at someone that's certainly a true feeling but is it any truer than the way you feel 10 minutes later when you've calmed down a bit and considered things?
If a colleague irritates me and I shout at him sure that's a representation of part of what I feel at that moment, but it doesn't represent the fact that ultimately I respect them and they normally do great work. So is shouting at them really my true feeling or just one small element of it that ultimately doesn't represent what I feel very well at all?
Ultimately though I think you have to ask yourself what am I try to achieve, how is what I'm going to say going to achieve that and am I happy that it really does represent "the truth" or is it just a knee jerk reaction (good or bad).
If you're angry (or happy) at someone that's certainly a true feeling but is it any truer than the way you feel 10 minutes later when you've calmed down a bit and considered things?
You have made great sense and raised a thought provoking questuion here.
Ultimately though I think you have to ask yourself what am I try to achieve, how is what I'm going to say going to achieve that and am I happy..."
You have summed it up perfectly.
Combining your two statements above is quite an insight. A great one. Thanks :)
> So how do you suggest you convey true emotions through words while being diplomatic?
If your emotions are destructive, wait to until they've changed to speak.
It's not like there's just one feeling that is "true." Furthermore, there's more than just feeling. The original, for example, was probably embellished to be more humorous and to get people's attention. The rant aspect-- that Google doesn't take service APIs seriously enough-- wasn't redacted or re-presented at all. So far, it's just the amazon-bashing, which, true as it may have been, was never intended to be a fair and comprehensive review of his beliefs or feelings; considered or not.
When you work at a high profile company, anything you say about another high-profile competitor must be very considered. Steve has always been more frank than most commentators in Google and other high profile companies, but even if the previous post hadn't gone public, a story about Bezos did need to be considered. And full respect to him for saying this much.
For a company so successful, one hears very little about how Amazon runs internally. Looking forward to Steve's next instalment.
I, like many of you, like Steve Yegge's eloquence. But not always agree with his logic. I have issues with both his posts (the leaked one and this), on the logic front.
a) In the earlier accidentally leaked one, I felt he was being too harsh on Jeff Bezos, in the UI design story he stated. Even having only the data points of Yegge's essay, I could understand Bezos point as far as the UI changes were concerned: 'Why mend it if its not broken?'
Also Jeff Bezos, had a vision of building Amazon into a huge company, right from the start. He comes across as a rare _true visionary_, for many reasons. Two simple ones: success with Amazon.com and then with EC2 . So I did not like at all when Steve sort of derided him in his post.
b) In this second post, it seems to me, that Steve is _making it up_ for the damage done in the first one. Making good use of his _eloquence_ to convert a single & perhaps boring meeting experience he had with Bezos, into an interesting one.
The fact that you reacted that way indicates that he's not actually as famous as you'd like him to be. If he'd described George Washington as a "famous-ish" general, you'd know he was being sarcastic.
I think this is e a cultural distance effect. I belong to a generation and live in a place where Liszt is part of the core. I recognise other places and generations may be different.
Back on topic, I always used to smile when I saw the Lisp interpreter known as Franz Lisp load up. Pity they re-branded it.
> 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?
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.
Steve accidentally made an internal memo public. Oops, but luckily he was just the butt of jokes all week. To make up for telling everyone how bad amazon was, steve talks about Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos is super-smart, and giving a presentation to him will either go really well (unlikely) or really terribly (much more likely). Therefore, when presenting: assume Jeff knows the subject really well (because he does) and that your amazing revolutionary idea is obvious to him. Also know everything about your subject, and expect Jeff to notice any tiny mistake you make.
While your intentions are good, I think the requester gave a good reason for wanting a tldr. The post is now deleted, but I'm pretty sure he said he was looking after kids at the same time. I'm all for encouraging people to spend time with kids rather than reading long articles.
I still can't believe the first post was not a fake. Gosh, it didn't contain any figures. How in a data-driven company can you propose some analysis without them?
The same way people don't need any figures to accept that a law prohibiting murder is a good idea. You demonstrate a sufficiently compelling argument and often only words are needed.
Steve left out data mining and machine learning from his presentation and Bezos spotted it. Is that an example of Bezos' smarts or just a silly omission on Steve's part? Steve keeps emphasizing how smart Bezos is but I see no evidence of it in this post. It just seems like Bezos is good at spotting obvious mistakes people make.
Actually, that is pretty close to how you should talk to -anyone- who likes thinking and does it well. If they have a question, they will ask it. You don't need to fill in every gap. (You need to KNOW it, but you don't need to say it.)
I would leave out the 'delete every third paragraph' bit, though. Or change it to 'delete anything that can be inferred.'
Contrary to what he wrote here, Steve actually has ragged on Amazon in the past, in particular in "Have You Ever Legalized Marijuana?" -- the imagery of Amazon doing things by burning through people like little tea-lights really stuck in my mind.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadMuch of the "Steve Jobs story" is quite public already - it's stuff that you just can't help knowing. Reed, Wozniak, kicked out of Apple, Next, Pixar, etc... I'm sure the bio will have some new details, but the basic plot is pretty well known.
Jeff Bezos, OTOH, is someone I know relatively little about. Also, given that my nascent LiberWriter business deals with Kindle formatting, decisions those guys are making have a very real impact on me.
Jeff Bezos may indeed be smart, and he may indeed come up with things that "domain experts" haven't yet thought of, but the explanations are usually much more timid and general than "Jeff is practically a giant-brained alien".
The whole thing felt like I was meeting the President - layer after layer of aides and executive assistants, tons of security, and briefings on where to sit, where to not sit, where to stand, where to not stand, look him in the eye when you shake his hand, etc etc. It was kind of surreal.
I haven't presented to any other big-corp CEO other than him, so I can't really draw any comparisons.
One thing Yegge brought up that I also felt the same about walking out of that room: Jeff is really smart, like really, really smart. I was warned about this beforehand and spent two weeks poring over every single detail, potential feature, everything about the idea I was presenting. He still managed to come out of left field with relevant questions that none of us had even thought of. So I can corroborate that side of the story.
The comparison to Liszt also seems apt - before we were even done presenting, he'd already grokked it to a surprising degree, and was already expanding upon the idea in out loud. You could hear my manager scribbling like a madman trying to get all of this down. This might not seem especially amazing, but the Director and VP level people I presented the very same idea to had not the same depth of insight. I remember being very impressed on the spot.
I'm no longer with Amazon, and I don't particularly want to go back - but that's not due to bad top management, IMO Bezos is one of the keenest tech CEOs around. He might be the closest thing we have left to Jobs.
To balance it out a bit and not make this seems like a complete Amazon love-fest: Jeff loved our idea, he gave us the green light right away. We left that room ecstatic thinking we were about to change the online retail experience forever.
Then middle management showed up. There was political infighting about who owns the project - it straddled multiple disciplines (hence why it was so groundbreaking), and there was a mixture of both hot-potato-oh-god-you-take-it and this-is-amazing-we-need-the-credit-on-this.
The teams that were interested were unwilling to yield to other teams that (rightfully, given their expertise and domain) wanted in, and some teams we needed support from kept punting it since it wasn't in their yearly plan (put together, well, a year or more ago). The project would have provided very powerfully tangible, very high-profile benefits to the customer, but said benefits weren't part of the metrics on which our department was getting judged, so at the VP level the willingness to devote resources was almost non-existent. There was lots of lip service given - especially about how a few people were able to hack together this thing and make it all the way to a Jeff Presentation.
But ultimately the project froze. It was, actually, probably the main reason I decided to leave Amazon for a smaller, more agile startup, where if the CEO wants something done, by golly, it's gettin' done.
This should be in a collection of Famous Last Words.
Even with this infighting and whatnot going on Amazon is still doing amazing things. I'd be interesting to see what it'd look like if they were able to execute everything well.
It seems that's also a crucial role of the exec - if they see something that needs to be happening and it's not, they need to get in there make the necessary changes.
There is a theory that gets posted here from time to time that As hire As and a few Bs that get through the filter, Bs hire Bs and a few Cs get through the filter, and so on down the line until you have hired people you really shouldn't have.
The other theory is promote until incompetent.
My guess is much more mundane, when you hire middle management they act like middle management. Which works as long as Their sphere of responsibility and control is well defined. When you need to cross cut concerns middle management actively fights against it. All most like using inheritance for code reuse and having deep inheritance hierarchies.
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.
I suppose the answer is "yes," given that MS seemed to manage with a minimal number of middle managers, at least based on the Joel Spolsky story shared elsewhere in this thread.
Middle management is really dangerous for this reason. Managers effectively are stuck with blinders; their one and only job, and often the only thing they know how to do (frequently through surreptitious or less-than-stellar means), is to keep their team and/or department sitting pretty in terms of normal company metrics. This correlates both to the resource allocation given a team and the rewards allocated specifically to the individuals that comprise that teams (including the manager, of course), which is why people appreciate "good" managers, until something unanticipated comes up and is killed by this rigid process.
Now he's doing that again, in a big way. He's saying "Bezos is a genius" and not saying "Bezos is a micromanaging asshole"
For hacking this ideology, Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt is a good intro. (http://disciplined-minds.com)
No one is perfect and it is really our ability to play to our strengths and our weaknesses that defines our ability to succeed in life.
And if they were serious about it, Brin wouldn't have replied so flippantly. Google is just a one product company (with Gmail being the exception that proves the rule) lacking the humility and gravitas to be more.
You're confusing what Google's main product is with how they make money.
That's a bit insulting to the engineers at Google that make Search so good.
IMO, Emacs is one of the best pieces of code that the FSF makes, but there's an important sense in which it's not accurate to call it a "product" of theirs.
Google sells advertising space to advertisers, while they give away search and maps to the users to facilitate the selling of said advertising. (GMail is an exception because they offer business products built out of GMail.)
The fact that search might not be considered a product need not reflect a value judgment. Either way, it is a very nice service they provide.
But when people refer to Google as an advertising company rather than a search company, they are correct from a business standpoint. Likewise, many media companies -- whether like the New York Times or like Daring Fireball -- have always "really" been in the advertising sales business. (Though some, like the Times are also in the content sales business.) Those companies obviously take great pride in the content they produce that draw the eyeballs to those ads, but it wouldn't be a viable business if the content was all they did.
Search is a product, too. It's just not a direct source of revenue on it's own.
"Experiencing a Significant Gravitas Shortfall"
Also, I don't care if he was joking, it was inappropriate considering it was such valid criticism. Nothing is intimating that they get this at a high level and his joke just underscored that.
Here are a couple of examples:
via a Facebook page called 'notes': http://www.facebook.com/notes/web20/robert-scoble-on-cloud-c...
via user Scoble's wall: http://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/posts/10150358391274655.
No Facebook account needed to view either.
Facebook started primarily as a website for college students to share privately with their friends.
Google Plus started by emphasizing that you can choose who you want to share with (including the public) and shipped with a "subscribe-like" feature that allowed technical people to add many of the same tech celebrities that they were following on Twitter. Since it takes awhile to convert one's friends to a new service, for many tech people, reading public posts by these other tech people became the prominent way they use the service.
You can mostly do the same things on each site (albeit at different levels of convenience), but their beginnings help shape how people think about and use the sites.
http://blip.tv/oreilly-open-source-convention/oscon-2007-ste...
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
You may be wondering why your comment got down-voted. It's not that we're a community of jerks, I promise. People just really prize a high signal-to-noise ratio here, and while we appreciate that you enjoyed the link, a better way to express that without adding noise is to up-vote the comment.
In general, you should post comments here only when the comment will provide value to someone else. That's largely the rubric by which it will be judged.
Exactly.
A few years back, I found myself in a one-on-one saying: "you would think someone taking a job managing a hog farm would at least know what a hog is."
Though, that was about web-development.
A suitable allegory.
Lou Gerstner and Meg Whitman are two examples from the technology world. Both came into their jobs at IBM and eBay with zero tech experience, but got up to speed very quickly. Of course, had they failed to do so they would have been out within a year or two.
Once you obtain certain scale, you can't do everything. It's equally ignorant to think an engineer can run a business top to bottom as it is to think an MBA can fully run an engineering company.
I so often read here MBA used pejoratively, but remember that most small businesses fail because they're run by people who have skills but no idea how to run a business. A major corporation needs both (and more!) skills.
Speaking of Yegge and Amazon: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2011/07/ebay-patents-10-clic...
Amazon has continued to grow in simplicity and coverage, including ease of purchase with third-parties (eBay's dealer market). Meanwhile, buying on eBay is still a huge pain, with no integration between eBay and its own subsidiary.
I /hate/ going with hires who are "good enough." The nightmare employee is someone who is not quite bad enough to get fired.
Like Bezos has an arsenal of nasty questions up his sleeve and BillG actually knows what the f he's talking about.
Snapshot of the blog http://web.archive.org/web/20090211060734/http://blog.layer8...
> In some sense you wouldn’t even be human anymore. People like Jeff are better regarded as hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs.
The difference between this description and Yegge's later description of Bezos as being like the Dread Pirate Roberts of Princess Bride fame, is that Roberts is a clever human putting on a very clever show to develop a reputation which does work for Roberts.
Bezos on the other hand, by all accounts, actually does make people walk the plank. Whether he does it because he's a super-human alien intellect, or some other reason, doesn't change the fact that he's built up a climate of fear around him. If anything, describing him as a super-human alien disturbs me more than if he were acting out of the same motivation as the Dread Pirate Roberts.
And I'd venture to say that the OWS movement wouldn't have much against Bezos. They're more against fratboys that rose to prominence and wealth through connections. And finance. Yeah, definitely finance. It's there that they sense some kind of unwarranted self-worth and wealth.
Sure, he/they are just one of many, but if you don't hate the players the game continues.
There are many people in many positions who have a free ride because they got some doddering politician to introduce their legislation without thinking past the immediate benefits. This isn't how good laws are made and any business, lobbyist, or lawmaker even tangentially related to this stuff is a valid target.
> I think Yegge's just defined the best characterization of the 1%
"she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human" - William Gibson, "Count Zero", 1986
Is it that simple? Of course not. But simple and resonant ideas are mediagenic, while complicated and more accurate ones are mediapathic.
(For anyone preparing an angry reply, please note the use of the word seemingly in the first paragraph. It's not there by accident.)
The first Yegge post felt real, authentic, natural and fully charged. This second one although better formatted and edited, lacked something. It just seemed obigatory and bland.
It is rather amazing that you can feel emotions through words.
Or am I the only one thinking this way?
I think it was probably more considered but I'm guessing that everything he's written since THAT post has been more considered - it would be a completely natural reaction to having accidentally laid yourself bare. After all whom amongst us having accidentally forwarded an e-mail to the wrong person hasn't got a little more careful about what we say for a while afterwards?
But I still think it sounds genuine and honest, just a little more polished.
But do you think it is a good thing?
The first time I noticed this was when I listed to the original and then studio version of 2 Pac's "Hit 'em up". In the first he was really and truly angry and you could feel it. The second version was 'just there'.
When actors and actresses get "into character" it is really clear. They mean what they act and it seems natural.
let us just say he was "in character" in the first post but not in the second.
Yegge's original piece was making a specific point and he came out with examples that supported that but that doesn't mean that those examples represent Yegge's overall view of Bezos and it's reasonable that he might want to throw out the other side of it.
In terms of whether it's honest - from both pieces I think it's fairly clear that Yegge doesn't believe that Bezos gives a shit what Yegge thinks so I see no reason why Yegge wouldn't be being truthful.
But even if Yegge was toning himself down, I don't have an issue with that.
I think that among some in the tech community there is a feeling that "honesty" and "truth" tend to trump everything. While that's great in theory the baggage (usually personal offence) that comes with it has to be considered.
Ultimately life is about getting stuff done and for most of us who aren't Jobs or Bezos level genius where brutal honesty will be forgiven, a "polished" truth will often get us better responses from others than it's more brutal counterpart.
If that's the case we all have to ask ourselves do you want to be right, or do you want to get things done?
Note: I'm not talking about lying here, I'm just talking about how you present the truth.
I do not think only anger can be conveyed.
I am not being specific about this very situation. And I agree that being diplomatic can be more effective most times.
Edited: To provide contest for question.
They eliminate the visceral, immediate reaction but that's only one part of the truth. If you're angry (or happy) at someone that's certainly a true feeling but is it any truer than the way you feel 10 minutes later when you've calmed down a bit and considered things?
If a colleague irritates me and I shout at him sure that's a representation of part of what I feel at that moment, but it doesn't represent the fact that ultimately I respect them and they normally do great work. So is shouting at them really my true feeling or just one small element of it that ultimately doesn't represent what I feel very well at all?
Ultimately though I think you have to ask yourself what am I try to achieve, how is what I'm going to say going to achieve that and am I happy that it really does represent "the truth" or is it just a knee jerk reaction (good or bad).
You have made great sense and raised a thought provoking questuion here.
Ultimately though I think you have to ask yourself what am I try to achieve, how is what I'm going to say going to achieve that and am I happy..."
You have summed it up perfectly.
Combining your two statements above is quite an insight. A great one. Thanks :)
If your emotions are destructive, wait to until they've changed to speak.
It's not like there's just one feeling that is "true." Furthermore, there's more than just feeling. The original, for example, was probably embellished to be more humorous and to get people's attention. The rant aspect-- that Google doesn't take service APIs seriously enough-- wasn't redacted or re-presented at all. So far, it's just the amazon-bashing, which, true as it may have been, was never intended to be a fair and comprehensive review of his beliefs or feelings; considered or not.
For a company so successful, one hears very little about how Amazon runs internally. Looking forward to Steve's next instalment.
a) In the earlier accidentally leaked one, I felt he was being too harsh on Jeff Bezos, in the UI design story he stated. Even having only the data points of Yegge's essay, I could understand Bezos point as far as the UI changes were concerned: 'Why mend it if its not broken?'
b) In this second post, it seems to me, that Steve is _making it up_ for the damage done in the first one. Making good use of his _eloquence_ to convert a single & perhaps boring meeting experience he had with Bezos, into an interesting one.But it was broken. Amazon did amazingly not because of their UI, but in spite of it.
As an aside: did he just say Franz Liszt was "famous-ish"?!
It's pasted in the top comment of the HN story:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876
As an aside: did he just say Franz Liszt was "famous-ish"?!"
His style seems to be hyperbole and tongue-in-cheek mostly. I wouldn't take it very seriously.
Back on topic, I always used to smile when I saw the Lisp interpreter known as Franz Lisp load up. Pity they re-branded it.
So if he knows everything, why am I writing for him?
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.
https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesv...
I would leave out the 'delete every third paragraph' bit, though. Or change it to 'delete anything that can be inferred.'
https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-pho...
This is a Steve's post on how he conducts and what he expects from phone interviews.
It's over seven years old so proceed with care -- it's possible that his views changed since then.
Also, this is probably more of a bare minimum rather than the whole picture.
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...