Classy.
Such behavior resembles totalitarian dictatorship rather than what most of us would consider ethical.
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Does anyone have a copy of Brin's post?
EDIT: Works now for me, too.
A poor choice of words perhaps...
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
"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.
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.
Considering that Yegge seemed to make a compelling case, that peremptory response doesn't reflect well on the Google executive team.
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.
shrug
That wasn't at Google, though.
Write a short memo: "This is just your opinion"
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
(Not that I have first-hand knowledge - I read this in "In the Plex")
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.
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...
"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.
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.
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.
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-...
Summary: If your writing is too short, then it doesn't spill over into people's long-term memory and they will forget it all too soon.
Having said that, you should go read the blog post so you can remember 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.)
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.
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.
Steve Yegge's blog is called "Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants" and not "Stevey's Key Points of Great Ideas" for a reason.
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.
;-)
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
This piecemeal approach is not going to work
in the long run
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-...
Also, if you looked in the comments of his G+ page there was no shortage of job offers there.
Only for insecure managers.
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.
This is one of the reasons good people, often the best people, (not just software engineers) leave big companies.
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 :)
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.
The shareholders should fire Brin if he suggests re-writing boring old "legacy" code in a sexy new language!
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.
No value statement about holding a job at Google was intended. Although he repeatedly claimed it was his dream job.
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.
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.
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.
So, I should probably also mention that Sergey is known for making /lame/ jokes.
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...
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.