What non-Google employees don't understand about Steve Yegge's post | Hacker News Reader

What non-Google employees don't understand about Steve Yegge's post

steveobd.blogspot.com

71 pointsnextparadigms11 comments

It was still insightful for me. I always wondered how it was that Amazon managed to beat Google at coming up with services like EC2 and S3.

Google's attitude towards services seems much different from Amazon's as well. Google seems to focus almost entirely on ad-supported (with a few for-pay services, like Apps for Domains); Amazon, on the other hand, charges for all of its services (with a few ad-supported things, like cheaper Kindles).

The Google approach would discount something like EC2 or S3 showing up; if your first question about any product is 'how can we use it to serve advertising?' then services like that won't make the cut. If your question is 'Will people pay for it?' then they definitely seem appealing.

I don't get it. I never assumed for a second that this sort of internal memo would be hugely controversial within google. Hell, even within Microsoft such things are not unheard of or terribly controversial. What I took away from Yegge's memo was that Google is still fucking up in maintaining an antiquated high level architecture for its services. And I naturally assumed that they knew of the problem already as well, most big problems are widely known even if they remain unaddressed. Perhaps Yegge's vehemence and reputation might draw more people's attention to the problem though.

That arrogancy is funny (or is it?) - we are the Gods of the Universe. Nothing is wrong, it never was. When appropriate, the exec team would address it and all problems (that we do not even hav) go away, just like that. Eric, Larry and Sergey are always aware of all things. We are invincible.

Oh, so we can expect nothing is going to change at Google, but he won't be fired. How inspiring.

What else did you expect? That a single leaked posting from a fairly visible blogger employed by a company whose size is best compared to an oiltanker under full power is going to cause a major change in direction?

If Larry Page would have written that email it would still take a couple of years before you'd see the effects.

Steve is possibly spot-on with his criticism but at the same time he has no idea about the top priorities to management at the moment. Simply writing this up will not change those priorities.

This "it's not a big deal" post makes it even worse, I think: so the upper management knows about the problem(s) outlined so well in Yegge's post and still does nothing (that we know of)? Why?

1. There's only so many priorities at once.

2. It's just the opinion of Yegge. His post mentioned that there are lots of pain points. It is not clear if enacting it would be worth it.

3. Note that the blog post mentioned that these sort of posts float around Google all the time. If Larry, Sergey and Eric worked on every single request, Google would be bankrupt from analysis paralysis.

That's management speak. From the post:

"what most people don't get about his post is that you see posts like this almost every day at Google"

If this is really the case, then we know Yegge's suggestions are not on the priority list.

Sounds like Larry, Sergey and Eric aren't working on any of these requests.

It seemed to me that the significant thing about the post wasn't really its content (which the world at large doesn't understand or care about), but that a genius Google employee had proved incapable of navigating their flagship social networking product, resulting in the public distribution of content that was intended to be private. I don't actually know if the mainstream press have made anything out of that, but it seems like potentially fairly massive PR fail.

This is a good article and reflects my experiences reading the mailing lists and watching TGIFs as a Google intern.

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