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.
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.
"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.
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.
Classy.
Such behavior resembles totalitarian dictatorship rather than what most of us would consider ethical.
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.
A poor choice of words perhaps...