Skype Loses Engineering Chief (possibly due to TechCrunch commenters?)
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
If you start with the link above, you'll see a bunch of really brutal comments about Yarlagadda (they seem suspect, but there are so many of them, it's hard to tell). If you continue through the pages, though, you can watch as the thread becomes an outlet for Skype employees angry about the decision and discussing what happened culturally at Skype after the guy was hired.
Skype employee responses: http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/06/skype-recruits-yahoo-engine...
Here's a post from "Anonymous Designer" that is telling:
"Two engineers gave notice today and another one quit earlier in the week. I am sad because it looks like Madhu is quick to have a negative impact on our company. The engineers here are not happy with this recent hire and have been very vocal. HR is talking to each and every engineer 1:1 so that they don't loose anymore over this. While I am in design and less impacted the environment is very tense. Makes me question whether it makes sense to stay working at Skype. I haven't talked with Madhu but he is definitely rubbing a lot of people I respect the wrong way and quite obviously doesn't understand our culture. Hope there is a resolution soon so I can focus on pixels and not whether I am wasting my time."
And another from "Skype Developer":
"Madhu presented yesterday for an hour and didn't say anything. Didn't really address comments here and didn't show any technical depth. Josh what have you done? Are we really follow this guy? May be Dan was right to leave. Look out for good Skype engineers on the market.
The only exec I saw at Skype that admitted a mistake was Dan. And he did it in front of his whole org. Josh it is your turn. Convince Dan to stay. Fix this. Is the board listening?"
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The later responses -- which were posted several days later -- discussing internal Skype politics lead me to believe the brutal comments are at least partially genuine.
see his blog:
http://madhuyarlagadda.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2009-...
Given that, I don't think he lost his job just because of the comments. Perhaps there is a slight confusion of cause & effect here.
Also, If you go back a page or 2, practically all the comments are positive and from people leaving their names. Why not ask techcrunch if they are all from the same IP?
With that said, I feel kind of bad for Madhu. Slander, is illegal under U.S. law. If the coward had not been anonymous he could have a court case against him.
Although I am sure he has learned his lesson about not being a flaming dick to people.
Now if more than 1 would step forward and do it in a non-anonymous way it would amount to something. Especially since those left at Yahoo have nothing to fear from their bosses in this respect. But maybe Yahoo has a policy about not speaking publicly about ex-employees which extends to current employees, and maybe they're afraid that this guy would sue. He might even have a case.
TC should analyze their logs for that thread and put up a count of the number of IPs tied to known proxies and tor exit nodes and how many of the comments were made from the same IPs. That way they would not reveal any sensitive data but you'd get a much more reliable impression on how much of it is one guy with an axe to grind and how much of it is real.
That goes for both the attackers and the defenders.
Referrers would be nice as well, especially if they came from some 'call to action' somewhere.
I sincerely doubt it. If skype execs would use anonymous commenters on a blog as the input to their HR process they'd have a serious problem.
Assuming it's true the order is more likely that some people came forward and voiced their concern, and now the public makes the link with this article because they have no other knowledge. After all, would you start a fishing expedition against a new hire post-fact if you saw anonymous text of the kind posted in that article?
Personally I'd like something with a bit more substance before digging in.
Either way, substance or not, the guy will have a hard time finding another gig after this. Google doesn't forget, and whoever does a background on this guy at some later date is doing to find an awful lot of smoke, even if there was no fire.
This seems like an entirely bizarre accusation to make.
This part is not very interesting. What's interesting to me, is how companies like Yahoo nurture such people to VP positions. I now totally believe all the criticisms that PG leveled at them in his essay, e.g. managers being termed "producers", etc. I guess such guys exist in all companies, but their ratio is a strong indicator of the weakness of the company.
Reasons why its probably true:
A) The comments by themselves would not have been enough to fire the guy. There must have been enough complaints by their own staff. In my corporation we managed to get our manager fired in the same way. Everyone complained to HR. Though it took like a year. This guy actually had me on "communications performance plan". It was right out of dilbert.
B) Its very very difficult to be a good manager.
This is because its easier to play the political game than it is to actually be a leader with morals, the technical chops and great communication/relationship skills. So most people just kiss ass and shit on their reports and climb up the ladder.
The higher you go in a corporation the harder it is to be a good manager. Because the amount of communiction/relationship/leadership skills necessary really rises exponentially rather than linerally. I say this from my experience of having worked in one corporation for 6.5 years. I have had MANY managers but only one good manager.
C) Sucky indian managers (selection bias). But yes there are many.
Now, I'm indian but I have to say that most indians SUCK at being managers (I've been a sucky indian manager myself :) . I've tried to figure out why and the only ponits I can think of are :
1. In tech companies there are a lot of indians and therefore a lot of indian managers.
2. Most managers suck at what they do. This because to be a good manager you have to be able to lead your employees but also be able to take orders from your own manager. Also you never get real world "practice" before your stuck into the role.
3. An indian on a H1-B is going to try harder to keep his job than one that doesnt and I think thats why they do downright deceitful things to look good to their own managers. Ie they become hardline task masters.
I've known quite a few bad indian managers. Infact if I get an indian manager the first thing I'll do that day is start looking for another job. The manager might turn out okay but I'm that disillusioned with them. Especially new ones.
PS: At the end of it all I did change. :) I got really huge pay increases for my best engineers and saved 1 from getting fired.
B) Its very very difficult to be a good manager.
This is because its easier to play the political game than it is to actually
be a leader with morals, the technical chops and great
communication/relationship skills.
It was made worse by my passive-aggressive boss. I live by the philosophy "if you don't ask, you won't get anything", and he constantly said "yes" (to mostly reasonable requests). At the same time, when I had issues with employees (one guy who needed to be fired for complete incompetence), he wouldn't back me up on the actions that needed to be taken. Of course, rank and file only hears the "wronged employee's" side of the story.
Sorry, I'll stop ranting now.
TL;DR: Stay away from management in big companies. You can have your soul or success, but very, very rarely both.
By the way the same thing happened to me. I wasnt trying to fire him though, just tried to make him get better. He was really bad. He ended up getting a raise from my boss. Funny!
So I did. I gave him a plan that he had to live up to. It was non-trivial, since he was a senior engineer making more money than almost anybody the engineering team, but it was doable.
My boss then made the mistake of moving him to a different manager to follow through with the plan. The goal was to show that we weren't just out for blood, but throwing somebody into a new environment (new team, new project, new coworkers) creates too many variables to track. On top of that, this engineer survived by hiding in those variables (and we knew that) and, as a result, was able to survive what would most likely have resulted in termination under me. Since he survived, my reputation with the engineering group was blown.
Quite literally, this guy was Dilbert's Wally. Six months later, the new manager was lamenting to me about this guy.
Lest it sound like I just have a grudge, I actually like the guy (even though I know he really doesn't like me). He is actually a really great people-person that, IMO, shouldn't be writing code. I really believe he should be a sales engineer. I think he would make a near-perfect sales engineer, in fact. I gave him that advice, but he didn't appreciate it. I don't blame him, but I stand by it.
Made more than me. His code was crazy bad. I mean I think he used to obfuscate it on purpose so as to keep his job. Every class was a friend of another class. But the code would work. It was a nightmare to maintain.
I was asked by senior management several times to get rid of him. I just kept thinking of his kids. I knew I couldnt live with myself if I did it. Because his intent was always good and he would do work that no one else wanted to do.
If I had to keep him for another year, I might have pulled the trigger - but I doubt it.
If it was my own startup I would have fired him immediately. You probably did the right thing.
Can you clarify what this means? Both "I'm going to be a somebody" and "I'm going to do something about it" seem affirmative.
The full quote is here: http://www.lesc.net/blog/be-or-do-col-john-boydrsquos-words-...
Boyd is credited as coming up with the strategy for the kuwait war and is supposed to be the reason why so few American lives were lost in that war.
His papers on "Creation and Destruction" and "OODA Loop" are classics. A must read.
In my experience, his third point (on them trying harder, and thus being more willing to treat ethical boundaries in an elastic manner) is spot-on.
Another indicator that this is true is that he says that being on a work visa required his colleagues to push ethical boundaries. Having worked for many years, multiple employers and many managers on a work visa myself, I can assure you that this is not true everywhere, or even most places.
Seriously, any one on a work visa who is being pressured to do something ethically repugnant should change their job. In many cases this is easier than you would imagine.
But yeah it might be very different on the west coast.
And your wrong its not easy to change a work visa because you lose your line in the G.C race if your not in the 3rd stage. Thats the clincher.
With present EB3 approval rates, its possible this could set you back 5 years. EB3 India is a mess right now.
What he meant, I rather suspect, is not so much as 'ethically repugnant' (in which case I might agree with you) but rather within the gray area, where unvoiced pressures such as these can affect the choices you make.
My friends and I have had many many managers and a good many were indian. Only one of them I would rate as good. Funnily enough I used to be his manager a long time ago. I've actually learnt a lot from his style of leadership though I've never worked under him.
He (ie 1) is the exception who IMHO proves the rule.
I've been on H1-B and I didn't think about my H1-B on a day to day basis to be a lousy manager/person. On that list could be any number of things like mortgage, car payment, family & kids etc.
Your comment is great for explaining why being a good manager is hard. Not sure if I would assume that the comments about Madhu Yarlagadda are true.
One manager (IIT + MIT) once called my friend while he was waiting for the delivery of his second child. Incredible.
This is new york so it might be completely different on the West Coast.
I do think a bit of it is NY culture, but a lot of it is probably the belief that "driving hard" leads to more productivity which is near Universal, and probably more prevalent amongst people who come from hyper-competitive environments like IIT or the NYC financial world. Others who believe that "paying more" leads to more productivity are also wrong.
Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn is an excellent compendium of research on what drives people to work.
I am really even more curious to find out the numbers before I can make any logical classification. However, if I am unclear about 3.) I would refrain from passing any strong judgement.
Totally my view of looking at things though!
I know there are fairly serious legal risks/fears when it comes to checking references and vetting potential hires. I wonder if this had a lot to do with Skype not knowing how unliked this guy was at Yahoo! ...
I wonder how much money it cost them to recruit, hire, and then lose this guy
Most of all, it seems to me like there is a startup opportunity here IF (big if) you can ease people's legal fears. Something like this:
(a) Maintain a largish db of tech workers that includes the dates they worked at various companies (Joe worked at Yahoo! from 2004 to 2007)
(b) Large company wants to hire some manager/exec (Phil). They pay the service $1,000 to evet him.
(c) The service matches Phil's work history against it's database and compiles a list of everyone who also worked at each company during those times. An email goes out asking each to complete a quick recommendation page.
(d) Anyone who knew him can just say "I worked with/under him" and maybe a thumbs up or down. Perhaps incentivise them somehow (unless that would taint the results)
(e) Large company gets a report and never sees names of respondents, only stats like "48 people responded and 75% said Phil is cool" ... maybe some anon. comments.
(f) Profit
"A friend" had a guy bully him from day 1 and who kept at him the whole time he was there, until the bully eventually left the company under mysterious circumstances following him making a physical threat of violence against my friend in the workplace. What's to stop a guy like that marking my friend down and making him look shit?
Additionally my friend works in a highly politicised environment where, by trying to do the right thing has pissed people off, not because he sucks, but because he cares - what if they vote too?
The problem is with these systems is that you can never be sure who's right and whether other things are at play there.
We'd all like everybody to love us, for the nasty pieces of work to be found out and the good people to be rewarded, but that very often isn't the case, and we shouldn't base a powerful assessment of somebody on an ideal.
My original thought is that this would be for executive/managerial jobs. Big dollar, recruiter kind of positions.
Plus, it would probably be best only applying a "bottom-up" approach ... get feedback from former co-workers or subordinates–not from former bosses.
Finally, don't charge and don't submit a report if there aren't enough responses to be statistically significant (or at least warn them). If 1 out of 2 people say this guys a tool, who knows. But if 78 out of 85 say it, it's probably trustworthy, no?
Who want's to get out on any legal limb in the current U.S. litigious environment?
EDIT: Of course candid (or even outrageous) negatively can easily be risked in an anonymous blog comment :(
TC is a public forum and in spite of the 'Possibly due to TechCrunch commenters?' above I doubt that would hold water because skype execs have not solicited TC to be their vetting agency.
But if they were and the vetting agency would give a 'no go' on what is anonymous hearsay then it would quickly turn in to something ugly.
Does taking money to solicit feedback and return a report really make you a vetting agency? (assuming you're not actually saying "You shouldn't hire this guy").
I'm not disagreeing with you–I see the libel point. I just find it odd that people tread so lightly here, while at the same time I can fairly easily trash a business on Yelp/Craigslist/Angieslist/TechCrunch/Wherever with varying degrees of anonymity.
EDIT: By "here" I meant the HR/hiring space, not HN ... sorry for the confusion.
The difference between Yelp/etc and HN is that on HN you have a very long lasting reputation, not just a throwaway anonymous comment on some article. And then there is the ban hammer to consider, I'm sure that puts the brakes on for some people.
My own HN username is tied very hard to my real life identity, and that goes for a very large number of people here.
re. your edit: Because HR is a minefield from a legal perspective.
They already do the first two steps, and going from there to (c) may already be possible with their profile API. From that onto the last two steps is a short step.
the charisma of an oyster, combined with the engineering skills of my mother.
I find a good indication that someone who doesn't understand something is they spend a lot of time defining acronyms.
All the engineers that report to him start to leave.
The company decides the manager is the problem.
The company actaully fires the manager instead of blaming the engineers!!!!!
That said - I'm a bit dubious of the TechCruch Peanut Gallery's role in the departure. Surely Skype did their reference homework before hiring the guy...