Hacker News Fires Steve Yegge | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News Fires Steve Yegge

steve-yegge.blogspot.com

340 pointsDanielRibeiro92 comments

It must be a truly great place to work if the sentences "I quit this project" and "I quit this company" don't end up with the same result.

How many companies let the employee choose to stop working on a project they are assigned to?

Not only that, but trash the project in public.

Is this not common in large companies that do lots of things?

It seems like a terrible waste if the only way to get off a bad project is to quit the company.

Not that common.

Most companies like to think that they don't have any "bad" projects; if they did, they would cancel them. And, they're afraid that employees will confuse "hard" projects with "bad" projects, and try to flee the hard projects, which are often business-critical.

Google is smart enough to realize that employees can often identify bad (and good) projects before the management does, and lets them vote with their feet.

My friend used to work for a large multi-national. In his company, each of the departments were like companies in itself. The formalities for quitting the job and changing departments were the same. So most of the time the only way to get off a bad project was to quit the company.

That's how I've usually heard of it being done at large companies. When a friend changed departments internally at a large petrochemicals company, he had to go through a whole application process: look on the internal HR system for a job opening, send in an application and resume, interview with the new group, etc.

perhaps a more pertinent question would be "how many companies would let Steve Yegge choose to stop working on the project he's assigned to?"

freedom like that is earned, and i'm sure not everybody at google has the same status he does.

Engineers at Google are not hired for specific projects. You're appraised as a good engineer, therefore we want you at Google. If you're not happy doing what you're doing, we'd like to find something you will be happy doing. But that doesn't mean you can just chop and change projects at will. It's considered pretty uncool to just quit a project abruptly without making the appropriate arrangements first. You've got to leave your work in a good state so that your teammates and successors can pick up where you left off.

I don't know anything about Steve's situation, but I would assume he did these things.

How does Google handle the intractably undesirable projects like internal apps for performance reviews, cleaning up huge legacy codebases, et al?

It seems unlikely that there aren't any projects that have to be done but that no one wants to do.

Maybe I'm an outlier, but I actually really enjoy cleaning up huge legacy codebases. Maybe there's also someone out there who likes building internal apps for performance reviews.

On top of this, people are very grateful for those who clean up messes, and that gratitude pays dividends.

It seems like, at the very least, Google wouldn't keep you on such a project indefinitely if you didn't enjoy it.

On the other hand, there are plenty of companies out there that would randomly assign you to an unglamorous project -- and make it your permanent job, to boot. I've been at some of those companies. They roll the proverbial dice when you first join, and whatever the outcome, that's your fixed-in-stone role. Such companies care more about needs to be filled than about the people they're hiring.

there is no project so intractable and undesirable that someone doesn't see it as a fun and satisfying challenge.

Every company says that. When I was a consultant at IBM middle managers loved to tell the tale of the software dev who became a gardener at some IBM facility because supposedly that was what he yearned for. In practice though, you took the projects that were available or you might find yourself in a friendly performance monitoring program.

It seems like Google is a bigger offender than most tech companies. At least at IBM or Cisco they will tell you exactly where you are going to work before you accept the job offer. You will probably be stuck there or get moved around in the future and won't have much choice on what project you want to work on next. But at least you are told what you will be working on, unlike Google.

I'm pretty low on the Google totem pole and I managed to get off a project that wanted me dearly because it didn't interest me.

At least at Amazon you are free to change projects after a year.

Any large tech company is probably so in need of coders that the idea of having to let one go because they were unhappy with what they were currently doing is repugnant.

Is this some sort of joke? This is usually a company wide policy at any large software company. Amazon is full of in-competent middle managers. Amazon as a company has no respect for software engineers and their quality of life. They are not in the same league as Google! No comparison. No self-respecting engineer lasts at Amazon for more than a few years. It is not a company where engineers go and build careers like Google, and heck even Microsoft. They have great top level leadership, and know how to suck blood and life out of their developers. That's about it.

according to whom? just you?

I worked there my friend, and know a ton of people who did and still do. Ask any one of them. One of the missions of a VP/SVP back in the day was to make Amazon a place where engineers go and build careers, and not quit in 2/3 years. Go check out reviews of Amazon on Glassdoor. They celebrate frugality. Engineers don't even get free pop. It is not an engineer's paradise like Google. Can you even a run a show like this in the valley, and expect top engineers to work for you? Free food is almost the norm now here in the valley.

just curious, what group did you work in? was it AWS?

That seems fairly normal in the consulting world. Granted we are expected to create a transition plan and only given a few months to find a new assignment but it's not that uncommon.

All of them?

There is a massive shortage of programmers in the market. Hiring a programmer costs a big company somewhere between $30,000 and $50,000. If you leave, that's half your salary down the toile, and they don't have anyone to do your work while they look for another programmer. This is a huge loss for them and something to be avoided. So if they can just swap two people's projects... done! It's cheaper!

Hiring a programmer? $50,000.00 . Getting rid of one that doesn't work for cultural reasons? Priceless.

Here's the money quote:

  I'm officially quitting that job on national TV

The use of the word 'job' there implies The Job, not 'the job on the project', hence the overall confusion - people taking the words as said, not as meant

Note: Did HN just screw up this same posting?

Agreed, interesting that Yegge stresses project in his post when he clearly says job in the video.

He said it more than once, and clearly said project one of those times. He also gave context that made it quite clear he was talking about the project.

He made it pretty clear that he was quitting "that job" and going to study more bioinformatics. As far as I know Google doesn't do a lot of bioinformatics. Peppered with a couple of his midlife crisis comments it seems like a fair assumption that he was leaving Google. At no time in the video did he explicitly say that he was staying.

Hm, i just rewatched it and you are right. When I watched it the first I took it to mean that project, but it was confusing.

Disagree. After watching the video, he talks about the project, mentions quitting "that job", and then the speech is over. Not that any of it really matters - but the statement in the video is confusing.

Yeah, you are right

"Google's interview process -- what's the word I'm looking for here -- ah yes, their process sucks at letting in all the qualified people. They're trying to get better at it, but it's not really Google's fault so much as the fault of interviewers who insist that you're not qualified to work there unless you are exactly like them. Of course, there are interviewers like that wherever you go."

I imagine that's one of the big problems that females, older people and others must face. If you're not like them (or everyone's stereotype of a qualified person), you'll have a harder time getting in. Not to mention enjoying your stay, once you're in.

(Maybe you're in a workplace that's so desperate for a little diversity that it's actually easier for non-stereotypes to get in. But will your coworkers act respectfully? I know that the guys at mine let loose putdowns about females, even with females in the room. They don't even realize they're putting females down.)

Exactly and it's the same at hacker news. Every time we see an article about sexism in computer science, someone will show up saying that: (1) hackers are the most egalitarian group that ever walked the face of the earth and (2) they've never seen any discrimination happen. The implication here is that sexism doesn't exist in computer science.

I have seen my colleague tell (ostensibly being funny) a female co-worker that she was hired because of her looks. I've also seen people joke about interviewing attractive women. These might seem innocuous to privileged males but they definitely contribute to making the workplace worse for women and so are IMHO completely unacceptable.

These are just two small issues - and I've heard a lot worse, but try and tell someone like DHH that we have a problem. He'll rant about how being edgy is cool and that being edgy requires us to make these tasteless "jokes".

Female humans are often referred to as women.

Could have sworn I saw this at no.1 with 44points in 12 minutes with about 7 comments. And there was a guy requesting a feature saying he hates to be that guy.

Edit: Oh it died: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813976

Guess it got flagged quite fast because of the title. Maybe I should change it to give more the spirit of the post.

Edit: hope it is better now.

What did it say initially?

It was the title of the blog (Hacker News Fires Steve Yegge ), which I understand that can be misleading and offsensive to some.

Edit: Guess I was wrong. Someone changed back to the original title. I guess it is more compliant with HN guidelines.

So basically his inspirational talk turned into "I was pulled over to the Google Plus team, but I said never mind and went back to working on developer tools"?

Kind of a let down. :(

It shouldn't matter what Steve Yegge decides to work on. You can still start working on big, important problems if you want to.

It doesn't, but you can't help but feel his excitement during the talk ... and yet ...

I think tools are very important for society. Improving them is important too.

Developer tools are kind of a big deal.

Not really in the sense he was talking about. He literally stood up at a major conference and urged the development community to go learn bioinformatics and work on the cure for cancer. No developer tool will ever come close to the amount of positive impact on the world that a cure for cancer would.

Good tools can help a lot with successfully managing the complexity of computational models of biological systems-- models that might end up being used in developing cures for all sorts of diseases.

It seems that those who have entered the tech world in the last 10ish years under appreciate how frameworks have changed the way people get work done and the scale of projects they are able to undertake. Even the existence of rich operating systems which provide robust APIs to networking and filesystems is relatively new. The impact of creating new frameworks that enable people to address broader problems more easily cannot be underestimated.

Biology is being held back by the low-quality code that the biologists are forced to write and maintain. Producing better programming tools means that biologists can start writing better programs.

This is already happening. The world of science woke up one day and realized that the C++ and Java their CS friends were talking about weren't helping them solve problems. So they switched to Python and Perl and now we have the human genome.

Programming tools are a big fucking deal.

Oh, that's how it happened? Weird, I thought they were using lots of C++.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/IEB/ToolBox/CPP_DOC/

http://www.seqan.de/

I guess I'd better go remind them to cancel their conferences and close up shop.

I think he's talking about this

http://www.bioperl.org/wiki/How_Perl_saved_human_genome

Don't be such a jackass. I didn't say nobody was using C++ or Java. I was saying that many individual researchers switched from Java for things like "scripts".

Infrastructure written by programmers will use different tools than glue code written by scientists.

Some tools are really important; agreed. Languages are a huge fucking deal. Monstrous. I can name one startup that failed because it chose the wrong language when it started, and that "wrong language" wasn't even a bad one-- just the wrong one for the kind of work they were doing (dynamically typed, in a domain where even extremely infrequent errors are unacceptable).

You don't know what you're talking about. Biology is held back by the extreme difficulty of doing informative biological experiments. If you know of biology domains in which lack of good software is the primary rate-limiting factor, please share, because I am acomputational biologist, and always on the lookout for high-impact problem domains.

BTW, the software tools for the assembly of the human genome were mostly written in C++.

I'd understood - because we are constantly told by the Folding@Home people - that the problem was getting enough CPU for simulations. Is this not actually true?

There are lots of problems in computational Biology. Some can be solved by more processing time, for some you need to have better software, and for others more experimental data is necessary.

The domain of biology that Folding@Home works on, i.e. predictive in silico modeling of protein folding, is microscopic in comparison the everything else biologists study. So while they may need more computing power a lot of biologists simply need more slave labor (grad students) and grant money.

Having spent 5 years working directly with biologists at a major research center, I can confidently say that biologists don't want better tools. They have no interest in software beyond the bare minimum it takes to confirm the result they expect to see.

True, if a bit cynical. Biologists are like any other profession - resistant to change. Many research biologists are not tech-savvy and afraid or unwilling to learn new computer-aided techniques, algorithms, tools, etc.

This is further compounded by ancient tenured PIs who went to grad school before typewriters were mainstream and a publishing and grant system that stifles innovation.

Unless the cure for cancer relies on some developer tool, in which case the value of the tool is strictly greater.

And really, in this day and age— you think coming up with the cure for cancer isn't going to involve software system upon software system?

I think the cure for cancer will certainly be aided by software. I do not, however, think that current or even previous generation languages, editors or other development tools are holding the cure for cancer back. I do not believe for one second that the cure for cancer will fundamentally rely on getting software written more quickly.

Development tools have a direct impact on one set of the human race: people developing software. A cure for cancer will have direct impact on every human being who ever lives. You simply can't compare the two in any meaningful sense.

If you don't think the people developing software have a direct impact on the rest of the human race, I just have no idea what human race you're talking about. Sure, cancer researchers don't have any use for the latest Node framework, but that doesn't mean their field doesn't benefit from new technology just like everyone else.

He also said he's started learning bioinformatics and so on, so that he'll be ready to tackle more important problems in a couple of years.

Did you watch his talk?

It depends. I feel like a lot of dev. tools compensate for illnesses in software engineering that should be cured in a way that doesn't depend on one's environment.

For example, apparently Java doesn't totally suck if one uses the appropriate tools and environment. But Ocaml and Haskell are great regardless of whether one uses vi, emacs, or whatever else. Ocaml, for example, has this great static analysis tool far more powerful than all but the most premium SA tools for C++ and Java-- the compiler.

I'm surprised Stevey didn't mention that this is not the first time something like this has happened: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/boring-stevey-status... .

Hi all,

I am original poster of "Steve Yegge quits Google in the middle of his speech".

Now I get to brag around the office that Steve Yegge rage-posted because of me ^_^

I am really sorry if I caused some trouble, but I was just interpreting things as i heard them, he really did say "... quitting that JOB..."

I would like to say that I totally agree with Steve. But unlike him I can't afford to quit my "job", but what I can afford is to setup my PS3 and my desktop machines to work on folding@home and World Community Grid whenever they are idle.

Best, Dragan.

He mentions how broken the typical interview process is, something I hear repeated frequently. I'm curious what you guys think the "ideal" interview process would look like?

it looks awfully like "hey, we need x and y done, I (worked with you before / was recommended by a friend I trust / follow your open source contributions / blog) and think you would be a good fit, interested?

I'm not trying to be crass, I really don't know: what does he mean by Google is "forcing governments to be more open, forcing corporations to play more fairly"? I'm racking my head on how this could be true as I would really like it to believe it.

Basically, high-quality search and comprehensive indexing means its hard to sweep things under the rug: once the data gets out onto the net, it tends to stay there. Google's played a large part in that.

here is his talk, very inspiring

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8

interesting - but I didn't totally buy into it. new web communication tools are helping to bring down governments and giving people new freedoms

it is like telling alexander graham bell to not waste his time on the telephone since people are just going to use it to spread gossip and rumor

But the thing is, a lot of these "new Web communication tools" are "new" only in the sense that they aren't very old, not in the more important sense that they're novel in a useful way.

But it would be so convinient for Google if they have less competition working in communication tools. and more working on projects that Google is not working on. yes longevity of life is important but quality is also important.

I think this is the highest level of tinfoil hattery I have yet seen on Hacker News.

Google gets Steve Yegge to encourage coders to work on bioinformatics because it gets rid of the competition!

(I doubt that)

It is different point of view but I just said it would be convinient, wouldn't it? i also don't know what is really going on.

Source code can be turned in the form of wikipedia information, how awesome that would be, reading and understanding bad code or not properly documented or written code is one hard problem in the industry that needs a really good solution. Good luck Steve.

with this headline the magical voice-over told me he was fired from hacker news.

I think a big reason why most people go with a career and degree in software engineering as opposed to bioinformatics is because of a bigger job market, a higher salary potential, and a lower commitment to achieve the goal (computer science degree as a 4 or 6 year degree, vs a mandatory 8+ year degree in bioinformatics.) Unless these things change, bioinformatics will remain unappealing to top google engineers who are paid to scale cat pictures at salaries like 250k+.

To add one more thing, perl is huge in the bioinformatics community, which would never win a popularity contest among software developers.

I expect that most universities have a core curriculum that requires CS majors to take other science courses. Make those courses genetics and biochemistry and a CS undergraduate can probably get into a 2-year masters program for bioinformatics.

I might get some backlash for this, but while you can apply for some bioinformatics jobs with a MS, PhD is the norm not the exception for biology-related fields. Without a PhD, you won't get very far career-wise.

This is more like "Steve Yegge discovers the power of linkbait".

I interviewed at a Google campus in Kirkland. Unimpressed. Overrated madly, in my opinion. I expected a lot, a lot better campus, sorry. The buildings were boring and I couldn't find the right one because NONE OF THEM have a visible building number.

There is no map of the campus (hell, even community colleges have maps). The parking didn't have cover so after staying under hot sun, my car became extremely hot.

Unpleasant experience to say the least. People were cool, though.

I just had a much better feeling from Microsoft campus than Google's campus.

While it is a fair point, you have to keep in ming you are comparing Microsoft's main campus with a secondary Google campus.

Yeah, the secondary campuses (except, I've heard, for Zurich and Moscow...Pittsburgh is pretty cool too) are nowhere near as nice as the headquarters. Many of them don't even serve dinner.

> "Many of them don't even serve dinner."

Oh the humanity.

Not to be the nitpicker, but since I work at this very campus (and worked at main MS campus for 8 years) I'll share my opinion.

In all essentials this campus is light years ahead of MS. From the public WiFi for Androids & iPhones, to on-campus gym, floor plan maps on every corner, available conference rooms with VC equipment, laptop power bricks in conference rooms, espresso machines, actually drinkable tea, tech support staff on site and godzillion other tiny details it's easier to work on this campus in so many aspects each and every work day.

Since there are only three buildings next to each other is seems not much effort went into inter-building navigational aids (doors are labeled, but clearly it's not enough), may be we can do better. Visitor parking has no cover on MS campus as well, it's pretty much common to have it this way.

And, btw, after having a chance to compare, I think our cafe is better than most of MTV cafes.

I worked at the MS main campus almost 8 years and now work in downtown Seattle (Pioneer Square). I will take a vibrant, walkable urban setting with great, cheap food everywhere over any number of silly amenities in a sterile campus environment.

Folks that are good at making money to invest in folks solving big problems. I don't get it.

Regardless of what Steve does in his professional life, I, for one, am going to stop procrastinating on all of those R links I've been saving up on Evernote and get down to some science.

And share those links with the rest of us!

http://digitalauteur.wikispaces.com

I follow http://www.r-bloggers.com/ but hopefully I'll be able to contribute something in the future.

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