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.
Only for insecure managers.
;-)
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.
So, I should probably also mention that Sergey is known for making /lame/ jokes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
... 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.