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Comment by hankchinaski | Hacker News Reader

Who is Steve yegge?

He's one of the first developer bloggers. He wrote a load of famous articles, the echos of which you'll have been exposed to even if you've never read them.

His first set were from his time at Amazon: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/blog-rants

He then wrote a load of later ones when at Google: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/index.html

And, yes, the (in)famous platforms rant.

While the blogs range widely, a major overarching theme was static vs dynamic typing.

Basically everything he wrote is worth reading; and definitely a thousand times more that whatever's on the HN front page these days.

Also the guy who wrote the follow up to Joel Spolsky's brilliant "Smart and Gets Things Done" article with one entitled "Done, Gets Things Smart" which is nearly a tome and also brilliant.

Check it here: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things...

He wrote this great piece on Google: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

You could have linked to Yegge's site.

He had to take it down. It was only accidentally posted to Google Plus. Though we all benefitted in the end, because it's absolutely excellent.

But what if Google+ doesn't exist, possibly some posts aren't written. SNS encourages people to write something. I remember some Linux/Unix developers or Googler wrote good posts on Google+. Perhaps they still write at somewhere but I don't know.

It is interesting reading that second paragraph many years later. Most of the things that Steve Yegge brags about that Google "does right" (e.g. how they do recruiting, their engineering "standards", SREs running products rather than the engineers, their cushy offices and benefits packages, etc) now read to me the opposite of the intended way. As in, they read more like a list of reasons why Google slowly declined from being the shining city on the hill to the dysfunctional embarrassment it is today.

Having recently left Google after more than 10 years, I don't think those are the reasons for any decline at Google. I think it's very hard to scale a company to that size without many layers of middle management, and I think it's very hard to be an effective middle manager at Google (and maybe anywhere).

Until I see a more functional company with 100,000+ employees, I attribute all the issues to scale.

I first heard of him on Stackoverflow podcast #25, when Steve was working at Google. https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W25795

A noted expert on Sasquatch

you are on his lawn

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