Comment by donretag | Hacker News Reader

Comment by donretag | Hacker News Reader

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While it is understandable that the author is upset about his dealings with O'Reilly, I would have preferred if he left people's names out of the article. Naming the acquisitions’ editor does not affect the article, but makes the author sound (a bit) whiny. No need to get personal, especially since the issue is with the entire company.

I have been purchasing O'Reilly books since the mid '90s. They used to be my goto publisher. Looking back the past few years, the only book I have purchased from them was the Programming Collective Intelligence book, which was published in 2007. Manning has replaced them as my new goto book series. O'Reilly has been publishing many small books. Instead of one good MongoDB cookbook, they choose to publish 5-6 smaller ones, whose prices are almost comparable to a book of "normal" length.

And let's not discuss their conference pricing. What happened to Hadoop World after they took over? I hope that smaller conferences will not be bought out by O'Reilly.

I've never understood why people dance around naming names when calling companies out. Doesn't that help the whole community? Now I know Tim is a good guy, and specific people tried to waste the author's time. If I ever publish a book with O'Reilly, I know to avoid those people. "The issue is with the entire company", which is made up of people. When people get good service, they use names. When they don't get good service, they suddenly avoid names at all? I just don't get it.

I agree, and I would add that people don't avoid names in all cases. The trend against naming names is especially annoying because it basically only emerges when there is a power imbalance, and thus serves only to protect those in positions of power as they continue to act poorly.

As an example, have you ever heard anyone say "I don't want to name names, but a certain local cleaning service has been very disappointing to me." No of course not, they'll say the name of their cleaning wo/man and trash them, because why should they give a shit? I mean it's "just" the cleaner. The waitress at the bar? Screw her, what do they care about her reputation, trash her if you are unhappy with your service.

But deal with someone in a position of authority and suddenly its all kid gloves and politeness. "Oh I don't want to be unprofessional and name names, but I worked for a game company where I did 8 months of unpaid OT and then was laid off after release." Great, that helps exactly no one avoid the same situation you found yourself, so now another college grad can be exploited. If you worked for EA Tiburon and they screwed you, say it! If they treated you well say that too! Bad actors should be named and shamed or else they never have to pay for their actions.

Thanks to this post I can avoid O'Reilly as a publisher, and more importantly I can know that working with the editors named is a good idea as they were honorable people, but if I see that this Laurie person is involved with a potential publisher I can avoid them too.

I have a theory that this excessive deference to authority is why you can see so many people in upper management skate from one failure to the next, as no one has the balls to name them as poor performers, so they never have to reap consequences of their actions.

Good on the author for actually having the integrity to call things as they are.

Avoiding names is polite and professional because there is potential for doubt in any situation, and one report by an injured party can inflate or distort the truth. This is hard to see when you are the injured party, but that's why these are social norms, to give guidance for appropriate behavior in emotionally charged situations.

One of the benefits of there being a company involved is the company can take responsibility for the imperfect acts of its employees. Blaming a bad author experience on a publisher is entirely appropriate. Connecting the names of individuals to a disgruntled report in the public record is usually not.

Disclaimer: I'm a satisfied O'Reilly author. I'm considering self-publishing for my next project, but not because of my experiences with a publisher. For my (non-design-oriented) tech book, O'Reilly did far better by me than other major publishers did by other authors I know.

> Bad actors should be named and shamed or else they never have to pay for their actions.

Sounds good in theory. Just be damned sure that someone is really a "bad actor", and not a good person with their hands tied, being manipulated by an upper management socio-path.

Well, it all depends what your goal is.

If your goal is to embarrass and piss off the people who have annoyed you, naming names will accomplish that goal.

If your goal is to make a broader point about an industry, naming names will just distract.

If your goal is to criticize a particular company, naming names again distracts from the objective.

I can't read the OP's mind, so I don't know his goals.

There's all the difference in the world between public praise and public criticism. I can't explain it to you, but maybe think back to when you've been on the receiving end of both.

> If your goal is to criticize a particular company, naming names again distracts from the objective.

In this case you couldn't be more wrong. Pointing out to a crowd who mostly knows how awesome Tim O'Reilly is that Tim is still great, but is not really involved anymore, is genuinely useful and constructive criticism.

I'm pretty unhappy with O'Reilly's trend towards tiny books as well. I realize that 80 page books are easier to iterate rapidly on and get out the door while they're still relevant, but they're so short that they feel like glorified (and expensive) blog posts. I read tech books instead of blog posts because I appreciate the overall structure and "big picture" views that they give, not because I have some kind of fetish for paying for information.

I've also found Manning to be a pretty good publisher. In particular, I really appreciate that their books tend to avoid "language reference syndrome", where half of the book walks you through the language syntax and the other half exhaustively details every function in the standard library. Books like that tend to be out-of-date as soon as they come off the (possibly virtual) printing press, and they just aren't as necessary as they were when online documentation didn't exist.

Yeah, I used to love their books, and tended to feel pretty confident that if a book had O'Reilly on the cover, it would be decent.

Then I went and bought an O'Reilly title recently which appeared to have not been edited, at all. The code didn't work as written, and I quickly realized that I'd be better off reading source code on Github. The comments were better than that piece of garbage book.

This is not a new thing. I used to have the same feeling, that the O'Reilly brand was a mark of quality.

That ended when I bought their "Creating Applications with Mozilla" book (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596000523.do), which was riddled with misprints and errors, to the point that even the "Hello World" example code at the start of the book didn't work. It was disgracefully bad. I was actually, literally shocked by how bad it was.

That was 11 years ago. And I haven't run into a whole lot of "buy the O'Reilly book" recommendations since.

It kind of sounded to me like the author was pointing out that, though O'Reilly sucks, the editors (including the acquisitions editor) were good. The author didn't seem to get personal in a bad way.

Exactly, they were named to point out that they "both possessed integrity and practical minds."

Not true. The part where he contacts Tim O'Reilly directly, he names the name of "the publisher who replaced him", and said they lacked "integrity and good business sense".

"They used to be my goto publisher. "

Tim Oreilly is distracted and is missing the hunger of the early years. This happens to most people when they age and if it doesn't it's the exception. It also happens to businesses as well. They become complacent fat and lazy. Sometimes a near death experience brings them back sometimes they die.

All the talk of "we will be different this will never happen to us" doesn't change that in most cases.

> I would have preferred if he left people's names out of the article

I wouldn't. I'm sure a very large part of the problem at O'Reilly like any large corporation is the bureaucracy making it easy for individuals to evade personal responsibility.

The author praised the editors who did good work and criticised the publisher on reasonable grounds. Recognising people who do well and making people accountable when they don't are two sides of the same coin.

Besides, I'm sure if I'd poured a couple of thousand hours into a book it damn well would be personal to me in that situation.

Except the issue wasn't with the entire company, and it rarely is with things like this.

He didn't appear to call out anyone. In fact, the only names he mentioned were the ones that he interacted well with. It was the nameless "company" that didn't fulfill their end of their agreement.

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