Hacker News Reader

The article is all about the difference between the innovation being created by low level employees and the stupid decisions by top level management who want to shut it all down. The author is among the former and even says he doesn't like ads, so I think your proposition that he is a Microsoft shill working in an elaborate anti-Google marketing campaign is misguided.

There's not much excuse for not reading things and then complaining about them.

View on HN

James Whittaker was not a "low level employee," he was a director of engineering. This is the same level as Kurzweil. At that level he was responsible for many management decisions, some of them probably "stupid."

Fair enough. I may have read that incorrectly by focusing on him saying "shipping code", but he's still not the part of management at the very top making company wide decisions that have the power to crush large swaths of innovation (i.e. everything has to fit into google+) and that is more what I was referring to.

A company the size of Google has 100's of "Director"s. There are probably 3 or 4 layers between a director and the CEO... if not more. I doubt he had much to do with the actual market direction of the company (ironically... since the word "Director" would lead you to believe that it had something to do with directing).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com