Tim O'Reilly: How I Failed

I complained, but I eventually gave in. As we grew, it was harder and harder to maintain our informal processes. (I remember a real inflection point at about 50-60 employees, and another at about 100.) We gradually gave up our homegrown way of doing things, and accepted normal HR practices — vacation and sick days, regular reviews, annual salary adjustments — and bit by bit, I let the “HR professionals” take over the job of framing and managing the internal culture. That was a mistake.

The original process reminded me of Bryan Cantril's (bcantrill on Hacker News[1], creator of DTrace and VP of Engineering at Joyent) recent post on Leadership without Management: Scaling Organizations by Scaling Engineers[2], and of Yshan Wong's (former director of engineering at Facebook, and current CEO of Reddit) writtings on the topic[3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bcantrill

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6387649

[3] http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management-process...

1) It started producing mediocre books by the dozens. Gone are the days were the O'Reilly tomes (like the Perl books) were THE definitive books on a language.

2) It started promoting all sorts of half-though marketing/visionary crap (Thomas Friedman means Alvus Toffler style), on Open Source, Web 2.0 etc.

3) The Safari bookstore (which I was on and off subscriber over the years) had BS restrictions and a bad UI. I haven't even bothered to check if they provide a good tablet story nowadays.

Tim, you didn't fail. The industry has failed. For the past few-to-several years, books on technology have been obsolete by the time they are written- not just published, so you can't make money off of selling even digital copies of books. Developers read about the latest technology in project readme's (markdown formatted in GitHub), a wiki, one or more blogs, StackOverflow, and so on.

What else could your company do to stay relevant? I really have no idea. Posts on your site that come up in Google are often outdated, so O'Reilly to me is at most a place where developers that want to give talks and lectures can publish a book, which probably won't sell much. Maybe it will boost their resume or help them get more contract work? I really have no idea why people give talks and write books anymore. It seems like a waste of time that could be spent developing. Developing good code makes you relevant now.

I just feel sorry for the whole situation. I would have hoped will all of the publishing money from the 1990's and early 2000's, you'd own your own island, where you'd be on the beach drinking Coronas. But instead, the company has apparently tanked. That sucks. I liked the animal-covered books.

I was leery of taking so much time reading it. Most times when people write essays about "How I failed" they're full of self-promotional bullshit, the end of which is usually something like "I was just too awesome", or "We tried too hard" or some other pointless throwaway.

Here there's a fair bit of patting himself on the back, but Tim is honestly trying to get somewhere. Where, I don't know. In parts it reads like he's finally figured out that he was way too loosey-goosey with feel-good ideas that he wasn't ready to fight for. In other parts it feels like he's compelled to make lists of people or groups he should have treated with more attention.

In short, it needs an editor. I'm plowing through 3000 words where a better structure could probably cut that in half. Is there a thesis? Or is this just a mashup? I'm betting on the latter, but I'm still not sure.

I love the ideas Tim espouses but not because they make me feel all warm and fuzzy. I get the feeling this is his criteria. I love the ideas because they work, they have functional and financial value. Not sticking with them would be like not paying the electric bill because it was inconvenient.

I liked the essay and voted it up on HN. But I can't recommend it. It's rambling, it's honest, and it's missing the kind of structural and cognitive analysis that could have turned a thoughtful recollection into something more consumable and immediately usable. Sorry to be so negative. It just hit a weird spot with me where I know there's something really good in there, but I don't believe the author hasn't done the work of teasing it out for himself, much less the rest of us.

If you do not know about Safari Books Online [1], do yourself a favor and check it out! You pay a smallish monthly fee, and get access to digitized books. Want to learn about XZY tech, just head over to Safari Books Online and read the latest and greatest books, pick the chapters you want, and move on. Most university libraries will have access agreements, so this will most likely be free, or ask your company about a corporate membership!

I am not affiliated with them, just a very happy customer. This is the perfect use case for me, since I typically will read tech books only once, never looking at them again, and just google from that point on.

[1] http://www.safaribooksonline.com/

They have solid experience in classic publishing and online publishing and a culture rooted in openness. They also have the brand to attract enough peer reviewers and the like.

And they know how to "fill the gas tank" via conferences if they want to go that route so maybe they should just prototype a couple of academic conferences and see how it goes.

Your customers at the end of the day define your business, because they spend the money that enables you to continue. While you believe you have great thoughts, as a commercial entity you do not have the luxury of such things because the market speaks louder than your own ego.

I like Tim, a lot, but at the end of the day he vainly spoke as O'Reilly media and not as Tim (a guy who has some smart things to say but is independent from a company) and that has an impact. If Gates spoke as MS HMFIC about vaccinations he would get roasted in the market, but Tim never divorced himself from the company and thus made the company suffer for his own personal conceits. If you're a sole propietorship then you can afford such luxury, but Tim had a larger vision for the company yet confused himself with that vision.

Tim O'Reilly changed the trajectory of my life and probably countless others how self-taught themselves using the famous O'Reilly books into a job or often much more.

oh god yes. money is like a blind spot to me - but this line speaks to me best in a whole article that reeks of good advice.

thanks Mr Oreilly.

[1] http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1521

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The only raises we had were merit raises, as you improved your skills and impact. You were expected to manage your own time, with no set hours, and the only responsibility around vacation time was to make sure that no balls got dropped.

Eventually, I hired an employment lawyer to review my draft, and he said, “That’s the most inspiring employee manual I’ve ever read, but I can’t let you use it.”

I complained, but I eventually gave in. As we grew, it was harder and harder to maintain our informal processes. (I remember a real inflection point at about 50-60 employees, and another at about 100.) We gradually gave up our homegrown way of doing things, and accepted normal HR practices — vacation and sick days, regular reviews, annual salary adjustments — and bit by bit, I let the “HR professionals” take over the job of framing and managing the internal culture. That was a mistake.

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We ended up building a culture where managers too often compensated for the failings of employees by working around them, either working harder themselves, hiring someone else to fill in the gaps, or just letting the organization be less effective.

As an employee, observing these indicators should probably push you to change to a better situation.

SO : O'Reilly :: web : print

I worry about this with my own "company". I have two different projects right now, one that brings in money and I'm starting to add people to, one that has a couple of people and might soon bring in money. I see them separate only in so much as the people of the second one aren't interested in the work of the first one at this time. There will be opportunities in the future to merge the two.

I started working for myself because I hated working in modern office culture. I was always interested in being more than just a code-monkey. I wanted to understand the business and work practically and efficiently to create good value for our clients. I saw that a lot of programmers where architecture astronauts and a lot of project managers were unchecked salesmen and I thought I could be the best of both worlds by being honest with both the customer and myself about what could and couldn't be done. I didn't want to delay releases just because I was more interested in scratching an intellectual itch than getting the work done. But I also didn't want to over-promise on deliverables knowing that it would lead to an even bigger argument in a month's time when we didn't get 6 months worth of programming done.

And I got sick and tired of my health issues, fundamentally created by my overly demanding employers, being treated like they were a personal problem that I shouldn't bother them with. I'm sorry, you keep me in the office overnight, I'm not coming in on time the next day. It's not "unprofessional" for me to fall asleep in a meeting in which I'm not even expected to participate the day after you dumped last-minute changes on me, changes I know you kept to yourself because I overheard you on the phone talking about it and how you knew it would be easier to convince me to stay if the situation seemed dire. The chemical depression I experienced as a result of the poor nutrition, lack of sleep, and lack of sunlight you imposed on me through feeding me at my desk and holding my job over my head was fundamentally your fault, as was the resulting complete lack of productivity. You can't work someone 100 hours one week and expect them to be as fresh as a daisy the next.

Ahem, sorry, got lost there for a minute.

The last thing I want to do is be responsible for creating a business that becomes the very thing I despise. But I won't be able to oversee everything. I'm going to have to hire people who will be responsible for hiring more people. The fundamental structure of the company will have to be built on the understanding that treating employees with respect is not just a phrase for the promotional material.

The problem is that it's a whole litany of problems. You can't just focus on the vacation time or core hours or snacks and games in the break room. Frankly, even when I was in my early 20s I didn't care for snacks and games at work. I wanted to work at work and play at home. It's hiring practices, it's how you communicate with your customers, it's how you organize work, it's who you hire for work, it's the sort of work you do, it's 100% of everything that a company does, and if any one part of it is out of whack it's going to corrupt it all.

In O'Reilly's example of his "Rules of Thumb" manual, he hired the wrong lawyer, a lawyer that was only interested in viewing the problem through the lens of common corporate lawyering. He needed a lawyer that was just as devoted to recreating the work place as he was and understood that it was his (the lawyer's) job to protect that environment, not completely destroy it just because it wasn't easy to protect it.

And it scares the shit out of me. How many of my former employers started their own companies because they hated working for their own former employers? How do I avoid being ultimately responsible for someone's terrible work-life balance?