Battelle asked about the highly critical memo from a Google engineer that was mistakenly made public. Gundotra's talking point on this: "Larry and Sergey have fostered a culture that allows open debate. The outside world got a peek into what it's like to work at Google. That's why we didn't fire him."
Brin was less diplomatic about the memo. "I stopped reading it after the first 1,000 pages or so," he said. "If you want to get a point across, limit it to a paragraph or so."
Are we ever going to have a social network run by people with sufficient diplomatic skill to host a simple birthday party?
Having said that: Rather than analyzing these clunker quotes any further I'd note that they are a journalist's paraphrase of what may well have been a gotcha question asked by the very same journalist. That's a notoriously treacherous process. So I'd like to avoid piling on. Let's just say that, if the journalist was the one who pulled and slanted these quotes to make them read like a barely-veiled public threat and a not-at-all-veiled peremptory brush-off, that journalist did a fine job.
If I were a Google recruiter I'd be prepping a better response right now. A pity that the company blew the chance to deliver a kind human response from the podium, but you can't fix history.
> Are we ever going to have a social network run by people with sufficient diplomatic skill to host a simple birthday party?
No, because engineers run social networks, and many engineers are ironically socially lacking.
But that's besides the point. I thought Brin's response was HUMAN! Consider that he could have gone the PR route with "we value all our employees' opinions and are looking into the matter". I vastly prefer honesty over PR; and I think many engineers do too.
Am I the only one that interpreted as a light-hearted sarcastic remark? In the same interview he admitted to being very sarcastic when supporting key features of g+
I'd like to hear the audio to check out his inflection and the full context.
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...
Nonsense. I'm a big fan of long-form literature, short stories, essays and plays, but if all you want to do is get a point across, you'd better use something else.
I think that's a pretty unfair summary. Brin didn't suggest he disapproves of everything longer than a paragraph, and Yegge's post wasn't art or literature. In the context of a question whether an executive has read something an employee has written, it's a much more reasonable statement.
You have no idea how many jokes he makes about the length of the Android source code. They're hilarious too.
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.
"Services should be composable or sooner or later we'll get a competitor that gets this who will kill us."
I hope that accurately summarizes the essential bits, if you disagree or can shorten it further feel free to correct.
If there was one thing that pre-saged the decline of any large entity then it was probably the management being surrounded with people that agree with the management, and having their ears closed to the rest.
Someone that disagrees with you, even if it is verbose is worth 10x more of your attention than someone that agrees with you. Why? Because in disagreement you will find knowledge, alternative viewpoints and advancement, in agreement only confirmation.
Worst case he could have asked one of his underlings to summarize it for him and hope that nothing of the message got lost.
Sergey Brin doesn't matter any more. He's been off in his own little world, making acquisitions and having them report directly to him. They don't get integrated into the normal engineering environment, and they wind up in more buildings which normal badges won't open. Look up building 1489 for an example.
When I heard about this non-integration, my interpretation was that normal eng is where things go to die, so they were keeping the new things separate so they would not die. Then I realized, hey wait, if the core engineering area is sufficiently broken to where one of the founders is purposely keeping his own toys away from it, what does that say about us?
Battelle asked about the highly critical memo from a Google engineer that was mistakenly made public. . . . Brin was less diplomatic about the memo. "I stopped reading it after the first 1,000 pages or so," he said. "If you want to get a point across, limit it to a paragraph or so."
Considering that Yegge seemed to make a compelling case, that peremptory response doesn't reflect well on the Google executive team.
Brin doesn't come off well. He criticises a well received and thought provoking article calling it too long. How the hell would the guy squeeze what he wrote into one paragraph?
That kind of hubris always presages the fall. The failure of Wave, Google+, and things like this: Brin's flippant, cocky response to a valid criticism means that if I had Google stock, I would slowly start to sell.
Please, please don't make comments to the effect that there are hundreds of such postings within Google and that the management cannot read all of them. Steve Yegge is not a hot shot new engineer with some cool ideas, when he talks about SOA you listen. Just as if Peter Norvig (ever) rants about how AI and/or NLP is handled in Google Search you listen or when or when Andy Tobin talks about Android or when Matias Duarte talks about how UI is handled, well you get my point. So the comment that Yegge's is just another comment is PR-speak.
It seems Brin and others want to diffuse the situation with jokes, etc. It would have been much better if Brin would have said "Look, I don't agree with Yegge and here's why..", giving strategical and technical reasons why they are not doing what he's suggesting. In its place we get a sad, half-jokey response that would have come from a peppy MBA-type.
Had it appeared in the HN discussion for Yegge's post, I would have downvoted Brin's response, because it doesn't bring anything useful. Others probably would have done the same.
Sergey has a dry sense of humor that doesn't always come across well in quotes. My sense is that plenty of execs and other people in Google read Steve's post and gave it a lot of thought. Steve's post was long, but he made a ton of great points.
I'm never sure. I've been literally dismissed by execs for a six-page reason written by multiple senior engineers why they shouldn't spend $20 million buying another company with "this is too long. Bring it back under a page and we'll read it."
Yegge's articles are interesting but they are also ridiculously long. He writes a thousand words when a hundred will suffice.
There's nothing wrong with that - Neal Stephenson has made a name for himself using that technique - but it's not for everyone.
I can imagine a lot of people who have a full inbox may not have time to go through every article written about them or every complaint made by an employee.
Yeah the benefit is that Yegge's a good, humorous writer usually gets a large audience. "Hardened interface" still cracks me up. His point is usually fairly clear, and odds are good that plenty of other people will be capable of providing the executive summary.
Journalists edit quotes and mention them out of context. The "1000-page" comment surely wasn't completely serious.
Here's a 1-paragraph summary:
"Our current approach to building products closes them off from each other, and from the rest of the net. That limits their usefulness to only what our product managers could predict and our engineers could build. This is a serious issue that will cause the products - and the company - to die. The alternative is to start thinking of products as data and functionality sharing platforms, let them interact, let outside devs play, and let the ecosystem grow. Growing an ecosystem this way is worthwhile: Amazon did amazingly well out of it even though implementing it via Bezos-mandate sucked in so many ways. Let's do that, and do it better."
Everyone seems to assume that he meant this in a serious fashion, but for all we know he meant it in jest and had a huge grin on his face while he said it. It's easy to jump to conclusions, the internet being what it is (the biggest 24/7 news network on the planet), but without at least the audio, and preferably video as well, we shouldn't be so eager to take up pitchforks and torches.
Based on the comments on Steve Yegge's post, hundreds of non Googlers read it and appreciated it, I am not sure why a Google founder did not find it worthwhile to go thru it.
On the one hand they mentioned that Google has an open culture and on the other hand they are dismissive of his ideas and seemingly refuse to acknowledge them.
> I am not sure why a Google founder did not find it worthwhile to go thru it.
Because a Google founder and current executive doesn't have half an hour to devote every time an employee writes a long post about the company. That's what underlings and assistants are for.
edit: I see by the downvotes some of you disagree regarding workplace organization. Fair enough, but consider: if someone at Apple had emailed a letter this size to Steve Jobs, and he had responded with a trademark "don't write it that way if you want busy people to read it," would you disagree? And this post wasn't even aimed at Brin directly.
It's depressing, for someone considering working at Google, that all Brin can do is attack the form of a well-respected team member's rant. He should have said something like, "We encourage open debate at Google. Right now, I think that developing everything as a service will restrict the independence of teams and slow down our quick development cycle." Instead he says, "TLDR".
If there's one thing that Google should not let any of their higher-ups do, it's talk in public. They are really, really bad at it.
So you're saying he should have made an empty PR statement instead of something with more character in it?
It's funny how that works. On one hand, when someone says 'We value your inputs and are looking into the matter' we dismiss it as PR speak. When someone comes out and says something a little less politically-correct we jump on him for not running it through the PR department.
If Steve Yegge put an executive summary at the top of his posts, I doubt I'd find them half as entertaining. Part of the joy is always trying to figure out what exactly it is that you're reading. Gets particularly good when he just puts a random piece of creative fiction on his blog.
Definitely agree. If anyone else wrote rambling posts that are as long as his I'd end up giving up part way through, but his rants/articles are a real joy to read and they usually give you real food for thought.
I think Sergie Brin comes across as cocky in this interview and Steve Yegge's memo about Google's failure to create platforms is more valid then ever- Brin himself has treated Google+ as an afterthought and I don't think that bodes well for the service.
I feel pretty bad for Yegge because he always talks about how excited he is to work at Google and this is the kind of response he gets for being progressive.
You have to think that Brin was sort of 'stung' by Yegge's airing Google's laundry in public like that so he's zinging back, but still, he's had time to process it and come up with a more politic response. If he'd softened it with ' ... but he raises some good points and it's provoked discussion ...' it'd be ok but as it is it's a blowoff and diss. In Yegge's place I might leave.
In Brin's defense, Yegge is very wordy and prone to go off on tangents. Although I got through the leaked G+ post, I stopped reading several of his blog posts less than half way through, and I am much less busy than Brin is. Also, unlike me, Brin probably already knew the facts about Amazon revealed in the G+ post.
this is either hilarious (if he's just kidding around for PR's sake, and in reality he read the thing and took it to heart) or tragic (if he's really as dismissive as he suggests.)
"But I was being sarcastic at the time," Brin said.
One thing the Google founder and the Google+ VP do agree
on: the Circle feature. "I love them, I have dozens of
circles," Brin said.
Somehow I don't think Sergey takes this very seriously.
Seems bizarre to me that he would be so dismissive, I didn't think Brin had that kind of attitude. Even as an outsider I found the memo compelling enough to read all the way through.
But it also brings up a point about Google+ that it seems to encourage long posts like this - most of the Google+ posts I come across tend to look like huge walls of text.
Brin is simply alluding to something that's annoyed me many times about Yegge's posts, however insightful they sometimes are: Steve Yegge loves to hear himself write.
This whole fiasco is just a standard example of the mismatch between the sales/marketing/pr view of a product that the world normally sees and the what engineers think of it.
PR people talk about what's good about a product all day. That's their job, and it's whose words you normally read in the press. Engineers' jobs are to focus on what's bad about the product and to improve it. People saw Yegge's post and it was an engineer's view and they're flipping out. If Brin has ever talked to an engineer in his life he knows it's no big deal.
I personally have seen sales people who have been touting the virtues of a product for months have a single meeting with the engineers and come back absolutely devastated that things aren't all roses and unicorns.
I've also seen engineers brought into sales meetings and then talk about everything that's wrong with the product he's supposed to be helping to sell. (The engineer typically then gets his ass handed to him by the senior salesperson as soon as they're out of the customer's earshot.)
[+] [-] mechanical_fish|14 years ago|reply
Brin was less diplomatic about the memo. "I stopped reading it after the first 1,000 pages or so," he said. "If you want to get a point across, limit it to a paragraph or so."
Are we ever going to have a social network run by people with sufficient diplomatic skill to host a simple birthday party?
Having said that: Rather than analyzing these clunker quotes any further I'd note that they are a journalist's paraphrase of what may well have been a gotcha question asked by the very same journalist. That's a notoriously treacherous process. So I'd like to avoid piling on. Let's just say that, if the journalist was the one who pulled and slanted these quotes to make them read like a barely-veiled public threat and a not-at-all-veiled peremptory brush-off, that journalist did a fine job.
If I were a Google recruiter I'd be prepping a better response right now. A pity that the company blew the chance to deliver a kind human response from the podium, but you can't fix history.
[+] [-] pork|14 years ago|reply
No, because engineers run social networks, and many engineers are ironically socially lacking.
But that's besides the point. I thought Brin's response was HUMAN! Consider that he could have gone the PR route with "we value all our employees' opinions and are looking into the matter". I vastly prefer honesty over PR; and I think many engineers do too.
[+] [-] potatolicious|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] praptak|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enjalot|14 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] mtts|14 years ago|reply
;-)
[+] [-] astrec|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jarek|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelochurch|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxi|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 0x12|14 years ago|reply
"Services should be composable or sooner or later we'll get a competitor that gets this who will kill us."
I hope that accurately summarizes the essential bits, if you disagree or can shorten it further feel free to correct.
If there was one thing that pre-saged the decline of any large entity then it was probably the management being surrounded with people that agree with the management, and having their ears closed to the rest.
Someone that disagrees with you, even if it is verbose is worth 10x more of your attention than someone that agrees with you. Why? Because in disagreement you will find knowledge, alternative viewpoints and advancement, in agreement only confirmation.
Worst case he could have asked one of his underlings to summarize it for him and hope that nothing of the message got lost.
[+] [-] rachelbythebay|14 years ago|reply
When I heard about this non-integration, my interpretation was that normal eng is where things go to die, so they were keeping the new things separate so they would not die. Then I realized, hey wait, if the core engineering area is sufficiently broken to where one of the founders is purposely keeping his own toys away from it, what does that say about us?
[+] [-] donw|14 years ago|reply
As a non-Googler, I would love to hear more about this... if you won't write the blog post, mind if I interview you so I can? :)
[+] [-] mahyarm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dporan|14 years ago|reply
Considering that Yegge seemed to make a compelling case, that peremptory response doesn't reflect well on the Google executive team.
[+] [-] VonLipwig|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] david927|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jun8|14 years ago|reply
It seems Brin and others want to diffuse the situation with jokes, etc. It would have been much better if Brin would have said "Look, I don't agree with Yegge and here's why..", giving strategical and technical reasons why they are not doing what he's suggesting. In its place we get a sad, half-jokey response that would have come from a peppy MBA-type.
Had it appeared in the HN discussion for Yegge's post, I would have downvoted Brin's response, because it doesn't bring anything useful. Others probably would have done the same.
[+] [-] Matt_Cutts|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angelbob|14 years ago|reply
shrug
That wasn't at Google, though.
[+] [-] statictype|14 years ago|reply
There's nothing wrong with that - Neal Stephenson has made a name for himself using that technique - but it's not for everyone.
I can imagine a lot of people who have a full inbox may not have time to go through every article written about them or every complaint made by an employee.
[+] [-] Goladus|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jroseattle|14 years ago|reply
So, Sergey, you need things in a paragraph or less? Here you go:
If you're going to put the Google name on a product and release it, try doing it in a manner that's not half-assed.
Sorry to be so curt, Sergey -- but I didn't want to lose your interest.
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimworm|14 years ago|reply
Here's a 1-paragraph summary:
"Our current approach to building products closes them off from each other, and from the rest of the net. That limits their usefulness to only what our product managers could predict and our engineers could build. This is a serious issue that will cause the products - and the company - to die. The alternative is to start thinking of products as data and functionality sharing platforms, let them interact, let outside devs play, and let the ecosystem grow. Growing an ecosystem this way is worthwhile: Amazon did amazingly well out of it even though implementing it via Bezos-mandate sucked in so many ways. Let's do that, and do it better."
[+] [-] ordinary|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] g123g|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jarek|14 years ago|reply
Because a Google founder and current executive doesn't have half an hour to devote every time an employee writes a long post about the company. That's what underlings and assistants are for.
edit: I see by the downvotes some of you disagree regarding workplace organization. Fair enough, but consider: if someone at Apple had emailed a letter this size to Steve Jobs, and he had responded with a trademark "don't write it that way if you want busy people to read it," would you disagree? And this post wasn't even aimed at Brin directly.
[+] [-] Joakal|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxi|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrockway|14 years ago|reply
If there's one thing that Google should not let any of their higher-ups do, it's talk in public. They are really, really bad at it.
[+] [-] statictype|14 years ago|reply
It's funny how that works. On one hand, when someone says 'We value your inputs and are looking into the matter' we dismiss it as PR speak. When someone comes out and says something a little less politically-correct we jump on him for not running it through the PR department.
[+] [-] moomin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colin_jack|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egiva|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] statictype|14 years ago|reply
(Not that I have first-hand knowledge - I read this in "In the Plex")
[+] [-] atarian|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] queensnake|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hollerith|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vogonj|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] athst|14 years ago|reply
But it also brings up a point about Google+ that it seems to encourage long posts like this - most of the Google+ posts I come across tend to look like huge walls of text.
[+] [-] miked|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0x12|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajennings|14 years ago|reply
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-...
Summary: If your writing is too short, then it doesn't spill over into people's long-term memory and they will forget it all too soon.
Having said that, you should go read the blog post so you can remember it.
[+] [-] pgroves|14 years ago|reply
PR people talk about what's good about a product all day. That's their job, and it's whose words you normally read in the press. Engineers' jobs are to focus on what's bad about the product and to improve it. People saw Yegge's post and it was an engineer's view and they're flipping out. If Brin has ever talked to an engineer in his life he knows it's no big deal.
I personally have seen sales people who have been touting the virtues of a product for months have a single meeting with the engineers and come back absolutely devastated that things aren't all roses and unicorns.
I've also seen engineers brought into sales meetings and then talk about everything that's wrong with the product he's supposed to be helping to sell. (The engineer typically then gets his ass handed to him by the senior salesperson as soon as they're out of the customer's earshot.)