What Happened to Yahoo

Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article.<p><i>...the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had.</i><p>Is Apple a big winner, like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (the other companies he mentions repeatedly)? Bigger. (Check the last 1, 5 or 10 years on Google finance for the GOOG or MSFT comparison. FB is not public, but...) Do they have this obnoxiously elitist focus? No. They still manage to hire great engineers, though.<p><i>So which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture?... any company that needs to have good software.</i><p>I wouldn't say that Apple is dominated by a hacker culture at all. It's dominated by Steve Jobs and a focus on design and attention to detail. Yet that seems to produce much better software than Google or Microsoft, IMHO. That's <i>very</i> subjective, I realize, but the market seems to agree. At any rate, Apple does produce <i>good software</i>.<p>So are the hacker culture and the elitist focus really necessary for a technology company to succeed? Is Apple a complete anomaly while Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are typical? What say you, pg?<p>I realize it's borderline suicidal to post an HN comment that simultaneously calls out pg and lauds Apple, but it's criminal to completely leave the best (imho) technology company out of a discussion about attributes of great technology companies.

[edit: this thread has some insightful replies by others that are worth reading.]<p>I'm sorry, this may be PG's backyard, but I've gotta call bullshit. Note: I am not a Yahoo employee or corporate shill.<p>1. "At Yahoo this death spiral started early."<p>Apparently this death spiral took TWELVE YEARS (the WWW is 20 years old), and Yahoo is still #1 (or #2) in terms of total properties on the web. How is this a death spiral?<p>2. "If there was ever a time when Yahoo was a Google-style talent magnet, it was over by the time I got there in 1998."<p>Are you kidding me? You're implying all the current Yahoo engineers are idiots? Then how come each piece of code they release is revered, lauded and used by everybody?<p>Speaking of talent: Yahoo got best paper at EVERY data-related conference in 2010. No single lab(Google,MS) or university(Stanford etc) has ever done this. Clearly you can achieve this without talent, pg!<p>3. "In the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture. Probably the most impressive commitment I've heard to having a hacker-centric culture came from Mark Zuckerberg, when he spoke at Startup School in 2007."<p>Which company is responsible for inventing the term "Hack Day": Yahoo. Which is the only company to _promote_ hacking culture to students? Yahoo. Yahoo != Hacker-friendly? WTFFF!!! (edit:goog does soc, but it doesnt have engineers travel around the world teaching kids hands-on like yahoo does)<p>4. Google and Apple are shiny and get all the attention. Yahoo's the internet's underbelly. It's audience may not be SF hipsters, but they exist and there are a lot of them. Just because they're not like you doesn't mean they dont exist. Just because Yahoo doesnt cater to you doesn't mean it doesn't exist.<p>5. pg's product got hosed after inclusion into Yahoo. This happens. Reading a Yahoo critique from pg is like reading a Google critique from Evan Williams (Blogger), or a Google critique from the Dodgeball guys. It's a biased opinion.<p>6. It's a miracle Yahoo has survived for so long despite being criticized by the media /market for more than half its lifetime. The only other company that has had it worse was Apple, when they fired Steve Jobs. Yahoo doesnt have a Steve Jobs, and has been managed badly, but the engineering is SO GOOD that it STILL does a good job overall.

In 2002, Yahoo! began a serious effort to compete with Google in search by buying Inktomi (plus Altavista and FAST). In what must have been early 2004, I came over with the rest of the Inktomi crew to work on search. The Inktomi people were top notch, Yahoo! seemed earnest about doing what it took to go head to head with Google, and the integration efforts were done really well. While I was there I worked in an island of Inktomi people (plus some from Altavista), and I repeatedly got the impression that Y! people, technical and otherwise, were a little soft, maybe even complacent, relatively speaking.<p>I do feel Y! did a great job -- and made a great decision -- in integrating its search acquisitions; but those acquisitions threw into sharp relief what Y! really was. It's hard to get into too much trouble when all you're doing is throwing horoscopes onto web pages; but Yahoo! never struck me as being serious about software, and as Paul says, they didn't seem to think that was a problem.<p>Somewhere in 2005-2006, Y! made an attempt to revamp its search ad services with a large-scale software project called Panama. It was going to do a lot of things, including ad ranking refinements to improve revenue per query, and allowing advertisers to create more complex ad campaigns. This project seemed to undergo huge troubles, and I wonder if it was ever completed in any real sense, because I heard so little about it, and everything I heard suggested disaster.<p>Honestly I don't know if the fruits of Panama -- such as improved auctions for ads on search result pages, which is a critical thing -- were ever deployed. But a couple years later they made the Microsoft deal. Over the last couple years, select people at Y! have moved on to Google, and many many others are now at Microsoft.

&#62; <i>" You can get programmers who would never have come to you as employees by buying their startups. But so far the only companies smart enough to do this are companies smart enough not to need to."</i><p>Yahoo did do this through the Inktomi (Yahoo Search, 2003-2010) acquisition. I've worked in that organization and learned a tremendous amount from the people. At that time the hiring bar had been considerably raised from what Graham describes (I have no idea whether that was the rule or the exception at that time, I was there 8 years later), nobody was shy of rejecting weak candidates. Much of the knowledge did diffuse to rest of the organization and it's important to note that along side the "dot-com-wannabe-millionaire-vesting-in-peace" crowd the essay describes, there <i>was</i> plenty of genuine technical talent (anyone who has worked there can attest to presence and influence of hackers).<p>Unfortunately, for many reasons, that talent has slowly bled out. There was also a great amount of friction between Search and rest of the organization e.g., resistance (by Search engineers) to dog-fooding of what was often inferior technology. Search was, however, able to maintain a different platform, remaining on Linux, with their own platform/software stack, but were some "wtf" moments like porting and forcing the adoption of a custom user space locking library from FreeBSD when Linux already had futex (on the other hand, the fact there was a custom locking library built in a "media company" does say something).<p>The other key mistake made is that they would position bright, capable new hires in areas that weren't directly correlated to revenue and treated as cost centers. That just seemed highly illogical to me. It's a mistake that's often difficult to fix: once young graduates are used to working on glamorous projects, it's much harder to get them to work on more mundane, but revenue critical projects such as advertiser systems. Google's strategy of a uniformly high hiring bar (vs. some teams hiring people other teams rejected for roles involving the same skill-set) and assigning hires to business priority projects (while allowing individuals to transfer if the project wasn't their cup of tea, with proper incentives in place for some projects) seems to be (at least from an outside point of view, I've never worked at Google) better.

"In technology, once you have bad programmers, you're doomed. I can't think of an instance where a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered."<p>In any conflict, there is always a risk of fighting the last battle. I see today many companies, inspired by the lessons learned from the first dot-com bubble, making the opposite mistake; thinking that they need to be a technology company when they're really a experience providing company.<p>Twitter is the refutation to pg's thesis. Despite their initial technical incompetence, they managed to attract a top-notch technical team because they managed to deliver a crawl-over-broken-glass experience (it's so compelling people are willing to crawl over broken glass to experience it, see also: craigslist, plentyoffish).<p>It was interesting attending the YC work at a startup day and seeing RethinkDB present. Their pitch, in not as many words was basically "Look, we're the only company here that is actually working on a problem that demands world-class engineers (in the non-debased sense of the term)". For most of the other startups, despite all their bluster, the technology platform they were using was commoditized and technology was not their differentiating factor.

Disclaimer #1: My job is technology evangelist for Yahoo! So refuting this is probably the definition of my job.<p>Disclaimer #2: This is my own completely unsanctioned opinion and does not necessarily represent Yahoo!'s views or opinions.<p>I'm obviously biased here, but I have a great respect for HN and PG so I wanted to talk about this.<p>PG accuses Yahoo! of two things right at the very top of the article and the rest of the article is more details on those things. They are a) access to easy money removed Yahoo!'s desire to find the next big thing b) ambivalence about being a technology company.<p>I'm not going to substantially repute a) because I think it is true. However, I think it's a pretty big ask to expect someone being successful to see past the current success to the next big win. PG admit's neither he nor Larry and Sergey really understood how big search was. As such I feel it's a slightly ad-homonym attack to blame Yahoo! for not being Google. We didn't win the big prize, but we also aren't AOL, Lycos or Ask.com either. Just because we didn't become Google doesn't mean Yahoo! has failed.<p>As an engineer though PG's second point strikes me as deeply unfair. I joined Yahoo! in 2004 in the UK. The team I joined was exceptional. For a team of 30 people there were about 15 book authored by the team. I personally had written W3C standards and multi Web Standards Project founders littered the team. The rest of the team were coders, much better than I.<p>Now I work in US for the developer network and I get to see the vast range of technologies that Yahoo! does from Y! Research through to the engineering teams. There is a reason 'Hack Days' started here, because the engineers here are passionate about those technologies and playing with them.<p>I'm also on the Yahoo! Open Source Working Group and I see all the open source we put out of the door. We should probably do a better job of telling people how much, but it's a lot more than you think. I find it troubling that PG who left the company 10 years ago, can now, accuse me and my colleagues of apathy about technology when it's so fundamental to what Yahoo! does.<p>I think what PG is really talking to is two things. Firstly, it's important for a company to have a 'core competency'. Describing ourselves as a media company makes it clear to our investors and our employees the field of play. Secondly, the ease at which a cash-cow, such as Google's search war chest, allows them to make their presence felt in the technology community reminds people about all the things they touch. I am both proud an envious that Google have the freedom to do that, but again, it doesn't mean Yahoo! failed because we don't.

I heared that when one of the large investment banks (forgot which one) got a new CEO, the first thing he did was stopping all IT outsourcing projects. He did realize a modern bank is, in fact, a software company, and you shouldn't outsource your core activity.

Hindsight is easy. If you look back at the two decades before 1998, it was basically Microsoft, Intel (and to a lesser extent Oracle) buying (hopefully) or crushing every single engineering-centric company out there. They used good ol' monopoly power and FUD, which is pretty far from an engineering culture. Borland, Lotus, Apple, etc. IBM had successfully made a transition to a service company and the conventional wisdom was that that was all that saved them from being crushed in turn. Jerry Yang was just following the conventional wisdom.<p>EDIT: Most importantly they had just witnessed the spectacle of Netscape, a company that seemed unstoppable, just completely buried by MS.

PG: "But [Yahoo] had the most opaque obstacle in the world between them and the truth: money."<p>Sounds like yet another variant of Upton Sinclair's Law: "When a man's paycheck depends on his not understanding something, you can depend upon his not understanding it."

I find it interesting that Yahoo is considered not to have a "hacker" culture when they produce things such as YUI, YQL and YSlow which seem to have no reason to be there other than that they think of themselves as a company that has hackers and coding in their DNA. I guess these are small examples in the large scheme of things but it still seems odd that there is this disconnect - at the high level, they are just media company, at the low level they are right there in the hacker community producing, I would say, above their weight.

Rich Yahoo in 1999 overlooked the value of search.<p>Rich Google in 2004 overlooked the value of social networking (both their in-house hit Orkut and outside services).

As far as I was concerned (admittedly I was still a kid at the time), all that mattered was the Yahoo homepage was garish and full of ads, and the results were hard to sift through (because they were full of 'sponsored links' and the page was equally garish). Google was the antithesis of all that, and that's why I used, liked, and rooted for Google.

"It's probably too much to hope any company could avoid being damaged by depending on a bogus source of revenue. But startups can learn an important lesson from [the fact that] in the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture."<p>I think Yahoo made the correct decision on both counts. As far as depending on a bogus source of revenue, all new advertising mediums are massively undervalued at first, then massively overvalued, and then only eventually even out. It would be a huge mistake not to plan your entire business model around this cycle. Yahoo did this, and they made literally billions of dollars because of it. Sure, if they had chosen to go into a different sort of business they could have perhaps extended their reign, but it's hard to argue that they made the wrong choice.<p>As for not having a hacker-centric culture, I think they made the right choice here as well. Every time Yahoo bought a startup, their stock rose more than they paid for the company, meaning every time they acquired their tech through a buyout the execs took home massive paychecks. Whereas every dollar they spent on elite programmers was money out of their pocket.<p>I think the lesson here, if anything, is that you can make mostly the right decisions and your business can still decline over time.<p>Incidentally, I heard a great story about one of the Yahoo sales guys. Apparently he bought his own inventory at the end of every month to meet his quota, because the stock he was getting vested was worth more than the 100K or so he was required to fork over each month. (Because he obviously couldn't actually make any sales.)

"Most technology companies eventually get taken over by suits and middle managers."<p>Interesting statement. I suspect this process is well under way at Google these days.<p>But <i>why</i> does this happen? Is it just that once companies grow large enough, you need middle managers, (who then consolidate power and control)? Is there a more nuanced explanation?

Funny. I made a similar comparison with Facebook. PG said that Yahoo was a de facto pyramid scheme, although ponzi scheme is a better analogy: <a href="http://blog.jperla.com/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme-0" rel="nofollow">http://blog.jperla.com/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme-0</a><p>&#62;&#62; By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto pyramid scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of "Eureka!" I was shouting "Sell!"

Summing up:<p>* The Innovator's Dilemma, <i>and</i><p>* Mistaking a key driver of innovation and growth (software development) for a cost center.

Here is a Forbes article from 1998 Spring about Anil Singh and his team's perspective: <a href="http://www.forbes.com/asap/1998/0223/068.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/asap/1998/0223/068.html</a>

Aside: sorting advertisements by bids originated with goto.com in Feb 1998 (from Idealab), years before Google started using it.<p>It was a great idea, original and effective, though I'm not how to feel about their patenting it. If they hadn't, they would have been copied and crushed without credit. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goto.com#Origins_of_Goto.com" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goto.com#Origins_of_Goto.com</a><p>As it was, they got 2.7 million shares from Google's infringement, and later acquired by Yahoo for $1.63 billion.

<i>"in the early days Facebook made a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing."</i><p>No offense, but hiring programmers for HR seems like a terrible idea. HR people's main capacity is to understand people and relationships, not exactly something programmers are known for being good at.

How Software Companies Die: <a href="http://www.zoion.com/~erlkonig/writings/programmer-beekeeping.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.zoion.com/~erlkonig/writings/programmer-beekeepin...</a>

Don't miss the allusion ("Theirs was not to reason why") to the poem The Charge Of The Light Brigade. Into the Valley rode the 500. Very funny.

Great post. This left me wondering -- what do you think would have happened if Yahoo had been successful in their $1b bid for Facebook? Would FB have turned the company around by instilling a start-up/hacker culture. Or would it have just died there, infected by Yahoo?

It's bad to nitpick, but I take issue with the quote "It's hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995.":<p>I was born in 1981 and I clearly remember the fear and awe Microsoft inspired in 1995 :) .<p>There were articles about how Bill took things personally and crushed competition.<p>I read the 1992 biography "Hard Drive" ( <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp/0887306292/ref=pd_sim_b_3" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp/...</a> ); Bill was kind of a role model back then (a successful and well-known technologist).<p>Edit: See also ojbyrne's comment: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1596737" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1596737</a>

<a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/yahoo.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/yahoo.html</a> Anyone remember this article in Wired from way back in 2007? It goes into the details of the technology company vs a media enterprise dilemma of Yahoo as identified by Paul Graham in his piece and how then CEO Terry Semel messed it all up.

Somebody please help poor pg and design him some prettier buttons than those purple beveled monstrosities..

There is no single Yahoo (part of the identity problem Yahoo has) and therefore you cannot generalize a culture across Yahoo.<p>Each division within Yahoo really had its own culture. The search group culture was entirely different from the media (news, sports, etc.) group which was entirely different from the listings (real-estate, etc.) business.<p>A group like Yahoo Search (prior to its sale) was an entirely tech centric organization. Many of the top engineers from Yahoo Search Yahoo! are now co-founders within top Silicon Valley startups.

Yahoo went bad because:<p>1. It has no notable engineering foundation;<p>2. It has no clear vision about what it is and where it's going; and<p>3. Like Microsoft, it's put a business person in charge, which is the death knell of any tech company. You need someone with a technical foundation or a product person, not a business wonk.

I think there's something to be said for focusing on what the market rewards, and clearly the market wasn't rewarding yahoo for having great technology in 1998. Nor did it reward Google for having great enterprise search. You can't fault Jerry and David for not seeing search when the market had clearly supported banners with no basis for search as a viable model yet.

Relevant question on Quora: Why did the web services (Web 2.0) group at Yahoo faill after acquiring Flickr, delicious, upcoming, mybloglog et al:<p><a href="http://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-web-services-group-at-Yahoo-fail-after-acquiring-Flickr-Delicious-Upcoming-MyBlogLog-and-others" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-web-services-group-at-Yahoo...</a>

What Yahoo employees think about Yahoo: <a href="http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Yahoo-Reviews-E5807.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Yahoo-Reviews-E5807.htm</a>

<i>So which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture? Which companies are "in the software business" in this respect? As Yahoo discovered, the area covered by this rule is bigger than most people realize. The answer is: any company that needs to have good software.</i><p>In my time, I've heard and seen an number of non-software companies choke, stumble, and even become acquisition targets because of bad software. Budget car rentals was one that immediately comes to mind that I can actually talk about. For awhile I had a spate of bad customer service experiences where the reps explained that "our system crashed."<p>If PG is right, all companies are going to need a hacker-centric culture!<p>Another takeaway from the article: Bogosity kinda works, but only on shorter timescales and for a minority of participants.

&#62; <i>"I remember telling David Filo in late 1998 or early 1999 that Yahoo should buy Google, because I and most of the other programmers in the company were using it instead of Yahoo for search. He told me that it wasn't worth worrying about. Search was only 6% of our traffic, and we were growing at 10% a month."</i><p>I'm assuming that their other 94% of traffic came from their content/media business, mail, and other portal-related activities. Since search seems to be a large part of the internet now, has their numbers changed today, or have they stayed about the same?<p>And search was such a small thing back then—did Google set the example for search becoming one of the most important actions on the internet?

I really don't get these Yahoo is dead stories. It's still the biggest site in the world if all it's properties are put together.

So Yahoo's problem was they were trying to get big, and one way was to call themselves a media company (earn ad dollars, avoid MS radar). However, by doing this, they stopped acting like a technology company, and lost their focus on technology and solutions, but rather chasing the next banner ad buyer.<p>In contrast, Google was concerned about perfecting its search product, and therefore was focusing on what would help in that regard (hackers), which helped sustain its hacker culture.

Yahoo! is definitely not beyond being turned around, though it will take a huge effort.

Try logging into yahoo domains. It's nearly impossible. I think Yahoo's problems are 100% UI and navigation related.

"In the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture."<p>I think you have to tread carefully in an area like this if you are a programmer. Many opportunities to to confirm a bias.<p>First, the world is not composed of productive hackers and politicians. In a media company, for example, there are writers, producers, actors, etc. Some of them brilliant. A good strategy for a media company could be to have the best of these.<p>Second, it's not always obvious what business you are in. I think this is especially for startups because they don't have a big version of themselves to look at. If you are a budding fast food chain, you know what business you are in and you've got examples. Yahoo didn't.<p>Not all internet companies turned out to be technology companies. Not all such companies in the future will either.<p>I'm sceptical that Yahoo was ever a great media company either.

How about the 3rd universal factor: growing too big too soon?

I would remind people that PG's credibility as a successful "big thinker" is largely based on the cash he made winning the dot-com lottery by selling his first company to people who, as he says, had little idea of, and less interest in, what they were buying.

"But they had the most opaque obstacle in the world between them and the truth: money."<p>rings true for humans too.

From Quora: <a href="http://www.quora.com/How-valid-are-the-reasons-for-Yahoo-problems-mentioned-in-Paul-Grahams-new-article-What-Happened-to-Yahoo-Are-they-still-valid-in-current-Yahoo" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/How-valid-are-the-reasons-for-Yahoo-pro...</a><p>The main point of Graham's article is that Yahoo! didn't have a hacker-centric culture. If there was a time when that was true, it must have been before I joined.<p>A company without a hacker-centric culture doesn't encourage the kind of risk-taking and experimentation I saw when I was at Yahoo! Search. As an engineer, I had direct input into product features at every level, from ideation to design to implementation to launch. If I had a crazy idea, I was encouraged not just to tell people about it (up to and including executives), but to implement it and see if it tested well with users. I was able to add my own personal touch to parts of the product (sometimes big parts) without needing to ask permission or wade through excessive red tape.<p>This may not sound impressive to someone who's used to the way things work at startups or small companies. But this was at one of the largest Internet companies in the world, on one of the most visited websites in the world. For Yahoo! to give me and other engineers the kind of freedom and power we had is not normal for a company or a product that operates at this scale.

The essay seems to draw the conclusion that the difference between Yahoo and Google was more or less a matter of historical happenstance. Google did well because at the time Google was being built, they simply weren't (and couldn't be) part of the typical business model of the day, while Yahoo simply became trapped by it.

"The worst problem was that they hired bad programmers."<p>Can you provide any specific examples of how bad programmers hurt Yahoo?

I loved the last sentence on hacker culture:<p>"But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example."

Difference is the focus:<p>Business people -&#62; ROI,IRR -&#62; fast profits<p>Hackers -&#62; hard-to-do -&#62; sustainable profits

Very similar to AOL's situation except they went even further in becoming a media company.<p>Dial-up access was their inflated source of revenue and their focus for much of the 2000s was on ad sales and not hacking.

They hired many very good programmers. That's just crazy to say otherwise. But if you lead programmers into a dessert you can't blame the troops when you die of thirst.

The definition of hackers back in the 90's is (and should be) different than the definition of hackers today.

The interesting thing is that Yahoo could have solved their problems by buying Google for a pittance.

A minor stylistic nit: I wouldn't have put 'hosed' in the lead. There are many equally valid words that convey the same meaning without such a colloquial feel to them; in other words, in 10/20 years they won't look as out of place as 'hosed' might.

Excellent Essay PG! I was at Lycos about the same time, and what was going on there was very similar to what you describe at Yahoo. Search was considered a commodity and out sourced to FAST. Lycos wanted to be considered a "Media Company" too.

&#62; <i>The prices seemed cheap...</i><p>cheap -&#62; low

Tens years from now, will you be writing the same article with the title "what happened to Google?". I'd say likely. Companies come and go. Just like assuming Facebook is the THE social graph because somewhere somehow another entrepreneur is working on that next Facebook or Google.

Sorry, PG, but I believe your post is an example of "dancing 'round and 'round and suppose while the secret sits in the middle and knows".<p>The most important thing is, the CEO very much needs to know nearly everything important for his company. For a company heavily involved in software, the CEO needs to understand software in general and the software of his company in particular.<p>In a startup, he needs to be able to understand all the software, in detail, from the 'architecture' down to line by line. So, for this he needs to have enough knowledge of computing to understand, evaluate, and construct the architecture and have good knowledge of all the crucial 'software tools'. So, if the software is in C++ and Apache, then the CEO needs to understand these two. Windows? He needs to understand some or all of .NET, the CLR, C#, Visual Basic .NET, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, etc.<p>Now we come to a curious point: For the CEO to acquire that knowledge takes more of his time than writing the code, given the knowledge. So, really, once the CEO has learned to write the code, he can, for less than the time investment in learning the tools, just go ahead and write the code. He should.<p>Since the CEO wrote the code, maybe that makes his company a 'hacker culture'? I hope not: There are things more important than ASP.NET, etc. While knowing ASP.NET might be necessary, it is not sufficient. Just because the CEO drives his car does not make him a chauffeur. Instead, the software is just part of his job.<p>Next, my experience is that the best software developers and, in particular, the ones best at the most technical details of software, and the best at software 'architecture' are not 'hackers' and are not even 'computer scientists' but are mathematicians who took out a few afternoons to understand, say, AVL trees, extensible hashing, Cartesian trees, minimum spanning trees, DeRemer's LALR parsing, and monotone locking protocols but also understand dynamic programming, linear programming on networks, Lagrangian relaxation and non-linear duality, Poisson and Markov processes, and martingales. Sorry 'bout that!<p>With that technical knowledge and work, he has to pay close attention to the product, customers, revenue, hiring, etc.<p>Not so strange.

PG: And without good programmers you won't get good software, no matter how many people you put on a task, or how many procedures you establish to ensure "quality"<p>IMHO truer words have never been spoken.