Brin on Yegge's post: "I stopped reading it after the first 1,000 pages"

<i>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."<p>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."</i><p>Are we ever going to have a social network run by people with sufficient diplomatic skill to host a simple birthday party?<p>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 <i>public</i> threat and a not-at-all-veiled peremptory brush-off, that journalist did a fine job.<p>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 <i>human</i> response from the podium, but you can't fix history.

&#62; <i>"If you want to get a point across, limit it to a paragraph or so."</i><p>And, with that, Sergey Brin invalidates the entire human race's history of long-form literature, short stories, essays, and plays...<p>... and his company's own Android launch yesterday, which I suspect was more verbose than a few paragraphs.

Ok, just for mr. Brin then:<p>"Services should be composable or sooner or later we'll get a competitor that gets this who will kill us."<p>I hope that accurately summarizes the essential bits, if you disagree or can shorten it further feel free to correct.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>more</i> buildings which normal badges won't open. Look up building 1489 for an example.<p>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?

<i>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."</i><p>Considering that Yegge seemed to make a compelling case, that peremptory response doesn't reflect well on the Google executive team.

Please, <i>please</i> 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 <i>listen</i>. 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.<p>It seems Brin and others want to diffuse the situation with jokes, etc. It would have been <i>much</i> 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.<p>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.

Yegge's articles are interesting but they are also ridiculously long. He writes a thousand words when a hundred will suffice.<p>There's nothing wrong with that - Neal Stephenson has made a name for himself using that technique - but it's not for everyone.<p>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.

That is Brin's code for "I don't care what Steve Yegge thinks."<p>So, Sergey, you need things in a paragraph or less? Here you go:<p>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.<p>Sorry to be so curt, Sergey -- but I didn't want to lose your interest.

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.

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".<p>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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.<p>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.

Here's a Yegge blog post from 2008 where he defends his verbosity (in general):<p><a href="http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-size-does-matter.html" rel="nofollow">http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-...</a><p>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.<p>Having said that, you should go read the blog post so you can remember it.

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.)

Cnet's article calls the memo "highly critical" but it seems pretty clear that he wasn't trying to rant so much as issue what he sees as a clarion call to action at a company he loves... and he took care to begin by praising Google for doing "everything right" and end by apologizing for any ruffled feathers or misrepresentations he might have made.<p>He might not be too comfortable at work right now, but his post did have the intended effect: people are still talking about it, and his company management is getting asked about it. And Sergey Brin is cracking jokes about it. And here we are talking about it.<p>If anyone is entitled to get their feathers ruffled by all this, it is Amazon. He really pulled no punches with them. My favorites were the description of his former employer as a "dirt-smeared cube farm" and the characterization of his former CEO as "Dread Pirate Bezos" who "makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies". That is some good material there.

I completely agree with Brin -- I can't stand Yegge's rants because they take far too long to get to the point.

It would have been funnier if Brin would have said to limit these points to a tweet.

He gets some good advice from Brin himself, where is the problem? I don't think Yegge-rants work for everyone.

It speaks well of Google's openness that Brin's response is a quip about how long it was, not a serious comment about how such discussions should stay internal.<p>If Google were to fire Yegge, it would be for (voluntarily) deleting the post, not for accidentally making it public. When he publicly posted it, everybody was talking about what a great work environment Google must have for people to be able to talk so openly. After he deleted it, lots of people inferred censorship and Google's reputation suffered.

"That's why we didn't fire him"?<p>Classy.

Before we call Brin's attitude dismissive, let's not forget that at almost any other company Yegge would have been fired.

LOL, Brin was right on target. I ask myself how on earth can I guy write SO MUCH of a blog post and still have time to get things done. If Yegge is not not able to summarize his POVs in one page or two then it's better not to try at all.

Now, instead of talking about the points that Yegge raised, everyone is talking about how cool Google is for not firing. But for me the important thing is the content of his rant...

Finally! Yegge has some fine points and I would like to learn about them - but not for this price. And by the way - I really hate his strategy of flattening CS graduates by adding something about how real programming requires writing a parser a year.

I'm getting:<p><i>The page isn't redirecting properly<p>Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.</i><p>Does anyone have a copy of Brin's post?<p>EDIT: Works now for me, too.

For those who have read the Commonwealth Saga: is Ozzie=Sergey and Nigel=Larry or the other way around?

&#62;"He was intimately behind pushing us"<p>A poor choice of words perhaps...

This strikes me as pure arrogance. If that's Serg's general attitude about what Google does, I fear for its future.

Here you go, Sergey: "You're being a dick."

In pg's Hierarchy of arguments <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html</a> , "I stopped reading after x pages" is "DH2: Responding to Tone" and therefore always unconvincing.