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> I don't know how they didn't all get fired. Like, ALL of em, including everyone who set up the special "OldTuber" priv long before. I can think of 2 reasons:
by AceJohnny2 8y ago
> I don't know how they didn't all get fired. Like, ALL of em, including everyone who set up the special "OldTuber" priv long before.
I can think of 2 reasons:
1. The gamble paid off. It turned out the time was ripe. Thus, there was really no negative impact on the organization that people had to be punished for.
2. The OldTubers were the experienced backbone of the group. Firing everyone with that privilege would likely have destroyed the group's technical expertise. YouTube as it was would have died.
That latter point is a bit of a strong negotiation position that many engineers don't realize they have. For example in my team we're having a lot of difficulty filling job openings (we're picky and frankly our interviewing pipeline sucks). As such, there's a significant cost/benefit calculation to firing someone. Maybe the person did something egregious, but is it likely to happen again? I know some people in my team are... not great, but are they so bad that we would be better off without them? (I must reluctantly admit, no)
- Zak 8y agoI can think of a third reason: everybody in the industry wanted IE6 dead. It was expensive to maintain support for an old, broken browser and often meant new features couldn't be added. The people who should have fired the conspirators were glad that the conspiracy succeeded even if they had objections to the methods used.
- neilv 8y agoI'm really glad this method of execution was an honest banner. (The biggest problem here might've been cutting colleagues out of the loop it sounds like they were probably supposed to be in.) When I started reading the story, I was afraid it was going to go in the direction of sneaky sabotage, like intentionally causing performance problems or crashes. There've been accusations of that happening, within the last year. Earlier, there was a long history in the computer industry of sneaky sabotage of competitors, which was suggested by the (perhaps only a joke, in that particular case) mantra "DOS isn't done, till Lotus doesn't run".
- closeparen 8y agoYou don't need sneaky sabotage to break the UX in IE6. Just not going out of your way for it will do that.
- neilv 8y agoI remember. :) Getting browser developers to comply with basic standards was a bigger problem around then. (Initially, everyone out of the gate, including MCom/Netscape, was rushing to throw in new features without standards, either to make the Web more appealing to people, or because the nonstandard bits were a shorter path from their current platforms or implementations, or as a competitive play to be the preferred browser. A bit after, one of the developers had incentive to sabotage the Web, which arguably is part of the reason why many organizations got stuck on particular old browser versions.) After monumental amounts of work, everyone started accepting standards, we then had waves of other related problems, and might be entering a new wave now (unclear).
- taf2 8y agozoom:1;float:left
- Shorel 8y ago> When I started reading the story, I was afraid it was going to go in the direction of sneaky sabotage, like intentionally causing performance problems or crashes. You mean like they seem to be doing to Firefox right now?
- razakel 8y ago>I can think of a third reason: everybody in the industry wanted IE6 dead. Ever heard the story of Ken McElroy? He was a rapist, burglar and child molester murdered in 1981 in Missouri. In front of 46 witnesses. Nobody saw anything.
- megaremote 8y ago3. They need developers. Everyone was hiring like mad in those days, still are. They don't want to lose a big pile of good developers.