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I think 'thrown under the bus' is a bit extreme. He was simply telling it as he saw it. They hired people that turned out to be not as good as he would have l

I think 'thrown under the bus' is a bit extreme. He was simply telling it as he saw it. They hired people that turned out to be not as good as he would have liked, and that was a major issue that cascaded. I don't see anything wrong with that.

acidblue 16y ago
I completely agree. I see this sort of 'shotgun hiring' all the time. It is very difficult to hire a lot of very good developers in a short amount of time. Sorry to say it, but there are an ever increasing amount of awful coders out there. I really do mean awful. Kevin is just telling it like he saw it. I am sure the good devs over at Digg would say the same thing.
- Dylanlacey 16y ago
  To be fair, I'm assuming that the percentage of terrible developers is constant, it's just that A: You're hiring more of them, and B: More people are being terrible web developers rather then terrible desktop application developers.
  - dasil003 16y ago
    That doesn't seem like a legit assumption though. Combine the sensationalization of tech media with ever-lower barriers to entry for web and mobile development, and it seems almost impossible that there wouldn't be significantly more terrible developers than ever before.
- Stormbringer 16y ago
  The shotgun can work. Put them to work as interns, then mentally review their performance at the 2 week, 4 week, 2 month and 3 month anniversaries. If at any point you find that they are significantly underperforming, go and find out why. E.g. maybe for the first 3 weeks they were on database stuff, which they love, but they've been reassigned to UI which they hate. Maybe their dog died. If they underperform at any two of the reviews stages, get rid of them. If they are bad for morale, get rid of them. A great coder that is an energy vampire for your good coders is a net loss. One place I worked we had a guy who was supposed to be a good programmer. The first week there he was really depressed about Michael Jackson's death. I tried to cheer him up and he perked up for a couple of days in the second week. Then in the third week I discovered he was actively looking for work elsewhere (and telling other devs about it). I pulled him aside and told him to pull his head in. He came right for a while but the next week he was down again. He broke the build every second day, and nobody ever chastised him for it (there might have been some playful ribbing along the lines of 'you broke it, you bought it') but the one time I broke the build he lost his shit and started screaming at me, telling me (in front of managers) that I was incompetent. He had epic mood swings, when he was up he could be the most charming guy in the world, when he was down he was evil up to and including physically attacking and bullying other devs (but never in front of the managers). Naturally, the managers loved him, so I left.
  - ojbyrne 16y ago
    There was never anything resembling performance reviews at digg, while I was there.
    - Stormbringer 16y ago
      And actually, I was careful not to call them performance reviews. Performance reviews are horrible, and consist of all sorts of minefields and HR BS. E.g. rate yourself from 1 to 5 in these areas, but nobody gets a 5. When I said mentally review their performance, I meant mentally ask yourself if the person is up to scratch. E.g. is their actual performance good. Now, most managers wouldn't be able to tell you this, so this shouldn't be something that is done by a manager. It should be done by a senior dev who has some kind of knowledge of the area the 'intern' is working in. Alternately, you could have a tribal council of say three senior devs, and they vote at the 2w,4w,2m,3m periods. Anybody that gets too many downvotes gets to leave the island :D But note also that if somebody is temporarily under-performing then you need to find out why and fix it (Note: not the same as 'fix them'). The goal is to as fast as possible identify the people who are consistently underperforming, or show enough signs of flakiness, so that you can utilise the built in 'thank you for playing, you are the weakest link, goodbye' clause built in to most contracts.
ojbyrne 16y ago
No offense, but Kevin wouldn't know a good coder from a bad coder if his life depended on it. He can't read code, is essentially innumerate, and mostly just plays a techie on TV. To be blunt, he's blaming just about everybody else but himself. A college dropout who couldn't write a line of code to save his life talking about "B and C" players is offensive.
- getsat 16y ago
  I had that same though pop into my head. Right after claiming that Digg hired a lot of "B" and "C" coders, he says that he's handpicking everyone who is working on his new project. I don't see how that will prevent the same issue from occurring.
  - Stormbringer 16y ago
    I agree. And massive raspberries in Mr Rose's general direction. However, consider the reverse, is there anybody who is consistently good at picking good developers? Is there any interview process that consistently works? If so, I am not aware of it. Hence I don't consider the hiring process to be 'solved'. I can see the reasons behind Joel Spolsky's "make sure they write code during the interview" mantra, but you look at some of the other stuff he wants and it's all pointless pointer twiddling. Then he went and broke all the rules anyway by working with Jeff Atwood who by his own admission wouldn't know a C pointer if it bit him in the face. It makes me wonder, how do they do it in other professions? E.g. is there a process by which you can weed out the good Civil Engineers from the bad ones? Or good Lawyers (leaving aside the obvious and droll joke), or good Doctors? What about a people oriented profession like Priest? Surely they would be able to weed out the good from the bad. But no, it turns out that for Doctors and Priests we're always getting bad ones in the news (Doctor's lying about their qualifications, practicising without a licence etc). Okay then, the 'fluffy' professions haven't got this sussed, what about the technical ones?
    - dacort 16y ago
      "is there a process by which you can weed out the good Civil Engineers from the bad ones" Yes, this the process of licensing. In those professions you mentioned, all people who (legally) work in the field must undergo a process of training and subsequent certification. This includes both work experience and exam requirements over the course of several years prior to certification. Yes, there are people that cheat the system, but the licensing exists to weed them out and protect the consumer. Software "engineers" undergo no such process or requirements. I can learn ruby in my basement in a year, call myself a software engineer, and get hired building any number of apps. Is my work critical enough that someone may die if I am not certified? Usually not, so the need for certification isn't as strong. Nor have we had the time to develop such continuously relevant certifications in a field that changes several times a year.
moonpolysoft 16y ago
What I find objectionable about the video is not his identification of team quality being the problem. It's his total abandonment of responsibility for it as a founder. That he'd say he just woke up one day surrounded by B and C players he hadn't interviewed makes it seem like everyone else was running amok and he is not to blame. Trashing the reputations of his ex-employees in order to save face on a tech show is irresponsible at best, and at worst a demonstration that he is unfit to lead a team of any size.
- ojbyrne 16y ago
  Amen. Note that the reason Kevin was too busy to interview everyone is that he was busy doing side projects. In my opinion if you want to know what was wrong with digg, I'd start with Revision3 Pownce Wefollow
- originalgeek 16y ago
  The most telling part is he doesn't even have enough sense to recognize that blaming "them" only makes him look bad. I'll bet though there are plenty of "Bubble Boys" who just can't wait to lose money on his next venture.
- zmmmmm 16y ago
  Especially since in the period he talks about digg was somewhere between 30 - 75 employees. He speaks as if they had hundreds or thousands of employees, but having only ~50 employees and claiming that you don't know half of them is either completely not credible, or if you accept it as true, a huge abrogation of responsibility and personal indictment of his own behavior.
  - danilocampos 16y ago
    My completely uninformed assumption is that for an attention seeker like Rose, running around and doing things that get you more attention is probably a lot more fun and rewarding than the nitty, gritty details of managing a business.
    - 16y ago
mikeryan 16y ago
So from my perspective (having no internal knowledge) while Digg may have had its downtime, there's no technical reason why it's failing right now. Digg's biggest failures seem to be 1. it doesn't make enough money and 2. its product re-launch was a failure of epic proportions. Blaming this on the B&C level programming talent is a bullshit way to deflect mistakes he made.

acidblue 16y ago

I completely agree. I see this sort of 'shotgun hiring' all the time. It is very difficult to hire a lot of very good developers in a short amount of time. Sorry to say it, but there are an ever increasing amount of awful coders out there. I really do mean awful. Kevin is just telling it like he saw it. I am sure the good devs over at Digg would say the same thing.

Dylanlacey 16y ago
To be fair, I'm assuming that the percentage of terrible developers is constant, it's just that A: You're hiring more of them, and B: More people are being terrible web developers rather then terrible desktop application developers.
- dasil003 16y ago
  That doesn't seem like a legit assumption though. Combine the sensationalization of tech media with ever-lower barriers to entry for web and mobile development, and it seems almost impossible that there wouldn't be significantly more terrible developers than ever before.
Stormbringer 16y ago
The shotgun can work. Put them to work as interns, then mentally review their performance at the 2 week, 4 week, 2 month and 3 month anniversaries. If at any point you find that they are significantly underperforming, go and find out why. E.g. maybe for the first 3 weeks they were on database stuff, which they love, but they've been reassigned to UI which they hate. Maybe their dog died. If they underperform at any two of the reviews stages, get rid of them. If they are bad for morale, get rid of them. A great coder that is an energy vampire for your good coders is a net loss. One place I worked we had a guy who was supposed to be a good programmer. The first week there he was really depressed about Michael Jackson's death. I tried to cheer him up and he perked up for a couple of days in the second week. Then in the third week I discovered he was actively looking for work elsewhere (and telling other devs about it). I pulled him aside and told him to pull his head in. He came right for a while but the next week he was down again. He broke the build every second day, and nobody ever chastised him for it (there might have been some playful ribbing along the lines of 'you broke it, you bought it') but the one time I broke the build he lost his shit and started screaming at me, telling me (in front of managers) that I was incompetent. He had epic mood swings, when he was up he could be the most charming guy in the world, when he was down he was evil up to and including physically attacking and bullying other devs (but never in front of the managers). Naturally, the managers loved him, so I left.
- ojbyrne 16y ago
  There was never anything resembling performance reviews at digg, while I was there.
  - Stormbringer 16y ago
    And actually, I was careful not to call them performance reviews. Performance reviews are horrible, and consist of all sorts of minefields and HR BS. E.g. rate yourself from 1 to 5 in these areas, but nobody gets a 5. When I said mentally review their performance, I meant mentally ask yourself if the person is up to scratch. E.g. is their actual performance good. Now, most managers wouldn't be able to tell you this, so this shouldn't be something that is done by a manager. It should be done by a senior dev who has some kind of knowledge of the area the 'intern' is working in. Alternately, you could have a tribal council of say three senior devs, and they vote at the 2w,4w,2m,3m periods. Anybody that gets too many downvotes gets to leave the island :D But note also that if somebody is temporarily under-performing then you need to find out why and fix it (Note: not the same as 'fix them'). The goal is to as fast as possible identify the people who are consistently underperforming, or show enough signs of flakiness, so that you can utilise the built in 'thank you for playing, you are the weakest link, goodbye' clause built in to most contracts.

ojbyrne 16y ago

No offense, but Kevin wouldn't know a good coder from a bad coder if his life depended on it. He can't read code, is essentially innumerate, and mostly just plays a techie on TV. To be blunt, he's blaming just about everybody else but himself. A college dropout who couldn't write a line of code to save his life talking about "B and C" players is offensive.

getsat 16y ago
I had that same though pop into my head. Right after claiming that Digg hired a lot of "B" and "C" coders, he says that he's handpicking everyone who is working on his new project. I don't see how that will prevent the same issue from occurring.
- Stormbringer 16y ago
  I agree. And massive raspberries in Mr Rose's general direction. However, consider the reverse, is there anybody who is consistently good at picking good developers? Is there any interview process that consistently works? If so, I am not aware of it. Hence I don't consider the hiring process to be 'solved'. I can see the reasons behind Joel Spolsky's "make sure they write code during the interview" mantra, but you look at some of the other stuff he wants and it's all pointless pointer twiddling. Then he went and broke all the rules anyway by working with Jeff Atwood who by his own admission wouldn't know a C pointer if it bit him in the face. It makes me wonder, how do they do it in other professions? E.g. is there a process by which you can weed out the good Civil Engineers from the bad ones? Or good Lawyers (leaving aside the obvious and droll joke), or good Doctors? What about a people oriented profession like Priest? Surely they would be able to weed out the good from the bad. But no, it turns out that for Doctors and Priests we're always getting bad ones in the news (Doctor's lying about their qualifications, practicising without a licence etc). Okay then, the 'fluffy' professions haven't got this sussed, what about the technical ones?
  - dacort 16y ago
    "is there a process by which you can weed out the good Civil Engineers from the bad ones" Yes, this the process of licensing. In those professions you mentioned, all people who (legally) work in the field must undergo a process of training and subsequent certification. This includes both work experience and exam requirements over the course of several years prior to certification. Yes, there are people that cheat the system, but the licensing exists to weed them out and protect the consumer. Software "engineers" undergo no such process or requirements. I can learn ruby in my basement in a year, call myself a software engineer, and get hired building any number of apps. Is my work critical enough that someone may die if I am not certified? Usually not, so the need for certification isn't as strong. Nor have we had the time to develop such continuously relevant certifications in a field that changes several times a year.

moonpolysoft 16y ago

What I find objectionable about the video is not his identification of team quality being the problem. It's his total abandonment of responsibility for it as a founder. That he'd say he just woke up one day surrounded by B and C players he hadn't interviewed makes it seem like everyone else was running amok and he is not to blame. Trashing the reputations of his ex-employees in order to save face on a tech show is irresponsible at best, and at worst a demonstration that he is unfit to lead a team of any size.

ojbyrne 16y ago
Amen. Note that the reason Kevin was too busy to interview everyone is that he was busy doing side projects. In my opinion if you want to know what was wrong with digg, I'd start with Revision3 Pownce Wefollow
originalgeek 16y ago
The most telling part is he doesn't even have enough sense to recognize that blaming "them" only makes him look bad. I'll bet though there are plenty of "Bubble Boys" who just can't wait to lose money on his next venture.
zmmmmm 16y ago
Especially since in the period he talks about digg was somewhere between 30 - 75 employees. He speaks as if they had hundreds or thousands of employees, but having only ~50 employees and claiming that you don't know half of them is either completely not credible, or if you accept it as true, a huge abrogation of responsibility and personal indictment of his own behavior.
- danilocampos 16y ago
  My completely uninformed assumption is that for an attention seeker like Rose, running around and doing things that get you more attention is probably a lot more fun and rewarding than the nitty, gritty details of managing a business.
  - 16y ago

mikeryan 16y ago

So from my perspective (having no internal knowledge) while Digg may have had its downtime, there's no technical reason why it's failing right now. Digg's biggest failures seem to be 1. it doesn't make enough money and 2. its product re-launch was a failure of epic proportions. Blaming this on the B&C level programming talent is a bullshit way to deflect mistakes he made.