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Meg is part of a generation that treated devs (originally called “implementors” when she was young) like interchangeable technicians or “plumbers”. Jobs, was al

by vaxman 6y ago

Meg is part of a generation that treated devs (originally called “implementors” when she was young) like interchangeable technicians or “plumbers”. Jobs, was also part of that generation, except he was way “cooler” about it (in order to squeeze more productivity out of his plumbers than say, his original employer HP). Some of Jobs’ peers learned to do the same thing with their plumbers achieving varying degrees of success but a lot of FAILURE. To her credit, I think Meg always has understood you don’t give cash to some half-baked hipster because of their black turtleneck and story about a low barrier to market, but due to her limited perspective (she is not GenX), she didn’t know the proper balance to grow something like eBay into something like $3,000/share Amazon. I do think she is a winner and was a wise choice to get Katz’s mobile-first content out the door..the failure is due to mobile not being a thing during the Shelter In Place orders.

simonh 6y ago
Your comments on Jobs are weirdly off the mark. He had huge respect for engineering and said top engineers could be 10x or more as productive as the average. He certainly didn’t think they were all interchangeable. He said he hired the best engineers because he wanted them to tell him what needed doing or how to do it. Also he never worked for HP.
- AlanYx 6y ago
  I agree with you. But technically Steve Jobs did work for HP once... he had a summer job at HP at age 12, which he landed after calling Bill Hewlett asking for some spare parts to build a frequency counter.
BigJono 6y ago
I don't think this is a generation thing. The strategy of treating devs as interchangeable cogs is still absolutely thriving in management circles. The only differences now are that it's often glammed up with a bunch of lip service that seems to suggest the opposite approach (but no actions to follow that up), and that there's very successful pockets not using that approach, that aren't representative of the majority of the industry. I don't think either approach is necessarily 'wrong' either, because I've seen tons of companies have great success with staggering numbers of thoroughly mediocre devs and lots of turnover. But you very likely have to commit to one strategy or the other, the absolute shittest places I've worked are the ones where they're kidding themselves, unsure what they're trying to do, or half way through a transition from one approach to the other. As dumb and unintuitive as it sounds, I think you can run a big bank very successfully with 200 engineers siloed into small teams of experts, or with 3000 engineers shoveled into big "tribes" (or whatever the buzzword of the day is) of distributed responsibility. But I'm wary of anyone that's trying to do it with 800 engineers, especially the "we only hire the best!" variety. (those three numbers obviously scale with the size of the business and a bunch of external factors).
statictype 6y ago
This is definitely not true of Jobs. He would put aside time to identify and heavily recruit engineers he thought were talented. Scott Forstall has a story about how Jobs was basically afraid that he (Forstall) would be put off by the rest of the HR process and pulled him out and told him he's getting hired and to just go through the motions. Cabel Sasser from Panic has a story about how Jobs and Schiller tried to recruit Panic to work at Apple. Bill Atkinson also has a story about Jobs spending a day pitching to him to join the Apple engineering team.
baobabKoodaa 6y ago
> I do think she is a winner and was a wise choice to get Katz’s mobile-first content out the door..the failure is due to mobile not being a thing during the Shelter In Place orders. "Mobile only" is a self imposed limitation, so that's on Katzenberg and everyone else who had influence on that decision.

by vaxman 6y ago

simonh 6y ago

Your comments on Jobs are weirdly off the mark. He had huge respect for engineering and said top engineers could be 10x or more as productive as the average. He certainly didn’t think they were all interchangeable. He said he hired the best engineers because he wanted them to tell him what needed doing or how to do it. Also he never worked for HP.

AlanYx 6y ago
I agree with you. But technically Steve Jobs did work for HP once... he had a summer job at HP at age 12, which he landed after calling Bill Hewlett asking for some spare parts to build a frequency counter.

BigJono 6y ago

I don't think this is a generation thing. The strategy of treating devs as interchangeable cogs is still absolutely thriving in management circles. The only differences now are that it's often glammed up with a bunch of lip service that seems to suggest the opposite approach (but no actions to follow that up), and that there's very successful pockets not using that approach, that aren't representative of the majority of the industry. I don't think either approach is necessarily 'wrong' either, because I've seen tons of companies have great success with staggering numbers of thoroughly mediocre devs and lots of turnover. But you very likely have to commit to one strategy or the other, the absolute shittest places I've worked are the ones where they're kidding themselves, unsure what they're trying to do, or half way through a transition from one approach to the other. As dumb and unintuitive as it sounds, I think you can run a big bank very successfully with 200 engineers siloed into small teams of experts, or with 3000 engineers shoveled into big "tribes" (or whatever the buzzword of the day is) of distributed responsibility. But I'm wary of anyone that's trying to do it with 800 engineers, especially the "we only hire the best!" variety. (those three numbers obviously scale with the size of the business and a bunch of external factors).

statictype 6y ago

This is definitely not true of Jobs. He would put aside time to identify and heavily recruit engineers he thought were talented. Scott Forstall has a story about how Jobs was basically afraid that he (Forstall) would be put off by the rest of the HR process and pulled him out and told him he's getting hired and to just go through the motions. Cabel Sasser from Panic has a story about how Jobs and Schiller tried to recruit Panic to work at Apple. Bill Atkinson also has a story about Jobs spending a day pitching to him to join the Apple engineering team.

baobabKoodaa 6y ago

> I do think she is a winner and was a wise choice to get Katz’s mobile-first content out the door..the failure is due to mobile not being a thing during the Shelter In Place orders. "Mobile only" is a self imposed limitation, so that's on Katzenberg and everyone else who had influence on that decision.