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Hacker News Fires Steve Yegge
- tomfakes 15y agoHere's the money quote: I'm officially quitting that job on national TV The use of the word 'job' there implies The Job, not 'the job on the project', hence the overall confusion - people taking the words as said, not as meant Note: Did HN just screw up this same posting?
- rsanheim 15y agoAgreed, interesting that Yegge stresses project in his post when he clearly says job in the video.
- jshen 15y agoHe said it more than once, and clearly said project one of those times. He also gave context that made it quite clear he was talking about the project.
- nimblegorilla 15y agoHe made it pretty clear that he was quitting "that job" and going to study more bioinformatics. As far as I know Google doesn't do a lot of bioinformatics. Peppered with a couple of his midlife crisis comments it seems like a fair assumption that he was leaving Google. At no time in the video did he explicitly say that he was staying.
- jshen 15y agoHm, i just rewatched it and you are right. When I watched it the first I took it to mean that project, but it was confusing.
- brown9-2 15y agoDisagree. After watching the video, he talks about the project, mentions quitting "that job", and then the speech is over. Not that any of it really matters - but the statement in the video is confusing.
- jshen 15y agoYeah, you are right
- chegra 15y agoCould have sworn I saw this at no.1 with 44points in 12 minutes with about 7 comments. And there was a guy requesting a feature saying he hates to be that guy. Edit: Oh it died: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813976 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813976
- DanielRibeiro 15y agoGuess it got flagged quite fast because of the title. Maybe I should change it to give more the spirit of the post. Edit: hope it is better now.
- raldi 15y agoWhat did it say initially?
- DanielRibeiro 15y agoIt was the title of the blog (Hacker News Fires Steve Yegge ), which I understand that can be misleading and offsensive to some. Edit: Guess I was wrong. Someone changed back to the original title. I guess it is more compliant with HN guidelines.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- madmaze 15y agointeresting is also that even after this post got pushed back down, it got 12 votes in 10 min and didnt make it to the front page where as there are 2 posts that have <10 votes in one hr
- madmaze 15y agohere is his talk, very inspiring http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8
- nikcub 15y agointeresting - but I didn't totally buy into it. new web communication tools are helping to bring down governments and giving people new freedoms it is like telling alexander graham bell to not waste his time on the telephone since people are just going to use it to spread gossip and rumor
- chc 15y agoBut the thing is, a lot of these "new Web communication tools" are "new" only in the sense that they aren't very old, not in the more important sense that they're novel in a useful way.
- majmun 15y agoBut it would be so convinient for Google if they have less competition working in communication tools. and more working on projects that Google is not working on. yes longevity of life is important but quality is also important.
- bretthoerner 15y agoSo basically his inspirational talk turned into "I was pulled over to the Google Plus team, but I said never mind and went back to working on developer tools"? Kind of a let down. :(
- btrask 15y agoIt shouldn't matter what Steve Yegge decides to work on. You can still start working on big, important problems if you want to.
- bretthoerner 15y agoIt doesn't, but you can't help but feel his excitement during the talk ... and yet ...
- jshen 15y agoI think tools are very important for society. Improving them is important too.
- pnathan 15y agoDeveloper tools are kind of a big deal.
- bartonfink 15y agoNot really in the sense he was talking about. He literally stood up at a major conference and urged the development community to go learn bioinformatics and work on the cure for cancer. No developer tool will ever come close to the amount of positive impact on the world that a cure for cancer would.
- paulbaumgart 15y agoGood tools can help a lot with successfully managing the complexity of computational models of biological systems-- models that might end up being used in developing cures for all sorts of diseases.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jsavimbi 15y agoRegardless of what Steve does in his professional life, I, for one, am going to stop procrastinating on all of those R links I've been saving up on Evernote and get down to some science.
- dougws 15y agoI'm surprised Stevey didn't mention that this is not the first time something like this has happened: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/boring-stevey-status-update.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/boring-stevey-status... .
- suyash 15y agoSource code can be turned in the form of wikipedia information, how awesome that would be, reading and understanding bad code or not properly documented or written code is one hard problem in the industry that needs a really good solution. Good luck Steve.
- vailripper 15y agoHe mentions how broken the typical interview process is, something I hear repeated frequently. I'm curious what you guys think the "ideal" interview process would look like?
- daleharvey 15y agoit looks awfully like "hey, we need x and y done, I (worked with you before / was recommended by a friend I trust / follow your open source contributions / blog) and think you would be a good fit, interested?
- riprock 15y agoI think a big reason why most people go with a career and degree in software engineering as opposed to bioinformatics is because of a bigger job market, a higher salary potential, and a lower commitment to achieve the goal (computer science degree as a 4 or 6 year degree, vs a mandatory 8+ year degree in bioinformatics.) Unless these things change, bioinformatics will remain unappealing to top google engineers who are paid to scale cat pictures at salaries like 250k+. To add one more thing, perl is huge in the bioinformatics community, which would never win a popularity contest among software developers.
- sciurus 15y agoI expect that most universities have a core curriculum that requires CS majors to take other science courses. Make those courses genetics and biochemistry and a CS undergraduate can probably get into a 2-year masters program for bioinformatics.
- riprock 15y agoI might get some backlash for this, but while you can apply for some bioinformatics jobs with a MS, PhD is the norm not the exception for biology-related fields. Without a PhD, you won't get very far career-wise.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- brown9-2 15y agoIt must be a truly great place to work if the sentences "I quit this project" and "I quit this company" don't end up with the same result. How many companies let the employee choose to stop working on a project they are assigned to?
- orangecat 15y agoNot only that, but trash the project in public.
- nostrademons 15y agoIs this not common in large companies that do lots of things? It seems like a terrible waste if the only way to get off a bad project is to quit the company.
- URSpider94 15y agoNot that common. Most companies like to think that they don't have any "bad" projects; if they did, they would cancel them. And, they're afraid that employees will confuse "hard" projects with "bad" projects, and try to flee the hard projects, which are often business-critical. Google is smart enough to realize that employees can often identify bad (and good) projects before the management does, and lets them vote with their feet.
- sbhat7 15y agoMy friend used to work for a large multi-national. In his company, each of the departments were like companies in itself. The formalities for quitting the job and changing departments were the same. So most of the time the only way to get off a bad project was to quit the company.
- _delirium 15y agoThat's how I've usually heard of it being done at large companies. When a friend changed departments internally at a large petrochemicals company, he had to go through a whole application process: look on the internal HR system for a job opening, send in an application and resume, interview with the new group, etc.
- GaryOlson 15y agoSteve, if you plan to do more public speaking, and promote your videos, please spend more effort on your public speaking skills....ya know? 'K? I was bored. Right?
- ddw 15y agoI'm not trying to be crass, I really don't know: what does he mean by Google is "forcing governments to be more open, forcing corporations to play more fairly"? I'm racking my head on how this could be true as I would really like it to believe it.
- pnathan 15y agoBasically, high-quality search and comprehensive indexing means its hard to sweep things under the rug: once the data gets out onto the net, it tends to stay there. Google's played a large part in that.
- swah 15y agoFolks that are good at making money to invest in folks solving big problems. I don't get it.
- fedd 15y agowith this headline the magical voice-over told me he was fired from hacker news.
- mannicken 15y agoI interviewed at a Google campus in Kirkland. Unimpressed. Overrated madly, in my opinion. I expected a lot, a lot better campus, sorry. The buildings were boring and I couldn't find the right one because NONE OF THEM have a visible building number. There is no map of the campus (hell, even community colleges have maps). The parking didn't have cover so after staying under hot sun, my car became extremely hot. Unpleasant experience to say the least. People were cool, though. I just had a much better feeling from Microsoft campus than Google's campus.
- DaveMebs 15y agoWhile it is a fair point, you have to keep in ming you are comparing Microsoft's main campus with a secondary Google campus.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- nostrademons 15y agoYeah, the secondary campuses (except, I've heard, for Zurich and Moscow...Pittsburgh is pretty cool too) are nowhere near as nice as the headquarters. Many of them don't even serve dinner.
- drgath 15y ago> "Many of them don't even serve dinner." Oh the humanity.
- vl 15y agoNot to be the nitpicker, but since I work at this very campus (and worked at main MS campus for 8 years) I'll share my opinion. In all essentials this campus is light years ahead of MS. From the public WiFi for Androids & iPhones, to on-campus gym, floor plan maps on every corner, available conference rooms with VC equipment, laptop power bricks in conference rooms, espresso machines, actually drinkable tea, tech support staff on site and godzillion other tiny details it's easier to work on this campus in so many aspects each and every work day. Since there are only three buildings next to each other is seems not much effort went into inter-building navigational aids (doors are labeled, but clearly it's not enough), may be we can do better. Visitor parking has no cover on MS campus as well, it's pretty much common to have it this way. And, btw, after having a chance to compare, I think our cafe is better than most of MTV cafes.
- calibraxis 15y ago"Google's interview process -- what's the word I'm looking for here -- ah yes, their process sucks at letting in all the qualified people. They're trying to get better at it, but it's not really Google's fault so much as the fault of interviewers who insist that you're not qualified to work there unless you are exactly like them. Of course, there are interviewers like that wherever you go." I imagine that's one of the big problems that females, older people and others must face. If you're not like them (or everyone's stereotype of a qualified person), you'll have a harder time getting in. Not to mention enjoying your stay, once you're in. (Maybe you're in a workplace that's so desperate for a little diversity that it's actually easier for non-stereotypes to get in. But will your coworkers act respectfully? I know that the guys at mine let loose putdowns about females, even with females in the room. They don't even realize they're putting females down.)
- microarchitect 15y agoExactly and it's the same at hacker news. Every time we see an article about sexism in computer science, someone will show up saying that: (1) hackers are the most egalitarian group that ever walked the face of the earth and (2) they've never seen any discrimination happen. The implication here is that sexism doesn't exist in computer science. I have seen my colleague tell (ostensibly being funny) a female co-worker that she was hired because of her looks. I've also seen people joke about interviewing attractive women. These might seem innocuous to privileged males but they definitely contribute to making the workplace worse for women and so are IMHO completely unacceptable. These are just two small issues - and I've heard a lot worse, but try and tell someone like DHH that we have a problem. He'll rant about how being edgy is cool and that being edgy requires us to make these tasteless "jokes".
- spudlyo 15y agoFemale humans are often referred to as women.
- dstein 15y agoThis is more like "Steve Yegge discovers the power of linkbait".
- kodisha 15y agoHi all, I am original poster of "Steve Yegge quits Google in the middle of his speech". Now I get to brag around the office that Steve Yegge rage-posted because of me ^_^ I am really sorry if I caused some trouble, but I was just interpreting things as i heard them, he really did say "... quitting that JOB..." I would like to say that I totally agree with Steve. But unlike him I can't afford to quit my "job", but what I can afford is to setup my PS3 and my desktop machines to work on folding@home and World Community Grid whenever they are idle. Best, Dragan.