6 ms·

> "If you want to get a point across, limit it to a paragraph or so." And, with that, Sergey Brin invalidates the entire human race's history of long-form lite

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

praptak 15y ago
Heh, my first association was The Gettysburg Address as Powerpoint Persentation by Peter Norvig: http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/ http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/
- gujk 15y ago
  The Gettysburg address as something like 3 minutes of a 22 hour ceremony. It proves Brin's point exactly. Steve Yegge's blog is called "Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants" and not "Stevey's Key Points of Great Ideas" for a reason.
jxi 15y ago
You have no idea how many jokes he makes about the length of the Android source code. They're hilarious too. He was just trying to be funny. I don't know why one comment about a post that wasn't even intended to be posted to the public is being nit-picked to such detail. Sergey is just a normal guy like all of us. Sure he's the CTO of a very important company, but it'd be cool if he were treated like a normal person too. Why should he have to be held to a higher standard of political correctness at all times, even when commenting about something fairly insignificant (in both mine and probably his opinion). I don't want to argue about the importance of Steve Yegge's post, but let's just assume that we've already made the assumption that it isn't too significant.
- Confusion 15y ago
  The first line of his response ("I stopped reading after ...) was a joke. I don't see how the second line, quoted above, can be construed as a joke.
  - jxi 15y ago
    I don't pretend to be a comedian, but it seems to be just reinforcing his first assertion (which he was kidding about). I actually think he's referencing something internal related to having to make certain descriptions shorter. So, I should probably also mention that Sergey is known for making /lame/ jokes.
  - narag 15y ago
    I smiled with the first line because I did knew about Steve's lengthy rants. I understood the second line as an explanation for an audience that might not catch the first one. Also, the rant has no mercy with Jeff Bezos. The dismissive tone and the "that's the reason he wasn't fired" phrase might be just a way to say that Google, as a company, doesn't subscribe the views of an employee. That's just my personal interpretation anyway.
  - jarek 15y ago
    Why does everyone seem to miss that Brin is right? If you want to get the CTO of a company the size of Google to read a memo, you do make it short and to the point. It took me like half an hour to read it, it was a good read, but if I was an executive I'd much rather read "this guy says we need more APIs and interoperation and a couple of other smart guys agree." Short and to the point is not what Steve Yegge was doing, it's not what Steve Yegge generally does, and it's fine because I'm pretty sure he didn't write his post aiming at the C-level and expecting them to read it.
    - nradov 15y ago
      When Bill Gates held the equivalent position at Microsoft he used to dedicate a week twice a year to reading long texts. http://books.google.com/books?id=kaJZkwhVRYEC&pg=PA293&lpg=PA293&dq=bill+gates+%22reading+weeks%22&source=bl&ots=V9wD7FR0y-&sig=2xjoWHeOCGf6-qt5Q-ahbNBSMIA&hl=en&ei=JTagTtWbDbOPigKPobR3&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=bill%20gates%20%22reading%20weeks%22&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=kaJZkwhVRYEC&pg=PA293&#...
      - jarek 15y ago
- 0x12 15y ago
  With great power comes great responsibility. Once you are the CTO of the #1 web company you have to expect that you're going to be held to different standards than J. Random Blogger. The fact that you consider it 'fairly insignificant' is probably what drives your view of this more than anything, consider the possibility that you are wrong. Yegge is anything but dumb and when people like that speak up, publicly or otherwise and you employ them to further the goals of your company the smart thing to do is to listen. Nobody is all knowing. If you hire such people to ignore them do them and yourself a favor and don't waste their time. After all, what's the point of having talent like that on board without at least hearing it out. Verbose or not.
  - jxi 15y ago
    By no means did I mean it was dumb. I meant that this kind of thing happens almost every week inside of Google. There is a ton of discussion going on all the time and Google is known to be a company where every employee's voice is heard. Steve's rant was a bit longer than usual rants, and he was just pointing that out in his kind of lame way. What would be a satisfactory answer anyway? "I thought it was a good idea, we are going think about making all of Google into platforms right now"? Or, some no-op response that most CEO/CTO's tend to give to things like this?
    - potatolicious 15y ago
      The funny thing is Brin's response is in direct contrast to Gundotra's - both of whom were being interviewed at the same time. Gundotra was diplomatic and used the question as an opportunity to brag about Google's culture of openness. Brin used it as an opportunity to either: A - crack a badly worded joke B - slam Yegge One can only hope it was option A, though given the way it's worded I don't doubt there is some venom in there.
    - bad_user 15y ago
      You can't argue that Amazon is kicking their asses in regards to AWS versus Google's App Engine. The lame joke I'm seeing here is GAE. And I think Yegge has a good point - Facebook IS different for each individual because everybody has their own preferences in regards to how they use it and that's because while Google was making lame experiments with Buzz forcing Gmail users to use it, Facebook was busy becoming a platform. And Android is popular not because it's a better / more polished product than iOS. It isn't, not by a long shot. Instead Android is a better platform. Personally I loved Steve's rant and he nailed it.
- ajays 15y ago
  "Sure he's the CTO of a very important company" .... ... and Yegge's criticism was squarely about Brin's area of responsibility. So it's natural that Brin would be a little pissed about it, because Yegge was effectively saying that Brin's doing a half-assed job in some critical areas.
mtts 15y ago
Nonsense. I'm a big fan of long-form literature, short stories, essays and plays, but if all you want to do is get a point across, you'd better use something else. ;-)
michaelochurch 15y ago
"63 words because you're clearly not important enough for 64."
astrec 15y ago
I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead - Twain, Pascal, Cicero et al.
enjalot 15y ago
Am I the only one that interpreted as a light-hearted sarcastic remark? In the same interview he admitted to being very sarcastic when supporting key features of g+ I'd like to hear the audio to check out his inflection and the full context. I was surprised by Vic ending with "that's why we didn't fire him." The thought of firing Yegge over a rant would signal extreme shortsightedness to me...
- bostonpete 15y ago
  Well, others had discussed whether he'd get fired, but I think the consensus was that he wouldn't because it'd be a bad PR move. However, I don't think it's correct to say that they would have been firing him "over a rant". They would have been firing him over a lengthy, detailed, public (intentional or not) criticism of the company that went after the most senior company executives by name. I don't think he should have been fired, but I think something like that would be considered at least a "fire-able" offense at pretty much any company.
  - 0x12 15y ago
    > but I think something like that would be considered at least a "fire-able" offense at pretty much any company. Only for insecure managers.
- kragen 15y ago
  It read to me like he was answering the question, "Why didn't you fire Yegge for posting this?"
jarek 15y ago
I think that's a pretty unfair summary. Brin didn't suggest he disapproves of everything longer than a paragraph, and Yegge's post wasn't art or literature. In the context of a question whether an executive has read something an employee has written, it's a much more reasonable statement.

praptak 15y ago

Heh, my first association was The Gettysburg Address as Powerpoint Persentation by Peter Norvig: http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/ http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/

gujk 15y ago
The Gettysburg address as something like 3 minutes of a 22 hour ceremony. It proves Brin's point exactly. Steve Yegge's blog is called "Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants" and not "Stevey's Key Points of Great Ideas" for a reason.

jxi 15y ago

You have no idea how many jokes he makes about the length of the Android source code. They're hilarious too. He was just trying to be funny. I don't know why one comment about a post that wasn't even intended to be posted to the public is being nit-picked to such detail. Sergey is just a normal guy like all of us. Sure he's the CTO of a very important company, but it'd be cool if he were treated like a normal person too. Why should he have to be held to a higher standard of political correctness at all times, even when commenting about something fairly insignificant (in both mine and probably his opinion). I don't want to argue about the importance of Steve Yegge's post, but let's just assume that we've already made the assumption that it isn't too significant.

Confusion 15y ago
The first line of his response ("I stopped reading after ...) was a joke. I don't see how the second line, quoted above, can be construed as a joke.
- jxi 15y ago
  I don't pretend to be a comedian, but it seems to be just reinforcing his first assertion (which he was kidding about). I actually think he's referencing something internal related to having to make certain descriptions shorter. So, I should probably also mention that Sergey is known for making /lame/ jokes.
- narag 15y ago
  I smiled with the first line because I did knew about Steve's lengthy rants. I understood the second line as an explanation for an audience that might not catch the first one. Also, the rant has no mercy with Jeff Bezos. The dismissive tone and the "that's the reason he wasn't fired" phrase might be just a way to say that Google, as a company, doesn't subscribe the views of an employee. That's just my personal interpretation anyway.
- jarek 15y ago
  Why does everyone seem to miss that Brin is right? If you want to get the CTO of a company the size of Google to read a memo, you do make it short and to the point. It took me like half an hour to read it, it was a good read, but if I was an executive I'd much rather read "this guy says we need more APIs and interoperation and a couple of other smart guys agree." Short and to the point is not what Steve Yegge was doing, it's not what Steve Yegge generally does, and it's fine because I'm pretty sure he didn't write his post aiming at the C-level and expecting them to read it.
  - nradov 15y ago
    When Bill Gates held the equivalent position at Microsoft he used to dedicate a week twice a year to reading long texts. http://books.google.com/books?id=kaJZkwhVRYEC&pg=PA293&lpg=PA293&dq=bill+gates+%22reading+weeks%22&source=bl&ots=V9wD7FR0y-&sig=2xjoWHeOCGf6-qt5Q-ahbNBSMIA&hl=en&ei=JTagTtWbDbOPigKPobR3&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=bill%20gates%20%22reading%20weeks%22&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=kaJZkwhVRYEC&pg=PA293&#...
    - jarek 15y ago
0x12 15y ago
With great power comes great responsibility. Once you are the CTO of the #1 web company you have to expect that you're going to be held to different standards than J. Random Blogger. The fact that you consider it 'fairly insignificant' is probably what drives your view of this more than anything, consider the possibility that you are wrong. Yegge is anything but dumb and when people like that speak up, publicly or otherwise and you employ them to further the goals of your company the smart thing to do is to listen. Nobody is all knowing. If you hire such people to ignore them do them and yourself a favor and don't waste their time. After all, what's the point of having talent like that on board without at least hearing it out. Verbose or not.
- jxi 15y ago
  By no means did I mean it was dumb. I meant that this kind of thing happens almost every week inside of Google. There is a ton of discussion going on all the time and Google is known to be a company where every employee's voice is heard. Steve's rant was a bit longer than usual rants, and he was just pointing that out in his kind of lame way. What would be a satisfactory answer anyway? "I thought it was a good idea, we are going think about making all of Google into platforms right now"? Or, some no-op response that most CEO/CTO's tend to give to things like this?
  - potatolicious 15y ago
    The funny thing is Brin's response is in direct contrast to Gundotra's - both of whom were being interviewed at the same time. Gundotra was diplomatic and used the question as an opportunity to brag about Google's culture of openness. Brin used it as an opportunity to either: A - crack a badly worded joke B - slam Yegge One can only hope it was option A, though given the way it's worded I don't doubt there is some venom in there.
  - bad_user 15y ago
    You can't argue that Amazon is kicking their asses in regards to AWS versus Google's App Engine. The lame joke I'm seeing here is GAE. And I think Yegge has a good point - Facebook IS different for each individual because everybody has their own preferences in regards to how they use it and that's because while Google was making lame experiments with Buzz forcing Gmail users to use it, Facebook was busy becoming a platform. And Android is popular not because it's a better / more polished product than iOS. It isn't, not by a long shot. Instead Android is a better platform. Personally I loved Steve's rant and he nailed it.
ajays 15y ago
"Sure he's the CTO of a very important company" .... ... and Yegge's criticism was squarely about Brin's area of responsibility. So it's natural that Brin would be a little pissed about it, because Yegge was effectively saying that Brin's doing a half-assed job in some critical areas.

mtts 15y ago

Nonsense. I'm a big fan of long-form literature, short stories, essays and plays, but if all you want to do is get a point across, you'd better use something else. ;-)

michaelochurch 15y ago

"63 words because you're clearly not important enough for 64."

astrec 15y ago

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead - Twain, Pascal, Cicero et al.

enjalot 15y ago

Am I the only one that interpreted as a light-hearted sarcastic remark? In the same interview he admitted to being very sarcastic when supporting key features of g+ I'd like to hear the audio to check out his inflection and the full context. I was surprised by Vic ending with "that's why we didn't fire him." The thought of firing Yegge over a rant would signal extreme shortsightedness to me...

bostonpete 15y ago
Well, others had discussed whether he'd get fired, but I think the consensus was that he wouldn't because it'd be a bad PR move. However, I don't think it's correct to say that they would have been firing him "over a rant". They would have been firing him over a lengthy, detailed, public (intentional or not) criticism of the company that went after the most senior company executives by name. I don't think he should have been fired, but I think something like that would be considered at least a "fire-able" offense at pretty much any company.
- 0x12 15y ago
  > but I think something like that would be considered at least a "fire-able" offense at pretty much any company. Only for insecure managers.
kragen 15y ago
It read to me like he was answering the question, "Why didn't you fire Yegge for posting this?"

jarek 15y ago

I think that's a pretty unfair summary. Brin didn't suggest he disapproves of everything longer than a paragraph, and Yegge's post wasn't art or literature. In the context of a question whether an executive has read something an employee has written, it's a much more reasonable statement.