8 ms·

Kevin Rose: We Made Lots of Hiring Mistakes at Digg

61 points by flardinois 15y ago

willvarfar 15y ago
To count programmers by their sole programming language proficiency suggests he was paying bottom dollar, rather than hiring hackers.
- shareme 15y ago
  true
LinaLauneBaer 15y ago
I think if you hire a smart person that knows PHP inside out and your requirements change, then you should not have a problem - in theory. Every good developer/hacker should be able to learn something new in a short amount of time. So it really seems that they hired not so smart people or they simply fired them too fast.
ebbv 15y ago
If your developers are either incapable of pivoting to a new language or flat out refuse to, then they are terrible developers. Regardless, Digg v4 was clearly the problem. I still haven't seen him outright admit that the fact that at launch Digg v4 was basically a blowjob to Mashable, Wired, and other "content" sites and a big middle finger to the average user. If he could honestly own up to the fact it would demonstrate a real understanding of what caused everyone to flee.
- jmuguy 15y ago
  Yeah anyone that used Digg around that time should attest to this. The launch of v4 basically took the site from pretty great to pretty horrible overnight. As someone that used to check Digg every day it was like they turned the interesting faucet off.
- bane 15y ago
  The principle mistake I see was also hiring so many people. Didn't Digg at one time have >40 people? What in god's name were all these people doing? "According to Rose, “there is a temptation that you want to throw as many developers as possible at a problem.” As Digg was built on top of PHP, the company would hire too many developers that specialized in this language. Then, however, Rose noted, “you end up with lots of PHP developers, but at some point, PHP isn’t a problem anymore and you are stuck with all of those developers.” At that point, said Rose, you end up having to hire a lot of developers that can do other things and don’t know what to do with the old developers." PHP wasn't the problem, stables full of idle, cash burning developers was the problem. Normally it's hard to do an apples to apples comparison, but having reddit around, and running for a hell of a long time with less than half a dozen people, really allows one to actually do that comparison in a pretty solid way. I'd even argue that even though reddit has only recently surpassed digg in terms of users and page views and all that, it far surpassed digg in terms of content quantity long before it. Yet was still managed with a micro-sized staff. Of course v4 was a huge pile, but at about 8-10x the burn rate of reddit, you almost have to do crazy things to make it work. It's like the Mythical Man-Month was never written.
  - trafficlight 15y ago
    According to this article, in 2009 they had around 75 employees. I wonder what they were all doing? http://allthingsd.com/20090122/digg-to-cut-10-percent-of-employees-says-it-will-try-to-be-profitable-in-2009-the-entire-blog-post/ http://allthingsd.com/20090122/digg-to-cut-10-percent-of-emp...
    - ojbyrne 15y ago
      Selling ads.
- jm4 15y ago
  If your developers are either incapable of pivoting to a new language or flat out refuse to, then they are terrible developers. That's a pretty strong statement. I'm glad I don't work for you. If my employer decides to switch to Cobol and I refuse that makes me a terrible developer? What if they want to switch from an imperative language to a functional language? If I can't easily make the transition I am terrible? What is so wrong with developers that specialize in one thing, even if it's PHP? Regardless of your opinion, there is a place for those kinds of developers. They likely won't advance as far as those with a broader skill set, but they are not terrible or useless. This isn't the developers' fault. Rose hired a whole team of developers that were not qualified to do the required work. That's on him, and he is rightly accepting responsibility.
  - ebbv 15y ago
    Just go ahead and assume there's an unwritten "within reason" on any assertion I make. I really don't want to have to type it every time. Of course a developer refusing to switch to Cobol or Brainfuck is completely justified. But switching from PHP to Ruby, Node.js, Python, etc. is a completely reasonable transition to expect a competent developer to be capable of. I'm not saying you should be able to be an expert in the new language overnight, but IMHO any developer worth her salt jumps at the chance to learn a new language on the company dime.
    - jm4 15y ago
      any developer worth her salt jumps at the chance to learn a new language on the company dime I would agree with that sentiment. Another way to put it is I would prefer not to be on a team with a developer that wouldn't do that. Still, I also think competence can be relative. There are lots of developers who prefer to stick with one thing. They usually cost less and are more likely to stick around long term. They can be experts in their domain (even if it is limited to 1 or 2 languages). There's something to be said about someone who is content (or ignorant) to have their career stagnate for years working with older technology and projects that keep the company running. Personally, I'm of the opinion that it's important to keep up with the times, but if you have a requirement for that sort of thing those developers can be the workhorses on projects that some other developers wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. They can also mean certain disaster if you hire a bunch of them for your fast-moving startup.
iwwr 15y ago
How would you explain reddit's success, compared to digg? Reddit was basically developed by 2 people and has never had more than 3 devs behind it.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- earle 15y ago
  they listen to their users
  - dpritchett 15y ago
    Also they had a hacker cofounder. AFAIK Digg was built in PHP on a contract from its TV personality founder.
    - ojbyrne 15y ago
      I was a cofounder up until the point where money was being taken off the table. From then on I was characterized as a freelancer/someone who developed a prototype.
      - dpritchett 15y ago
        That latter part is indeed the story I'd heard. I hope you've found something awesome now.
        ojbyrne 15y ago
        I appreciate the good wishes. I'm on my 4th job post-digg - some of it has been awesome, some not so much. Currently at Gazehawk, which is awesome.
- kn0thing 15y ago
  I wrote about this, actually: http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smallest-biggest http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smalle... spoiler: It's not just because of the logo
yourdp 15y ago
Grass is green, sky is blue. Rose was a kid - we all enjoy seeing entrepreneurial success and hopefully he finds that with Milk. Though it again sounds like he's merely surrounded by a bunch of developers and little creative...
mgkimsal 15y ago
"According to Rose, “there is a temptation that you want to throw as many developers as possible at a problem.” As Digg was built on top of PHP, the company would hire too many developers that specialized in this language. Then, however, Rose noted, “you end up with lots of PHP developers, but at some point, PHP isn’t a problem anymore and you are stuck with all of those developers.” At that point, said Rose, you end up having to hire a lot of developers that can do other things and don’t know what to do with the old developers." ------------------------------- OK - so don't hire employees, but contract with contractors. Seems a pretty simple problem, yet few companies I talk to want to go down that route. "We're looking for someone who's in it for the long haul" or "we value loyalty" are some reasons I've heard from companies that won't consider contractors. In some situations, that's probably fine. In many other cases - fast tech-driven startup-type stuff - contracting probably makes more sense for precisely this reason. The company's needs can change quickly, and having a lot of staff that don't know X but only Y is a competitive problem. "But smart people can learn X too!" Well, yes, to a point, but probably not as well as the people at your competition may already know it. And who says all those smart people really want to learn X? If you're really switching from Y to X, some Y devs may resent that, because Y can handle the workload too. They may not put all the effort in to learning X, because they see it as a fad, or a dangerous pivot that is doomed to failure, etc. "Smart people can learn new tech X too!" is condescendingly treating devs as interchangeable parts while damning with some praise ("but they're smart!") "If your developers are either incapable of pivoting to a new language or flat out refuse to, then they are terrible developers." You've just done 3 years of Rails development, fighting all those version bugs, pulling all the late nighters, getting every rock solid and scaling out to the moon. Yay! Launched, everything's great, and you're rocking it. Then your board of directors signs a deal with MS for Bing tie-in, and MS invests some money in your company, but you have to pivot to ASP.NET/C#. In 3 months. Do you refuse? YOU TERRIBLE DEVELOPER! What's that? You'd rather keep doing Rails, so much so that you'll quit your job and move somewhere else to get a chance to keep working on Rails projects? That describes most of the Rails devs I know, and I wouldn't say they're "terribly developers" at all. Well, a couple aren't great... :)
- petervandijck 15y ago
  "for fast tech-driven startup-type stuff - contracting probably makes more sense". On the contrary, actually.
VonLipwig 15y ago
Bit of a non-article really. One paragraph on bad hires. It doesn't say why PHP stopped being the problem. It doesn't really say why existing programmers couldn't transition to another language. It doesn't say what Rose would do differently a second time around. On the surface it looks like a lack of strategy lead to the company hiring too many PHP developers. Of course, it could also be the developers were CHEAP and couldn't transition to another language. It could also be a lack of leadership didn't realise programmers could transition between languages or individuals were not reassigned to focus on another language so little got done. With so little content all you have is speculation so who knows what was going on.
- ceol 15y ago
  I agree. I was hoping for a little more content from Mr. Rose himself— especially what he plans on doing in the future for Digg and how he decided to deal with the problems that arose.
  - fredoliveira 15y ago
    Kevin isn't associated with Digg anymore. He's been working on Milk, and Oink in particular.
    - ceol 15y ago
      Whoops! I totally forgot he left. Thanks for correcting me.
- Peroni 15y ago
  On the surface it looks like a lack of strategy lead to the company hiring too many PHP developers. Bingo. It's the only logical explanation. I've yet to meet a decent PHP Developer who isn't willing or capable to turn their hand to a new technology. There must be more to it than Rose simply not exploring the idea of adding to the teams existing set of skills by letting those Dev's try new things.
  - 15y ago
joshklein 15y ago
The two things he mentions as his biggest mistakes are both symptoms of the same thing: hiring outside your comparative advantage. He hired too many developers for a product that's comparative advantage is in what content is (and is not) shown, and what people say about the content, instead of hiring enough community managers (hence the unruly community problem). Digg and HN aren't differentiated by the features of the website, they're differentiated by the content and community. Hire inside your comparative advantage. Contract/vendor everything else.
- tibbon 15y ago
  As someone who has worked as a community manager frequently, I will say that startups always underfund and underhire in this area. They always want to hire the best engineers, but when it comes to community managers they generally don't want to hire more than 1-2, and aren't willing to pay for the best. In an engineering heavy culture, community management is sometimes incorrectly viewed as something 'anyone could do'.
  - emp_ 15y ago
    This works for design too (but improving lately), we usually model things around what we know best, thus the issues.
  - rkalla 15y ago
    Out of curiosity, how do you hire/find the best community managers? I know what an accomplished developer's resume looks like and how to vet it... I have no idea how to vet a community manager effectively. Tips/Suggestions? NOTE: A successful community manager would have the right personality, good sense of fairness, good communication skills, etc... a handful of skills that are hard to assess quickly. That is why I ask.
    - tibbon 15y ago
      I'm a bit stumped actually as to how to advise. Let me think about it. I generally feel that a great community manager has a wide base of skills, is incredibly social (has a large network), knows how to deal with trolls and also has a fairly decent tech background. The questions should be around how big of communities they have managed, what they do to grow them, how they deal with problems (big problems, like a billing fiasco) and how well they know social media. That being said, most "social media experts" make me want to vomit a bit and if someone professes themselves as such, maybe they aren't the right person for you. They are harder to assess, as there aren't as solid of skills. No github acct (although if they have one, thats awesome)
maeon3 15y ago
Funny how the developers get blamed for when the company fails, but never credited for companywide success. Frankly, im sick and tired of it and im going to do absolutely nothing about it.
teflonhook 15y ago
This makes no sense. You hired software engineers that could only program in PHP? Shows he had no clue about hiring.
knodi 15y ago
Thats the problem with someone that has not done development/engineering leading and development/engineering team they have a simplistic view of the problem or only understand it superficially.
hastur 15y ago
OLD NEWS (if you watched any interviews with KR, you knew this years ago)
smspence 15y ago
When people talk about hiring web developers, it always seems like there is such a strong emphasis on them knowing one and only one language. Like Kevin Rose said: "you end up with lots of PHP developers, but at some point, PHP isn’t a problem anymore and you are stuck with all of those developers." Was PHP the only language these people knew? And they were incapable of learning anything else? I don't get it. I don't call myself a "C++ developer" even though I use C++ every day at work. I know several languages, and I am confident that if I wanted to start learning a new language tomorrow, I could get up to speed on it and its relevant libraries fairly quickly. Were these so-called "PHP developers" completely incapable of learning Python or Ruby or some other language? I don't understand how you can be a software developer and only ever use one language in your life. But for some reason this seems to be common when I read articles about web development.
rickmb 15y ago
Short version: Rose, like so many non-technical founders, had no idea what developers actually do and how to hire and manage them. It's not exactly a unique story, in fact it's not limited to start-ups, it's pretty endemic in the whole IT-business.
- cookiecaper 15y ago
  Is Rose really "non-technical"? Maybe I was just duped by TechTV/G4 and some of that other stuff, but he sounded like he'd done at least some coding in the past. Is this incorrect? He doesn't seem naive enough to call a "non-technical founder". Maybe a "non-expert founder"?
  - devs1010 15y ago
    yes, he is, or at least was when he started. I read that he hired some freelancer in Canada to build the initial Digg site rather than having worked on it himself.
    - mikeryan 15y ago
      http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ojbyrne http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ojbyrne
      - devs1010 15y ago
        thank you for the link, so why I am getting down-voted for this?
  - ojbyrne 15y ago
    Kevin couldn't write a line of code if his life depended on it. He routinely misrepresents that fact.
  - mikeryan 15y ago
    Technical or not isn't really the point - he'd never worked with or lead engineering teams and didn't know how to hire or fire them. That's all kind of beside the point however. Jay Adelson was there pretty early on he should have been technically savvy enough to avoid these pitfalls.
wavephorm 15y ago
I just love how he's blaming web developers for managerial mistakes.
snorkel 15y ago
Makes no mention of how the quality of Digg's content fell head-first down a staircase. All the rock star developers in the world can't fix bad editorial decisions.
- rpledge 15y ago
  Given that Digg's content was (at least in theory) community driven, there seems to be some sort of chicken/egg issue here. The article is poor summary of the interview, which I saw replayed TWiTs live stream. While the quotes are accurate, the interview wasn't really about Digg
  - reledi 15y ago
    I think the presentation of content drove away a lot of users. Many didn't like their new interface. Personally, I left before that because I was tired of the "power diggers" that controlled what everyone saw. It didn't feel community driven any longer.
  - jcslzr 15y ago
    > at least in theory no it was not community driven, that was their mistake, that is something a user ends up figuring out and leaves
richardz 15y ago
His biggest mistake is doesn't understand what is a developer. I have never seen a developer ONLY do PHP.
dbbo 15y ago
Don't hire 20 developers of a single language. Got it.
Hominem 15y ago
He couldn't fire them? I've always thought his blaming the digg developers was pretty classless. He was in a leadership position, he needed to lead.
jcslzr 15y ago
my problem with digg didnt have to do with technology, it had to do with my perception of rating links as fake
reledi 15y ago
Every few months a story like this from Kevin Rose pops up where he tries to explain what went wrong. Nothing's changed, he's still blaming the hiring process and the developers. On the other hand, I would love to hear the story of why Digg failed from one of these developers.
- formerdigger 15y ago
  We have enough to write a book about it. There is definitely more to it than what is said by Kevin.
ojbyrne 15y ago
The sheer arrogance is amazing. So since leaving digg I've heard the following phrase from many competent software dev managers - any good software engineer can learn a new language - but to Kevin - those same software engineers can't learn anything new, while he, of course, can easily learn from his mistakes. Just to be clear - those engineers, dismissed as "PHP devs" have numerous degrees, decades of experience, and at least one published book. Kevin dropped out of a PC repair school that he likes to refer to as a "CS program." Anyway he seems to be doing his best to expose his lack of competence.
- spitfire 15y ago
  He's doing what is known as failing upwards. This is what happens to people in the tech-celebrity/VC circle. I expect he has learnt a lot - how to sell, how to shake hands, etc.
  - earl 15y ago
    Kevin learned how to walk away with millions even if your startup is, on net, a failure. ^^ that's a key fucking learning edit: just to be clear, I don't begrudge him anything. Kevin negotiated the best deal for himself that he could and that's what everyone should be doing. I hope the employees got taken care of as well, but it is what it is. Being an employee at a startup, and I'm on my third, is gambling.
    - spitfire 15y ago
      Yup. Wish I could see past my own tech-ego and play the game to that end.
- NinetyNine 15y ago
  Is there more to the story that you know (considering you used to work at Digg?). You're claiming that leadership at Digg didn't attempt to retrain these programmers new projects, which is a pretty substantial claim. Also, I don't see why Rose's educational background is relevant to his leadership ability, and that statement seems like a superfluous ad-hominem. I'm not necessarily defending Digg leadership in this case, but I certainly question an emotionally heated top post in an HN thread.
formerdigger 15y ago
Kevin wasn't around enough to know what was going on with the company. We probably saw him 1-2 days a month at the office and that was because he needed a place to park his Porsche 911.

61 points by flardinois 15y ago

To count programmers by their sole programming language proficiency suggests he was paying bottom dollar, rather than hiring hackers.

shareme 15y ago
true

LinaLauneBaer 15y ago

I think if you hire a smart person that knows PHP inside out and your requirements change, then you should not have a problem - in theory. Every good developer/hacker should be able to learn something new in a short amount of time. So it really seems that they hired not so smart people or they simply fired them too fast.

ebbv 15y ago

If your developers are either incapable of pivoting to a new language or flat out refuse to, then they are terrible developers. Regardless, Digg v4 was clearly the problem. I still haven't seen him outright admit that the fact that at launch Digg v4 was basically a blowjob to Mashable, Wired, and other "content" sites and a big middle finger to the average user. If he could honestly own up to the fact it would demonstrate a real understanding of what caused everyone to flee.

jmuguy 15y ago
Yeah anyone that used Digg around that time should attest to this. The launch of v4 basically took the site from pretty great to pretty horrible overnight. As someone that used to check Digg every day it was like they turned the interesting faucet off.
bane 15y ago
The principle mistake I see was also hiring so many people. Didn't Digg at one time have >40 people? What in god's name were all these people doing? "According to Rose, “there is a temptation that you want to throw as many developers as possible at a problem.” As Digg was built on top of PHP, the company would hire too many developers that specialized in this language. Then, however, Rose noted, “you end up with lots of PHP developers, but at some point, PHP isn’t a problem anymore and you are stuck with all of those developers.” At that point, said Rose, you end up having to hire a lot of developers that can do other things and don’t know what to do with the old developers." PHP wasn't the problem, stables full of idle, cash burning developers was the problem. Normally it's hard to do an apples to apples comparison, but having reddit around, and running for a hell of a long time with less than half a dozen people, really allows one to actually do that comparison in a pretty solid way. I'd even argue that even though reddit has only recently surpassed digg in terms of users and page views and all that, it far surpassed digg in terms of content quantity long before it. Yet was still managed with a micro-sized staff. Of course v4 was a huge pile, but at about 8-10x the burn rate of reddit, you almost have to do crazy things to make it work. It's like the Mythical Man-Month was never written.
- trafficlight 15y ago
  According to this article, in 2009 they had around 75 employees. I wonder what they were all doing? http://allthingsd.com/20090122/digg-to-cut-10-percent-of-employees-says-it-will-try-to-be-profitable-in-2009-the-entire-blog-post/ http://allthingsd.com/20090122/digg-to-cut-10-percent-of-emp...
  - ojbyrne 15y ago
    Selling ads.
jm4 15y ago
If your developers are either incapable of pivoting to a new language or flat out refuse to, then they are terrible developers. That's a pretty strong statement. I'm glad I don't work for you. If my employer decides to switch to Cobol and I refuse that makes me a terrible developer? What if they want to switch from an imperative language to a functional language? If I can't easily make the transition I am terrible? What is so wrong with developers that specialize in one thing, even if it's PHP? Regardless of your opinion, there is a place for those kinds of developers. They likely won't advance as far as those with a broader skill set, but they are not terrible or useless. This isn't the developers' fault. Rose hired a whole team of developers that were not qualified to do the required work. That's on him, and he is rightly accepting responsibility.
- ebbv 15y ago
  Just go ahead and assume there's an unwritten "within reason" on any assertion I make. I really don't want to have to type it every time. Of course a developer refusing to switch to Cobol or Brainfuck is completely justified. But switching from PHP to Ruby, Node.js, Python, etc. is a completely reasonable transition to expect a competent developer to be capable of. I'm not saying you should be able to be an expert in the new language overnight, but IMHO any developer worth her salt jumps at the chance to learn a new language on the company dime.
  - jm4 15y ago
    any developer worth her salt jumps at the chance to learn a new language on the company dime I would agree with that sentiment. Another way to put it is I would prefer not to be on a team with a developer that wouldn't do that. Still, I also think competence can be relative. There are lots of developers who prefer to stick with one thing. They usually cost less and are more likely to stick around long term. They can be experts in their domain (even if it is limited to 1 or 2 languages). There's something to be said about someone who is content (or ignorant) to have their career stagnate for years working with older technology and projects that keep the company running. Personally, I'm of the opinion that it's important to keep up with the times, but if you have a requirement for that sort of thing those developers can be the workhorses on projects that some other developers wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. They can also mean certain disaster if you hire a bunch of them for your fast-moving startup.

iwwr 15y ago

How would you explain reddit's success, compared to digg? Reddit was basically developed by 2 people and has never had more than 3 devs behind it.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
earle 15y ago
they listen to their users
- dpritchett 15y ago
  Also they had a hacker cofounder. AFAIK Digg was built in PHP on a contract from its TV personality founder.
  - ojbyrne 15y ago
    I was a cofounder up until the point where money was being taken off the table. From then on I was characterized as a freelancer/someone who developed a prototype.
    - dpritchett 15y ago
      That latter part is indeed the story I'd heard. I hope you've found something awesome now.
      - ojbyrne 15y ago
        I appreciate the good wishes. I'm on my 4th job post-digg - some of it has been awesome, some not so much. Currently at Gazehawk, which is awesome.
kn0thing 15y ago
I wrote about this, actually: http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smallest-biggest http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smalle... spoiler: It's not just because of the logo

yourdp 15y ago

Grass is green, sky is blue. Rose was a kid - we all enjoy seeing entrepreneurial success and hopefully he finds that with Milk. Though it again sounds like he's merely surrounded by a bunch of developers and little creative...

mgkimsal 15y ago

"According to Rose, “there is a temptation that you want to throw as many developers as possible at a problem.” As Digg was built on top of PHP, the company would hire too many developers that specialized in this language. Then, however, Rose noted, “you end up with lots of PHP developers, but at some point, PHP isn’t a problem anymore and you are stuck with all of those developers.” At that point, said Rose, you end up having to hire a lot of developers that can do other things and don’t know what to do with the old developers." ------------------------------- OK - so don't hire employees, but contract with contractors. Seems a pretty simple problem, yet few companies I talk to want to go down that route. "We're looking for someone who's in it for the long haul" or "we value loyalty" are some reasons I've heard from companies that won't consider contractors. In some situations, that's probably fine. In many other cases - fast tech-driven startup-type stuff - contracting probably makes more sense for precisely this reason. The company's needs can change quickly, and having a lot of staff that don't know X but only Y is a competitive problem. "But smart people can learn X too!" Well, yes, to a point, but probably not as well as the people at your competition may already know it. And who says all those smart people really want to learn X? If you're really switching from Y to X, some Y devs may resent that, because Y can handle the workload too. They may not put all the effort in to learning X, because they see it as a fad, or a dangerous pivot that is doomed to failure, etc. "Smart people can learn new tech X too!" is condescendingly treating devs as interchangeable parts while damning with some praise ("but they're smart!") "If your developers are either incapable of pivoting to a new language or flat out refuse to, then they are terrible developers." You've just done 3 years of Rails development, fighting all those version bugs, pulling all the late nighters, getting every rock solid and scaling out to the moon. Yay! Launched, everything's great, and you're rocking it. Then your board of directors signs a deal with MS for Bing tie-in, and MS invests some money in your company, but you have to pivot to ASP.NET/C#. In 3 months. Do you refuse? YOU TERRIBLE DEVELOPER! What's that? You'd rather keep doing Rails, so much so that you'll quit your job and move somewhere else to get a chance to keep working on Rails projects? That describes most of the Rails devs I know, and I wouldn't say they're "terribly developers" at all. Well, a couple aren't great... :)

petervandijck 15y ago
"for fast tech-driven startup-type stuff - contracting probably makes more sense". On the contrary, actually.

VonLipwig 15y ago

Bit of a non-article really. One paragraph on bad hires. It doesn't say why PHP stopped being the problem. It doesn't really say why existing programmers couldn't transition to another language. It doesn't say what Rose would do differently a second time around. On the surface it looks like a lack of strategy lead to the company hiring too many PHP developers. Of course, it could also be the developers were CHEAP and couldn't transition to another language. It could also be a lack of leadership didn't realise programmers could transition between languages or individuals were not reassigned to focus on another language so little got done. With so little content all you have is speculation so who knows what was going on.

ceol 15y ago
I agree. I was hoping for a little more content from Mr. Rose himself— especially what he plans on doing in the future for Digg and how he decided to deal with the problems that arose.
- fredoliveira 15y ago
  Kevin isn't associated with Digg anymore. He's been working on Milk, and Oink in particular.
  - ceol 15y ago
    Whoops! I totally forgot he left. Thanks for correcting me.
Peroni 15y ago
On the surface it looks like a lack of strategy lead to the company hiring too many PHP developers. Bingo. It's the only logical explanation. I've yet to meet a decent PHP Developer who isn't willing or capable to turn their hand to a new technology. There must be more to it than Rose simply not exploring the idea of adding to the teams existing set of skills by letting those Dev's try new things.
- 15y ago

joshklein 15y ago

The two things he mentions as his biggest mistakes are both symptoms of the same thing: hiring outside your comparative advantage. He hired too many developers for a product that's comparative advantage is in what content is (and is not) shown, and what people say about the content, instead of hiring enough community managers (hence the unruly community problem). Digg and HN aren't differentiated by the features of the website, they're differentiated by the content and community. Hire inside your comparative advantage. Contract/vendor everything else.

tibbon 15y ago
As someone who has worked as a community manager frequently, I will say that startups always underfund and underhire in this area. They always want to hire the best engineers, but when it comes to community managers they generally don't want to hire more than 1-2, and aren't willing to pay for the best. In an engineering heavy culture, community management is sometimes incorrectly viewed as something 'anyone could do'.
- emp_ 15y ago
  This works for design too (but improving lately), we usually model things around what we know best, thus the issues.
- rkalla 15y ago
  Out of curiosity, how do you hire/find the best community managers? I know what an accomplished developer's resume looks like and how to vet it... I have no idea how to vet a community manager effectively. Tips/Suggestions? NOTE: A successful community manager would have the right personality, good sense of fairness, good communication skills, etc... a handful of skills that are hard to assess quickly. That is why I ask.
  - tibbon 15y ago
    I'm a bit stumped actually as to how to advise. Let me think about it. I generally feel that a great community manager has a wide base of skills, is incredibly social (has a large network), knows how to deal with trolls and also has a fairly decent tech background. The questions should be around how big of communities they have managed, what they do to grow them, how they deal with problems (big problems, like a billing fiasco) and how well they know social media. That being said, most "social media experts" make me want to vomit a bit and if someone professes themselves as such, maybe they aren't the right person for you. They are harder to assess, as there aren't as solid of skills. No github acct (although if they have one, thats awesome)

maeon3 15y ago

Funny how the developers get blamed for when the company fails, but never credited for companywide success. Frankly, im sick and tired of it and im going to do absolutely nothing about it.

teflonhook 15y ago

This makes no sense. You hired software engineers that could only program in PHP? Shows he had no clue about hiring.

knodi 15y ago

Thats the problem with someone that has not done development/engineering leading and development/engineering team they have a simplistic view of the problem or only understand it superficially.

hastur 15y ago

OLD NEWS (if you watched any interviews with KR, you knew this years ago)

smspence 15y ago

When people talk about hiring web developers, it always seems like there is such a strong emphasis on them knowing one and only one language. Like Kevin Rose said: "you end up with lots of PHP developers, but at some point, PHP isn’t a problem anymore and you are stuck with all of those developers." Was PHP the only language these people knew? And they were incapable of learning anything else? I don't get it. I don't call myself a "C++ developer" even though I use C++ every day at work. I know several languages, and I am confident that if I wanted to start learning a new language tomorrow, I could get up to speed on it and its relevant libraries fairly quickly. Were these so-called "PHP developers" completely incapable of learning Python or Ruby or some other language? I don't understand how you can be a software developer and only ever use one language in your life. But for some reason this seems to be common when I read articles about web development.

rickmb 15y ago

Short version: Rose, like so many non-technical founders, had no idea what developers actually do and how to hire and manage them. It's not exactly a unique story, in fact it's not limited to start-ups, it's pretty endemic in the whole IT-business.

cookiecaper 15y ago
Is Rose really "non-technical"? Maybe I was just duped by TechTV/G4 and some of that other stuff, but he sounded like he'd done at least some coding in the past. Is this incorrect? He doesn't seem naive enough to call a "non-technical founder". Maybe a "non-expert founder"?
- devs1010 15y ago
  yes, he is, or at least was when he started. I read that he hired some freelancer in Canada to build the initial Digg site rather than having worked on it himself.
  - mikeryan 15y ago
    http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ojbyrne http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ojbyrne
    - devs1010 15y ago
      thank you for the link, so why I am getting down-voted for this?
- ojbyrne 15y ago
  Kevin couldn't write a line of code if his life depended on it. He routinely misrepresents that fact.
- mikeryan 15y ago
  Technical or not isn't really the point - he'd never worked with or lead engineering teams and didn't know how to hire or fire them. That's all kind of beside the point however. Jay Adelson was there pretty early on he should have been technically savvy enough to avoid these pitfalls.

wavephorm 15y ago

I just love how he's blaming web developers for managerial mistakes.

snorkel 15y ago

Makes no mention of how the quality of Digg's content fell head-first down a staircase. All the rock star developers in the world can't fix bad editorial decisions.

rpledge 15y ago
Given that Digg's content was (at least in theory) community driven, there seems to be some sort of chicken/egg issue here. The article is poor summary of the interview, which I saw replayed TWiTs live stream. While the quotes are accurate, the interview wasn't really about Digg
- reledi 15y ago
  I think the presentation of content drove away a lot of users. Many didn't like their new interface. Personally, I left before that because I was tired of the "power diggers" that controlled what everyone saw. It didn't feel community driven any longer.
- jcslzr 15y ago
  > at least in theory no it was not community driven, that was their mistake, that is something a user ends up figuring out and leaves

richardz 15y ago

His biggest mistake is doesn't understand what is a developer. I have never seen a developer ONLY do PHP.

dbbo 15y ago

Don't hire 20 developers of a single language. Got it.

Hominem 15y ago

He couldn't fire them? I've always thought his blaming the digg developers was pretty classless. He was in a leadership position, he needed to lead.

jcslzr 15y ago

my problem with digg didnt have to do with technology, it had to do with my perception of rating links as fake

reledi 15y ago

Every few months a story like this from Kevin Rose pops up where he tries to explain what went wrong. Nothing's changed, he's still blaming the hiring process and the developers. On the other hand, I would love to hear the story of why Digg failed from one of these developers.

formerdigger 15y ago
We have enough to write a book about it. There is definitely more to it than what is said by Kevin.

ojbyrne 15y ago

The sheer arrogance is amazing. So since leaving digg I've heard the following phrase from many competent software dev managers - any good software engineer can learn a new language - but to Kevin - those same software engineers can't learn anything new, while he, of course, can easily learn from his mistakes. Just to be clear - those engineers, dismissed as "PHP devs" have numerous degrees, decades of experience, and at least one published book. Kevin dropped out of a PC repair school that he likes to refer to as a "CS program." Anyway he seems to be doing his best to expose his lack of competence.

spitfire 15y ago
He's doing what is known as failing upwards. This is what happens to people in the tech-celebrity/VC circle. I expect he has learnt a lot - how to sell, how to shake hands, etc.
- earl 15y ago
  Kevin learned how to walk away with millions even if your startup is, on net, a failure. ^^ that's a key fucking learning edit: just to be clear, I don't begrudge him anything. Kevin negotiated the best deal for himself that he could and that's what everyone should be doing. I hope the employees got taken care of as well, but it is what it is. Being an employee at a startup, and I'm on my third, is gambling.
  - spitfire 15y ago
    Yup. Wish I could see past my own tech-ego and play the game to that end.
NinetyNine 15y ago
Is there more to the story that you know (considering you used to work at Digg?). You're claiming that leadership at Digg didn't attempt to retrain these programmers new projects, which is a pretty substantial claim. Also, I don't see why Rose's educational background is relevant to his leadership ability, and that statement seems like a superfluous ad-hominem. I'm not necessarily defending Digg leadership in this case, but I certainly question an emotionally heated top post in an HN thread.

formerdigger 15y ago

Kevin wasn't around enough to know what was going on with the company. We probably saw him 1-2 days a month at the office and that was because he needed a place to park his Porsche 911.