5 ms·

Heroku COO on RapGenius, legendary hires, and developers’ woman problem

48 points by craigkerstiens 14y ago

nasalgoat 14y ago
Interesting non-answer on the whole RapGenius debacle - very politician-like move to talk about "respect" and not actually address the serious technical issues. I think he's a bit too touchy-feely and not enough make-it-worky.
- vampirechicken 14y ago
  You would expect this answer from the COO or CEO, you get technical answers from the CTO, but when you have a PR problem you trot out the CEO/COO.
  - rhizome 14y ago
    “I see this in a big picture,” he said. No details will be forthcoming.
    - vampirechicken 14y ago
      That's about what you can expect from that guy. When RapGenius didn't get the answers they thought they deserved, they went to the court of public opinion, and put Heroku on the defensive. All Heroku can do now is damage control, and we recently saw an example of that which didn't work out very well for Elon Musk. So they give interviews to Venture Beat (a C-level exec publication) with the COO who talks about trust and community, and the C-level execs feel a little better. You and I are left to wonder why a random routing dispatcher is better than a deterministic routing dispatcher regardless, of single-thread, multi-thread, evented, non-evented listeners.
jroseattle 14y ago
The "respect" line sounds admirable, but it comes off as defensive in light of the RapGenius fiasco. And I wouldn't call documentation that indicates a core piece of infrastructure works one way but then functions an entirely different way as a "mis-communication". That sort of CEO-speak is simply meant to minimize the situation to make any further discussion around it look petty. Respect, indeed.
- chc 14y ago
  I think "miscommunication" is a reasonable description of outdated documentation that should have been replaced but wasn't. How would you describe an oversight that led to communicating erroneous ideas like that?
  - dandelany 14y ago
    Seeing as how most potential customers use the documentation to determine whether or not Heroku would be a good fit for their business before becoming customers, I'd call it "false advertising".
    - badgar 14y ago
      Exactly. The "documentation" that was out of date was a fundamental description of the product. They were selling a different product than they were delivering.
  - jroseattle 14y ago
    I guess I don't really consider an explanation of a company's core product that's inaccurate a miscommunication or outdated communication. If this is the amount of oversight the company provides, I should commensurately view Heroku with an sufficient amount of skepticism and expect that their documentation is inaccurate and outdated. In the end, the characterization of this matter means little. What's key is how this reflects on their reputation, and right now it's worse than it was previously.
saym 14y ago
I am mostly disappointed with this response. I see this as an attempt to skirt the issue, the technical problem. Sure, developer success is important, but the issue is with server performance and efficiency. I would rather they address their problems head-on. Perhaps I'd prefer that approach for every company and every problem.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ripberge 14y ago
"That middle-American dad programmer using .NET, how do we respect and engage with that community"? I live in Silicon Beach in LA. I've architected two very successful startups in .NET. I have written .NET for sites making 100's of millions like Hulu, Ticketmaster, Fandango. I wake up in the morning thinking about software and fall asleep thinking about software. I take my craft very seriously. I am not some aberration in the .NET world, as I've worked with hundreds of guys like myself. Sounds like you don't have a whole lot of respect for the .NET community. I've just lost a little bit more respect for Heroku.
- bitcartel 14y ago
  It's not just Heroku, it seems a lot of start-ups love to beat down on C# and .NET. "Why we don’t hire .NET programmers" http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-hire-net-programmers/ http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-...
  - ripberge 14y ago
    LoL. What a great 1.6 to 1.7 oz burger analogy he makes. I'm convinced this man is an expert in .NET and it's pro's and con's in relation to other platforms.
  - revelation 14y ago
    Wow, what a horribly misinformed post. Users of jQuery UI complaining about not being able to build that 1.7oz burger in the .NET ecosystem, while having not a sliver of understanding what a virtual machine is and just calling it all a "language".
- chc 14y ago
  I am baffled by what has you so offended here. I don't see anything disrespectful to the .NET community in that quote. He's not saying ".NET programmers aren't serious about their craft" — he's essentially saying "Ruby was really popular in the Silicon Valley startup culture, but other stacks were more popular in other places and among other demographics." The "middle-American dad using .NET" is more or less the complete opposite of Heroku's initial core audience, so he was essentially saying "How do we expand this to everybody?" You even fit what he's talking about — you're not in Silicon Valley, and you're using a different technology stack. I don't see anything wrong with being you, and I don't think Teich does either.
seivan 14y ago
Rap Genius might have a point about the routing issue, but still being on Bambo and not running with more workers is just plain stupid. I've know this since June 2011...
jaytaylor 14y ago
Great..so they've fixed that one problem. What about all the rest of the bugs? For example, I was just bitching at them earlier today [0] about the 13-month old bug [1] which prevents uninstalling virtualenv packages on the cedar stack. Seriously, check out the workarounds listed in the stackoverflow link, they are pretty desperate.. the situation is ridiculous. Certain aspects of Heroku, and especially some of the people who work there, are excellent. However, it seems like there are chronic systemic problems with how the organization monitors/checks quality. [0] https://twitter.com/jtaylor/status/307261409262202880 https://twitter.com/jtaylor/status/307261409262202880 [1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/15087542/293064 http://stackoverflow.com/a/15087542/293064 edit: added a missing comma
revelation 14y ago
Thats genius PR. He didn't "open up", he gave a bunch of prepared statements, inserted long pauses to simulate thinking and then told that whole story of his inner zen and meditation with the Notes app open. And the reporter bought it.
- hobs 14y ago
  Yep. I closed the article as soon as the I read "He handed me his iPhone...daily meditation..screenshot of bullshit" I don't have a stake in the game, and I have been interested in seeing the back and forth, but this is fluff malarky.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
programminggeek 14y ago
The problem with how Heroku handled RapGenius is that they basically have punted each time they have said almost anything with an apology and a promise for more info in the future. What they probably should have said is that at some point if you are running too much stuff on Heroku, you probably should be running your own servers tuned to your own very specific workloads. Of course, that would sort of violate the whole premise of a PAAS in the cloud that can scale to infinity, but the point remains. If you are paying $10,000+ a month, that buys you a lot of server time elsewhere that would probably be tuned better for current workloads or maybe Heroku needs to offer more turning options. Either way, it feels an awful lot like Heroku has punted every time they had a chance to run with the ball on this and that's pretty disappointing.
- tlrobinson 14y ago
  "if you are running too much stuff on Heroku, you probably should be running your own servers tuned to your own very specific workloads" ...and if you're using a blocking, single-threaded server/framework your definition of "too much stuff" is a lot less than everyone else's.
  - programminggeek 14y ago
    I agree, and honestly part of the problem is that people seem to have this notion that Heroku, AppEngine, or Azure will scale to infinity without any extra work on your part. At some point regardless of your tech, if you are at a large enough scale, you need to control your own destiny.
happywolf 14y ago
Talking about respect seems too little too late on Heroku's effort to save its reputation. I still fail to see how Heroku actually plans to compensate the users for the resources thrown in to 'fix' the issues they thought they were fixing. From RapGenius' version of the story, it seems Heroku was aware of the issue for sometime, it only started to respond and fix things up when RagGenius started to bitch about the issue on a massive scale. Frankly I don't see much 'respect' behind all these.
jimzvz 14y ago
This marketing fluff failed to communicate anything useful to me but did make me decide that I no longer like heroku. Actually, I guess that is useful. >"Ultimately, our stances always come from a place of respect. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all." >"I think it’s great when someone provides feedback , positive or negative, but we need to do it in a respectful way. When these things come up — and they will always come up — just treat everyone involved with respect." >Two years ago, he told me, the word “respect” wasn’t on that list. Today, it defines how Heroku will respond to RapGenius and the rest of its customers. What? This guy sounds like a politician. If you accidentally (or deliberately) hide the way a major part of your product works and it just so happens that this means that to get a certain performance from your product, your customers will have to pay a lot more than they think, do not give an interview talking about "respect" (shouldn't that be a given!?), apologise and tell us how you are going to fix it.
herokulawsuit 14y ago
This is interesting... www.herokuclassaction.com

Interesting non-answer on the whole RapGenius debacle - very politician-like move to talk about "respect" and not actually address the serious technical issues. I think he's a bit too touchy-feely and not enough make-it-worky.

vampirechicken 14y ago
You would expect this answer from the COO or CEO, you get technical answers from the CTO, but when you have a PR problem you trot out the CEO/COO.
- rhizome 14y ago
  “I see this in a big picture,” he said. No details will be forthcoming.
  - vampirechicken 14y ago
    That's about what you can expect from that guy. When RapGenius didn't get the answers they thought they deserved, they went to the court of public opinion, and put Heroku on the defensive. All Heroku can do now is damage control, and we recently saw an example of that which didn't work out very well for Elon Musk. So they give interviews to Venture Beat (a C-level exec publication) with the COO who talks about trust and community, and the C-level execs feel a little better. You and I are left to wonder why a random routing dispatcher is better than a deterministic routing dispatcher regardless, of single-thread, multi-thread, evented, non-evented listeners.

jroseattle 14y ago

The "respect" line sounds admirable, but it comes off as defensive in light of the RapGenius fiasco. And I wouldn't call documentation that indicates a core piece of infrastructure works one way but then functions an entirely different way as a "mis-communication". That sort of CEO-speak is simply meant to minimize the situation to make any further discussion around it look petty. Respect, indeed.

chc 14y ago
I think "miscommunication" is a reasonable description of outdated documentation that should have been replaced but wasn't. How would you describe an oversight that led to communicating erroneous ideas like that?
- dandelany 14y ago
  Seeing as how most potential customers use the documentation to determine whether or not Heroku would be a good fit for their business before becoming customers, I'd call it "false advertising".
  - badgar 14y ago
    Exactly. The "documentation" that was out of date was a fundamental description of the product. They were selling a different product than they were delivering.
- jroseattle 14y ago
  I guess I don't really consider an explanation of a company's core product that's inaccurate a miscommunication or outdated communication. If this is the amount of oversight the company provides, I should commensurately view Heroku with an sufficient amount of skepticism and expect that their documentation is inaccurate and outdated. In the end, the characterization of this matter means little. What's key is how this reflects on their reputation, and right now it's worse than it was previously.

saym 14y ago

I am mostly disappointed with this response. I see this as an attempt to skirt the issue, the technical problem. Sure, developer success is important, but the issue is with server performance and efficiency. I would rather they address their problems head-on. Perhaps I'd prefer that approach for every company and every problem.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ripberge 14y ago

"That middle-American dad programmer using .NET, how do we respect and engage with that community"? I live in Silicon Beach in LA. I've architected two very successful startups in .NET. I have written .NET for sites making 100's of millions like Hulu, Ticketmaster, Fandango. I wake up in the morning thinking about software and fall asleep thinking about software. I take my craft very seriously. I am not some aberration in the .NET world, as I've worked with hundreds of guys like myself. Sounds like you don't have a whole lot of respect for the .NET community. I've just lost a little bit more respect for Heroku.

bitcartel 14y ago
It's not just Heroku, it seems a lot of start-ups love to beat down on C# and .NET. "Why we don’t hire .NET programmers" http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-hire-net-programmers/ http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-...
- ripberge 14y ago
  LoL. What a great 1.6 to 1.7 oz burger analogy he makes. I'm convinced this man is an expert in .NET and it's pro's and con's in relation to other platforms.
- revelation 14y ago
  Wow, what a horribly misinformed post. Users of jQuery UI complaining about not being able to build that 1.7oz burger in the .NET ecosystem, while having not a sliver of understanding what a virtual machine is and just calling it all a "language".
chc 14y ago
I am baffled by what has you so offended here. I don't see anything disrespectful to the .NET community in that quote. He's not saying ".NET programmers aren't serious about their craft" — he's essentially saying "Ruby was really popular in the Silicon Valley startup culture, but other stacks were more popular in other places and among other demographics." The "middle-American dad using .NET" is more or less the complete opposite of Heroku's initial core audience, so he was essentially saying "How do we expand this to everybody?" You even fit what he's talking about — you're not in Silicon Valley, and you're using a different technology stack. I don't see anything wrong with being you, and I don't think Teich does either.

seivan 14y ago

Rap Genius might have a point about the routing issue, but still being on Bambo and not running with more workers is just plain stupid. I've know this since June 2011...

jaytaylor 14y ago

Great..so they've fixed that one problem. What about all the rest of the bugs? For example, I was just bitching at them earlier today [0] about the 13-month old bug [1] which prevents uninstalling virtualenv packages on the cedar stack. Seriously, check out the workarounds listed in the stackoverflow link, they are pretty desperate.. the situation is ridiculous. Certain aspects of Heroku, and especially some of the people who work there, are excellent. However, it seems like there are chronic systemic problems with how the organization monitors/checks quality. [0] https://twitter.com/jtaylor/status/307261409262202880 https://twitter.com/jtaylor/status/307261409262202880 [1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/15087542/293064 http://stackoverflow.com/a/15087542/293064 edit: added a missing comma

revelation 14y ago

Thats genius PR. He didn't "open up", he gave a bunch of prepared statements, inserted long pauses to simulate thinking and then told that whole story of his inner zen and meditation with the Notes app open. And the reporter bought it.

hobs 14y ago
Yep. I closed the article as soon as the I read "He handed me his iPhone...daily meditation..screenshot of bullshit" I don't have a stake in the game, and I have been interested in seeing the back and forth, but this is fluff malarky.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

programminggeek 14y ago

The problem with how Heroku handled RapGenius is that they basically have punted each time they have said almost anything with an apology and a promise for more info in the future. What they probably should have said is that at some point if you are running too much stuff on Heroku, you probably should be running your own servers tuned to your own very specific workloads. Of course, that would sort of violate the whole premise of a PAAS in the cloud that can scale to infinity, but the point remains. If you are paying $10,000+ a month, that buys you a lot of server time elsewhere that would probably be tuned better for current workloads or maybe Heroku needs to offer more turning options. Either way, it feels an awful lot like Heroku has punted every time they had a chance to run with the ball on this and that's pretty disappointing.

tlrobinson 14y ago
"if you are running too much stuff on Heroku, you probably should be running your own servers tuned to your own very specific workloads" ...and if you're using a blocking, single-threaded server/framework your definition of "too much stuff" is a lot less than everyone else's.
- programminggeek 14y ago
  I agree, and honestly part of the problem is that people seem to have this notion that Heroku, AppEngine, or Azure will scale to infinity without any extra work on your part. At some point regardless of your tech, if you are at a large enough scale, you need to control your own destiny.

happywolf 14y ago

Talking about respect seems too little too late on Heroku's effort to save its reputation. I still fail to see how Heroku actually plans to compensate the users for the resources thrown in to 'fix' the issues they thought they were fixing. From RapGenius' version of the story, it seems Heroku was aware of the issue for sometime, it only started to respond and fix things up when RagGenius started to bitch about the issue on a massive scale. Frankly I don't see much 'respect' behind all these.

jimzvz 14y ago

This marketing fluff failed to communicate anything useful to me but did make me decide that I no longer like heroku. Actually, I guess that is useful. >"Ultimately, our stances always come from a place of respect. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all." >"I think it’s great when someone provides feedback , positive or negative, but we need to do it in a respectful way. When these things come up — and they will always come up — just treat everyone involved with respect." >Two years ago, he told me, the word “respect” wasn’t on that list. Today, it defines how Heroku will respond to RapGenius and the rest of its customers. What? This guy sounds like a politician. If you accidentally (or deliberately) hide the way a major part of your product works and it just so happens that this means that to get a certain performance from your product, your customers will have to pay a lot more than they think, do not give an interview talking about "respect" (shouldn't that be a given!?), apologise and tell us how you are going to fix it.

herokulawsuit 14y ago

This is interesting... www.herokuclassaction.com