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>"Well, because that guy pointed out a bug without also blowing sunshine up my ass, I'm going to just leave our product buggy." Has this guy worked anywhere be

>"Well, because that guy pointed out a bug without also blowing sunshine up my ass, I'm going to just leave our product buggy." Has this guy worked anywhere before? (Yes, it's a joke, I know who Zawinski is). I am sure there is a faction in Facebook who thinks their filter system needs an overhaul, and I'm sure this post will go on a big pile of "why" somewhere. However, if you're asking an engineer who works near (but probably not on) something to go talk to another team, you need to be somewhat polite. Because you're not asking them to do their job - you're asking them to go tell a colleague that they aren't doing theirs. You want them to spend political capital internally to make Facebook/whatever better for you instead of spending it on what they think would be best. I don't think he's a hypocrite for using and hating Facebook. That's just life. I think he's forgotten that people, even Facebook employees, have ideas and agendas other than his own and you need to be diplomatic if you want them to serve yours.

mikeash 12y ago
Complaining in public and having insiders dismiss it for bad reasons probably serves his agenda better than getting it fixed. A fix from insiders in this case will probably just get this one thing through, or maybe whitelist the account for more careful attention in the future, while bad public attention has the potential for getting them to fix the whole system.
abstractbill 12y ago
A long time ago, jwz used to use Justin.tv for the DNA Lounge webcast, and I used to use his rants as evidence that someone out there cared about a given bug and we should prioritize fixing it. If anything I think it helped that his rants were rude, since that made it clear how much he cared about the problems. Startups are different though. What you wrote is probably a lot more true of a company the size of Facebook.
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forgottenpass 12y ago
You want them to spend political capital internally to make Facebook/whatever better for you instead of spending it on what they think would be best. What kind of broken ass backwards corporate culture requires expending political capital just to report a bug across teams? If someone is letting pettiness degrade the quality of the product like that, they're bad at their job.

mikeash 12y ago

Complaining in public and having insiders dismiss it for bad reasons probably serves his agenda better than getting it fixed. A fix from insiders in this case will probably just get this one thing through, or maybe whitelist the account for more careful attention in the future, while bad public attention has the potential for getting them to fix the whole system.

abstractbill 12y ago

A long time ago, jwz used to use Justin.tv for the DNA Lounge webcast, and I used to use his rants as evidence that someone out there cared about a given bug and we should prioritize fixing it. If anything I think it helped that his rants were rude, since that made it clear how much he cared about the problems. Startups are different though. What you wrote is probably a lot more true of a company the size of Facebook.

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forgottenpass 12y ago

You want them to spend political capital internally to make Facebook/whatever better for you instead of spending it on what they think would be best. What kind of broken ass backwards corporate culture requires expending political capital just to report a bug across teams? If someone is letting pettiness degrade the quality of the product like that, they're bad at their job.