I totally listen to reasonable people talking about reasonable things. However, I would never use the reason that somebody is a billionaire to pay more attention.
Let me give you examples.
Elon Musk in Windows (I disagree with him, even in 2000, Linux kernel version 2.2.12-20, RedHat version 6.1 --old versioning--)
"In the year of 2000, Windows is considered much better than good old Unix platform. Musk wanted to move all technologies from UNIX to Windows platform. But, Unix zealots like Max Levchian (Co-founder of Confinity[1]) and his team disagreed with Elon. A holy war started, and Elon Musk lost the battle. The board fired Elon in October 2000, and appointed Peter Thiel as new CEO. Elon officially left the company's day to day operations by 2001, though he stayed on in an advisory role and as the largest shareholder."
Jeff Bezos Mandate, internal APIs (I agree with him 80% of his points, not because he is billionaire but because his argument is reasonable for the size of company he was running at the time)
"
1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
"
And so on. After working with many millionaires and billionaires I just realised that it does not matter what they say without a good argument, I have seen CEOs fired just like Elon Musk over decisions similar to move the company stack to Windows and I also have seen CEOs listening to staff and making an intelligent decision that moved the company forward. I definitely like to listen to people with reasonable arguments, especially if the things they are suggesting works.
Out of curiosity, what's wrong with the Bezos thing?
It's maybe a little dogmatic, but it also means that any useful internal tools can be turned into an AWS service, which seems like it's been a decent strategy for Amazon.
Slight tangent: at one company, years after Yegge’s blog post, a senior manager presented those principles as his own cunningly developed strategy. The ridicule was palpable.
Let me give you examples.
Elon Musk in Windows (I disagree with him, even in 2000, Linux kernel version 2.2.12-20, RedHat version 6.1 --old versioning--)
"In the year of 2000, Windows is considered much better than good old Unix platform. Musk wanted to move all technologies from UNIX to Windows platform. But, Unix zealots like Max Levchian (Co-founder of Confinity[1]) and his team disagreed with Elon. A holy war started, and Elon Musk lost the battle. The board fired Elon in October 2000, and appointed Peter Thiel as new CEO. Elon officially left the company's day to day operations by 2001, though he stayed on in an advisory role and as the largest shareholder."
Jeff Bezos Mandate, internal APIs (I agree with him 80% of his points, not because he is billionaire but because his argument is reasonable for the size of company he was running at the time)
" 1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions. "
And so on. After working with many millionaires and billionaires I just realised that it does not matter what they say without a good argument, I have seen CEOs fired just like Elon Musk over decisions similar to move the company stack to Windows and I also have seen CEOs listening to staff and making an intelligent decision that moved the company forward. I definitely like to listen to people with reasonable arguments, especially if the things they are suggesting works.