[queensnake]

You have to think that Brin was sort of 'stung' by Yegge's airing Google's laundry in public like that so he's zinging back, but still, he's had time to process it and come up with a more politic response. If he'd softened it with ' ... but he raises some good points and it's provoked discussion ...' it'd be ok but as it is it's a blowoff and diss. In Yegge's place I might leave.

[potatolicious]

Where would Yegge go?

We know how he feels about Amazon ;) Somehow I don't think MSFT is going to be a fit for him either.

Oracle? Perish the thought.

Facebook? Maaaaybe.

There are precious few companies out there who give the amount of freedom to engineers that Google employees enjoy. For all its problems, Google is still one of a kind - unless Yegge wants to play the startup game for a while.

[yardie]

He can always start or join a startup. He's a well known and well respected engineer. His name on the corporate letterhead guarantees at least a years funding if not more.

Also, if you looked in the comments of his G+ page there was no shortage of job offers there.

[SkyMarshal]

It might even have been a missed opportunity. Brin (or better yet Page) could have posted a public reply that said, to the effect of:

Yegge is absolutely right, I've been thinking along similar lines recently, and now is a great opportunity to do something about it. I'm issuing the same edict as Bezos - every Google product must expose its full functionality via public API. From today, Yegge is in charge of coordinating and making it happen. etc etc

One of the issues that Google seems to face is that a form of technical debt is catching up with them. They've had the same three officially approved languages for a decade now - C++, Java, Python - with Go on the way to becoming a fourth. But that rules out interesting new ones like Scala, Clojure, Erlang, Haskell that might 1) be good tools for particular projects, and 2) attract great developers.

Requiring all their products to interact via published API only might enable increased polyglot programming and a more diverse and interesting tech ecosystem.

Just speculating on all this, but I do wonder...

[MrMan]

Must take issue with one point - whatever technical debt they may have amassed has little to do, I suspect, with holding on to the same boring old programming languages too long.

The shareholders should fire Brin if he suggests re-writing boring old "legacy" code in a sexy new language!

[SkyMarshal]

Haha, I certainly didn't mean to imply any of Google's current stuff should be rewritten. It's all very high quality, performant. Rather, I was thinking of new projects that might benefit from other languages or platforms.

[Tichy]

Who knows, maybe Yegge is wrong? Not saying he is, but what makes everybody so sure they know the best future strategy for Google?

[Tichy]

He was lucky he wasn't fired...

[wingo]

...by Hacker News ;)

[david927]

...again :-)

[jrockway]

Why? He can get a job anywhere, but Google is still actively searching for people as smart as him to work on their stuff.

[Tichy]

I was only referring to the other statement in the article that they didn't fire him because of some reason (forgot - maybe because nobody can realistically be expected to figure out what is being shared with whom on G+).

No value statement about holding a job at Google was intended. Although he repeatedly claimed it was his dream job.