[potatolicious]

> "If you want to get a point across, limit it to a paragraph or so."

And, with that, Sergey Brin invalidates the entire human race's history of long-form literature, short stories, essays, and plays...

... and his company's own Android launch yesterday, which I suspect was more verbose than a few paragraphs.

[praptak]

Heh, my first association was The Gettysburg Address as Powerpoint Persentation by Peter Norvig: http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/

[gujk]

The Gettysburg address as something like 3 minutes of a 22 hour ceremony. It proves Brin's point exactly.

Steve Yegge's blog is called "Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants" and not "Stevey's Key Points of Great Ideas" for a reason.

[enjalot]

Am I the only one that interpreted as a light-hearted sarcastic remark? In the same interview he admitted to being very sarcastic when supporting key features of g+ I'd like to hear the audio to check out his inflection and the full context.

I was surprised by Vic ending with "that's why we didn't fire him." The thought of firing Yegge over a rant would signal extreme shortsightedness to me...

[bostonpete]

Well, others had discussed whether he'd get fired, but I think the consensus was that he wouldn't because it'd be a bad PR move.

However, I don't think it's correct to say that they would have been firing him "over a rant". They would have been firing him over a lengthy, detailed, public (intentional or not) criticism of the company that went after the most senior company executives by name.

I don't think he should have been fired, but I think something like that would be considered at least a "fire-able" offense at pretty much any company.

[0x12]

> but I think something like that would be considered at least a "fire-able" offense at pretty much any company.

Only for insecure managers.

[kragen]

It read to me like he was answering the question, "Why didn't you fire Yegge for posting this?"

[mtts]

Nonsense. I'm a big fan of long-form literature, short stories, essays and plays, but if all you want to do is get a point across, you'd better use something else.

;-)

[astrec]

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead - Twain, Pascal, Cicero et al.

[jarek]

I think that's a pretty unfair summary. Brin didn't suggest he disapproves of everything longer than a paragraph, and Yegge's post wasn't art or literature. In the context of a question whether an executive has read something an employee has written, it's a much more reasonable statement.

[michaelochurch]

"63 words because you're clearly not important enough for 64."

[jxi]

You have no idea how many jokes he makes about the length of the Android source code. They're hilarious too.

He was just trying to be funny. I don't know why one comment about a post that wasn't even intended to be posted to the public is being nit-picked to such detail.

Sergey is just a normal guy like all of us. Sure he's the CTO of a very important company, but it'd be cool if he were treated like a normal person too. Why should he have to be held to a higher standard of political correctness at all times, even when commenting about something fairly insignificant (in both mine and probably his opinion).

I don't want to argue about the importance of Steve Yegge's post, but let's just assume that we've already made the assumption that it isn't too significant.

[0x12]

With great power comes great responsibility. Once you are the CTO of the #1 web company you have to expect that you're going to be held to different standards than J. Random Blogger.

The fact that you consider it 'fairly insignificant' is probably what drives your view of this more than anything, consider the possibility that you are wrong.

Yegge is anything but dumb and when people like that speak up, publicly or otherwise and you employ them to further the goals of your company the smart thing to do is to listen.

Nobody is all knowing.

If you hire such people to ignore them do them and yourself a favor and don't waste their time. After all, what's the point of having talent like that on board without at least hearing it out. Verbose or not.

[statictype]

Google is a large company. I'm sure Brin didn't personally hire Yegge and didn't do it for the sole purpose of his inputs on platforms.

That said, he (Yegge) does have a good point and I bet the top brass at Google really did pay attention to what he said.

I suspect this is Brin just trying to be funny.

[freejack]

Yegge already knew what Brin thought of his post long before Brin made that comment. You can't seriously think that this wasn't dealt with internally. The only reason that Brin is making jokes about it is because it is 100% water under the bridge for them.

[0x12]

Well, then maybe he should have said something to that effect. The problem with speaking in public is that people will actually hear what you say. If you don't intend to come across as flippant don't be flippant.

[freejack]

Yeah, and I'm sure that his entire statement would have been quoted in the press :-)

"We talked with Yegge and dealt with the matter internally, and besides, I didn't read past the first thousand pages"

gets quoted as...

"I didn't read past the first thousand pages..."

[sigmaxipi]

Brin is not the CTO of Google: "Sergey Brin co-founded Google Inc. in 1998. Today, he directs special projects. From 2001 to 2011, Sergey served as president of technology, where he shared responsibility for the company’s day-to-day operations with Larry Page and Eric Schmidt."

http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/execs.html#ser...

[0x12]

I should have verified that I guess, but it doesn't really matter either way. Brin is very visible as co-founder of Google and can expect his words to be quoted. And typically those quotes will come out in the worst possible way so when you make a public statement you try to do so in a way to minimize the possible damage.

[jxi]

By no means did I mean it was dumb. I meant that this kind of thing happens almost every week inside of Google. There is a ton of discussion going on all the time and Google is known to be a company where every employee's voice is heard.

Steve's rant was a bit longer than usual rants, and he was just pointing that out in his kind of lame way. What would be a satisfactory answer anyway? "I thought it was a good idea, we are going think about making all of Google into platforms right now"? Or, some no-op response that most CEO/CTO's tend to give to things like this?

[potatolicious]

The funny thing is Brin's response is in direct contrast to Gundotra's - both of whom were being interviewed at the same time.

Gundotra was diplomatic and used the question as an opportunity to brag about Google's culture of openness. Brin used it as an opportunity to either:

A - crack a badly worded joke

B - slam Yegge

One can only hope it was option A, though given the way it's worded I don't doubt there is some venom in there.

[bad_user]

You can't argue that Amazon is kicking their asses in regards to AWS versus Google's App Engine. The lame joke I'm seeing here is GAE.

And I think Yegge has a good point - Facebook IS different for each individual because everybody has their own preferences in regards to how they use it and that's because while Google was making lame experiments with Buzz forcing Gmail users to use it, Facebook was busy becoming a platform.

And Android is popular not because it's a better / more polished product than iOS. It isn't, not by a long shot. Instead Android is a better platform.

Personally I loved Steve's rant and he nailed it.

[Confusion]

The first line of his response ("I stopped reading after ...) was a joke. I don't see how the second line, quoted above, can be construed as a joke.

[jarek]

Why does everyone seem to miss that Brin is right? If you want to get the CTO of a company the size of Google to read a memo, you do make it short and to the point. It took me like half an hour to read it, it was a good read, but if I was an executive I'd much rather read "this guy says we need more APIs and interoperation and a couple of other smart guys agree."

Short and to the point is not what Steve Yegge was doing, it's not what Steve Yegge generally does, and it's fine because I'm pretty sure he didn't write his post aiming at the C-level and expecting them to read it.

[Confusion]

I'm not sure you're right. There are at least two reasons for expecting people to read long forms:

1) Sometimes you need to tell a story to get people to see a point. Merely stating the facts won't do it. You need to slowly lead them somewhere, while drawing a landscape, pointing out some of the pitfalls they would have pointed out, telling them how you avoided them. You need time to draw people into your line of thinking let something sink in

It's much like with security issues: if you report them, nothing happens. If you extract the details of a thousand customers and present those, people get upset and take action. The first approach is short and to the point, but does not achieve the goal, but the goal is inherently inachievable by short-and-to-the-point approaches.

I know I've been persuaded by stories where short factual statements didn't succeed, because I didn't take the time to turn the facts into the story for myself.

2) If short reports are good enough for the CTO, any manager between you and the CTO will think short reports are good enough for him as well. You will never get the chance to make a subtle point that requires some paragraphs, because nobody will read it.

There is a general complaints about a cultural change in this direction that the internet supposedly induced, but I believe it started much earlier, with the growth of megacorporations where people were expected to consume more information than they could possibly handle.

To cope, they started to consume summaries by supposedly smart advisors that they trusted. However, they also get to randomly disregard such summaries when they feel like it (out of intuition if we're being generous), because they can always say "well, it's actually complex" and they get to excuse themselves in the same way. Short reports often actually aren't good enough at all, but we've learned to live with it, because some wrong decisions are better than no decisions at all.

There is a way in between, where you sometimes, when the issue is important enough, do read the long form. Even top-level CEO's may be interested in an 800 page book on 'The better angels of our nature'. Yegge may be important enough, and his subject matter may be important enough, that Brin should actually read it entirely.

[nradov]

When Bill Gates held the equivalent position at Microsoft he used to dedicate a week twice a year to reading long texts.

http://books.google.com/books?id=kaJZkwhVRYEC&pg=PA293&#...

[jarek]

Cool, so Brin will read Yegge's blog at Christmas. A week after the big post, it's reasonable for him to have dismissed it based on length.

[narag]

I smiled with the first line because I did knew about Steve's lengthy rants. I understood the second line as an explanation for an audience that might not catch the first one.

Also, the rant has no mercy with Jeff Bezos. The dismissive tone and the "that's the reason he wasn't fired" phrase might be just a way to say that Google, as a company, doesn't subscribe the views of an employee.

That's just my personal interpretation anyway.

[jxi]

I don't pretend to be a comedian, but it seems to be just reinforcing his first assertion (which he was kidding about). I actually think he's referencing something internal related to having to make certain descriptions shorter.

So, I should probably also mention that Sergey is known for making /lame/ jokes.

[ajays]

"Sure he's the CTO of a very important company" ....

... and Yegge's criticism was squarely about Brin's area of responsibility. So it's natural that Brin would be a little pissed about it, because Yegge was effectively saying that Brin's doing a half-assed job in some critical areas.