[mechanical_fish]

Battelle asked about the highly critical memo from a Google engineer that was mistakenly made public. Gundotra's talking point on this: "Larry and Sergey have fostered a culture that allows open debate. The outside world got a peek into what it's like to work at Google. That's why we didn't fire him."

Brin was less diplomatic about the memo. "I stopped reading it after the first 1,000 pages or so," he said. "If you want to get a point across, limit it to a paragraph or so."

Are we ever going to have a social network run by people with sufficient diplomatic skill to host a simple birthday party?

Having said that: Rather than analyzing these clunker quotes any further I'd note that they are a journalist's paraphrase of what may well have been a gotcha question asked by the very same journalist. That's a notoriously treacherous process. So I'd like to avoid piling on. Let's just say that, if the journalist was the one who pulled and slanted these quotes to make them read like a barely-veiled public threat and a not-at-all-veiled peremptory brush-off, that journalist did a fine job.

If I were a Google recruiter I'd be prepping a better response right now. A pity that the company blew the chance to deliver a kind human response from the podium, but you can't fix history.

[pork]

> Are we ever going to have a social network run by people with sufficient diplomatic skill to host a simple birthday party?

No, because engineers run social networks, and many engineers are ironically socially lacking.

But that's besides the point. I thought Brin's response was HUMAN! Consider that he could have gone the PR route with "we value all our employees' opinions and are looking into the matter". I vastly prefer honesty over PR; and I think many engineers do too.

[mechanical_fish]

I vastly prefer honesty over PR; and I think many engineers do too.

It is a mistake to equate "honesty" with "blurting out the first thing that comes into one's head, no matter how rude, and no matter who is listening".

And it's one thing to take your employee aside for a blunt conversation, and another to broadcast your criticism from a public stage, a stage where the employee's pride is at stake and yet the realities of politics, PR, and media ecology leave the employee effectively unable to respond in kind.

There's nothing dishonest about the phrase "no comment", just as there's nothing dishonest about concealing your body by wearing clothes. It's about privacy. Some things are appropriate for a press conference, some things are appropriate for an all-company email, some things are appropriate for a one-on-one with an employee, some things are appropriate for close friends, and I'm afraid some thoughts are just inappropriate -- there's no shame in having them, but you should show some restraint in sharing them.

And it's true that many people grapple with these principles in the way that one grapples with a strange foreign language, and that engineering culture has evolved to cope with that reality. But Google's not trying to build a social network for engineers. They're trying to build a social network for the world. And if appealing to people beyond the Google culture is business-critical for Google, then politeness is business-critical for Google.

[awj]

I don't think that's what's going on here. Steve Yegge is notorious for his overly-long blog posts. I got a chuckle at the comment, and I think that kind of offhand joke is what Brin intended.

This looks like an inside joke pulled out of context by the reporter. Maybe Brin made an error in speaking to his audience, but I don't think this comment was as damaging as you're making it out to be.

[tptacek]

The Internet peanut gallery has decided that any number of people are notorious for any number of things. That doesn't make it OK for someone's employer to berate them about it on stage.

[pork]

I think you may be taking this a bit more seriously than either party intended. See bostonpete's comment below.

[bostonpete]

> I thought Brin's response was HUMAN!

Me too! And a bit funny. I can't think of a better way to handle this mess than to (a) not fire Yegge, (b) poke back at him a bit publicly and playfully, (c) address Yegge's concerns internally.

[bh42222]

I thought Brin's response was HUMAN!

And if not re-contextualized by the reporter, then also clearly shows him being a dick.

I've been at huge companies, I've written Yegge sized rants to the VP of engineering, and that VP actually red my rant of frustration, ALL of it, and did something about it. And this was at one of those boring giant East Coast tech companies that still have their roots in the old DEC and IBM company cultures.

[billswift]

>then also clearly shows him being a dick

And, except that you are hiding behind pseudonymity, your post shows you being an even bigger dick. Maybe you ought to think about what you are writing before you post it.