the blog: tag= bureaucracy
More than bleeding purple
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- http://valleywag.com/5017424/stewart-butterfields-bizarre-resign....
Click it, read it. It's Stewart Butterfield's—Flickr co-founder—good-bye resignation note. Simply unreal and hilarious. I wish I had the cajones.
It's an appropriate metaphor for Y!'s 2005 ascent to its current cluster-mumbo-jumbo. It's rather sad because in early '05, Y! began to hire big guns, major frackin' talent. Flickr had just been gobbled up. Soon, upcoming.org del.icio.us and Jumpcut joined the ranks, and with 'em, some extraordinary peeps. Internally, the Y!UI library, YDN network sprouted wings both as critical platforms for Y! properties and external entities in the wide open web. Yahoo! Answers busted its nut in late '05 too, growing to 20 million unique users in 6 months and over a dozen languages. Hack day, Y! Teachers and Y! Photos shone brightly. Man, those were good times. We were all doing some good companywide.
But .... 2007 reared its ugly head and somewhere, somehow the egos and bureaucracy ate into that spirit. Panama's flop and a deteriorating stock price didn't help.
Y!'s bookmarking services is a prime example of "does anyone have a clue?" There's del.icio.us, Bookmarks, and MyWeb, all of which do similar things, but no one has a clue how to offer a complete service. And some of these were supposed to help Search results in the losing battle against the Big G!. Again, never happened. Most of the resources were allocated towards dinky and trivial features, including color changes / reskinnings—except for the del.icio.us Firefox and IE extensions which rose to awesomeness. Overall, if there's one product that persevered the hogwash, Flickr did it best. Best example? Its well-thought out approach to video; otherwise corporate would have probably demanded Youtube on Flickr. Ha!
It's really sad to see the top dawgs go, beginning early this year: Bradley, Ian, Zawodny, Leonard, Caterina, Stewart and many others. (Yes, I'm name-dropping) They're not just any ol' rank-n-files. They were the ones that made you work hard and feel proud at Yahoo!.
*sigh* Too bad.
At least, Joshua still bleeds purple ;) But for how much longer?Labels: bureaucracy, del.icio.us, flickr, jumpcut, upcoming, yahoo, yanswers, ybookmarks
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The Answers Network
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A few hours ago, the team released the latest incarnation of Answers. The release includes a beta program for adding contacts / building relationships; one can then view all his / her contacts' questions and answers. Also, there is a 'Top Contributor' label for extraordinary Answerers. So far, the response is mixed; it always happens =)
This is my last sprint (project) w/ Answers. It's kinda sad. Answers has been a gift and one of my greatest personal achievements. It's just time, as 5 other engineers have left or also leaving. These things happen, as products and project teams grow, outlasting the original cast.
So, add some friends / contacts / peeps to your Answers Network now!Labels: bureaucracy, yanswers
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I love peanut butter.
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- Over the weekend, someone leaked an executive memo regarding the bureaucratic mass that has grown within Yahoo!. It happens and all growing companies have the same problem. It's inevitable. Growth, growth, growth: that's what defines the success of a publicly-traded company, right? =) Along the way, there will be bad hires, nepotism, power abuse, etc. It's gonna happen folks and it's up to management to wade through the blob or bring in the consultants, "The Bobs," to fix it.
Read the memo: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116379821....
Y! is my first product company as I had been in professional services (consulting) for the past 8-9 years. I would work onsite with clients, quietly chuckling at their politics. Now, i'm one of 'em. *giggles*
It's part of life and I do agree the company needs to part ways with such a heavy top-down management approach. It does stifle passion and innovation. I am 9 or 10 levels from C-level status but I think I make a darn big difference. How? Mostly by sticking to my guns. My credo to corporate life:"Trust your guts, do what's right and cut the bullshit politics."
You wanna build something cool? Do it. You wanna play games to hold on to your job? Get the hell out of my way. I'm not saying I'm better than other peeps, but I have no desire to hold the team back. Plus, I wanna make dollars ($$$) so I can retire at 45 =P
Better Bookmarks grew up like this. The PMs managed the politics and shielded the worker-bees; basically, I just made up stuff on the fly (agile stuff). The team had sanity checkpoints to verify product goals. It went something like this ....- I copied and pasted this example
- Using this skeleton, I began by wrapping the existing markup, implementing a single drag thing-a-ma-bob
- Then I did multiple drag thing-a-ma-bobs
- The designers asked me to mimic the Candygram user experience (I'm using the same akamaized image)
- Put in a messaging overlay for passive events
- Couldn't make the cursor scroll upwards to the folder list, so I made the list come down
- Next: "tag-on-drags"
- It also helps to build on top of world-class framework like Symfony and the YUI platform libraries
And there you have it! Ding ding! Dinner is served!
How bout some jelly to go with that peanut butter?
So, in a nutshell, I can't wait to hear the Monday-morning quarterbacking on the PB memo. It ain't Valerie Plane, but it sure is darn interesting! Booyakasha!Labels: bureaucracy, memo
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