Finally starting to settle into my new apartment. Just put together the desk I got at Ikea this weekend, so I finally have a semblance of a work station at home. Once I get the package with my monitor from the leasing office tomorrow, I’ll really be back in business.
I’ve moved to San Francisco. After a few days on Crowley’s couch, I’m in my own apartment, albeit sleeping on Dimitry’s airmattress until the movers get here with my shit.
Empty and lonely as the apartment is, it is pretty awesome. Feels sort of surreal that I actually live there. Once the camera cord arrives with the movers, I’ll have some pics.
Already started hacking on shit at Yahoo! and will post some more of my own code soon. Holler!
Just opened my Y! inbox for the first time in a few days to find these three emails, literally in succession:
Sue Decker: Positioning Yahoo! to lead
Ari Balogh: Evolving our Tech Organization to Drive our Strategies
jerry yang: moving yahoo! forward
WOW. That could have been either one very short email (these are also page turners, folks) Or better yet: STOP SENDING ME BULLSHIT EMAILS. I know. We’re gonna focus on our mission statement, though that’ll be confusing, since Jeff Weiner won’t be there to write it for us.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m seeing some inconsistencies in the way the press interprets the recent events at Yahoo!
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Shares of Yahoo Inc fell more than 3 percent on Friday as reports of a brain drain raised fresh worries about the future of the Web company
Simultaneously, there has been lots in the press about Jerry Yang not being the right guy for the CEO job (see here).
So while on one hand Yang is being ripped for having gotten the company where it is, there is all this worry, concern, and disappointment about other high level execs leaving.
Yang didn’t get there on his own. The three big execs that announced their departure prompting the stock dip and mouth-foaming are Brad Garlinghouse, Vish Makhijani, and Qi Lu. Yeah, Garlinghouse wrote the peanut butter manifesto and we love him for it (I really do think Garlinghouse would have rocked as CEO and certainly could have done a better job than Weiner at whatever that guy did… more on that later)… but he’s also the guy in charge of Yahoo! Mail. Yeah, the same mail product that had a big launch party on Yahoo’s campus and then failed to actually deliver the new version to it’s own employees until months later. Let’s not forget it still sucks ass.
Makhijani was involved with search. Oh you mean that thing where Yahoo! keeps getting shit on for not having enough market share?
Qi Lu, who is a brilliant guy to be sure, was the head engineer of the Panama project. Though I’ll reiterate that I’ve seen Qi speak and he is indeed a very smart guy, and that his employees have great things to say about him, we were all around for what happened with Panama.
So why do the execs below CEO get a free pass? Yahoo! gets shit for not having enough market share in search, but the guy in charge of search leaving is considered a huge loss. Yahoo! mail continues to lose users to Google and be a bloated in-browser version of Outlook, but Garlinghouse leaving is a tragedy. Panama is largely irrelevant (the latest coverage to be found online is from 2006), but Qi Lu is part of the “brain drain.”
Don’t even get me started on Jeff Weiner who left earlier in the week. The guy who would write our mission statement, then revise it the next quarter because Google will have stomped our ass at whatever it was our mission statement was before. Not to mention the mission statements were fucktarded. Happy trails!
What I’m getting at is, Yang shouldn’t take all the blame. The state of the company is a reflection on ALL of the executives, not just Jerry. Though all of the guys recently leaving are bright talented people who have done great things (especially Joshua and Stewart, but not Weiner), you also can’t just blame the company’s fortunes on that one guy. All of the execs should get the blame, thus their departure shouldn’t cause such a backlash…
… unless you see what’s really happening: the press simply needs to shut the fuck up, as I have said before. Yahoo! isn’t doing as bad as they make it sound. The reason the stock holders are worried is because those three guys ARE good. Yahoo! does have a 20% market share in search (Miakhjiani is immediately hired by Yandex, a huge Russian search engine, proving my point that 20% market share ain’t nothing to fuck with). Yahoo! does grow at something like 7-8% a year (and our friend Michael Arrington should know from his econ classes that anything that grows faster than the GDP is overachieving). There is a lot to lose here, there are many ways in which Yahoo! is actually a great company that is incredibly successful, and now that might change. Yahoo! had, in my opinion, slowly started to turn it around before Microsoft came and just fucked everything up. Note that even amidst the obnoxious takeover battle, Yahoo! posted an awesome quarter.
This is all very messy, but what sucks is that all these smart people are probably leaving because they are tired of reading shit about their company in the press. The place is too big for a quick turn around, and after the exhausting msft ordeal, the end of the tunnel seems far away.
Hopefully this “brain drain” won’t result in an influx of dolts, and young, smart, driven people will seize on the opening these departures create to take over and make Yahoo! awesome again. But please, no more mission statements.
I added Techcrunch because it was an easy way to keep up with the industry while I wasn’t directly immersed in it - namely while I was finishing up school in St. Louis.
I’m removing it because I’ve come to conclude that a lot of the articles are really really bad.
The straw to break the camel’s back was Arrington’s coverage of the events surrounding Yahoo! over the past few months. It has gotten incrementally worse. Yes, Yahoo! is in a tough spot. However, some of the attacks he has levied at the management and the decisions made by the company are just laughable. His recent post, an attempt to analyze the market impact of Microsoft walking away from the table, just sounds bitter. He talks about how outsourcing to Google will cause people to leave the Y! ad platform, giving Google an effective monopoly on the ad mkt.
However, let’s consider the alternative: Google vs Microsoft. Two massive players. Apparently Michael missed the lectures on duopoly and oligopoly during his years as an economics major. The more players remain in the game the better. He is correct to note that this will likely lead to Google market gains, likely at the expense of Yahoo!, but I still maintain that Yahoo! remaining a semi-independent player at least buys time before it’s just an all out duopoly.
Another writer for Techcrunch reports in the very next article posted that the minimum requirement for how much Google makes from the deal is very low. Thus Yahoo! can take its time in serving up Google results. This is nowhere near the disaster Arrington describes it as. Though a microsoft buyout would be good for the shareholders in the short term, it would be much worse for the market.
The other reason I’m leaving is because I have found a better alternative: http://news.ycombinator.com, ironically discovered in a TechCrunch article written by Arrington, provides a much better way to keep tabs, as well as lots of articles that are actually USEFUL to me as a developer. The important TC stories make it on there anyway.
Like I said before, I’ve started fiddling with Python. The approach I’m taking is starting with a command line script. I’ve been pondering writing a variable manager (duffel) to make deployment from my dev box to my staging box to dreamhost/aws/wherever I end up hosting my project (and yes, I am actually working on a project that people will be able to see and use). It was originally going to be in PHP, but instead I am writing it in Python as a way to force myself to learn it.
Surprisingly, I’ve had to do very little forcing. Despite spending most of my college years hacking PHP, I’ve found switching to Python (and back) very easy. The documentation is great and the language is very intuitive - I’d say much more so than PHP once you get a grip on the basic patterns.
Things I miss: isset() - referencing an empty key in a dictionary throws a KeyError. Instead of a simple if (isset($foo[’bar’])) clause, I have to do something crazy like:
try: cp._sections[section+':cur'][x] except KeyError: pass else: print 'current value: '+cp._sections[section+':cur'][x]
Another thing that threw me off at first was the lack of a switch/case implementation, but I’ll definitely live. Also the shorthand if-else isn’t really shorthand at all…
Things I love: the brevity, notably in string operations and regular expressions. The lack of brackets is also amazing. Years ago I wrote some rudimentary pythong basically using an existing script as a crutch, and I was infinitely bothered by the lack of brackets. Then my other nut descended, and I started reading code using tabulation. I now love not having to use brackets.
Function objects do it for me.
Keyword argument passing also rocks my socks.
The icing, though, is the standard library. Holy fuck.
op = OptionParser()
op.add_option('-a', '--action', dest='action')
op.add_option('-p', '--package', dest='package')
(options, args) = op.parse_args()
You kiddin me?!! If you write Python cli scripts and don’t use this, you are really missing out. It doesn’t do that much, but it sure makes things easier.
Also, the ConfigParser class makes me remember the “If you have the right tools, you aren’t really working” saying.
You can see the source (nowhere near finished) for duffel in my svn.
“Go It Alone” by Beck on speaker while on the john.
Wrote this literally a month ago… must have missed the “Publish” button…
Though I had made my mind up a while ago to start seriously hacking other languages besides PHP, I saw something today that really reinforced that decision: average programmer salaries.
Erlang $99,000 (added 8 June 2008)
…
Java $79,000
Python $78,000
Perl $77,000
Ruby $74,000
COBOL $73,000 (added due to demand)JavaScript $72,000ColdFusion $64,000 (8 June 2008)Delphi $64,000
PHP $64,000
…
Yikes!
Yahoo! continues to take heat from the “blogosphere” and the press. Most recently, Arrington complained that Yahoo! has no focus and that they have no idea what they’re doing.
That’s funny. Because a week ago, he reported that they have a 22% market share in search. You know who else has a similar share in their market? GM. Yahoo! is still profitable. Yahoo! is still growing at 7-8%/yr. Last I checked, that’s a pretty healthy business.
I’m not saying Yahoo! is perfect - everyone knows I do my fair share of bitching and moaning. But to say that Yahoo! is “done” because the CEO looks tired in the middle of a highly publicized, nasty takeover battle is reaching at best. I realize that the only way bloggers can differentiate themselves from the maintsream media is by having extreme opinions and foaming at the mouth, but in my mind this article has about as much substance as Valleywag’s blaming Filo for Yahoo’s “troubles.”
Arrington’s complaint that Yahoo!’s “focus” is too broad seems silly. How many multi-billion companies just do one thing? Where is the outrage at Google basically inserting themselves into every market they can possibly think of?