mikhail panchenko / blog

WOW. Thanks CNN! We couldn’t have guessed it from the ELECTION we just had. Is an election not just a massive poll? Am I crazy? Or does some asswipe at CNN need a new job?

This is almost as good as that time they ran a story that basically said “According to the poll, how Americans feel on X issue depends on who you ask.”

No, seriously, code-related posts are going to make a comeback in a big way.

Ask for better reporting in the new system, then complain that the reports in the new system aren’t identical to the reports in the old system. That will just about do it.

I was serioulsy fucking dismayed when I found out that http://www.ups.com/track is a busted ass looking 404 page. How the fuck, in 2008, do you not have a rewrite for that? FedEx, on the other hand, takes you straight to the appropriate page. Kudos to FedEx for actually paying attention.

I just have to wonder how many times a day that 404 is logged by UPS’s web server without anyone taking notice.

I signed up for an account with Beanstalk a while ago back when I was looking for a place to host my code, and haven’t really visited or used it much due to having switched to Git (you’ll notice that after trying Beanstalk and rolling my own SVN/WebSVN, I’ve ended up at Github with all the cool Rails kids). They recently sent me an email asking how they can make their service better, but instead of replying like a civil person, I’ll rip on it here.

I actually like the Beanstalk quite a bit – had I not fallen in love with Git, I would have probably used this app quite a bit right about now: the free account allows up to 3 users, and that’s exactly what I need. However, the developers realized far too quickly that it is also the perfect app to ride 37signals jock with – it has a very limited feature set by definition, so it lends itself nicely to a nice clean, simple interface. The team ended up taking that mantra a little too seriously: they have foregone a “login” feature. I recently tried to log into my account to see what code I had there before closing it (I had completely forgotten about Beanstalk until they sent me that email), but alas I could not. Maybe I’m fucking crazy, but here are the screenshots. You tell me where the login button is. I tried clicking a few of the main navigation buttons to see if maybe it was tucked away somewhere, but I did not see it. Help me find it!

I was going to write a healthy rant about the bundle of fail that is Yahoo!’s new “start wearing purple” campaign, but it pretty much took care of itself. Just go have a look:

http://startwearingpurple.com

Reasons why this is total fail:

• it’s a marketing campaign about NOTHING
• Yahoo! clearly outsourced the development of this website – because it’s not like that’s what we do… websites…
• perhaps even more hilarious is the evidence for this: whoever did the website used mootools instead of YUI; gotta commend the sense of humor – a website all about getting people pumped up about Yahoo! using a library that is pretty much in direct competition with one of Yahoo!’s own.
• the worst part is that whoever they outsourced it to did a terrible job, in my opinion. I could catalog the reasons, but I’ll just let you roll your mouse over one of the pictures and see for yourself. Fancy animation does not a quality website make.

Yahoo! is a great place to work, and I really can’t complain about it too much, but things like this really make me wonder who was asleep at the wheel when this was getting pushed through. I bet someone gets a huge raise for this too.

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.

• Automated phone answering systems that do not let you go back; you make you choice about what you want to do, it spits out the response, and then ends the call, so if you wanted to do something else, you have to redial and re-enter all your shit. OH THANKS! Also, whose brilliant idea was it to start making systems that only let you SAY your information, especially numbers. “Please say your social security number… I heard ‘barney molests children.’ Is that correct?” NO you piece of shit, just let me ENTER IT. It’s a NUMBER. EVERY PHONE HAS THOSE!
• Websites that don’t test their javascript/flash combination and don’t know that flash can block your lame popup menu in Linux. A round of applause for FedEx!

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.