Google acts on 'rogue' engineer's rants

Remember the rogue Google engineer who accidentally posted his rants about Google+ for all to see? He is staying with the company and says the search giant appears to be listening. In a post on his Google+ account, Steve Yegge said Google listened to his concerns and is now working on ways to address some concerns he cited in his post that went viral. “(They) also listened, which is super cool. I probably shouldn’t talk much about it, but they’re already figuring out how to deal with some of the issues I raised. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, though. When I claimed in my internal post that ‘Google does everything right,’ I meant it. When they’re faced with any problem at all, whether it’s technical or organizational or cultural, they set out to solve it in a first-class way," he said. Yegge also appeared to attempt to make amends with his former employer Amazon, saying bagging on the company, even in an internal memo, was “uncharacteristically unprofessional of me." But Yegge said he is “not retracting anything" he had said in his past post, although he said he would want to “paint a more balanced picture." Earlier this month, Yegge accidentally aired his rants against Google+ and Amazon in a post that quickly went viral. “Sadly, it was intended to be an internal post, visible to everybody at Google, but not externally. But as it was midnight and I am not what you might call an experienced Google+ user, by the time I figured out how to actually post something I had somehow switched accounts," he said in his Google+ account at the time. In that viral post, he had ranted about his former employer Amazon, then proceeded to score Google for not doing well on platforms. “We don’t understand platforms. We don’t ‘get’ platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority. This has become painfully clear to me over the past six years. I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from Microsoft and Amazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up collectively and start doing universal services. Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it: all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on," he said. “But no. No, it’s like our tenth or eleventh priority. Or fifteenth, I don’t know. It’s pretty low. There are a few teams who treat the idea very seriously, but most teams either don’t think about it all, ever, or only a small percentage of them think about it in a very small way," he added. He said Google+ is a prime example of Google’s “complete failure" to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership. Yegge particularly questioned Google’s not giving developers enough privileges, saying even Microsoft is aware of what he called the “Dogfood rule." — TJD, GMA News