

Google disables Steve Yegge's site - mojuba
http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/

======
nickb
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Google's anti-spam algo probably screwed up.

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pchristensen
Anyone know what this was about? No pornography, not hateful content (well,
except towards Perl), not violent, not impersonation, unlawful use, or spam.
Maybe copyright for some Amazon stuff he had there? I'd like to make sure
Stevey gets back online.

~~~
pchristensen
Interestingly, the "Contact Us" page doesn't give any to indicate that the
page was blocked in error. I had to report abuse as "Other" and hope someone
read my message that it really wasn't bad.

Looking at the archives, I was reminded of the "It's nothing really" article
where he roundly criticized the way his father was treated at a hospital. He
did mention the UC Davis hospital by name, and they might have been mad about
it.

------
Elfan
Boring Stevey Status Update

[http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/boring-stevey-
status...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/boring-stevey-status-
update.html)

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neilc
This is a complete non-story. For one thing, this is the _old_ blog
(<http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/>). For another, the blog isn't even
disabled anymore.

~~~
pchristensen
It is the old blog, but it's where most of his best stuff is. And it was
disabled when people commented.

~~~
neilc
Is there _any_ evidence of malfeasance? It is more likely that someone just
mistakenly disabled it, perhaps Steve himself. Who cares? Surely there are
more interesting things to talk about than "Uh, the old version of some dude's
blog _was_ disabled for some unclear reason, but now it works again."

~~~
pchristensen
How fast do you think it would hit the top of the YCNews charts if pg's
pre-2007 essays disappeared for no reason? (relax, pg, I know that YStore is
better than Google Pages)

------
BitGeek
Steve's a nice guy and I enjoy reading his rants, but there's one thing he's
wrong about: Amazon. A horrible, horrible company, where bright engineers are
managed by horrible horrible idiots and nothing is done very well... Amazon
doesn't believe in having engineers do management so they hire people with no
skills other than asskissing (its the most political work environment I've
ever seen) to manage engineers-- thus you have the joyful experience of having
someone who knows absolutely nothing about programming telling you that you're
doing something wrong based on a misunderstanding of something he overheard
someone else say about a whole other programming language.

There are a few decent engineers who make it thru the incompetance filter
(amazon calls this "Raising the bar") and become managers, and obviously steve
wored for one. But the vast majority of people managing engineers at Amazon
are non-engineers. And the managers managers are even worse- paper pushers
whose primary goal is their own personal advancement-- not the product, not
the quality of the work and certainly not hte profitability of the company.

Worst environment for engineers, ever.

~~~
arasakik
BitGeek - why do you think that?

~~~
BitGeek
Because I worked there, and I saw first hand the way that company is run. I've
worked for a wide variety of companies, including what is now HP and
Microsoft, a number of startups and a number of medium sized companies. I'd
rank Amazon as the worst company I've worked for, and even Microsoft was a bit
better (there's on startup between the two in the rankings for the suckiest
environments).

Amazon is a very employee hostile place- all advancement is due to politics.
Unless you have a good manager (and there are a few, mostly engineer who have
been there a very long time) you can't advance unless you play really vicious
politics-- and I mean, sabotaging others work kind of vicious. The people they
bring in as managers (because they claim engineers don't want to be managers)
are people who have no management skill.

I may have had one of the worst- his only training was in "criminal justice"
and he clearly thought he was a prison guard... he'd regularly chew out the
whole team for failing to do things that he didn't even understand weren't our
responsibility (or in once case something we had actually done, but some other
manager had told him we hadn't and of course he knew absolutely nothing about
software so he had no way of knowing whether we'd done it or not.)

Maybe microsoft is that bad now- it was heading in this direction when I
worked there...but Amazon was the worst place I ever worked. (And I worked for
an educational startup where all of management was gradeschool teachers who
also didn't understand technology and treated us like grade schoolers... and
this company had trouble making payroll... but being belittled is much better
than being verbally abused in my book.)

~~~
arasakik
I worked there as well. Like any company, I think it really depends on your
team/organization. I've heard horror stories about certain orgs at Amazon and
nothing but glowing reviews for others. Perhaps you had a terrible time on
your team under a specific manager - others could have had the opposite
experience.

------
pg
Boy, that is a reason not to use Googlepages...

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pchristensen
He's back! YCombinator saves the day!

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jey
I hope it was something more dangerous than this:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20070601015846/http://steve.yegge...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070601015846/http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/)
(taken from June 1, 2007)

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sajidu
Steve is a Google employee.

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Goladus
What was the message, for those of us that missed it? Was there anything to
suggest it wasn't just a generic downtime page?

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apgwoz
Perhaps it got too popular. I don't imagine GooglePages puts up with large
volumes of requests?

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Goladus
I must have missed something? Everything seems to be working fine right now.

------
alaskamiller
He wrote about NDA-ed Google items. That's all.

