

Heroku COO on RapGenius, legendary hires, and developers’ woman problem - craigkerstiens
http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/28/heroku-chief-opens-up-about-rapgenius-legendary-hires-developers-woman-problem/

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ripberge
"That middle-American dad programmer using .NET, how do we respect and engage
with that community"?

I live in Silicon Beach in LA. I've architected two very successful startups
in .NET. I have written .NET for sites making 100's of millions like Hulu,
Ticketmaster, Fandango.

I wake up in the morning thinking about software and fall asleep thinking
about software. I take my craft very seriously. I am not some aberration in
the .NET world, as I've worked with hundreds of guys like myself.

Sounds like you don't have a whole lot of respect for the .NET community. I've
just lost a little bit more respect for Heroku.

~~~
bitcartel
It's not just Heroku, it seems a lot of start-ups love to beat down on C# and
.NET.

"Why we don’t hire .NET programmers"
[http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-
dont-...](http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-hire-
net-programmers/)

~~~
revelation
Wow, what a horribly misinformed post. Users of jQuery UI complaining about
not being able to build that 1.7oz burger in the .NET ecosystem, while having
not a sliver of understanding what a virtual machine is and just calling it
all a "language".

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jroseattle
The "respect" line sounds admirable, but it comes off as defensive in light of
the RapGenius fiasco.

And I wouldn't call documentation that indicates a core piece of
infrastructure works one way but then functions an entirely different way as a
"mis-communication". That sort of CEO-speak is simply meant to minimize the
situation to make any further discussion around it look petty.

Respect, indeed.

~~~
chc
I think "miscommunication" is a reasonable description of outdated
documentation that should have been replaced but wasn't. How would you
describe an oversight that led to communicating erroneous ideas like that?

~~~
dandelany
Seeing as how most potential customers use the documentation to determine
whether or not Heroku would be a good fit for their business _before_ becoming
customers, I'd call it "false advertising".

~~~
badgar
Exactly. The "documentation" that was out of date was a _fundamental
description of the product._ They were selling a different product than they
were delivering.

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revelation
Thats genius PR. He didn't "open up", he gave a bunch of prepared statements,
inserted long pauses to simulate thinking and then told that whole story of
his inner zen and meditation with the Notes app open.

And the reporter bought it.

~~~
hobs
Yep. I closed the article as soon as the I read "He handed me his
iPhone...daily meditation..screenshot of bullshit"

I don't have a stake in the game, and I have been interested in seeing the
back and forth, but this is fluff malarky.

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nasalgoat
Interesting non-answer on the whole RapGenius debacle - very politician-like
move to talk about "respect" and not actually address the serious technical
issues.

I think he's a bit too touchy-feely and not enough make-it-worky.

~~~
vampirechicken
You would expect this answer from the COO or CEO, you get technical answers
from the CTO, but when you have a PR problem you trot out the CEO/COO.

~~~
rhizome
_“I see this in a big picture,” he said._

No details will be forthcoming.

~~~
vampirechicken
That's about what you can expect from that guy.

When RapGenius didn't get the answers they thought they deserved, they went to
the court of public opinion, and put Heroku on the defensive. All Heroku can
do now is damage control, and we recently saw an example of that which didn't
work out very well for Elon Musk.

So they give interviews to Venture Beat (a C-level exec publication) with the
COO who talks about trust and community, and the C-level execs feel a little
better.

You and I are left to wonder why a random routing dispatcher is better than a
deterministic routing dispatcher regardless, of single-thread, multi-thread,
evented, non-evented listeners.

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saym
I am mostly disappointed with this response. I see this as an attempt to skirt
the issue, the technical problem.

Sure, developer success is important, but the issue is with server performance
and efficiency. I would rather they address their problems head-on. Perhaps
I'd prefer that approach for every company and every problem.

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jaytaylor
Great..so they've fixed that one problem. What about all the rest of the bugs?
For example, I was just bitching at them earlier today [0] about the 13-month
old bug [1] which prevents uninstalling virtualenv packages on the cedar
stack. Seriously, check out the workarounds listed in the stackoverflow link,
they are pretty desperate.. the situation is ridiculous.

Certain aspects of Heroku, and especially some of the people who work there,
are excellent. However, it seems like there are chronic systemic problems with
how the organization monitors/checks quality.

[0] <https://twitter.com/jtaylor/status/307261409262202880>

[1] <http://stackoverflow.com/a/15087542/293064>

_edit: added a missing comma_

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jimzvz
This marketing fluff failed to communicate anything useful to me but did make
me decide that I no longer like heroku. Actually, I guess that is useful.

> _"Ultimately, our stances always come from a place of respect. If you can’t
> say anything nice, don’t say anything at all."_

> _"I think it’s great when someone provides feedback , positive or negative,
> but we need to do it in a respectful way. When these things come up — and
> they will always come up — just treat everyone involved with respect."_

> _Two years ago, he told me, the word “respect” wasn’t on that list. Today,
> it defines how Heroku will respond to RapGenius and the rest of its
> customers._

What? This guy sounds like a politician.

If you accidentally (or deliberately) hide the way a major part of your
product works and it just so happens that this means that to get a certain
performance from your product, your customers will have to pay a lot more than
they think, do not give an interview talking about "respect" (shouldn't that
be a given!?), apologise and tell us how you are going to fix it.

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programminggeek
The problem with how Heroku handled RapGenius is that they basically have
punted each time they have said almost anything with an apology and a promise
for more info in the future.

What they probably should have said is that at some point if you are running
too much stuff on Heroku, you probably should be running your own servers
tuned to your own very specific workloads. Of course, that would sort of
violate the whole premise of a PAAS in the cloud that can scale to infinity,
but the point remains.

If you are paying $10,000+ a month, that buys you a lot of server time
elsewhere that would probably be tuned better for current workloads or maybe
Heroku needs to offer more turning options.

Either way, it feels an awful lot like Heroku has punted every time they had a
chance to run with the ball on this and that's pretty disappointing.

~~~
tlrobinson
"if you are running too much stuff on Heroku, you probably should be running
your own servers tuned to your own very specific workloads"

...and if you're using a blocking, single-threaded server/framework your
definition of "too much stuff" is a lot less than everyone else's.

~~~
programminggeek
I agree, and honestly part of the problem is that people seem to have this
notion that Heroku, AppEngine, or Azure will scale to infinity without any
extra work on your part. At some point regardless of your tech, if you are at
a large enough scale, you need to control your own destiny.

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happywolf
Talking about respect seems too little too late on Heroku's effort to save its
reputation. I still fail to see how Heroku actually plans to compensate the
users for the resources thrown in to 'fix' the issues they thought they were
fixing. From RapGenius' version of the story, it seems Heroku was aware of the
issue for sometime, it only started to respond and fix things up when
RagGenius started to bitch about the issue on a massive scale. Frankly I don't
see much 'respect' behind all these.

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seivan
Rap Genius might have a point about the routing issue, but still being on
Bambo and not running with more workers is just plain stupid. I've know this
since June 2011...

