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.
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.
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.
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."
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)
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.
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.)
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.
