Me on Paul Graham on Yahoo
Paul Graham, Y Combinator partner and “essayist,” blames Yahoo’s problems on trying to be a media company and not having a sufficiently “hackerish” culture. I think he’s only kinda right. Here are my quick tumblr-sized thoughts.
First: Yahoo remains one of the most heavily visited internet sites in the universe, so every critique of Yahoo ought to start out with the phrase “oy, we should have such problems,” and at least a small acknowledgment that sustaining their popularity is a sign that at least part of Yahoo is doing things right.
My impression of Yahoo is that the content folks (meaning, the editors at things like Yahoo News and the other content, um, properties) don’t have much bureaucratic power, so the idea that being a “media company” is what ails Yahoo falls pretty flat.
And on the idea that Yahoo’s problem is that it isn’t primarily an engineering company, I don’t buy it. I’m sure I don’t know what a “hacker culture” is, or that it’s different than what a “newsroom culture” is. The idea that the doers, and not just the managers, ought to have a say in how things are run is true at every organization. There are lots of kinds of expertise necessary at a place like Yahoo, and each kind of expert ought to have a big say in how things run.
The idea that only computer programmers have good ideas strikes me as pretty dangerous (cough), and I take the opposite tack on Graham’s enthusiasm for Facebook’s “hire only programmers” culture. I’m grateful that the human resources people and the editors and the accountants at companies I’ve worked for weren’t all programmers — there being, after all, best practices in all fields that are distinct from, and sometimes in conflict with, best practices in computer science.
But in any event it seems to me that Yahoo’s problem is much more banal than Graham makes it out to be: It’s deeply factional, it’s got a sometimes stifling bureaucracy, and a culture has grown up that feeds all its bad habits.
