hans.gerwitz

Paul Graham has posted his thoughts on what went wrong at Yahoo. As always, his thoughts are cogent and presented as a dense but acces­sible story. One of his state­ments, though, deserves some inspection:

At Yahoo, user-​​facing software was controlled by product managers and designers. The job of programmers was just to take the work of the product managers and designers the final step, by trans­lating it into code.

One obvious result of this practice was that when Yahoo built things, they often weren’t very good.

I expect Paul meant this as a condem­nation of the waterfall, specify-​​and-​​build process, but it sounds like an attack on product managers and designers. Perhaps it is, as he thinks very highly of programmers and I wouldn’t be surprised if the designers at Yahoo were… yahoos.

But I do wish he’d be more explicit, here, because in some places, everyone’s a hacker, even if they don’t write code.