Whenever I read about the EU's struggles to compete with american tech companies (also SAP vs Salesforce), I think of Steve Yegge's rant on AWS, quote:
> So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.
> His Big Mandate went something along these lines:
> All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
> Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
> There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
> It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
> All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
You're seriously claiming that the EU cannot compete with US companies because you can't credibly threaten to fire people to show that you're serious about a policy decision?
1. In Europe salaries are not worth personal sacrifices
2. No compay aims for IPO, few are public
Maybe, if you'd hire only desperate people from Spain, Italy, Poland, Greece, and Romania, AND they all had a mortgage... then squeeze like this would work.
Apart from results (for whom?) being not the only thing to judge a compan culture for, I am pretty damn sure that Amazon does not, in fact, rely primarily on constant explicit threats of firing people to make people just fucking do what their boss tells them to do.
All. I worked with many top tier companies and policy adherence is null without reinforcement; this is the reality, without motivation everyone ignores policies and decisions.
There are many other forms of motivation and reinforcement other than explicit threats of firing pople, and most of them are less aggravating. In fact I very much doubt Amazon actually does that constantly, and I also doubt that it was the key reinforcement in this specific case, even if it wasn't simply an exaggeration.
Refusing to do what you're told will in fact get you fired in most European companies as well. I actually witnessed that happening not too long ago. So what's even the argument here?
Not sure what you are talking about. If people don't do their job you can just fire them. The only difference is that in e.g. Germany it will result in the employment contract expiring in a few weeks instead of the same day. I don't really see why people make a big deal out of a few weeks as if it is equivalent to waiting until the end of the universe.
> So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.
> His Big Mandate went something along these lines:
> All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
> Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
> There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
> It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
> All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
> Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.
Emphasis mine. Good luck trying that in europe. Full rant: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611