I can think of 2 reasons:

1. The gamble paid off. It turned out the time was ripe. Thus, there was really no negative impact on the organization that people had to be punished for.

2. The OldTubers were the experienced backbone of the group. Firing everyone with that privilege would likely have destroyed the group's technical expertise. YouTube as it was would have died.

That latter point is a bit of a strong negotiation position that many engineers don't realize they have. For example in my team we're having a lot of difficulty filling job openings (we're picky and frankly our interviewing pipeline sucks). As such, there's a significant cost/benefit calculation to firing someone. Maybe the person did something egregious, but is it likely to happen again? I know some people in my team are... not great, but are they so bad that we would be better off without them? (I must reluctantly admit, no)

When I started reading the story, I was afraid it was going to go in the direction of sneaky sabotage, like intentionally causing performance problems or crashes. There've been accusations of that happening, within the last year. Earlier, there was a long history in the computer industry of sneaky sabotage of competitors, which was suggested by the (perhaps only a joke, in that particular case) mantra "DOS isn't done, till Lotus doesn't run".

You mean like they seem to be doing to Firefox right now?

Ever heard the story of Ken McElroy? He was a rapist, burglar and child molester murdered in 1981 in Missouri.

In front of 46 witnesses. Nobody saw anything.

"He had come in on an otherwise normal day to find email from every major tech news publication asking why the second largest website on the planet was threatening to cut off access to nearly a fifth of its user base. Fortunately for us, the publications had already settled on a narrative that this was a major benefit to the Internet. By their call, YouTube was leading the charge towards making the web a faster, safer experience for all of its users."

Go with the Zeitgeist, and you'll have a lot of wind in your sails.

That seems extreme.

I've worked in some organizations where the assumption is that engineers aren't capable of making product decisions. They are merely walking, talking machines that are there to implement the vision of the PM and designers.

In other orgs engineers are very much in tune with how product decisions are made, what the business is optimizing for, and what constraints they need to be aware of. They will generally work with the product owners to shape the user experience.

I'm guessing that YouTube was much more in the latter category.

>They will generally work with the product owners

is exactly what the engineers didn't do in this story. The company was completely blindsided.

More importantly, the EU's decision on bundling IE with Windows came down in 2007: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Commission

The EU has continued pursuing antitrust cases, and the FTC has now set up a task force to investigate antitrust in tech. The main problem is that the wheels of the legal system turn very slowly, much slower than the startups rise (and fall).

If you choose Firefox or Chrome it never suggests that you should switch to Edge.

Microsoft’s lawyers are not stupid.

Even the UI for changing the default browser in Settings heavily encourages you to set Edge.

Try something like EdgeDeflector (https://github.com/da2x/EdgeDeflector) for redirecting those links to your default browser.

With Win10 Enterpise I’ve never encountered pop-up nags for Edge when changing the browser. Links are never redirected into Edge even from other MSFT products.

This is on like three different Win10 enterprise laptops.

I’ll have to ask the help desk guys what they do to our corporate images if anything. To me it looks like plain-vanilla Win10 Enterpise while deploying from our WDS server.

A lot of that input will be garbage. Some seriously laughable in a good way, a few gems.

Why not get them?

Imagine working at a medical or financial company and having secretive 'old timer' permissions that basically backdoored the company's engineering processes. Even if the engineers saw a good reason to do so.

I mean, who are we to say that this was doing it right? It turned out to be beneficial but there are thousands of ways that this could explode in your face if you tried it yourself.

No medical or financial company has this vibrant engineering IT culture like the web startups 20 years ago had.

Everything was new and exciting, and things moved foreward exactly due to the flexibility of all involved, the uncertainty, the flat hierarchies, and the fact that many rules either didn't exist, or only existed on paper.

This is what happens everytime a new market emerges, where structures need some time to settle.

Once they have settled down, procedures become standardized, but they also become so boring that all innovation is lost.

What happend at Youtube 12 years ago is exactly what happens right now at some Cryptocurrency start ups. The start ups that are succesful are exactly those start ups where people like this Youtube engineer do not get fired. If YT had such an authoritarian attitude in 2009, they would never have become succesful.

It's easy for the blog author to say "I have no idea why we weren't fired" but I bet back then it was all fun and games. (Getting fired isn't even that bad, what really harms people is when everyone around them starts to tell them things like "You could have ruined everything!")

And something similar to the excitement and fluidity within the Youtube of 12 years ago happened 80 years ago in pharmaceutical companies, or 200 years ago within a Bank, when such structures were still freshly formed.

> I mean, who are we to say that this was doing it right? It turned out to be beneficial but there are thousands of ways that this could explode in your face if you tried it yourself.

How would this explode in your face, exactly? What was the risk here?

The risk could be that a competitor could step into the market and use "legacy support" as a positive of their platform. Youtube is weird - especially at that time - since it didn't really have any movers and shakers in terms of either consumers or producers, but if they were selling software that corporations legitimately use (for instance - vimeo offers good streaming video embeds that do "things" to try and restrict the video to a limited audience) then a company using this service to host their streaming videos may be motivated to shift off of that service to a competitor that won't artificially limit the users that can actually use this third party plugin.

Again, it's a bit hard to say here with YouTube in particular, because it isn't a place where work happened at that point[1] so none of the consumers wielded significant power - honestly YouTube may have been fine just say "Welp, 18% of our user base is forcing us into supporting janky old browsers - guess we're losing 18% of our user base and saving a bunch on code maintenance."

[1] Now there are streamers that may legitimately threaten the company if they threaten to jump ship, it's economically weird but beside the point... just, back then there was nothing.

All that said... I had to work with ie6, it is terrible, and these people are heroes.

The most awful thing that could happen to 2006-era YouTube: they could stop delivering ad impressions for an hour or two. Oh wait, no; 2006-era YouTube didn't even have ads yet.

That said, the people with this access probably knew WTF they were doing.

And it sounds like it wasn't just DOS - also just plain "it doesn't work in ie6" seems the most likely outcome; crashes and DOS that the article describes just sounds like the most egregious cases.

They got lucky, IE6 in that sense was ready to die, and they basically declared mutiny with good cause.

Can you imagine any other scenario where insisting your idea is correct above every alternative, to the extent you can bypass the organisation and enforce your idea, could be utterly catastrophic? These developers in particular set up a system to subvert their own company.

They even said it themselves: Legal shit their pants because they tried it and saw Chrome as the first suggestion. They were lucky that the media didn't capitalise on that if they got the same ordering.

This story with Youtube and IE6 is romantic. It's not realistic or aspirational. Besides which, we would not hear of it if the attempt failed.

Ok, and if IE6 had not been ready to die, what kind of catastrophe would have ensued?

> Can you imagine any other scenario where insisting your idea is correct above every alternative, to the extent you can bypass the organisation and enforce your idea, could be utterly catastrophic? These developers in particular set up a system to subvert their own company.

I can imagine catastrophes. But they're mostly the sorts of catastrophes that are bad for an organization, but great for a civilization.

> This story with Youtube and IE6 is romantic. It's not realistic or aspirational. Besides which, we would not hear of it if the attempt failed.

Something we don't hear about if it fails, but produces a great social benefit if it succeeds seems like exactly the sort of thing we should be doing.

I think a difficulty seeing a catastrophic is because YouTube is not valuable to businesses[1] and when your income source is more distributed (no large contracts) there are less chances to really shoot yourself in the foot. You have to piss off all your customers in a way that - really - you should probably see coming.

[1] I don't mean to deride the service, but it didn't have any commercial tie ins at this point worth mentioning, stuff like professional streamers and hosted partnerships with IP holders came later, at this point they were interesting in pop-culture but not a tool for making money.

Given that IE6 was one of the worst pieces of software in all of human history, there was never likely to be a significant downside.

The problem with IE6 is Microsoft declaring victory in the Browser war with Netscape, and IE6 development stopped. For years until Firefox and Chrome threatened Microsoft's browser dominance.

for one thing that actually happened because they did (and got away) with this: youtube engineers feel like they can leverage their site to dictate what they want in the browser space, by deliberately making it 5x slower on firefox and edge[0].

As a rule of thumb, if something looks fishy and shady, but just because it doesn't directly explodes in your face, treat it as a "but I don't have anything to hide" situation, and be against it. Because eventually, it will be your face.

[0] http://fortune.com/2018/07/25/youtube-slow-mozilla-firefox-c...

There's no evidence that that was deliberate. These two things are also pretty completely unrelated.

Have you heard about Kerviel? A trader that cost his banks a few billions of euros? He was able to do this because he could bypass reviews by his boss and the internal compliance team.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A9r%C3%B4me_Kerviel

Edit: to be fair, it look like he took the blame for all the failings of the company

Can't we presume that all of this setup happened because everyone involved knew perfectly well that it was just a moderately popular video hosting site? And that they would all have behaved differently if they knew that peoples' life savings and medical histories were at risk? Did it go out of style somehow to presume that people were mostly sane most of the time?

Although... the number of people involved in the "OldTubers" backdoor seems to have been pretty substantial, I don't know if they could really have fired all of them...

But who is anyone to say if doing anything is "right"? We're all equally qualified to have a moral compass.

(Which is to say, with more generality: people who get acquihired are basically temporarily invulnerable to office politics.)

- 'OldTubers' vs. the new Googlers is a clear us v. them thing. Bad for culture, especially when you get privileges on top. - Their plan was actually successful so there must have been a thing or two to learn on the product side, even if it's as simple as accepting engineering input and understanding the difficulty of maintaining stuff (as opposed to relying on the analytics). - There's some good thinking and ingenuity in there, despite the methodology.

I'd want to keep hold of that talent while dealing with burgeoning elitism. Up to them to quit if they don't like the changes. Fire them if their contribution begins to suffer.

Formal warning, perhaps, if it actually contravenes a written policy, but in this case is unlikely to have been one. There was no actual financial or reputation loss to the company.

THB, meh.

A reality that we would still be supporting IE6 today because so many businesses still use it seems realistic to me. Maybe we would have developed a facade for it..

This brave actions of the OldTuber saved us a ton of effort.

Hopefully somebody from Oracle sneak in Clojure in the JVM!

That's really blowing it out of proportions. It's a minor button addition to the UI and they paid attention to not be sued by the European commission for it for anti competitive behavior. It's a job well done with nothing to criticize.

It's a BAU example of how works get done in a large bureaucratic organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_on_the_Orient_Express_(...

>The next morning, Poirot discovers Ratchett was murdered during the night, having been stabbed a dozen times. [...]

>With the train back on track, Poirot concludes that justice is impossible in this case, as Cassetti deserved death; for the first time, Poirot will have to live with a lie and imbalance.

Because this is how everything on the web used to be done. Google won the internet partly because they moved away from this first and best, but product decision making by engineering and overriding approval processes in the name of a good outcome were pretty much standard back then.