This is not comparable imho.

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.

What makes you think it's different in financial organizations?

I just implied it is different because the industry was so young, it is solidified now, thus resembling other industries. (i.e. in the corporate world the hierarchies in big tech now resemble the hierarchies in big [insert any other industry])

In my experience, I think it is a question of developper count and company culture. Larger corporations have processes & checks that smaller businesses do not always have.

In my view, it is the inability to hire great people that causes implementation of strict rules. It is also when processes are broken down down into imitatable parts instead of specialty skills.

This is exactly the sort of riskless sentiment that causes something like IE6 to persist forever.

> 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?

> 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.

I agree that in a hypothetical scenario that this wasn't, it could have been a catastrophe. But in the one that actually existed, it couldn't have been.

I disagree, since in this actual situation their actions caused google drive to jump on the bandwagon and they run an actual business with competitors that would be happy to guarantee long term support.

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

Do you seriously think people would scrap off their contracts for legacy browser support? This is not like all or nothing. If they think its unfair then the org is gonna complain to the vendor about this. I don't know if any org can decide to switch over to a different vendor without trying to resolve first.

From what it looks like, this is quite literally the ability to get code into the main codebase with no oversight. Even without malicious intentions, it seems very easy to do something awful by accident.

The main codebase... of a video sharing site. With no SLAs, and (at the time) no partner video-hosting agreements.

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.

I suppose more awful thing could be an accidental XSS or other vulnerability.

Which would then compromise what? People's youtube accounts?

IE6 had plenty of nasty vulns by the time this banner had gone up (06/14/2009): https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-26/p...

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

Exactly. They were getting rid of IE6

As opposed to the denial of service style bugs like an empty src element in an img tag?

They're perfectly capable of introducing other DOS bugs that don't depend on bad markup.

This is a poor argument - just because we can shoot our own feet, doesn't mean we should not try to prevent it from happening by accident.

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.

This is why I like to work at small businesses, where I'm either the only developer or one of just a few. Even with annual turnovers, through the website, of approaching $10million/year (in my current and last role) there is very little oversight of what I do - there's literally no-one to challenge me on a technical level. That doesn't mean I abuse my position, but it does give me a lot of technical freedom in how I create the functionality the business asks for.

Reminds me of Marx's Alienation of the worker from their product.

of course there was oversight. Those with experience had privileged access. Basically meritocracy. Today innovation and movement is stiffled by large corprate and legal structures where engineers only recieve commands.

This must not be such a strange ability? Even at ‘big enterprise corp’ we have the ability (though not necessarily approval) to push directly to master, and I doubt there’s more restrictions in smaller companies.

It's not like there was no oversight. As noted in the article, their boss was in on it, and "the rest of us leveraged our OldTuber status to approve the code review." so there was review. They short-circuited a number of the usual steps, but it's not like there was a single person who made all the decisions.

Take it away from the specific case of IE6, and consider the situation where you have a product team that says one thing and a team of engineers insist on their solution.

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.

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

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.

No catastrophe would have ensued. They didn't remove support for IE6. They put up a banner telling IE6 users that support would be removed some time in the future. Only taking the second step (actually removing support) would have any consequences. If a large, powerful contingent demanded that IE6 support be kept indefinitely and persuaded management of this, the banner would have been removed.

With drive following in their footsteps a catastrophe really could have ensued - drive was at that point (I believe? It was a long time ago) already being marketed as good for organizations - any organization stuck with IE6 for stupid corporate reasons may have decided the potential for the site to suddenly stop working was too risky and immediately started migrating to a competitor that offered long term support.

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.

IE6 was ready to die the moment it was born. This story boils down to some influential developers saying "Fuck this shit" and doing something about it, taking most of the industry with them.

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.

That is untrue. When IE6 first arrived it was on par with Mac IE 5.2 in terms of web standards support. It was a great browser for its time.

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.

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

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...

> 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].

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

They deliberately chose to run pre-release performance testing on chrome but not other browsers.

They weren't working at a medical or financial company so your argument is pointless.

> Imagine working at a medical or financial company and having secretive 'old timer' permissions that basically backdoored the company's engineering processes

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

The whole question about Kerviel is if his management let him "bypass" regulatory safety nets or if he did it by himself.

This seems like a kind of silly objection. It's kind of like - I have some knives in my kitchen for cutting food, as does most of the world's population. I, or anyone else, could pick one up and go out and stab somebody. 99% of the world is capable of not doing that.

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?

This is correct, but there's a complication: YouTube today is a lot more than the YouYube of 2006. Today, people's livelihoods depend on YouTube. Naturally, I'd expect more responsible engineers.

Yes. I love the story, and if I had been in charge I don't see how I could do anything but fire the whole lot of them.

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.

I mean, Google just paid a ton of money to acquihire this team, and then the acquihired team is going to turn around and fire all the people Google paid for? That doesn't sound like an arrangement Google would be happy with.

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

The engineers involved were not part of YouTube at the time of acquisition. YouTube also wasn't really acquihire. The site had a huge user base Google wanted.

I'd keep them on board but I'd get rid of that backdoor and encourage them to adapt to the new situation, for a number of reasons:

- '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.

It's not a us v. them thing since they were not OldTuber and the article says that many other people were granted the access in spite of not being OldTuber.

Yes, you're right, there are options available other than 'firing' and that's the right one. This is why I'm not a manager. :)

They’d quit and you’d kill morale. Something Yahoo would do.

This may be a management culture thing, but I would regard that happening as a massive red flag and immediately start looking to quit.

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.

But mah autonomy!!!

THB, meh.

It doesn't seem though, from the story, that the 'OldTubers' group was exposed. It seems like the 'why' was more important than the 'how'

If enough developers want to do something, you can't stop them. You can make it take more developers, that is the best you can do.

Pretty sure there was enough developers whom hated JavaScript. What happened is that made more if it.

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!