Morrie the Toupee Salesman

I’ve talked about Organizational Theory in the past, but today inspired by the launch of PleaseDressMe.com, I want to talk about titles. Calling Joe Stump “Lead Architect” of digg, as a lot of articles have, is quite frankly, a joke. Joe is a great guy, but while I was at digg, his primary contribution to the site was getting us to use trac, something we had talked about briefly before, and he did the svn-trac integration and was a great contributor, but by the time he arrived, the architecture was pretty well set in stone. If they could put the phrase “be Kevin Rose’s drinking buddy” in a job req, then Joe met that requirement pretty damn well (though most of us did, and I always felt that my career there was deeply wounded when I decided to quit drinking for 4 months).

The people who actually built the architecture of the digg we know and love (though some of us actually might dislike it some) were, uh, not me. I basically wrote some code, and wrote some more code, and basically shepherded the site into the top 500 or so sites in the world (Kevin mostly worked full time during the first year) so I did a lot more than coding – customer support, took Daniel Burka’s great design and actually made it work. etc. But when Jay joined, and the Series A happened, we hired 3 very smart people, who basically rebuilt every piece of the site I built (totally demolishing my ego in the process) and in essence they were the Lead Architects of the site. None of those people were named “Joe Stump.” Just to give credit where credit is due, their names are:

• Timeless (in more conventional circles, where he is unlikely to be found) his name is Tim Ellis. He was our dba and can be seen below
  
• Steve Williams

and

• Eli White

Why were none of these anointed as “Lead Architect?” – I’m going to hazard some guesses. Time was probably not all that interested (he is kind of weird). Steve was probably too old (not to do the job but to fit the hipster SF image). In fact anyone who knows him would say he’s definitely capable, and I’m of the opinion that he’s vastly more capable than Joe. Vastly. Also he doesn’t drink, so he didn’t meet the key “Kevin’s drinking buddy” criteria. Eli worked remotely for us at digg and that probably eliminated him from consideration – even if he does like his beer, he would have difficulty being a buddy from 2500 miles away (he’ll end up arguing with me about why that shouldn’t preclude him from consideration, and probably get me to agree). So Joe was probably given the title by default. Doesn’t make it any less meaningless.

And that’s the problem with titles. There’s a lot of considerations in building those org charts I’ve talked about in the past, but performance should be top of the list. When you give people empty titles, you may suddenly find yourself with an empty company.

I’ve been forgetting my digg disclaimer lately (does anyone who reads this blog not get it?), but for this one I’m going to post a new one. Eli works for me now, and I’m periodically going to post articles about “Joe Stump, Digg’s Lead Architect” because nothing motivates like a grudge. Eli will probably complain to me about “grudge” so I should say that that is my personal impression.

Update: In the comments, timeless wondered why I didn’t link to his blog. Frankly it was because I was writing this in a rush and forgot about it. Figured a picture was worth more than a little of my meager google juice. But I’ve added the link.