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Comment by ben_jones | Hacker News Reader

I actually think companies can get away with "underpaying" engineers if they can offer alternative benefits like great culture, lower cost-of-living, growth opportunities (career and equity value), etc..

But Reddit is a company with a laundry list of PR crises, with an office in one of the most expensive cities in the world, constantly changing leadership, constantly changing leadership goals, extremely dissatisfied investors, an estranged and angry founder, AND a reputation for underpaying engineers.

Ten bucks says they file a complaint somewhere stating "their aren't enough developers in the work force".

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They didn't used to be in San Fran, and they used to support remote work, where cost of living was less of an issue, and lower salaries could stretch a lot further if (for example) an employee was working in the mid west. They had a bunch of strong advantages and an already geographically dispersed workforce and threw it away at a time when they really needed to be getting the most bang for their buck.

As far as I remember, they indeed are in severe money troubles. I guess they are, if they need to get pennies off affiliate links. Because, let's be honest here, how much money do they expect to make? My guess is that they will make around a couple thousands a month. What do they expect to do with that, especially at the expense of looking cheap as fuck?

> A couple thousand a month

I think your off by a couple orders of magnitude on that one.

Every penny counts. Even if it's only a couple of thousand every month that's part of a year of dev time paid for, who could be focussed on infrastructure efficiency etc.

> extremely dissatisfied investors,

I'm one of those investors and I'm not aware of any of my fellow investors being dissatisfied.

> an estranged and angry founder

All of the founders currently work for reddit (and are quite happy doing so as far as I know). Who are you talking about here?

I'm assuming the conditions currently occurring at Reddit would make any investor dissatisfied. Stemming from a mix of seemingly negative public opinion, seemingly rushed or short-sighted monetization strategies, and technical challenges.

Articles like this [1] seem to indicate tension between the board and leadership. I assume when any such tensions become public that they are larger in reality then they first appear, because normally such tensions remain private. Though in this case it may just be Wong's and Reddit's board's personality to be more open about such things.

It's pretty liberal for me to make these assumptions, granted. And I've made like a dozen comments on this thread mostly because:

A) my procrastination is terrible today and

B) I'm a rabid Reddit user and usually speak up whenever it comes up on Hacker News, I'm not be trying to gun down the company's throat I promise, just trying to engage in a critical discussion.

I would change extremely dissatisfied to dissatisfied though, but the edit option isn't appearing to me right now (time limit or "tree-weight" I guess).

[1]:http://gawker.com/former-reddit-ceo-youre-all-screwed-171790...

Who would they file such a complaint against? Do they write it on an index card and drop it in a box in front of the US Department of Labor or something? I'm confused by the premises of this bet. They're a teeny tiny company with < 100 employees and people talk about them like they're Standard Oil circa 1890, twirling their mustaches and engaging in Dynasty-level interpersonal corporate drama. It's literally just a small group of (probably mostly twentysomething) people sitting in a small clump of office space in SF, regardless of how significant the thing that they maintain is to so many people. I don't know how they manage to even keep the lights on given how much traffic they get, much less the crap they have to deal with on a regular basis from many of their users.

I don't doubt that there's a laundry list of corporate dysfunction at Reddit HQ, but even the most seemingly universal complaints I see people post about seem more like collaborative storytelling exercises where a bunch of people are getting each other worked up into a frothy rage over stuff that just really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. The pitchforks-and-torches mob mentality I've occasionally seen on Reddit is way more damaging to those communities than anything I've ever heard of regarding the company leadership.

The last legitimate valuation for Reddit was $500M in 2014. They are not a teeny tiny company. And as far as Reddit's competency being heavily editorialized, I'd agree, but if you google a prospective employer and get ten pages of shit it's enough to get the wheels turning against joining the company, which is the question at hand.

Which also reminds me that I do want to push to support Yishan-style CEOs in the future, regardless of what happens to Reddit.

Relevant:

"Reddit board member and YC president Sam Altman announced that Yishan Wong was leaving after being unable to garner support for a proposal to move the Reddit office from San Francisco to Daly City.[12] Wong, who thought newer employees would prefer to work in a less expensive area, stated that before the disagreement he had considered leaving due to an abundance of stress."[1]

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yishan_Wong

Edit:

That quote is a little disingenuous, and you can read more about the situation in these links if you're curious. The Quora link is the ex-CEOs response which puts a good frame on things.

[2]:http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/13/ex-reddit-ceo-wanted-to-mov...

[3]https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Yishan-Wong-resign-as-Reddit-C...

Edit2: It's also telling just how many people were championing Ellen Pao as the replacement. I have to think nobody really knows who'll be a good CEO until after the fact.

[4]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8603845

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