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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao made a good comment on the controversy: https://reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_by_e...

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That's very childish and lame for Steve Huffman to say "Ellen wasn't the first Reddit engineer, so she probably lacked the expertise to do it, and even if she did, she was smart enough to not".

I think this guy needs to grow up.

Yeah, he is a child. I can't imagine a CEO of any company I have ever worked at acting as such. I wonder how employees of reddit feel at the moment?

nervous.

I cannot understand how the board hasn't dismissed him over the comment editing subterfuge. It's simply not how a CEO should behave. No matter what is being said about him.

Basically, by not firing him, the board is sending a message. It is saying that 1. The platform and it's comments cannot be trusted. and 2. That it's ok for employees to surreptitiously edit comments. If the CEO did it and didn't get fired, then how could they fire a lower level employee for doing it?

The CEO has set the standard through his own behaviour. And that is now the culture of reddit. By not dismissing the CEO, the board has sent the message that they accept this behaviour.

I think you're misreading this. I understand it to mean: "She didn't have the technical knowledge of the internals nor the past experience of doing such hacks to do this"

This is a good time to mention the https://archive.is/9RFIp fiasco (I think there is another example just after she left Reddit). I am thinking of Yishan-style CEOs seriously now, including in public companies too. As another example, here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11666857

He's saying, "Ellen probably didn't know how to edit any comment on reddit, but she was smarter than me anyway and wouldn't have done it in the first place."

Sounds like you're reading more into it than he said. I didn't hear him say "she's not smart enough to do it", I heard "she didn't write the code so she's not intimitely familiar with how to exploit it". Hell, he even closed with a compliment: if she does know, she's not as stupid as I am.

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