Zed Shaw has Left Dropbox
sheddingbikes.com
sheddingbikes.com
the Trie thing looked awesome and I immediately started to think of wrong uses for it (e.g. XPath parsing)...
There are still some companies left idling along from a group 10 years ago that sold commercial event-driven webservers / reverse-proxies / caches / load-balancers that were much better than Apache, but are heaps of shit compared to the nginx ecosystem.
In other words, there really is no higher ground in tech unless you're already rich.
(Not related to Dropbox, not what I'm implying. Just that you should have more free time to write for a while, so we'd love to see the fruits of it.)
(I can't for the heck of it remember who trolled comp.lang.c in the mid-nineties. Same guy, always went on about assembly etc.)
Is it me, or is this a running meme/problem for him?
http://www.sage.org/lists/sage-members-archive/2005/msg02937...
If they just want you to add user accounts, that's weird. But SRE style jobs are where a lot of guys who write famous open source systems software end up.
from the google groups post: "Yes, sysadmin skills are essential here, however we also require a very strong skillset in development, automation, high-level systems architecture, networking, statistics and general problem-solving."
sounds like a description of zed!
The original post I commented on: "Maybe because you write software used by sysadmins?"
Even after posting the original message, I really don't get your comment on it.
Same thing with programming. If you are given enough freedom to do the job right, and you can find a way to motivate yourself, there are no bad programming jobs.
Zed Shaw himself has bragged about a system he wrote which does the kind of business logic you mention -- except by his description it's a meta-programming system that can add rules almost as fast as they can think them up. That sounds like some sort of constraint solver, which is among the fanciest kind of programming around.
In that respect, the job description is pretty accurate. You do need a strong skillset in development, automation, high-level systems architecture, networking, statistics, and problem-solving to perform well as an SRE. You need to be able to think on your feet and evaluate the suggestions that engineers are throwing at you before somebody does something stupid, as well as the ability to figure out how to avoid having problems recur.
On the contrary, some of the code I've seen written by SREs has been among the most delicate, finely tuned, and "hard core" (by my definition) I've seen.
It's not required, but that pedantic nature seems to help make a good sysadmin.
I liked OmniTI's description of a role akin to SRE and the progression through the web operations career path they identify: http://omniti.com/seeds/what-is-web-operations .
"This role is in no way fitting for failed developers, it is for developers/engineers that have outpaced their career path. One that has a deep understanding of how things work: a complete systemic view of general site architecture."
Either that, or getting a Ph.D. in Education.
> "killer apps" are for mongrel2
You just said it. Bypassing any connection limitations on the browser.
Operations guy: Mongrel2 is a ops wet dream. Totally automatable and you can use it to easily carve your infrastructure up as needed to scale and deal with all the random crap programmers throw at you.
Programmers: Mongrel2 is future proof and gives you want you need with low friction. Wanna do sockets? Got it. Use any language? Got it. Change up the request flow to work around a bug? Got it. Drop Scala for Rails? Got it.
Or something like that.
If you think you've been a poor fit at some companies, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Education departments attract some of the very worst students, people pathologically stricken with know-nothingness. The graduate schools then take the more craven among them, the ones that realize that their school-system contracts give them huge automatic raises for getting higher degrees, often paid for too. They often come out as worse teachers after having had the recently recycled fad pedagogies pumped through them, which they then regurgitate in a game of telephone onto their students.
If you want to work on some stellar CS education stuff, try to talk your way into Kay's VPRI. Stay the hell away from Ed schools, they'd make your blood boil.
The rest is far, far worse.
Say what you like about the tenets of Constructivism, Zed, at least it's an ethos. I'm surprised that you'd have beef with it — you don't even like Papert's Constructionism?
As easily misinterpreted and misapplied as liberation pedagogy can be, at least it gives the non-subject-matter-experts something to apply themselves at, something they could actually help children with even if they're as dumb as a bag of rocks. It's definitely not a good fit for you, but it's far from worthless.
DI does have it's merits — it does keep bright assholes like us from dominating the classroom as students in a mixed setting. You can also get through the material a lot faster without getting mired in repetitive interactivity, but the script has to be perfect, or you can skip past a crucial facet without noticing, and there's very little opportunity to get back on the rails, especially because from the lecturer's perspective the resulting complaints are difficult to distinguish from the usual whining.
Part of the problem with curriculum design is that trials generally only occur with either uniformly high-achieving or uniformly delinquent students, both of whom can abide nearly any method if it's intentionally delivered.
I'm not even sure what that would produce. Maybe a post-post-modern _why.
I'm not that jazzed about the idea of reminiscing about a Smalltalk. How about instead of making esoteric references, you just say what's on your mind?
This is a thread, not a bibliography.
> This is a thread, not a bibliography.
What is that supposed to mean?
Is this a Heinlein reference?
Sorry for the long rant here, but I would like to see a healthy atmosphere for developers producing quality AGPL projects and the community accepting that they need to pay up reasonable fees for non-AGPL use.
The interesting thing is, other people have had the same sentiment about the AGPL. It seems they actually prefer it plus some small commercial license option. I hadn't really thought people would like the AGPL for servers, but it seems that's what people are liking.
At this point I have no idea which direction it'll go, but I'll make a decision once it's more stable and actually runs stuff.
I think the world deserves to know when Zed is taking a crap.
You need them, but they don't need you, and they know it. So they walk in and want to do what they want to do, they have no intention of doing the shitty stuff. But work in a company has a lot of shitty stuff to be done.
The problem with Zed is that though he is a good developer, he's also a good writer and probably a good talker. Those last two are important to him, and when people work at companies, they should not be having two big side projects (writing and talking). It distracts from the work.
All the rockstar programmers of the last few years all seemed to have entered CTO roles, have started their own companies, or are important people in very big companies. Very few are still just slugging away at code at small startups.
This story is basically why you should not hire rockstar programmers. Hire normal people who depend on you for their income.
Is that your conclusion?
Sorry for the snark, but that last line may be pretty unintentionally revealing. employer/employee relations are a complex relationship which requires a delicate balance of power. Having the employee be entirely dependent on the employer is just as damaging (to both parties!) as having a keystone employee who knows he can't be replaced. I'd replace your last line with "Hire equals who you can treat as equals."
"Authority is solvent to humanity."
Second, who the hell are you to say I shouldn't have a life outside of your company? This is not a damn salt mine, or a factory. Programmers are hired based on their visible experience. The projects they do and the things they write are now a major deciding factor on whether they get jobs. To then tell someone that all of that stops because you're paying them a piddly little 100k/year compared to your massive ownership in the company is down right abusive.
Third, in the valley the trend of firing people at the drop of a hat because they aren't a "good fit" cuts both ways. If you show no loyalty to your employees then they owe you nothing. Expecting them to stick around and be loyal, but then fire their peers for having a bad day with no warning is completely unfair.
Basically, I think your entire comment smacks of business douchebag who has no concept of worker's rights, fairness, or even basic capitalism.
What I'm saying is not slander, it's the opposite. YOU are putting yourself in the wrong spot, because you should not be playing bass when you have all these other talents. You should form your own band and create your own vision.
Imagine you are casting a band and you put Carlos Santana as the guitarrist of Britney Spears. Sure, he's an excellent guitar player, but that's now where he belongs. He should not play guitar in Britneys band and dabble in experimental rock music, he should be focusing on his own thing.
That's what I mean - many companies simply need a cog. They need some small piece that will keep the machine turning smoothly. They need a pawn - and though you could stick a queen in there to do the job of the pawn, it's not where it belongs.
And when someone says the queen should not be used as a pawn, the queen should not be arguing that it should be a pawn.
'sorry, that wasn't meant to be an insult - I just think you're better suited to running your own show'
would be a better way to put it.
You make it sound like you can only be "important" if you are not programming anymore. I say: go to hell.
I have never seen a manager winning a Nobel Prize - scientist are respected in our world, except in our field. Go figure.
I, for one, like to work for people who are smarter than I am. I believe many good programmers (here refered to as rockstars) feel the same. Therefore, they will not want to work for you and you can stop worrying about them.
Why don't you see your argument through to its most logical conclusion and say "only hire people who depend on you for their worker's visa?"
Kid you need to get out of the house more.
I think he's smart enough to contribute strategically to the project and the direction it takes. I think he's knowledgable enough to teach me and other people in the group things we don't know. I think he's good enough to bring in other good people when we need to expand. And I think he'd just be an awesome, fun guy to be around.
Hiring a cog doesn't get me any of that. If I have to pay Zed two-three times what it costs me to hire a cog to get all those skills, I'd consider it a bargain. And I'm guessing he'd be pretty happy at that rate too.
This phrase has appeared multiple times in response to comments on this story, but I think it misses the point entirely. The parent poster has a point at some level, but he delivers it with no tact.
The point is that you need more than money to hire really talented people. It sounds as if Zed left Dropbox because the problems he was solving there weren't the type of problems that he was passionate about solving. The pinhead, middle-manager response to this is to get pissed off and rant against hiring "rockstar" programmers, but that just shows how little they understand about what motivates really talented people.
I can't speak for Zed, but I know a few talented programmers myself. I've brought them in on projects and seen them hit the door in short order. The #1 reason was never money. Great coders are artists. Their greatest work will always be works of inspiration, not portraits they're paid to paint by narcissistic clients.
The bottom line is, if you want to hire talented people, set out to solve interesting problems, or build interesting projects. And don't be upset if the "rockstar" programmer you hired doesn't want to keep doing what you're doing. Go out and find someone who is interested in solving those problems and pay them what they deserve.