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Comment by MrUnderhill | Hacker News Reader

There was an open letter from the CEO just last week about re-staffing the team to be more engineering-oriented: https://symless.com/blog/open-letter-synergy-team

(Edited, thanks corpMaverick and stagger87)

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So they did a commercial fork of a working v1 open source product, and produced a closed source buggy v2, which they then open sourced again.

Now they are keeping the key members responsible for the buggy v2 (CEO + Devs).

I loved v1. I am skeptical that they will produce a reliable v3...

Some context, the letter came only after months of the same guy dismissing openly or behind the scenes - e.g. not approving posts on the forum - any reported issues and calls from the users that v2 was of beta quality. So I'd say it was an OK move but for sure a forced one after all the negative feedback.

Yep I left after the v2 beta nonsense. He locked my account out from the forums when he didn’t like my feedback. ShareMouse is by far a better product. I feel sorry for the employees but it’ll be a good day when symless goes out of business.

Here’s a fine example of Nick Bolton addressing a longstanding bug:

https://github.com/symless/synergy-core/issues/5226

He deleted a bunch of comments, locked the conversation and then has the audacity to say this a rare issue. I would have gladly helped them debug this issue if he had behaved like an adult.

ShareMouse doesn't support Linux so it's not a 1to1 replacement. Plus I'm very satisfied with synergy v1 just commenting on the approach from the symless CEO here

I have had the exact same experience. Plus totally unacceptable tweets by Nick. Those have been deleted in the mean time for obvious good reasons.

Not everybody. They let go "all staff whose role is not purely hands-on Software Engineering"

I feel it is the right thing to do, so they can focus on improving the product.

Except it looks like Nick fired everyone except himself and one customer service person who is 'Rather excitingly, Sarah is also spending some of her time to improve her software engineering skills so she can help with developing Synergy' (https://symless.com/blog/open-letter-synergy-team)?

Seems like a really terrible plan, when you need to retrain CSRs to do your engineering.

Reread the sentence, the parent commenter is correct.

Yep, and starting several months ago I was getting weekly emails asking if I'd be interested in moving to England to work for them as a software engineer. Except, I'm not a software engineer (I'm a hardware guy), just a customer of theirs from V1 days. They made it sound like an emergency situation where they had to stall development until they could recruit some more talent.

It got so bad I had to unsub from their mailing lists.

No software engineers were fired. There were 3 devs at Symless, including myself, and we left of our own accord for various reasons.

This certainly did create a bit of a crisis, because hiring C++ talent in small towns outside of London is hard.

Thanks for the insider update.

I don't understand, with the nature of the product (coming from open source) why is Symless doubling down so hard on centralizing this? Look for remote C++ developers across the world and get the tools to make remote work work well.

I was just talking with a coworker -- I used Synergy around 4-8 years ago, then my employment situation changed and I didn't use it for about 3 years. Have just started using it again, and it seems like it's actually worse than it was then. Anecdotal, obviously, but that's not a good trajectory.

Thanks for the info. Please note I never said anyone was fired, perhaps you meant to direct that to the comment above mine?

To be more specific, most non-software developers were let go with the intent to be to hire more software developers and streamline other aspects of the business. (saw the edit)

Awesome - I wasn't aware of that, but after reading that post I'm greatly reassured. It sounds like they're doing the right things first, glad they've straightened out the priorities.

I really hope it can become a great product.

well that's not good. I use Synergy daily.

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