Jedberg leaves reddit | Hacker News Reader

Jedberg leaves reddit

reddit.com

210 pointskacy89 comments

IMHO, this is a major, major loss for reddit. Jedberg, I know you read HN -- you were a hugely important part of that community; any time there was about to be a user revolt, it seemed like a red-lettered Jedberg would pop up in the thread to calm everybody down.

I don't think you were technically a community manager (were you?) but you did a damn good job at it anyway.

jedberg was officially the sysadmin. but when you have a staff of ~5, everybody kind of fills all the roles no matter what their title is.

Thank you. That really means a lot to me.

Good, man. You deserve every word of praise that you get, especially for keeping that site running with the team you had (5, was it? And you were the only SA?).

Good luck at whatever it is that you decide to do :)

Thank you. That's very kind of you.

The most dire time was right after raldi left, when I had just two tech people, a programmer and a sysadmin.

jedberg - Its sad to see you go, I remember when you came on at reddit. Whats next for you?

Right now I'm going to enjoy the nice summer weather and take care of some things that I've been neglecting for a while.

Then we'll see where the wind takes me. :) The last paragraph of the blog post has details.

Good luck on whatever you do in the future and thanks for the family time, effort and sanity invested into reddit.

I'll second that.

While it was certainly a loss when the other guys left, I definitely felt this one the most simply because jedberg was always popping up in the community, and seemed more visible than the other admins, though I'm sure the impact is also deepened because losing jedberg means the old guard have all moved on now. He made an excellent whipping boy, and played the role quite well.

Jeremy, you have my sincere thanks for helping make reddit such a welcoming and entertaining environment. I wish you nothing but success in your future endeavours.

Thank you very much. Your kind words are appreciated.

He was employee number one and I think the last remaining link to the founding team (not sure). I've got a lot of respect for him, especially after meeting him in person when I toured the office earlier this year. His commute was over 2 hours each day, and he had to deal with all the scaling issues with amazon almost single-handedly, not to mention the Saturday nights that were devoted to keeping the site up.

I wish you the best, dude. Hopefully you'll join hipmunk! :-)

First I have to clarify that nothing I did was single handed. I couldn't possibly have done what I did without the support of the awesomeness that was the rest of team reddit.

As for hipmunk, I think they already have too much talent, since they have the rest of reddit. :)

Where were you commuting from?

Cupertino.

You should come swing by the foursquare offices sometime if your bored, I'll get you a fresh pack of bacon if you give me a heads up :)

Everything up to the bacon sounded good. :) I think you sent me an email, I'll hit you up there.

Jedberg was not on the founding team of Reddit. The founding team of reddit was Steve Huffman (spez) and Alexis Ohanian (kn0thing). Jedberg was their first hire after acquisition, though they'd acquired two other team members via merger (Chris Slowe and Aaron Swartz) prior to that.

"He was employee number one and I think the last remaining link to the founding team"

Not what it said when I commented ;-)

Apologies for the downvote then.

Thanks for clarifying that. By the time I got to it, it was already fixed. :)

First hire is still pretty cool :-)

I always thought so. :)

The biggest question I have is: why are so many people leaving Reddit?

Over the past few months, the site has grown continuously yet the people that have been the driving force of the site seem to be leaving just as the site is hitting its peak. What has changed?

There's a lot to be said for wanting to work in small teams. I know the growth isn't that dramatic, but it's perfectly reasonable to step away and start something new if the new environment isn't ideal for you.

I think it might actually be a different aspect of having (or having had) a small team: that the churn over time is more noticeable when the number of employees is just a handful. Jedberg has been with reddit for over 4 years, as he mentions.

Maybe nothing has changed other than the obvious.

People who work for small companies tend to do so because they like it. The same goes for those who work for big companies.

Reddit is not a small company any more. The massive growth would have brought a lot of internal changes. It doesn't surprise me that people are out seeking what they like again.

Huh? The "massive growth" has been in traffic. I thought they had less than 10 employees.

That's correct. But they were bought by Conde Nast.

Five years ago. http://techcrunch.com/2006/10/31/breaking-news-conde-nastwir...

More bandwidth and users have probably made it a very stressful job for ~5 people.

Maybe a big cash bonus got triggered if they stayed on for a certain period of time when Reddit was acquired

I think Jedberg is leaving because he values his marriage over reddit. He kinda hints at that in his blog post.

I agree, also this: http://imgur.com/tTQQ5 He truly is bad ass.

He has one of the most difficult, stressful jobs scaling one of the most heavily trafficked sites in the world.

And I'm sure the bitching and moaning whenever there's downtime doesn't help.

Under-funded, over-loaded, filled with hyper-critical users and entire armies of abusers. Sounds like a great job!

Anyone who's stuck that out for years is a hero.

Someone sent me a cape once, but it didn't fit.

To be honest, none of those things by themselves really bothered me. But I supposed the sum total of it always dragged on my subconscience.

>Someone sent me a cape once, but it didn't fit.

How does a cape not fit??

The thing that goes around the neck was too small. :) It was a kids cape.

Cheers jedberg. For the fish and all that.

Maybe he just wants to move on to new opportunities. It happens, I wouldn't look too hard into it. Maybe he thinks his job there is now "done" and wants tot do something else.

I never attribute to malice what can be just plain simple, "I've done all I set out to do here and more" feelings.

A four year vesting period is typical. Like he mentioned, he's just gone over four years.

Average-ish salaries with much higher than average work expectations. Basically the only perk of the job is that you're working on Reddit, but it seems obvious that there's a lot of extra stress involved.

It's a high stress low pay job

I'll give you high stress, but I doubt it was low-paying. When they were doing their hiring rounds they said applicants with experience would be making six figures, so I'm sure their chief architect wasn't exactly starving.

What are the odds he ends up at Hipmunk?

It's not mentioned at all in the post, but it seems like a lot of ex-reddit employees end up there.

He confirms he isn't in the thread:

> Not leaving to work at Hipmunk? Breaking tradition eh?

> Jedberg: Nah, they're full up on awesomeness already.

http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/i29yk/all_good_things/...

There is something sounding very wrong about that: the work of a sysadmin that is of value for a big site should never reach the point to be so stressful that you have to wake up on alerts too many times.

It may happen 4 or 5 days every year maybe, if it is worse than that then there is something wrong. It is not impossible that jedberg is actually leaving because that kind of condition is not good in the long time. But here the problem is, a better employer would fix the root cause instead of letting good people go.

I'm saying that as I think this happens in many places actually, and is a huge mistake. A lot of work and traffic should never turn into a nightmare for a few guys.

That's a good point, why can't responses be automated to alerts? I wonder what critical parts he needs to fix.

They did automate most of it. They need to get off EBS, as there are simply too many issues with it that have a negative effect on performance and stability. Doing that, however, is a bit of a task.

A guy with so much knowledge about running such a huge site probably has hundreds of job offers. Best of luck Jedberg, wish you all the best!

Reddit has quite a few stability/uptime problems. Probably not his fault, but a scary prospect nonetheless.

EDIT: Did I get downvoted by someone who thinks Reddit is stable? It clearly isn't and anyone who thinks otherwise is dreaming. I guess I'll stop going against the HN hivemind just to keep my account in good standing. This place feels more like Reddit every day.

> This place feels more like Reddit every day.

That's why I downmodded you.

Didn't you prove him right ...?

Pretty much HN reminds me of Reddit before Digg imploded.

Yeah, just like reddit. Especially posts complaining about downvotes.

I think it's off base to blame someone that has meager personnel running such a highly trafficked site, especially since Conde Nast is/was reluctant to hire more. Read his blogs on his dedication to putting out fires. He didn't get enough resources to manage the complexity. I think most of HN's readers would hire him in a heartbeat, if they only got the chance.

This is the reason that you're getting downvoted, not because people think it's stable.

jcol -- you've been here for 10 days, and in that time you've contributed stuff like this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2601356

Linking to a bunch of "let me google that for you"? That's about the least productive answer you can give some one (not to mention it's incredibly rude, and incredibly unwelcoming to somebody asking a question); come on...

Not to be a jerk, maybe you have more than one account or something, but I don't really know that you can start getting angry at the HN community for not being up to your standards just yet.

Just an observation: people on HN who complain about being downvoted rarely see their comments get out of the "grey" zone.

Wow, I just watched him give a presentation on reddit architecture at Velocity yesterday. Shame to see him go.

And let me tell you how awkward that was knowing that I was going to post this today! And not being able to say anything.

Link / video to said presentation please?

Were you able to make arrangements with the team to make the transition easier? Do they know the ropes as well as you?

Was there much camaraderie among the team members? It seemed that way.

Did you have to agree to/sign anything from Conde Nast to proceed with your resignation?

I wish you the best of luck and I hope you succeed both personally and in future ventures.

We all got along very well and I'm confident that they will be able to handle it. Also, I'm not dropping off the face of the planet -- they can still ask me questions. :)

I was at your talk and gotta give you all props for trying out pretty much every new technology under the sun -- from all the Amazon services, to memcachedb, to Cassandra. And for sharing what went wrong with various components.

Well, one of the ways we try to stay lean is by using new technologies that solve problems so we didn't have to. I guess this was a nice side effect.

Well, the included cat and transformer pictures must have helped.

I'm glad at least someone liked those. It was hard to tell from the stage. I imagine people were a bit more subdued given the late hour of the day. At least, that is what I hope!

From someone that spent years sysadmining very high traffic systems: Well done sir. Well done.

Been using Reddit since launch. Somewhat nervous that the new people running Reddit will get overrun by the corporate overlords now that they see the "hockey stick" traffic charts.

I can see some bean counter doing the math:

  Slap 4 teeth whitening ads on every page
  = 4 ad impressions
  * 1.2 billion page views
  = 4.8 billion ad impressions
  * $0.30 - $0.50 eCPM
  = $17 - $28 million/year.

I've said it before, so I apologize for repeating myself, but it shocks me (shocks!) that reddit doesn't append affiliate IDs to all of the outbound links to amazon that are generated.

I've probably made well over $100 in purchases just in the last few months via links I've seen on reddit. ("Can you recommend a good book on welding/bicycles/iOS dev/etc.")

Hopefully they don't do what you're suggesting, because I think if they did, the users would leave almost immediately (and probably flood HN).

Last time I saw this suggested, the more-or-less official response was along the lines of "we thought about it, but we'd be unable to convince everyone that those types of links aren't being tampered with (ranking-wise)" from which I inferred that the trust of their community was (is) worth more than that revenue stream.

Ads are one thing. Manipulating user content for profit is seedy

As long as they are being sent to the same endpoint I don't see the problem.

How is this manipulating user content?

What are you talking about? Altering the link the user submits isn't manipulating user content? Especially when they incentivize sponsored ads from users that use affiliate links specifically?

How is it NOT?

Well, it's not altering the intention, at least. The link still leads to the product that the user intended. As long as they aren't actively removing existing affiliate codes I don't see a problem with that approach.

Reddit can't live off nothing forever, they are going to have to find a way to monetize in line with corporate overlord expectations for a site of its traffic level or eventually be replaced by drones.

Personally, I'd be quite happy if they pulled user affiliate codes from links and replaced them with their own.

Every sane person knows that a site like reddit has to be paid for somehow & this seems like a relatively unintrusive way to do so.

Metafilter does this, and their user base has no problem with it.

One of the problems with Reddit is that the vast majority of users are anti-ads and anti-corporation making any form of commercialism (even if it means more employees or a better site) nearly impossible.

And yet tons of them shell out $4 a month for Gold, so it's clearly not impossible to monetize.

I still don't think it's enough though.

$0.30 - $0.50 eCPM? On Reddit?

You high. They'd be extremely lucky to get $0.03 eCPM.

While I'm not nearly so famous as he is, and the job wasn't either, I know how he feels... I had the same routine as him. Check things all day from the time you wake until you go to sleep, and when you do sleep, fear that you'll be woken up by a problem.

And I know what a relief it was when it was gone. It really does feel like a weight has been lifted from your shoulders.

4 years, I wonder if his shares just fully vested and he's been waiting for it.

I might be mistaken but Conde Nast is a privately owned company.

You can still have a vesting period for shares in a private company. 4 years is a normal amount of time to be fully vested.

Private company shares are usually illiquid, or have their liquidity controlled by the company.

i actually got a little teary-eyed about this. i know i'll "see him around" as much as anyone can in communities like these but it really is sad.

What would you like to do now Jedberg?

Jedber will be missed.

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