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Comment by eggbrain | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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