Yihui Xie, RMarkdown Creator, Laid Off from RStudio | Hacker News Reader

Yihui Xie, RMarkdown Creator, Laid Off from RStudio

yihui.org

63 pointskarpatic20 comments

That is really worrying. He worked there for over 10 years, doing incredible work for the R community, and then just being laid off with 2 weeks notice, over Christmas no less... Of course we don't know the other side, but he at least handles it like a total professional in this post.

EDIT: Also see the outpour of thanks and support in the comment thread https://github.com/yihui/yihui.org/discussions/1555 which gives an impression how well known and liked he is in the R community.

I was/am a fan of the R language. I was in fact working on a reactive R IDE, distantly related to R markdown, largely for fun. However, with ChatGPT, that changed my focus to using python more, since ChatGPT provides so much help in the use case of data analysis. For me its use in python offsets advantages of R. And R Studio/Posit was trying to generalize into Python even before ChatGPT. I am sure that must have some impact on the company.

I like how he uses iso8601 dates even in conversational writing. I thought it was just me.

I’ve benefited tons from Yihui’s work and hope he finds good footing.

This is how people write dates in Chinese-speaking countries

I came to write the same thing! ISO8601 FTW.

When a girl asked me 20 years ago "What a perfect date would be", I answered enthusiastically "ISO8601, of course".

I'm still single today, and I don't know why.

(Just kidding :)

lmao! It's so stupid that it's funny again.

Posit (Rstudio) have been carrying out layoffs for the last few months, judging by the twitter posts of well known R developers looking for work, but the actual numbers seem to be a well held secret.

I can't tell if they're struggling or this is part of their wider shift away from an R focus towards datascience in general?

Wouldn’t a shift to data science require more R people, not fewer?

I worry that they’re struggling so the “data science” bit is just marketing scrambling to reposition the good stuff it already does.

They're pivoting away from R which is a shame.

That doesn’t really make sense to me because there are a million “data science” consulting firms. The only thing that made them special is R. If they try to just be a python package company it’s going to be rough times.

What's the difference? I'm still not actually sure where R sits these days but it is certainly my impression its confined to an ever smaller niche of social scientists and non-CSy folks. As more and more fields becme programmer-native, that niche becomes naturally smaller. Most, if not all, quantitativepy trained students now (and have been for a while) are bilingual in Python for glue and analysis and C++ for compute. R is also not a great fit for HPC, at least, they people attempting it are as few and far between as Windows supercomputers these days.

Rstudio is arguably Spyder, and they seem well positioned to blow it away if they let go of R.

I've worked with a few numerical fields now (physics, medicine and neuroscience, some of the largest consumers of academic HPC) and I can count the number of R folks without hands. Even friends at consulting firms and fintech, and they're also not using R. Or am I missing something?

I did a considerable amount of R dev during an internship. It had a lot of breadth surrounding classical stats that python didn’t have. Other killer features were rstudio itself, ggplot2 graphing lib, dplyr data munging lib, r shiny for interactive graphs. It seems like python has surpassed it in all areas. When it’s time, it’s time. I hope this person lands on his feet!

If somebody of Yihui Xie's calibre got laid off, there's no hope for 99% of R programmers at Rstudio.

That may not be the case. It could have been a personality clash, some manager wanting to shake things up a bit, or maybe despite the good will Yihui Xie has with the community they may have been unpleasant to work with.

Tech work, from engineering to programming to grunt work, is a lot about your skills and talent, but it is much more about your ability to integrate with your coworkers, to get along with others, and create a pleasant atmosphere.

If you fail that, regardless of whether it is your fault or not, it can easily lead to the end of your employment with that company.

Of course, if your company makes life unpleasant for you, then make your escape plan and quit asap

> I have spent more time thinking and exploring a different approach to building software that is more minimalist and handcrafted.. I have become more interested in developing smaller software tools that do fewer things.

> To a large extent, I’m leaning towards the “Less is More” or “Worse is Better” philosophy, and I find stoicism and the wabi-sabi concept very appealing.. This philosophical change of mine is not only about software development, but also my daily life.

Perhaps this shift in philosophy is somehow related to their leaving the company. Even if it's not, it does sound like a guiding principle toward the next step. I relate to this in my personal and professional life. As I get older, I observe myself getting more bare, gruff, less tolerant of bloat and waste.

I did laugh when first read it though, that they aspire toward smaller tools that do fewer things. I don't know about other industries or the arts, but it seemed like something a wise battle-worn software developer would say.

Well… wow. That sucks. Why?? Couldn’t they have him pitching in on other projects or something? Seems a tough pill. Gosh. Is the money posit is able to make from its R products dropping or what? Would be super interesting to know the inside details on what’s going on with Posit now.

Honestly shocking that they would lay off a guy whose had this much of an influence on data science tooling generally. Every company I've worked at has had a sizable proportion of the analytics team using knitr+rmd.

I hope this does not mean there are financial troubles within Rstudio/Posit.

Did RStudio get private equity'd?

What!! You gotta be kidding me

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