Douglas Crockford now at PayPal | Hacker News Reader

Douglas Crockford now at PayPal

looksgoodworkswell.blogspot.co.uk

88 pointspetercooper48 comments

LOL paypal. I wouldn't even want to put that on my resume.

They froze my account and kept my info (SSN and all). I had to subpeona them to get them to tell me why my account is locked. Their reason was I was associated to another person that owe them money. They won't tell me who this person is.

I've asked them to just delete my info and I won't ever create another paypal account and I have not done anything wrong. They stated no. I asked them if my information will be encrypted they said it's SSL encrypted (wtf). A month later their server got hacked.

They screwed so many people over that the person looking over your resume will be like ugh this guy works for that horrible company. Next!

Funny enough, I had a similar thought when I applied to eBay. The idea of working for the parent company of PayPal turned me off (I hadn't used my PayPal account in years after getting burned!)

However, since joining, I've met some amazing people (including Bill - He's a wicked smart, cool guy!) and seen some of the projects in the pipeline. The stuff they're working on is top-notch!

It may not be a "sexy" start up and PayPal's business practices may turn people off (I know first hand!) but at the end of the day, you'll be doing some cool stuff working with some amazing people (who know other amazing people and so on and so on...)

Personally, I'm ecstatic Crockford has joined the company!

Me neither. Over the years I have grown to passionately hate them. I wonder if they ever be able to turn around themselves.

Just recently this week they reminded me again of their incompentence.It seems they no longer allow Mass Payments for small businesses. Why is it so difficult to let users upload CSV with list of payments to be made? I guess they want their customers to suffer as much as possible, by doing payments one by one.

Somehow, I don't think PayPal is going to be a drag on Douglas Crockford's resumé.

PayPal? Wow. And, eh, I dunno, I'd prefer someplace more widely regarded as ethical. You know, like AIG or Goldman Sachs. :)

PayPal has some customer-unfriendly policies but are they really unethical? I would assume the people working there are just as good and honest as at any similar company.

By customer unfriendly you mean "arbitrarily freeze people's money for indefinite amounts of time without giving them any recourse in the matter". I think that might strike some people as unethical.

I've read a lot of these accounts and some are truly egregious. PayPal should definitely provide some better means of dealing with disputes, but I would hazard a guess that 99% or more of such disputes are simple cases of fraud and are dealt with appropriately. The lack of alternatives is the biggest issue I see with PayPal, so they can sail along without having to address the issue. Given that they are neither regulated as a bank, nor faced with any serious competition, it seems, to my admittedly limited knowledge, that they do well for the most part. While some of their actions may be deemed as unethical, I don't think there is cause to paint the entire organization with such a wide brush.

So I guess the "Use for good, not evil" clause will finally be removed from jsmin and jslint now.

He gave IBM a special license to do evil with it. IBM complained that, whilst they thought they were doing good things, they were not so sure there customers would.

Crockford speaking about this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C-JoyNuQJs&t=39m45s

What is fascinating about the description there is that IBM hasn't just asked once - they've asked many times.

I'd be willing to bet that the cause is that IBM's lawyers are aware that the most famous act of evil in the 20th century was committed by an IBM client, using IBM equipment. No joke, that was how the Nazis kept track of the Jews. And I'd be willing to bet that there are a lot of random dictators today who are using IBM software to keep tabs on their populations as well.

So while the IBM license exemption sounds silly and amusing, there is a very serious point behind it.

Incidentally this clause makes jsmin both not open source (discriminates against fields of endeavor) and also puts it in Debian non-free (same reason).

The idea of Douglas Crockford going through some generic new hire orientation process amuses me.

That was my thought exactly. "Doug, your LAPTOP and laptop accessory bag can be picked up from the IT Lab." Yeah.

"Doug, it's important that, when writing JavaScript, your use JSLint to verify it. Do you know it? If you need any help, refer to our internal wiki."

"Doug, opinions vary on the necessity or value of tools like JSLint. Consult your team's technical lead for guidance on whether your team chooses to enforce JSLint's strict guidelines."

"How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?

Why should he be treated differently than any other talented programmer? The goal of the orientation process is to familiarize one with the company, not to teach programming skills.

> The IT Department welcome's you to eBay, Inc.

First order of business, get them to use punctuation correctly.

The IT Department welcome's you to eBay, Inc.;

No No No!

    (function () {
        'use strict';
        The IT Department welcome's you to eBay, Inc.;
    }());

"The IT Department welcomes you to eBay, Inc."

Is that Python?

It's a string. I merely removed the errant apostrophe.

What's the point of good code if your data is bad?

I believe it. He seems to have done quite well at Yahoo! so I'm not surprised to hear about him going to another large company. I don't know too much about eBay's development community but there's http://ql.io/ so there's something. I can imagine Crockford helping to grow it.

I'm really sorry to hear that. I'm afraid its going to be a cultural and technical disappointment for him.

I can't imagine a bigger cultural disappointment than Yahoo! quite frankly. Crock was probably the best thing about that entire organization. I've been quietly thinking he should leave for awhile now, but haven't said anything on the internet because seriously who am I to say what he should or shouldn't do. We know he didn't lie about his college degree so I think the move away from Yahoo! is smart.

Yahoo may be losing users on some of their have-been web services, but to say that the developer culture is one of the worst is the funniest thing I ever heard. Yahoo is doing more for developers than almost any company out there. Ever heard of YUI or Mojito? How about YQL, Hadoop, or YSlow? With so much open source effort on their part, and the enormous success of some of those mentioned, I don't really see how Yahoo is a "cultural" step down from PayPal, especially when talking Javascript.

I started moving away from YUI between v2 and v3, mostly because the project started feeling very disorganized. There wasn't a clear timeline as to when components from v2 would be upgraded to v3. Namespacing helped, but I didn't want to invest time developing code around v2 components if v3 versions were right around the corner, but there was little to no insight as to if/when components would be migrated.

That seems to mirror the rest of Yahoo from what I've seen - some really good/cool/useful tech, poor management/communication about it. Perhaps at that size, it's just endemic in a culture?

YUI 2 was an awful mess but YUI 3 is pretty good. YUI 3 actually came out a while ago (it's at version 3.4 I think). But it's gotten a lot more simpler thanks in part to mimicking jQuery selectors.

You make some decent points, but a guy like Doug can work wherever he wants so while Yahoo! might release more open source packages than 99% of the shops out there, you can't just throw out the other, better companies in the top 1% like Google and Twitter who, in my opinion, release much better open source software, software that I actually use. I agree that Yahoo! has over the years done a respectable job in becoming a leader in open source JavaScript development, but since Doug has had a huge hand in this, couldn't one argue that he could bring that along with him wherever he goes? Furthermore, in some of these other companies, at least his CEO won't be just pretending to know what JSON is :)

> much better open source software, software that I actually use

Whether or not you use something doesn't determine whether it's high quality. Yahoo definitely releases some quality OSS.

I might agree, but what about the fact that Paypal has a user base that many companies can only dream of, so working with / developing new technology that can handle problems at this scale has to have some interesting and challenging projects somewhere?

Slightly worrying to see the conversation in the twitter widget between Bill Scott and a Techcrunch editor about this story where he has to explain that Java is not the same as JavaScript...

Common problem in the tech world. I have this conversation with every tech recruiter I talk to.

I have seen programmers who worked in both languages but couldn't tell the difference.

Such programmers have actually worked in neither.

Why would you even bother talking to them? I'd hang up / kick them out.

You just have to hope that their 'client' knows their shit and can tell the difference. But in short, it's useful to use recruiters for opportunities that aren't on the job boards and to poll the market.

Could you imagine having to work under Douglas and being required to have all your js lint on strict settings?

JSLint isn't that bad. Some people disagree with his opinions, but I quite like them. I write all my code with JSLint on strict mode and, while I hate how picky it is about whitespace, my code is nicer as a result.

Wow, I thought he would have stuck around a lot longer. He seemed to really like it there. Friday was my last day at Yahoo, it's unbelievable how many people are leaving.

I'm not very surprised people are leaving. The company looks like it has lost its direction, investors no longer take the company seriously, and the CEO lied about his academic credentials. I would not want to be there when Yahoo is sold for scrap.

> it's unbelievable how many people are leaving.

Where have you been? Yahoo! has been in limbo for half a decade, there has been a constant brain drain for all that time. The only engineers still working at Yahoo! are probably there because they can't find a job somewhere else.

I wonder why Crockford stayed there for so long, to be honest.

Title updated as I received confirmation from this post's author: https://twitter.com/#!/billwscott/status/201547332934828032

Crockford working for an IT department! It would be interesting to see what his views would be in a few months.

I doubt he's working for the IT department; I'd assume he's working R&D. I'm sure he also received a letter welcoming him from HR but that doesn't mean he will be working in HR.

Neat. Their web UI could use some serious help.

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