Hacker News Reader

Comment by bcantrill | Hacker News Reader

The name is beside the point -- and their character outs them anyway. To be clear, this was a conversation I didn't initiate (they came into my DMs, going off half-cocked about several technical aspects of Oxide that they did not understand), and they made no effort to hide their disposition. We probably disagree on this, but I don't believe that there's a basis for an assumption of privacy here (I'm not your priest, rabbi, lawyer, spouse, etc.) -- and anyone who knows me would know that I'm not the person to be confessing these kinds of sins to anyway.

View on HN

Bryan, if I may ask, what was the purpose of this LinkedIn / blog post?

Acknowledging that I don’t know you, and that I haven’t seen this private conversation, this post definitely reads like you just wanted to put a former colleague on blast semi-anonymously. I came to these comments to see if anyone felt the same.

> We probably disagree on this, but I don’t believe that there’s a basis for an assumption of privacy here

In my view you crossed the line when you included his gender, his current role and employer, and two former employers.

My intent at first was not to write about this, but I couldn't stop thinking about it: I was not only profoundly disappointed in my former colleague, but disgusted by the disdain towards VMware customers at Broadcom. I was earnest in that it brought a flood of memories back for me about how ashamed I was to (briefly) work at Oracle, and I did what I have always done when something is burning inside me: I spoke my heart.

I understand that you are concerned about my former colleague (though again, a little hard to say that I'm putting them "on blast" when they are unnamed!), but my sympathies lie not with Broadcom but with the customers that they are screwing over: I have heard many, many stories from VMware customers being taken aback by the audacious things that Broadcom has told them -- the kinds of things that even Oracle has the decency to not say out loud. These customers don't speak publicly (for understandable reasons!), leaving no one to speak for them.

So yes, a Broadcom employee shooting their mouth off in an unsolicited conversation with me about their contempt for their own customers shouldn't assume that their disposition will be kept in confidence -- especially when it tracks with so much bad behavior out there!

If you have a field engineering org that can move these players off of VMWare into Oxide (the software and monitoring, etc.), you could be looking at easy picking of VMWare customers.

you act like he violated some high moral commandment by badmouthing a customer. Wasn’t Reuters a sun customer you badmouthed? Wasn’t oracle a sun customer?

Wasn’t this guy you are badmouthing, asking you questions about Oxide tech, also arguably a customer, looked at more soberly?

I just don’t get the high horse. You’re going to defend llnl and Sandia and the nnsa no matter what, since they’re customers? Not badmouthing a customer is the eleventh commandment? It’s something folksy and nice scott McNealy said. It starts losing its charm when you bash people over the head with it in public humiliation rituals like you’re in the red guard or Khmer Rouge.

Well, this wasn't badmouthing a customer -- it was showing contempt for customers, full stop. As for the accusations of hypocrisy: the example you picked (a deep cut!) was a Sun customer who insisted that we disable DTrace for their application so their customers (who were also Sun customers!) wouldn't be able to instrument the software that they had paid for. So ironically, I was in fact operating in defense of their customers. (I have generally told that story with the ISV anonymized -- but you clearly found an example where I named them.)

Broadcom is definitely not an Oxide customer -- and the (misguided) questions that were being asked were not about them becoming an Oxide customer.

Finally: isn't it a little hard to argue that I'm public humiliating someone who I am not naming?

We are back to where we started. When I said in my first message that you basically outed this person, you said it didn’t matter as the tone of the (hitherto private) exchange gave them away anyway. Now you move the goalposts back to the original position and claim you kept them anonymous.

> I have generally told that story with the ISV anonymized -- but you clearly found an example where I named them.

It was on one of the OaF podcasts about dtrace. I worked for Reuters at the time and contempt for their customers was definitely a thread that ran through some parts of that org, even as it made a bunch of us feel very icky.

(I still have a side quest to find / talk to some of the people involved on 'our' side of the fence about this!)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com