I'm Moving To San Francisco, I Need A Job
zedshaw.com
Of note for HN: "I am interested in working for a funded startup that has about 5-20 employees and is growing or would like to grow."
zedshaw.com
Let's say he didn't post or publish anything, would you say he'd be better off? I'm positive he won't.
I'm sure he'll find something worthwhile, tho, because of his presence. So overall, it will help him.
If he wants a management position, not so much, IMO.
What qualities does he bring that would make him a good leader? It's his way or the highway, he's always right, everybody else are idiots, has a taste for drama...
Yep, just what any struggling organization needs. Dissent is fine, what Zed brings - just in a blog - would suck to work with.
I think he's a good programmer and self-promoter, but nothing of his that I've read would lead me to put him in charge of something. In a few years, when he's matured some, maybe.
...but, OTOH, it worked out well for ESR...
The mileage that Zed Shaw has received on a simple well-designed Python SMTP library is absolutely astounding and totally disproportionate to the complexity, novelty, and general market need for the library. His only other notable contribution is a simple, feature-constrained single-purpose micro web server that uses a scaling-limited thread-per-request architecture.
[Edit: This comment doesn't really make much sense now, since the parent updated his comment to note that Zed ALSO wrote mongrel. I'd delete this comment except for reply attached to it.]
[Edit] Why is the reply nonsense? The point is fairly clear -- there are far more established, widely used, complex and important projects that do not have such vitriolic personalities attached. Zed Shaw's known for his blog posts, not because of any proportionally notable contribution to the open source community.
(The original unmodified comment referred to this reply as "nonsense").
If you have the skills (he does), finding a job should not be too difficult. No need to blog about it.
I don't think Zed is much more abrasive than Linus, for example.
Well, in a perfect world I’d just work on Lamson but the days of companies actually paying people to work on open source are pretty much over.
Have I missed something? I thought that, at least, most of the kernel and gcc devs were employed by companies to work on those projects. Is he right, and something has fundamentally changed?
In fact, IBM, one of the largest paying contributors to Eclipse, also pays people to work on a boatload of open source stuff. You don't realize until you actually dig into it yourself.
And of course Lamson is not GCC or the kernel. Those are very special cases, look at the GNOME or KDE project... or Django for you web guys, who gets paid to work on Django? not even JKM
And lets not forget Rails....
In contrast, for example, a PHP programmer who probably does PHP day-in-day out and not much else is going to find it pretty easy to fix a bug in a PHP framework him/herself and therefore his/her employer doesn't need to pay a big support contract. If problems are found they are probably in the development phase and if the team can't work around them, I would expect any number of freelancers could pick up the problem and fix it.
Basically I'm saying it's supply and demand.
He strikes me as a "get things done" sort of person.
He seems to me to be a nice guy, a clean coder and yes, a guy who gets things done. Very much in contrast with the generally abrasive character he's built on his website.
Anyway, for what it's worth, I'd have no trouble hiring him.
Instead, take the ratio of your comment's parent divided by the (grandparent + parent), and you get x. I think.
One, not two.
I've never met Zed but have been impressed with some of his talks that I have seen. I'd really value the chance to work with him.
Good luck to Zed though, I'm sure someone will snap him up just because of his online status and it's certainly a different way to find a job!