Doug Cutting Leaves Yahoo for Cloudera | Hacker News Reader

Doug Cutting Leaves Yahoo for Cloudera

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Hadoop creator leaves Yahoo! to join Hadoop startup

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Doug, cutting leaves;

"Yahoo for cloudera," the groudskeepers say.

Dawn dew burns upward -- a fine mist.

It's gotta be tough when your last name is a participle

Its pretty clear to many people that Cloudera is a rocket ship heading skyward, both in terms of innovation and valuation. Working there as an early employee means participating in the profits as the company grows, as well as being able to focus on turning Hadoop into the kernel of the network computer of tomorrow. As cool as Yahoo is, its not hard to see why Cloudera could lure Cutting away.

Since when is Yahoo cool?

Since they hired Doug, gave us Hadoop, Pig, YUI etc? Since their home page started being a great portal for normal people? Since Yahoo Labs started churning out the awesome? Since they've given more to FOSS than any other company, ever?

By any standard other than 'Web 2.0 Douchebag' - Yahoo is SUPREMELY cool, whatever you think of their long-term prospects or what might have been.

And, you know, killed a lot of good startups, wasted a lot of engineers' time, etc.

"gave us Hadoop" -> let Doug do what he wanted.

I'm not convinced they've "given more to FOSS" - significant examples other than Hadoop and Doug's work?

Perhaps I spent too much time inside that particular sausage factory.

Would you go work there, right now?

I'm slightly intimidated to reply to you, but YUI and YSlow are pretty significant if you're a front-end guy.

I feel like YDN is pretty meaty. And yes, 'Let Doug do what he wanted and paid him, and gave us Hadoop and Pig with great docs, along with YUI' is a pretty strong contribution.

I've never worked there, but if I could work on a cool project - yes, I would.

You do sound like you have a unique perspective :) I've always heard nothing but bad things about Yahoo management, and if they acquired my baby and kilt it I'm sure I'd hate them too. Don't the cash and freedom make up for it, somewhat?

I guess. I think the folks that pay Linus or whatever have done more for OS. Sun's opensolaris, too. MySQL, etc too. Just by sheer weight of code.

The problem is that the number of cool projects is pretty minimal. They're in duck and cover mode. They'll get pushed to trim employees further and further to stretch the revenues out.

I wish I had not sold it to them. The cash and freedom do not even come close; I would rather work on a big, popular product.

I'm overall pretty impressed with Yahoo's commitment to FOSS development of Hadoop. They've done 90% of its development, and they seem very serious about a commitment to open source going forward.

But yeah, I can see how you'd feel like you do.

Can't you work on anything you want now that you have the money? If you hadn't sold and some catastrophe struck you, what then? I'm sitting here counting out months of savings and wondering if I'll be able to build what I want to build before debt and daily life grinds me down.

Yeah I feel the same as you. But I guess the grass is always greener...

He wasn't broke before the acquisition. A really successful product means you kinda get to do what you want whether you get an "exit" or not. Sure, the big cashout means you can go on a long vacation or something...but how many of us are in it for a long vacation? If I were to sell my company today, I would be thinking about what my next business would be by tomorrow.

A really successful product is not guaranteed to remain so, but cash remains cash. I speculate that if yahoo was going to get into social bookmarking then if he hadn't sold, they'd have picked up somebody else and the competitive landscape changes drastically. To me, the big cashout means an opportunity to work on bigger projects. The personal financials are of course the most important factor. If I had a few million or a fat trust fund, I agree selling only makes sense if I figure I am getting a very good price.

I can think of two companies with big popular products who would hire you.

Pinboard's hiring, dude! I've got a clever compensation formula I'll email you about...

Remember that many people do not have either cash and freedom OR a big popular project. While nowhere near the level of Delicious, I had a project acquired, and ended up with neither cash and freedom or a project to work on in the end. But, I'm not ready to say I wish I wouldn't have sold it. It's part of learning and I'll have a different perspective next time around. So, while I know where you're coming from, I'm not going to feel too bad for you ;-). Seems like you'll now nkow what to consider next time.

BTW, I still use Delicious every day, thanks for creating it.

There are very interesting and successful proprietary applications out there. A good example is bit.ly, one of my favourites.

Yahoo did not killed Delicious (launched in 2003), Google Reader (2005), FriendFeed (2006), Twitter (2007) and bit.ly did!

Of course that whole time, we on the Delicious team were watching the rise of those apps, thinking "Wouldn't it be cool if we could..." but being told "Maybe, though first you'll need to..."

If Mike Olson wanted to hire me to sweep floors and wash dishes, I would. (Former banking client; the best combo of tech smarts and people skills I've ever seen.)

Is it true that when an Internet company stops growing, people jump to the newest big-growth company (for reasons of stock options)? Like Microsoft to Google, and Google to whoever?

Yes. Facebook is the whoever.

JOSHUA!!!!!

The gall. Seriously.

"Thus did Schachter come to believe that the deal was what was best for Del.icio.us. And it's pretty good for him too. If reports of a price north of $30 million are accurate, the acquisition puts his net worth (on paper) at more than $15 million." ( http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/busine... )

Yahoo sets this little brat up for life and he has the audacity to talk about them as a "sausage factory?" Frankly, I think Yahoo has done a good job with Delicious BECAUSE they have tinkered with it so little. And what they HAVE done with the UI is a vast improvement. Remember all the worry when Yahoo bought Flickr? Most Flickr users say it's far better and more stable than ever. I just have problems with his taking the kind of money from this company like he did and then turn around in 4 years and bitch and moan and say he wished he hadn't sold. Does anybody here REALLY believe that? Put him back in his old apartment surviving on Mac 'n Cheese without the luxury home, trips, cars, gifts to family, etc. and see how badly he wished he would never have sold.

Shame, Josh Schachter, shame.

Did you really just call someone you've never met before -- who created a service you seem to enjoy -- a little brat? People who create great products which get acquired do not get "set up" by their acquirer. The cash they earn is often in exchange for giving up full control over the product's destiny. That is what happened here, and you can certainly argue whether or not Delicious is better or worse off for being underneath Yahoo, but it's foolish of you to try and divine how truthful you think Josh is being, merely because you may trade the best thing you've ever created for $15 million.

Every day, I seem to have a new "revelation" for how "you could use Hadoop for that."

Either I am retarded, or there's an awful lot of standard BS that Hadoop fixes.

Any problem you want to throw a lot of computers at, its now pretty easy to do that.

Kinda a big deal, yeah. Major changes coming to computing in general as new opportunities present themselves.

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