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Au Revoir

blog.docker.com

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Re: Au Revoir

#51

Post by moftz »

hartator wrote: post #23

It always amazes me how you can convince a founder/CEO is not right man for the job, and slowly push him away. Companies that succeed are driven by burning vision, not by day-to-day operation people. It might make feel the companies run smoother for some time, but day-to-day executives are harmful to a company core vision leading to boring companies if they manage to sustain profitability in the long run at all.

You can't have explosive growth forever. At some point, you look around and realize that you don't need to worry about coming up with big ideas anymore and that what you've developed is mature enough to be a real revenue generator. Hykes clearly isn't the kind of person that likes to sit back so he's off to find a replacement, the guy that will be really good at streamlining what Docker does (and ensuring that the stock does well).

Re: Au Revoir

#52

Post by c_r_w »

discussedbefore wrote: post #48

This guy led Docker's marketing-first approach here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shykes https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:shykes%20docker&sort=by... I put CloudFlare in a similar boat, but CloudFlare seems more tech-savvy (apart from one giant screw-up that cemented marketing-first for me). I'll always be sad that marketing wins.

What does that mean, "marketing-first approach?" Is this a common distinction in the Hacker News culture?

Re: Au Revoir

#53

Post by geofft »

hartator wrote: post #23

It always amazes me how you can convince a founder/CEO is not right man for the job, and slowly push him away. Companies that succeed are driven by burning vision, not by day-to-day operation people. It might make feel the companies run smoother for some time, but day-to-day executives are harmful to a company core vision leading to boring companies if they manage to sustain profitability in the long run at all.

> Companies that succeed are driven by burning vision, not by day-to-day operation people.

What is the evidence for this? We can throw anecdotes like Apple on one side and Unilever on the other, sure, but is there any study saying e.g. "Of these 100 promising companies founded in 1990, x% of the founder-led ones were successful by 2010 whereas y% of the outside-CEO-led ones were?"

Making a bold claim like "Companies that succeed have X cool-sounding behavior" is the realm of business books in airport bookstores. It would be nice to take a more data-driven approach.

Re: Au Revoir

#54

Post by markbnj »

peterwwillis wrote: post #43

I think their blog being hugged to death is a good example of how this technology (read: web backend tech in general, not containers) is still too complicated for people in general to use it for simple cases, like scaling the load of otherwise static content. (It's wordpress, but still) We need solutions that require less resources and smaller learning curves.

I don't know how their blog is hosted but wordpress in general is very chatty with the database backend, and I really don't think the site getting crushed by HN is indicative of fundamental issues with container technology. If it is then there is a long list of technologies that HN has exposed fundamental issues with by crushing their content sites :).

Re: Au Revoir

#55

Post by discussedbefore »

c_r_w wrote: post #52
discussedbefore wrote: post #48

This guy led Docker's marketing-first approach here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shykes https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:shykes%20docker&sort=by... I put CloudFlare in a similar boat, but CloudFlare seems more tech-savvy (apart from one giant screw-up that cemented marketing-first for me). I'll always be sad that marketing wins.

What does that mean, "marketing-first approach?" Is this a common distinction in the Hacker News culture?

If I had to pick a more common phrase to research on HN, it would be "growth hacking". By marketing-first I mean growth hacking/PR is priority #1.

I'm not saying anything against this person professionally or personally, it is more a textbook example of marketing hustle as key to financial success. I prioritize technology ahead of marketing, and am currently struggling to flip this around.

PS. I didn't know Docker was YCS10, so props to YC for connecting with this person early. Growth hacking definitely fits into the YC culture.

Re: Au Revoir

#56

Post by mmsimanga »

bsaul wrote: post #38
hartator wrote: post #23

It always amazes me how you can convince a founder/CEO is not right man for the job, and slowly push him away. Companies that succeed are driven by burning vision, not by day-to-day operation people. It might make feel the companies run smoother for some time, but day-to-day executives are harmful to a company core vision leading to boring companies if they manage to sustain profitability in the long run at all.

i guess it's a cycle. When a company needs to innovate to build its first iterations then the founder role is crucial, but then come the time of finding the best way to make money out of the product, and have a sustainable and well organized company. In that moment, (technical) founders find themselves a bit bored. The ideal would be for them to get back to pure R&D for a year or two, to discover more paths for the c…

Agreed. Most activities in big companies are not even remotely related to the core technology or idea that brought the company into existence. As company grows, training departments grow to train new clients, technical writing teams grow to write documentation in different languages, technical teams grow to support the many different operating systems and markets, HR department grow to support the many people now working at the company and soon the effort required to coordinate all these people is more than the effort put into the original product. Some founders adapt to the changing needs of the company some don't like all the admin.

Re: Au Revoir

#58

Post by ojosilva »

The author Solomon Hykes, user shykes, announced DotCloud's Docker was going opensource here on HN almost exactly 5 years ago on March 26th, 2013.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5445387

Aside for the near coincidence, I find reading historical first release posts very enlightening!

I'd be happy if any of you would share first-reaction posts and chatter and more on Solomon's marketing-first approach on making Docker a tremendously successful opensource project.

Re: Au Revoir

#59

Post by staticassertion »

peterwwillis wrote: post #43

I think their blog being hugged to death is a good example of how this technology (read: web backend tech in general, not containers) is still too complicated for people in general to use it for simple cases, like scaling the load of otherwise static content. (It's wordpress, but still) We need solutions that require less resources and smaller learning curves.

Or it's completely unrelated.

Re: Au Revoir

#60

Post by peterwwillis »

markbnj wrote: post #54
peterwwillis wrote: post #43

I think their blog being hugged to death is a good example of how this technology (read: web backend tech in general, not containers) is still too complicated for people in general to use it for simple cases, like scaling the load of otherwise static content. (It's wordpress, but still) We need solutions that require less resources and smaller learning curves.

I don't know how their blog is hosted but wordpress in general is very chatty with the database backend, and I really don't think the site getting crushed by HN is indicative of fundamental issues with container technology. If it is then there is a long list of technologies that HN has exposed fundamental issues with by crushing their content sites :).

Oh I'm not pointing at container technology. I'm talking web backend technology in general. I mean this is 2018. No well known company's blog on AWS should ever go down at all, unless the AWS service in the region is down. The fact that it's down is not a Docker failure or a Wordpress failure or a Database failure, as there are widely known methods to scale all these things. The problem is that putting the puzzle together is just complicated enough that it's easy to get wrong. If even Docker's blog can't scale, we have bigger issues as an industry.
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