211–220 of 305 posts
I'm getting a 504 Gateway timeout. Is the HN hug of death really affecting such a huge site?
blog.docker.com runs Wordpress, and the domain points directly at an ELB. Unless they are running some caching layer (behind that ELB but in front of their wordpress processes), they may have to scale out a lot in order to handle traffic spikes, and they may be limited in their ability to do that by DB capacity.
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> Running a company of 10 people is VERY different from running a company of 100, which is VERY VERY different from running a company of 1000 IMO thats a classist lie that keeps people in their place. Any reasonably smart CEO can learn his way from 10 - 10000. Yes, (s)he may not be capable of 10k on day one, but they can grow along the way.
> Any reasonably smart CEO Sorry but this is extremely naive and I'm sorry that your naïveté has caused you conclude things which are simply not true. This is a very strong assumption, and a lie that is peddled by the media (Zuck is the greatest example of this) to create a novel story. I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just a dangerous assumption. For the record, I've interviewed over 75 software founders (CEO/CT…
There is nothing inherently special about someone who runs a small vs. big company, except for experience. I agree with the poster above: classism at its finest.
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> Running a company of 10 people is VERY different from running a company of 100, which is VERY VERY different from running a company of 1000 IMO thats a classist lie that keeps people in their place. Any reasonably smart CEO can learn his way from 10 - 10000. Yes, (s)he may not be capable of 10k on day one, but they can grow along the way.
A lot of research has gone into describing this "classist lie". It is not simply something that the parent stated as a truism. Organizational theory seems to suggest that founders are, as a general rule, not the best CEOs for a maturing company. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_life_cycle and its sources.
Wow. What if the organization begins in Stage 5?
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Noam Wasserman (Harvard, USC) studies exactly this in a paper called "Rich vs King". As you can guess from the name, the conclusion is that bringing in outside generally management maximizes the expected value of equity. https://hbr.org/2008/02/the-founders-dilemma
Thanks! One thing the article brings up is that "success" may not be synonymous with "financial success". If you have a specific burning vision for a thing that should exist in the world, it might not be the most profitable thing, and the founder staying on is probably a good way for exactly that product to exist - but an outside CEO might choose to compromise the product vision and significantly expand the potential…
I suspect involuntary founder replacement is much more common in venture-funded companies. While your, my, and the founder's definitions of success may not be synonymous with "financial success", many VCs and their LPs may not feel the same. Obviously it's tricky to fully generalize, but the point is that VC can be expensive if founder and investor motivations aren't closely aligned.
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I think the phrase you're looking for is "exceptions that prove the rule". For every CEO that took a company from nothing to 10k employees, there are so many more examples of the opposite that you can't even begin to name them. You're able to name the exceptions because there are so few exceptions.
But it is worthy of note that right now, the top 6 largest companies (by market cap) in the US are or were helmed by their founders well into their fortune 500 status with many thousands of employees.
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> Running a company of 10 people is VERY different from running a company of 100, which is VERY VERY different from running a company of 1000 IMO thats a classist lie that keeps people in their place. Any reasonably smart CEO can learn his way from 10 - 10000. Yes, (s)he may not be capable of 10k on day one, but they can grow along the way.
One need only look at Soloman's posting history on this site to see why he was the right person to lead Docker during its inception and the wrong person to lead Docker long term. It was clear in the discussions over Docker that Soloman was passionate about the technology he'd created and had a very particular vision for its future, which was often at odds with the way that posters here saw Docker and wanted it to evo…
The lack of scrutiny means questionable technical decisions and complicated tool chains that add layers of complexity with little benefit are passed on to users with little knowledge of the trade-offs involved.
In a way the original promise of containers of being simple and portable have been completely lost to complicated wrappers like Docker and Kubernetes and words like devops that promise a lot but deliver an out of control web of complexity.
Google and Facebook have an army of networking, storage (they even hired the btrfs developer), security and scalability experts. It's not 2 engineers doing devops.
This also sets perverse incentives. Wrappers like Docker and Kubernetes monopolize all the attention and funding while the core open source projects that they are critically dependent on like LXC, Aufs, Overlayfs, Btrfs, Dnsmasq, Nginx, Keepalived, Consul, Quagga, Bird, open source networking tech, container tech in the kernel, apps are all hidden from view.
Docker initially wrapped the LXC project without proper credit and there was a lot of misinformation about what LXC is, with zero pushback here. Many commentators even today are not clear about containers and think Docker invented containers. And this after thousands of posts about containers here.
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.
Ideas get you to the 50 yard line, execution gets you into the end zone.
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What on earth makes it a “classist lie”?
The implication is that the (especially American) upper class is trenched on this belief that CEOs of large companies require a certain pedigree that may not be based on observable, empirical evidence but rather on a mythos to keep the upper class relatively "pure" and the number of rich CEOs controlled to (mostly) existing class members, while attempting to appear egalitarian ("anyone" can go to an ivy league school…
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There is a reason why most startups don't go big - burning vision is not even close to being the right formula for success. Running a company of 10 people is VERY different from running a company of 100, which is VERY VERY different from running a company of 1000. Just like precious few individual contributors are comfortable with and able to contribute meaningfully in this wide range of environments, it doesn't make…
> Running a company of 10 people is VERY different from running a company of 100, which is VERY VERY different from running a company of 1000 IMO thats a classist lie that keeps people in their place. Any reasonably smart CEO can learn his way from 10 - 10000. Yes, (s)he may not be capable of 10k on day one, but they can grow along the way.