Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thank u, next

words.steveklabnik.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 182 posts

Re: Thank u, next

#121

Post by steveklabnik »

leadingthenet wrote: post #97
steveklabnik wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am really of two minds about a foundation. I've seen a few different variations of this idea, and they all have a lot of downsides, as well as upsides. It's not clear to me that it would be a win.

I'm genuinely interested, could you expand a bit on what the downsides / upsides would be?

The pros and cons are both related to a thing that many people don't think about when it comes to non-profits: money. A foundation's job is to administer money. The pros are that well, someone has to do that work. Collectivizing helps; a random person giving $10 once isn't worth the management overhead, but 10,000 people giving $10 (or whatever) means you have a more substantial chunk of money. Additionally, projects also need things like legal support, which a foundation is well-set up to manage.

The cons are, well, that work is hard, and you can also end up in a position where you spend as much time fundraising as you do actually improving the project. This is why people talk about "efficiency" in non-profits, ideally these tasks take as little money as possible to do the administration, and spend as much as possible on the project. Also, when you're in the business of distributing money, you have to manage people's reactions to how you spend it, some people are going to be upset that you picked project A over project B, or person A over person B. That's also a form of overhead.

(and I'm not talking about MoFo here, I know very little about it or how it works. This is based on experiences with other non-profits and foundations that I've experienced and/or heard about elsewhere, and from lots of other people.)

Re: Thank u, next

#122

Post by mixmastamyk »

chrisseaton wrote: post #86
yanslookup wrote: post #26

This surprises me on so many different levels. To me, Rust is nearly the same thing as steveklabnik. Considering his level of engagement and enthusiasm I figured he was one of those people making easy SV money. Between this and Jess Frazelle (another household name) never getting a promotion shows how wrong this industry is.

> To me, Rust is nearly the same thing as steveklabnik. I thought it was designed by Graydon Hoare?

There's probably room for more than one person in building a new language/platform.

Re: Thank u, next

#123

Post by sstangl »

kevintb wrote: post #79
codezero wrote: post #21

This is a bummer on many levels, but also personally, a bit of a relief. For a while I was considering going all-in to try to get a role at Mozilla. I really believe in their mission, and I drink the kool-aid when it comes to the browser market getting gobbled up. What held me back at the time were the company reviews. The culture sounds toxic, and the management sounds incompetent, and there's no force of change tha…

I never knew Mozilla had a toxic culture. Could you expand on this (or any other former Mozilla employees attest to this)?

I have worked on Mozilla's JS team since 2010. I think our team culture is acceptable.

Glossing over details, Mozilla Corp seems to have two cultures: one for engineering and team management, and another for mid-to-upper-level management. When these two groups interact, it tends to produce unhappiness. Over the years, that has been the source of most griping I've heard from coworkers, particularly when they need upper management's approval.

Different parts of the company are pretty isolated from each other, and there's no real standardization, so experiences across the company likely differ from mine. The personal experience would depend a lot on who your manager is and how strongly they're able to advocate on your behalf, particularly when it comes to things like expanding your role and getting paid for that.

Re: Thank u, next

#124

Post by steveklabnik »

tzs wrote: post #117

> I started working at 15, when I took a job as a pizza cook. Over the next seven years, I moved up the ranks, to a driver, shift manager, and then as part of the “new store opening team.” Driver is up the ranks from cook? I don't know why, but I always assumed that it was the other way around.

They're sort of close, status wise, at least at the chain I worked for, but a driver has more requirements (I started as a cook at 15 and so legally could not drive a car) and pays better (tips are substantial, cooks are un-tipped.)

Re: Thank u, next

#125

Post by sah2ed »

gavingmiller wrote: post #31

> Why’d he quit? ... he told me this: at each stage of a company’s growth, they have different needs. Those needs generally require different skills. What he enjoyed, and what he had the skills to do, was to take a tiny company and make it medium sized. Once a company was at that stage of growth, he was less interested and less good at taking them from there. This is an aspect that gets overlooked in many businesses…

An old thread[0] used different terms like “commandos, infantry & police”; or “pioneers, settlers & town planners” but which correspond roughly to your “startup, scale up & optimize” description, to explain the 3 stages of a company’s lifecycle.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9159398

Re: Thank u, next

#126

Post by [deleted] »

chii wrote: post #38
lbotos wrote: post #32

For those that missed it, this is a subtle nod to Ariana Grande's "Thank u, next" song/tweet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl1aHhXnN1k https://twitter.com/arianagrande/status/1058888117808070656?... Never did I ever expect to see that on HN. 2019 culture clash is already wild.

It's not really subtle thb.

[deleted]

Re: Thank u, next

#127

Post by teacpde »

Really a bummer. I learned about Steve when he did awesome stuff with Rails, and knowing him work on Rust and frequently answering questions about Rust everywhere makes learning Rust a privilege to me. Thank you, Steve.

Re: Thank u, next

#128

Post by chrisseaton »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #122
chrisseaton wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me, Rust is nearly the same thing as steveklabnik. I thought it was designed by Graydon Hoare?

There's probably room for more than one person in building a new language/platform.

Well that's what I meant.

Re: Thank u, next

#129

Post by huac »

yanslookup wrote: post #26

This surprises me on so many different levels. To me, Rust is nearly the same thing as steveklabnik. Considering his level of engagement and enthusiasm I figured he was one of those people making easy SV money. Between this and Jess Frazelle (another household name) never getting a promotion shows how wrong this industry is.

being a household name is very weakly correlated to "getting that SV money" (an exception being household names in machine learning, where you will indeed make all the money)

Re: Thank u, next

#130

Post by nazka »

steveklabnik wrote: post #11
nindalf wrote: post #6

I'm surprised and disappointed to learn that Mozilla didn't value Steve's work enough. The documentation, especially the book [1] which he authored, is the gold standard that every software project should aspire to. As someone who learned the language recently, it's possible that I might have abandoned it if the documentation and learning materials hadn't been so good. I also thought his work in evangelizing Rust on…

Thanks! To be clear, the doc work was my job, but the evangelizing wasn't. I plan on continuing both, as much as time allows.

Thank you for all your work!
Post reply on HN