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Dropbox Hires Guido Van Rossum

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21–30 of 213 posts

Re: Dropbox Hires Guido Van Rossum

#21

I'll be very interested to find out what role Guido will take up at dropbox. When someone like Matz/ Guido/ etc gets hired, what do their job responsibilities, for the community include exactly? Are language writer hires such as this purely symbolic?

If Guido van Rossum wanted to work on python full time, I am sure that there would be companies like Red Hat that would be very happy to pay him to do exactly that.

Re: Dropbox Hires Guido Van Rossum

#22
post #10
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that a start-up can't have more than a certain number of employees?

It's a genuine question. To my mind, a startup has a small number of employees and not very much money. This is hardly the first time I've heard of a company with >100 employees described as a startup, so I'm interested to know what people's definitions are.

As long as we are on HN, might as well as cite PG on what a startup is: http://paulgraham.com/growth.html

>A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.

Re: Dropbox Hires Guido Van Rossum

#23

I'll be very interested to find out what role Guido will take up at dropbox. When someone like Matz/ Guido/ etc gets hired, what do their job responsibilities, for the community include exactly? Are language writer hires such as this purely symbolic?

I would assume that someone like Guido would be really valuable when architecting complex project written in Python. Maybe he won't be directly writing a bunch of small features, but at the scale Dropbox works at some REALLY good code reviews and language-related design decisions could produce big dividends.

Re: Dropbox Hires Guido Van Rossum

#25

I'll be very interested to find out what role Guido will take up at dropbox. When someone like Matz/ Guido/ etc gets hired, what do their job responsibilities, for the community include exactly? Are language writer hires such as this purely symbolic?

my thoughts exactly. I feel like it's a status symbol for a comapany. They are most likely busy giving talks and lectures to do any actual work. Maybe their value is in the odd meeting where they can voice some input. I've never had the pleasure of being in the room with giants such as these so I wouldn't know sadly.

There is a joke in Silicon Valley that one of the levels of success is "Your new company issues a press release that you've been hired."

It goes something like:

You know you are successful in Silicon Valley when:

followed by silly things like "You are Time's Man of the Year" or "On Wired's most Influential list" that sort of thing.

Re: Dropbox Hires Guido Van Rossum

#26
post #7

I was always impressed by how much code Guido wrote at Google, he definitely isn't afraid to get his hands dirty.

Wow if he really did contribute a lot (which I don't doubt at all) then how did Google let him get away? I'd imagine his lifestyle there was pretty nice.

What do you think Google could have done?

Re: Dropbox Hires Guido Van Rossum

#27
post #10
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that a start-up can't have more than a certain number of employees?

It's a genuine question. To my mind, a startup has a small number of employees and not very much money. This is hardly the first time I've heard of a company with >100 employees described as a startup, so I'm interested to know what people's definitions are.

Being a start-up really has nothing to do with number of employees.

Re: Dropbox Hires Guido Van Rossum

#30
post #4

" the adventure found at a nimble 250-person startup like Dropbox becomes more tempting " What is the definition of a startup these days, anyway?

I suspect a "startup" is any company that is serving a market that has yet to prove it is viable. Many folks use that term to describe any privately held company that is growing into something much larger.
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