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Dropbox Hires Guido Van Rossum

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Re: Dropbox Hires Guido Van Rossum

#71

Post by nostrademons »

j_baker wrote: post #50
bdesimone wrote: post #2

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?

Having worked with Guido on App Engine, I believe I can answer this. Just because someone wrote a language doesn't mean they have no other talents as engineers. I will say that apart from being a good language writer, he is also a good Engineer. For us having so much invested in Python, Guido has been an important part of App Engine. But even if that wasn't true (as it may be for Dropbox), having well-known programme…

Guido wrote the NDB framework for AppEngine, which, as an AppEngine user, I'd say has one of the most clever ways to do async requests that I've seen in any major language. I'm used to the C++ frameworks for async that are used in the main search stack, and switching to AppEngine and having things pretty much "just work" has been great.

He also did Mondrian, which kicked off the trend toward web-based code-review and was a huge step forward from just critiquing patches over e-mail.

Usually famous programmers get famous because they've done a lot of programming; that experience translates into some pretty cool programming chops.

Re: Dropbox Hires Guido Van Rossum

#72

Post by lmkg »

herge wrote: post #21
bdesimone wrote: post #2

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.

I think it's a good thing for Python that Guido doesn't work on it full-time, and instead keeps his hands dirty with other projects. It allows him better exposure to the experience and perspective of regular Python users, and the sorts of problems that they use Python to deal with on a day-to-day basis.

Re: Dropbox Hires Guido Van Rossum

#73

Post by napoleond »

RenegadeHero wrote: post #62

It always strikes me as odd when something like this happens. Guido is still working nine-to-fives and Drew never has to work again. Can someone tell me why a brilliant person like Guido isn't worth a billion dollars? Have tons of fancy cars and a fancy house? Has to work for another company?

I know nothing about Guido outside of his work with Python but I assume he's not hurting for money at all. Nevertheless, our capitalist system does not reward people for brilliance alone; it rewards people for taking risks. Some very wealthy people are still being rewarded for the risks of their ancestors, and others have managed to keep wealth gathered in different economic systems, but that is generally how new wealth is created in our economy today.

(By definition, risk takers are collectively expected to fail more often than they succeed. There is probably some level of intelligence below which success rates drop even further, but I would be surprised to see any strong correlation between success rates and intelligence above that level.)

Re: Dropbox Hires Guido Van Rossum

#74

Post by [deleted] »

RenegadeHero wrote: post #62

It always strikes me as odd when something like this happens. Guido is still working nine-to-fives and Drew never has to work again. Can someone tell me why a brilliant person like Guido isn't worth a billion dollars? Have tons of fancy cars and a fancy house? Has to work for another company?

[deleted]

Re: Dropbox Hires Guido Van Rossum

#75

Post by phpnode »

RenegadeHero wrote: post #62

It always strikes me as odd when something like this happens. Guido is still working nine-to-fives and Drew never has to work again. Can someone tell me why a brilliant person like Guido isn't worth a billion dollars? Have tons of fancy cars and a fancy house? Has to work for another company?

Has to or wants to? Guido has chosen to focus on building an awesome language rather than maximising his personal wealth. Some people just like programming, and I'm sure he's extremely well compensated and does not have to work 9 - 5.

Re: Dropbox Hires Guido Van Rossum

#76

Post by brian_cloutier »

mark-r wrote: post #32
Sukotto wrote: post #14

See also: https://tech.dropbox.com/2012/12/welcome-guido/

"Some people only need to be introduced by their first name" - maybe so, but it would have been nice for them to mention it at least once.

They did. They even linked to wikipedia pages on him twice.

Re: Dropbox Hires Guido Van Rossum

#77

Post by theorique »

m0th87 wrote: post #44
theorique wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a reasonable upper bound. Once the company is big enough to the point where you don't remember everyone's name, it's past the startup point.

Dunbar's number makes little sense for directly determining/classifying organizational sizes. Most of peoples' relationships lie outside of the organization they work for. You'd probably have little to no relationship with people in your organization way before you reach Dunbar's number.

Well, it may be 50, it may be 150, but the point is, it's probably fine to call a company of 10 a startup, and it's absurd to call a Google or Facebook a startup.

Which leaves open the question of what to call Dropbox. Well funded, profitable, late-stage startup? Sounds like too much of a mouthful.

Re: Dropbox Hires Guido Van Rossum

#78

Post by callmevlad »

brian_cloutier wrote: post #76
mark-r wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Some people only need to be introduced by their first name" - maybe so, but it would have been nice for them to mention it at least once.

They did. They even linked to wikipedia pages on him twice.

I think the parent was referring to his full name. "Guido" appears 7 times on that page, "Rossum" appears 0 times in text.

Re: Dropbox Hires Guido Van Rossum

#79

Post by pyre »

loganfrederick wrote: post #66
pyre wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Figure out why he wanted to leave, and see if they could remedy it (e.g. more money; different challenges; etc).

Pretty sure someone like Guido is, at this point, not motivated by money. If there was a challenge he wanted to undertake at Google, I'm sure they'd give it to him already. He probably wanted to participate in growing another new tech company that has a lot of potential. That's an opportunity Google would find hard to counter.

Sorry, my statement was more generic. I wasn't trying to say that Guido is motivated by money, just that these are common ways to get someone to stay if that is indeed the issue that makes them want to leave.

On the issue of challenges, maybe Guido has more pull on this, but there were recently some articles/discussion on HN about Google's hiring practices. They might hire you based on your PhD in databases, and then have you writing shell scripts for work because some randomized 'sorting hat' tells you what group you end up in. It's possible that even Guido doesn't have enough pull at Google to overcome this. :-\

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