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A new team at Reddit

blog.samaltman.com

121–130 of 379 posts

Re: A new team at Reddit

#122
post #4

Nice words, growing it 5x is great. Resigning over office plans sounds like a last straw sort of thing. In the grand scheme of things office locations aren't that big a deal. But then again, Reddit has had some weird dis-coordinated public communications, maybe more cohesion really was necessary?

"In the grand scheme of things office locations aren't that big a deal"

Office locations are a huge deal for me as it directly relates to how much of my time per day I'm expected to waste (twice) performing a mind-numbing activity while not even being paid for it (not to mention cost of fuel, etc).

I don't know the specific distance they were talking about in this case, Daly City isn't very far from SF proper, but as someone who lives in "San Diego" an office in "San Diego" could be across the street from me or it could be 45 miles away... and there's no way I'm driving 90 miles a day for work.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#123
post #94
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you done a search on Craigslist lately? They're still going for a basic-HTML4-user-agent "theme" (since that's basically their brand now), but the implementation is actually quite dynamic/AJAXified and CSS-heavy. (Also, apparently they use Redis everywhere on the backend for Matryoshka cashing, among other modern practices.) Also, Digg's failure had nothing to do with a visual refresh; it was that they changed t…

My point was just that users want the same experience as they got when they started using the site for the most part. Too many changes and you risk driving away your user base. Changes being anything from visual components to mechanics of the site.

They have made a lot of user-facing changes though, verified phone number, map search and map views for listings, search by distance, and contact info masking are a few that come to mind.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#124

Relevant context: Wong wanted everyone who worked at Reddit to move to San Francisco in an attempt to increase cohesion. http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/01/after-raising-50m-reddit-f... Some speculated that the move was to please investors, especially after a fundraise. This announcement indicates that the investors...disagreed?

From the previous thread here[1]...

From what I gather Yishan went to Sama after closing the 50m round and asked for advice on company structure and whether or not to consolidate workers into one location. How/why that was even a consideration hasn't been mentioned to my knowledge.

...anyway, Sama suggested that they do phase out remote workers and consolidate everyone in San Francisco.

> to state what should be obvious, this was a decision by the company not the investors (also, the company made the decision before the round.) i'm skeptical of remote work for early-stage startups. i'm not religious about it for larger companies; i think it works for some and doesn't work for others. if it works, great. if it doesn't, that's fine too. the only thing i felt really strongly about (when yishan explained the challenges they were facing and asked for my advice as a friend and not an investor) was that reddit needed to be super generous to people that were unwilling or unable to move, and i think they have been.

To me this seems like it was clearly a requirement of the investors. (honestly has getting rid of remote workers ever worked out for the employee?) and you'd be naive to believe otherwise.

This time around the dispute seems to be over where the new HQ should be located. Reddit is currently in SF and Sama states Yishan wanted to move to Daly City...

So we are expected to believe that the CEO of reddit resigns after not getting approval to move the office 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8398127

Re: A new team at Reddit

#127
post #71

2 months after a $50 million round of financing and the lead investor of said round steps in as temporary CEO. You would have to be very, very naive to believe that this was solely a dispute on the cost and location of a new office. It seems fairly obvious that with the new round of investment Wong saw his control of reddit significantly reduced and his decision making second guessed and overturned finally culminatin…

reddit employee here. there were no signs to justify your speculative argument.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#128
post #120
post #85

I realize that this sounds non-credible (and it's certainly one of the craziest professional things I've ever been a part of), but it's actually what happened. Yishan wanted to move the office from SF to Daly City. The board pushed back but said we'd agree to it with certain data (we wanted Yishan to figure out how many employees would stay with the company through the move, get a comparison to other market rents, et…

I don't want it to sound like you are being dishonest about this, and it's possible there were things going on in Yishan's head that you were not aware of, but "a new team at reddit" in 8 days makes it a bit hard to believe this came completely out of nowhere.

It has been a very busy 8 days.

Re: A new team at Reddit

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is 100% not true. Yishan wanted the team to move to the same location and the board supported him. This was a question of office location, not centralizing.

What about the office location was so contentious that the CEO would quit?

[deleted]

Re: A new team at Reddit

#130
post #8

Why did he write: "It’s interesting to note that during my very brief tenure, reddit added more users than Hacker News has in total." Was that a dig at Hacker News?

Seeing as how Sam Altman is president of Y Combinator, and there's a reason Hacker News' URL is news.ycombinator.com... yes, yes Sam Altman was definitely intending to insult Hacker News and everyone involved with it.
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