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

Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

recode.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 153 posts

Re: Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

#121

Post by tptacek »

eco wrote: post #111
tptacek wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Long before Yishan's post, Ohanian posted on Reddit saying he both owned the reorg of AMAs and flubbed the transition with Victoria Taylor. It's not speculation. Consider also that by Ohanian's own direct words, the chairman of Reddit had an operational role over one of the most visible parts of the site. Pao was in a situation that would have been difficult to manage even if things had been going smoothly.

Have a link handy? I can't find it. My memory was he's said a lot of things like "we messed up" and "we could have handled it better". Nothing that says he personally is responsible.

I'm looking at the text I was talking about right now. You can find it, or take my word that I'm not making it up, but if you're going to debate this particular issue with me, I'm going to ask you to do your own homework. :)

Re: Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

#122

Post by tptacek »

jazzyk wrote: post #120
tptacek wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Long before Yishan's post, Ohanian posted on Reddit saying he both owned the reorg of AMAs and flubbed the transition with Victoria Taylor. It's not speculation. Consider also that by Ohanian's own direct words, the chairman of Reddit had an operational role over one of the most visible parts of the site. Pao was in a situation that would have been difficult to manage even if things had been going smoothly.

When Victoria was fired, the _perception_ was (possibly incorrect, as we know now) that it was Pao's decision. Not unreasonably, since most personnel decisions below the CEO are made by the CEO. So the original premise still stands.

Pao's most vocal detractors "perceived" all sorts of crazy things, from malicious edits (ranging from comments about Pao's husband to moderation of stories about the Trans Pacific Partnership) to a holy crusade against just the kinds of hate speech Pao didn't like, so no, I don't think I'm required to accept the argument that in this case, perception is nearly as important as reality.

No, I do not believe you have established with evidence or reason that the original premise of this subthread still stands.

Re: Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

#123

Post by tptacek »

jasonlotito wrote: post #114
tptacek wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the idea that the CEO can resign in a hailstorm of racist and misogynist vitriol but that subsequent departures won't have anything to do with gender.

Do you have a reason to claim that Bethanye is lying?

No, and I object to the argument that I said anything of the sort. If you want to debate things with me, please don't start by imposing inflammatory and stupid positions on me.

Re: Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

#124

Post by smrtinsert »

kedean wrote: post #112
smrtinsert wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it extremely rare that the board is not involved directly in every hiring/firing for startups under some sort of business duress. Total tangent: I did not understand the outrage at reddit. The management clearly let her be thrown under the bus by the conspiracy wackos.

I don't know if reddit can still be called a startup. It's a decade old content aggregator business. That's like calling Facebook a startup in social media.

I thought they were still not profitable, which makes me use the term startup. I could be wrong though.

Re: Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

#125

Post by hga »

dcole2929 wrote: post #116
dimino wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably has a non-compete, among other things.

Most likely not. It's actually fairly difficult to enforce a non compete clause in California, to the point that most don't even bother trying. And besides anything useful in this case, would be way too broad to stand up in court anyway. It couldn't be anything preventing her from working at another internet, or media company and even, a clause about refraining from using the AMA format might not stand up either.

On the other hand, she was working out of their NYC office, SF is not a good location for PR work, they in fact relocated her from LA to NYC. These things can often turn into a race to the most favorable courthouse; then again what's a little more bad publicity for Reddit the corporation?

Re: Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

#126

Post by smrtinsert »

malandrew wrote: post #115
smrtinsert wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it toxic if representation doesn't even equal general populace? Men are clearly getting in no problem. This isn't a case of over correction, it's about seeing if they can look past historical biases towards men and be more open towards hiring for the future. The study you linked describes current faculty expressing a desire to bring it towards a balance. I'm not sure where the toxicity is created.

"more than half of the executives are women" === over-correction Would it be okay for a company to only hire women as executives since women are a minority of the executives in this industry? Technically that isn't over-correction using your definition. "The study you linked describes current faculty expressing a desire to bring it towards a balance." So if you've got XY chromosomes and you're finishing your post-gra…

That is exactly one company, not nearly a series.

Re: Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

#127

Post by smrtinsert »

eco wrote: post #77
Keyframe wrote: post #57

Apparently reddit has 71 employees. I would really like to know why reddit needs that many employees. It looks to me like an operation of maybe 20 people at most. That includes devops, engineering, social stuff and ads.

Alexa ranks reddit at 24. The other user content focused stuff high on the list are: 2. Facebook (10,082 employees) 3. YouTube (a lot of employees) 6. Wikipedia (~250 employees) 8. Twitter (3,900 employees) 13. LinkedIn (7,600 employees) 15. Sina Weibo (unknown employees) 24. reddit (71 employees) 30. Tumblr (306 employees) 32. Imgur ( Given this, I think it's rather impressive that they only have 71 employees (imgur…

To be fair, Facebook tends to hire 1 engineer per 1000 lines of php code.

Re: Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

#128

Post by LandoCalrissian »

onedev wrote: post #92
minimaxir wrote: post #2

To repost my comment from a previous submission: There's been a lot of meta discussion how Yishan Wong, Alexis Ohanian, and Ellen Pao have been talking trash to each other about Reddit and seemingly ignoring every NDA in the book. The comments made in the linked interview trashing a former employer seem to perpetuate this culture. It's weird . (although if you're planning on starting your own startup after a bad job,…

Even Sam Altman became furious and started talking trash to Yishan. Though to be fair it was after Yishan accused him of perpetrating a "long con" to regain control of reddit.

That one kind of surprised me, I expected Altman to be above that.

Re: Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

#129

Post by glomph »

Cacti wrote: post #33
untog wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Chief Engineer still has a budget, a CEO and a board to answer to. The budget is especially important - if a promise is made to deliver X and Y within six months but you can't hire enough developers to get it done then even the most talented Engineer in the world is going to fail.

So move the dates. These things aren't set in stone and part of her job is to convince the board and everyone else what is realistic and what isn't, convince them that X requires Y budget and Z time and what the risks are and that the investment is worth it and so on.

spez the CEO has made public time commitments for certain updates.

Re: Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

#130

Post by malandrew »

smrtinsert wrote: post #126
malandrew wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"more than half of the executives are women" === over-correction Would it be okay for a company to only hire women as executives since women are a minority of the executives in this industry? Technically that isn't over-correction using your definition. "The study you linked describes current faculty expressing a desire to bring it towards a balance." So if you've got XY chromosomes and you're finishing your post-gra…

That is exactly one company, not nearly a series.

... and?
Post reply on HN