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

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

#141

Post by jasonlotito »

tptacek wrote: post #118
jasonlotito wrote: post #113

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. That doesn't dispute the fact that Ellen was CEO and Ohanian's boss. He might have been responsible for the reorg, but as CEO, Ellen was ultimately responsible. Unless you think the CEO had no power.

No, you have this backwards. Ohanian was Pao's boss. That's why it's so weird he took an operational role in the company.

> No, you have this backwards. Ohanian was Pao's boss.

You based this on what specific information? The only insider information I read about this suggested that Pao was Ohanian's boss. Regardless, I still assert as CEO, Pao is the one responsible, and she had options to not put herself in that position.

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

#142

Post by tptacek »

jasonlotito wrote: post #141
tptacek wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you have this backwards. Ohanian was Pao's boss. That's why it's so weird he took an operational role in the company.

> No, you have this backwards. Ohanian was Pao's boss. You based this on what specific information? The only insider information I read about this suggested that Pao was Ohanian's boss. Regardless, I still assert as CEO, Pao is the one responsible, and she had options to not put herself in that position.

Ohanian is Reddit's chairman.

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

#143

Post by tptacek »

jasonlotito wrote: post #140
tptacek wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> No So then there is no reason to believe that her leaving has anything to do with gender. > 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. I'm not the one that started by posting an inflammatory comment that suggested Bethanye left because of gender issues. If you didn't mean to suggest that…

You mean apart from the concerns she brought about about gender?

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

#144

Post by tptacek »

jazzyk wrote: post #136
tptacek wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 es…

1. A well-liked/respected employee is abruptly fired. 2. In most businesses, the CEO does all the firings (or is responsible). 3. I liked the fired employee, I thought she did a great job, therefore I am angry at the CEO. Are you saying you need to be a crazy/malicious person to follow the above logic? Are all the 250K people who signed the petition crazy or malicious?

No, (2) is true of virtually no businesses of any meaningful size! Certainly in most companies of Reddit's size --- over 60 employees --- managers reporting to the CEO have hire/fire.

I wasn't the CEO of Matasano, and I fired people. And Matasano was not a big company.

Finally: people keep talking about Victoria Taylor as if she was somehow a key employee of Reddit. She probably was, but not by design. It was probably mismanagement of the AMAs that resulted in a single project manager becoming one of the most visible people in the most visible part of the site. At any rate: who was responsible for the operational organization of AMAs? Alexis Ohanian.

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

#145

Post by Keyframe »

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…

Given this, I think it's rather impressive that they only have 71 employees (imgur is impressive too).

In that context, I agree it's impressive. I still don't understand why would one need so many people considering there's next to none (except AMA, and that's gone) interaction with users on site. Code definitely doesn't need that many people (I know this firsthand, because it took me ~two months (less) to make a complete clone from scratch with all of the functionality of reddit for internal use and I'm not much of a coder anymore). Devops might be hairy, I admit that - but even with shifts and redundancy... I've seen sites with much more monetization in ads run on 10 sales people or less. So genuine question is still here, what do these people actually do?

I understand facebook is all over the place and is a lot more than meets the eye on their site, so I can understand their headcount. I can see that with youtube as well, especially if they curate some of the content. Reddit is, well, reddit - next to no interaction with userbase, third party ios app they bought (or something), no android app, codebase already built and not all that hard to build anyways, they did build reddit gold (how much of an effort is that anyways)... and we're left with devops. I'm sure most of those 71 people aren't even technical to begin with and they struggle with ads. I genuinely do not understand need for that many people on board considering the impression of what they do.

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

#146

Post by pvg »

tptacek wrote: post #144
jazzyk wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. A well-liked/respected employee is abruptly fired. 2. In most businesses, the CEO does all the firings (or is responsible). 3. I liked the fired employee, I thought she did a great job, therefore I am angry at the CEO. Are you saying you need to be a crazy/malicious person to follow the above logic? Are all the 250K people who signed the petition crazy or malicious?

No, (2) is true of virtually no businesses of any meaningful size! Certainly in most companies of Reddit's size --- over 60 employees --- managers reporting to the CEO have hire/fire. I wasn't the CEO of Matasano, and I fired people. And Matasano was not a big company. Finally: people keep talking about Victoria Taylor as if she was somehow a key employee of Reddit. She probably was, but not by design. It was probabl…

She probably was, but not by design. It was probably mismanagement of the AMAs that resulted in a single project manager becoming one of the most visible people in the most visible part of the site.

I interpret most of what happened very similarly to you but this part I think can't be right. Her original title was 'Director of Communications', it wasn't someone who started in the copy room and, by grit and luck, quietly ended up running one of the most popular subreddits. If the board is pestering you about growth, the chairman is back and has new plans for AMA, the AMA-person is about to be no-notice insta-fired on a Tuesday by said chairman, you probably know who that person is and what they do. If 'reddit didn't know who they were firing' is plausible then much of the stuff the crazies are saying would be plausible too.

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

#147

Post by tptacek »

eco wrote: post #137
tptacek wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

You made the claim. I provided a link with my own claim because it's the polite thing to do and furthers the conversation.

It's just a pattern (not with you, but with message board arguments):

1. Person X stridently argues a position contradicted directly by the record, which they haven't taken the time to read.

2. Person Y rebuts X.

3. X demands a source from Y.

4. Y sources their rebuttal.

5. X recapitulates argument based on dubious, nitpicky reading of source, pretending they'd known the source was flawed all along.

The problem isn't that providing sources makes it harder to win arguments with lazy people, it's that it tends to introduce a second argument, over the interpretation of the source, as a smokescreen for instability of the first argument. It gets tedious.

I'm not saying that's what you did, just that I've been conditioned by message board nerdery to expect that to happen.

In this case, you can if you'd like just take my word for it that Ohanian took responsibility both for the reorg of AMAs and for the handling of the Taylor transition, not in a tea-leaf-reading way, but directly and overtly, prior to Yishan Wong's post, and in a public Reddit comment.

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

#148

Post by eco »

tptacek wrote: post #147
eco wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You made the claim. I provided a link with my own claim because it's the polite thing to do and furthers the conversation.

It's just a pattern (not with you, but with message board arguments): 1. Person X stridently argues a position contradicted directly by the record, which they haven't taken the time to read. 2. Person Y rebuts X. 3. X demands a source from Y. 4. Y sources their rebuttal. 5. X recapitulates argument based on dubious, nitpicky reading of source, pretending they'd known the source was flawed all along. The problem isn't…

One of the joys of the web is being able to easily cite and read sources (it was the whole point of hypertext). Sure, we could all just discuss and debate by shooting from the hip with our opinions and recollections like we are at a wine-fueled dinner party but that's not why I come to Hacker News.

I wasn't trying to win or even have an argument with you. I was just trying to better my own understanding of the situation. I hadn't seen Alexis write that and couldn't find it despite spending way more time than I should be reading about reddit drama.

I don't know who you are or why I should take your word for it. I don't know why you'd expect me to take your word for it. That's something you do for people you know in person and trust, not strangers on the internet. That'd be a terrifying prospect if that's how we all did things online.

I, too, have noticed a pattern:

1. Person A writes something about a topic.

2. Person B writes about how bad something is which is related but orthogonal to the actual topic.

3. Persons C...Y have a heated debate of the orthogonal topic.

4. Person Z writes thoughtful comments about the topic but nobody reads it because the meta debate has drown out the actual topic.

A good name for it might be The Hacker News Comments Pattern. I'm not saying that's what you were doing.

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

#149

Post by tptacek »

eco wrote: post #148
tptacek wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a pattern (not with you, but with message board arguments): 1. Person X stridently argues a position contradicted directly by the record, which they haven't taken the time to read. 2. Person Y rebuts X. 3. X demands a source from Y. 4. Y sources their rebuttal. 5. X recapitulates argument based on dubious, nitpicky reading of source, pretending they'd known the source was flawed all along. The problem isn't…

One of the joys of the web is being able to easily cite and read sources (it was the whole point of hypertext). Sure, we could all just discuss and debate by shooting from the hip with our opinions and recollections like we are at a wine-fueled dinner party but that's not why I come to Hacker News. I wasn't trying to win or even have an argument with you. I was just trying to better my own understanding of the situat…

I'm not following. What's the orthogonal (B) point?

(I seriously wasn't saying you were trying to bait me into giving you more ammunition for a stupid argument, but I'm pretty sure you really are implying that I introduced a bogus topic.)

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

#150

Post by maxerickson »

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.

The post that the comment you linked to is part of has a link to the clearest statement he made about it:

https://reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_old_te...

(It's also linked in the top reply to the parent post of your linked comment, but it is not visible in the context= view)

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