How I Failed to Change Wasmer

Regardless, he identifies himself as a co-founder and took the co-founder responsibilities during the time period this article describes.

> if that's all true then what else could this person do other than air out the dirty laundry?

Simply leaving the company quietly is a huge statement in itself. A founder who leaves an active company and tactfully announces that they’ve chosen to move on speaks volumes.

Airing dirty laundry like this is politics, plain and simple. It doesn’t benefit the author to advertise his issues as a co-founder and it doesn’t benefit the remaining employees who are now at a company known primarily for founder drama.

I interviewed with Wasmer a few weeks ago. It wasn't enough time to get a real inner view into the company but I saw enough to give me pause. They set up an interview for 3 hours, which stretched into 4 hours. During this interview both interviewers had to leave at points to attend other meetings.

After this, they wanted another interview. Sure, I guess one 3 hour interview isn't enough. They first scheduled it in the middle of the night my time, but meh time zones are hard. Most egregiously, the interview was to work on the wasmer runtime and fix a bug. Put politely, wasmer is an evolving codebase at a startup. Basically, it's not in the most clean state.

This was a bug involving a virtual file system using WASI. I was fortunate enough to be somewhat equipped to handle this bug. I've sat in on WASI meetings; I remember my file systems; and I've touched a lot of raw WebAssembly. It was still freaking hard as hell. Not to mention, the bug turned out to actually be two bugs sitting next to each other, and partially caused by an unused variable which Rust should warn you about, except for some reason they turned that warning off. Oh yeah and the CEO tried to argue with me about whether Rust warns you for unused variables. Yeah dude, anybody with half a second of experience in Rust can tell you that.

That interview took 2 hours stretching into 3.

After that fun experience, they asked me for yet another interview. I'm sorry but if you're a seed startup hiring anybody with qualifications, you do not get to give me two, 2+ hour long grueling interviews, then ask about a third. You do not get to give me a question that you only solved in the middle of the interview. Your job is to convince me to work for you as much as it is my job to convince you to hire me. Don't waste my time. If you think I'm stupid or lazy or whatever, just reject me.

Maybe it was because I was tired and irritable, but the spirit of the interview did not feel like a collaborative "let's solve this together", but more a "let's see if you're as smart as me". Which just sucks man. I want interviews to be encouraging and emotionally healthy, not just grueling beat downs.

One last petty tidbit, I find it really disingenuous how the CEO markets himself as a "mathematician". I asked about it in the interview and the dude had an undergrad degree in math. Maybe this is my elitism showing but an undergraduate degree is not enough to call yourself a mathematician. There's so much damn work that you need to do to get a PhD. I got pretty damn far in undergraduate math and I still only know a fraction of a fraction of what a PhD knows.

Really sorry to hear this. I was kind of cheering for Wasmer as it seemed to be making a really nice WASM runtime and adding great tooling around it, including the package manager. I had always thought that Mozilla and the WASM WG were being a little bit "jealous" of Wasmer, intentionally making things difficult for them by moving repositories together with their competing (actually, the standard WASM runtime) wasmtime... now, I'm not so sure!

Good luck to the author, but I would just say one thing if I could meet him: never put so much energy on a job, no matter how much you love the project... it's NEVER worth it. Unless you're one of the real founders, and even then, you're always running the much higher risk of losing everything than of becoming a millionaire.

Go to work. Enjoy it, have fun, but never become emotionally involved with it. If you need social ties, try your local community, working as a volunteer at a school or whatever... at work, you're there to provide your services at a certain agreed time. After that, get out! Go home to your family. Don't let them make you think they're also your family! They're not and they'll forget you as soon as you leave (and you, them). Everyone will be better off by recognizing that.