CEO in the weeds interviewing engineers and trying to solve bugs as as part of an interview process for 10 combined hours? CEO needs to reevaluate his job and priorities.
How I Failed to Change Wasmer
31–40 of 73 posts
Re: How I Failed to Change Wasmer
#32I 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 th…
Thanks for posting this, genuinely. Sorry you had to go through that.
Re: How I Failed to Change Wasmer
#33The author seems to be making live changes to the article. It started as “How I failed to Change Wasmer” but it’s now titled “I’ve loved Wasmer, I still love Wasmer”. This is a tough story to read for anyone who has been passionate about a startup only to watch it decline under management quarrels. However, I have mixed feelings about this article because the author appears to be a co-founder of the company despite w…
> The only thing worse than startup leadership quarrels is watching one of the founder exit the company and air all of their dirty laundry on the way out. If there were any engineers or managers still working at Wasmer and hoping to turn the ship around, this blog post may have destroyed any chance of that. What is the alternative though? I mean this developer, at least from their telling of it, had held almost every…
When someone feels sufficiently burnt out to leave a company they play a key role in, and are passionate about, I wouldn't judge them too harshly when they feel the need to vent their frustration.
The mature thing to do is to see it for what it is. Not to judge people who've had a hard time.
Re: How I Failed to Change Wasmer
#34Wasmer has had some controversy on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24900186
As someone pointed out in that thread, there's also an HN account that appears to be a sockpuppet of the CEO[1], used to astroturf his projects (wasmer and a previous one).
For me, finding that was one of the things that made me pick wasmtime over wasmer for my own project.
Re: How I Failed to Change Wasmer
#35I 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 th…
Interesting perspective. Was the author of this blog post still involved at the time? Or was this after his departure? Having the CEO try to dunk on applicants during interviews is not a great sign for any company.
> Having the CEO try to dunk on applicants during interviews
Wasn't the CEO, but the CTO at a startup I was applying with years ago swooped into an interview at a place I was pretty sure I wasn't going to accept an offer from, while I was at the whiteboard solving some stupid thing.
He immediately started arguing with me about some code on the side that was from a previous question, kept interrupting me when I tried to correct him, and then told me I should be cleaner about my work when he finally figured out his mistake.
I thanked the person actually interviewing me (not Mr. CTO) for his time, picked up my stuff and walked out without another word.
Re: How I Failed to Change Wasmer
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> author appears to be a co-founder of the company despite writing much of the article from the perspective of an IC engineer who was taken advantage of. With all respect to the author, I think, from reading this, they gave him the title of co-founder to try to try to stop him from leaving earlier, given 85% of the engineering team had left (it's implied this happend before he became a co-founder). He jokes about it…
He writes further down that he was handling founder-level responsibilities. That’s actually part of his complaint about his workload. If he has the title of co-founder within the company, describes himself as co-founder in his blog, and was responsible for founder-level activities then I think it’s clear that he was, indeed, a cofounder. I sympathize with his experience, but I also think we need to be careful about l…
I can definitely sympathize with this. I've been in a situation before where I was employee #1, hired an entire team of developers and built a complete product all the while being baited along with promises of "we'll discuss equity later", "we'll incorporate later" etc. Originally our understanding was I'd be a co-founder with double-digit equity (this was the main motivation for being OK with taking a salary 30% below my typical market value, even though we supposedly had "millions in the bank"). All the while this was intermixed with the most toxic micromanagement, gaslighting, and unrealistic expectations disguised as performance shaming that I've ever seen at any company ever (though strictly speaking this was not a company -- we were all self-employed because the guy was too lazy to incorporate or provide benefits). Eventually I left when none of these promises panned out and morale was at an all-time low because of the constant negativity and direction changes from the CEO.
Re: How I Failed to Change Wasmer
#37I tried and tried to fix a dysfunctional environment on a contract and my boss (also from the contract company) kept telling me “you can’t fix stupid”. Oddly despite being upbeat he was the first to quit.
I have driven culture forward before, but a couple lucky breaks can make you think you have more control than you really have and subsequently failing to change other people can feel like a personal failing instead of their issues being the problem. Internalizing that is toxic and that’s what my boss was trying to say but didn’t have the words.
Re: How I Failed to Change Wasmer
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The only thing worse than startup leadership quarrels is watching one of the founder exit the company and air all of their dirty laundry on the way out. If there were any engineers or managers still working at Wasmer and hoping to turn the ship around, this blog post may have destroyed any chance of that. What is the alternative though? I mean this developer, at least from their telling of it, had held almost every…
> 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 be…
If there's no public acknowledgement that the CEO ran an awful workplace, there's not much to stop him doing it again with another company.
Re: How I Failed to Change Wasmer
#39> I’ve joined the Wasmer company at its early beginning, in March 2019. The company was 3 months old.
I had no idea that Wasmer, Inc. was a company. The home page, wasmer.io, says nothing about a company and reads like an open source project landing page.
Way at the bottom is a banana button to "Contact Sales" that's just an email address.
What's the product Wasmer is selling?
Clicking through to "about," I see nothing about products, just bios of the team members:
> The CEO, Syrus Akbary, had evidently a lot of pressure on its shoulders.
I suspect that pressure had to do with not having a product for sale in the traditional sense. Maybe the company was viewed as a product, with another company as the customer. If so, it's clear how this could become a pressure cooker.
No product + investor money + team to support = pressure and bad work environment.
Re: How I Failed to Change Wasmer
#40Wasmer has had some controversy on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24900186
As someone pointed out in that thread, there's also an HN account that appears to be a sockpuppet of the CEO[1], used to astroturf his projects (wasmer and a previous one). For me, finding that was one of the things that made me pick wasmtime over wasmer for my own project. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=peter998
8 months ago I was evaluating Wasmer vs. wasmtime for my personal use and for a team I was working with at my work (Sourcegraph)
Ultimately I went with wasmtime (we ended up using neither at work, too premature) because I just found a frankly disturbing amount of controversy surrounding Wasmer vs. wasmtime, and Wasmer hyping itself up far too much and trying to put down wasmtime.
I'll say as I did 3 months ago[0]. I don't know what's wrong with Wasmer, but there's something _weird_ going on there. I'm not surprised to see this thread.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/o1838v/the_web...