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How I Failed to Change Wasmer

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Re: How I Failed to Change Wasmer

#51

Post by sushisource »

mmmpop wrote: post #50
sushisource wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an awful story, I'm sorry you had to endure that. My undergrad is in applied math and I would never even dream of calling myself a "mathematician", so, yeah, tells you a lot about the guy.

That's a funny standard, and not that I disagree--quite the contrary--but once you get an undergrad in engineering you're an engineer right? Sure, there is an expectation to pass the FE exam but is being employed as an engineer a requirement to "be an engineer"? I hear a lot of people with a BS in Comp Science that call themselves computer scientists which seems mostly inaccurate too. It's just odd, these titles and…

It's just about how it's colloquially used. Even in industry we mostly call ourselves software engineers / developers, but if people say "Computer Scientist", especially in the context, it's generally understood you didn't mean PhD level research.

Mathematician, OTOH, does kinda usually imply that, or at least implies you do something that likely requires beyond undergrad level education.

Re: How I Failed to Change Wasmer

#52

Post by lwb »

chrisseaton wrote: post #47
IshKebab wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah a free open source implementation. How are they planning on making money?

For example how does Oracle make money from MySQL, a free open source implementation of a database? They sell support.

"Selling support" is one way to make money from OpenSource, but a) it's not clear that Wasmer is even doing that, and b) there's loads of other ways too (hosting, open core, freemium, etc).

Re: How I Failed to Change Wasmer

#53

Post by munificent »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #14
joshstrange wrote: post #10

Earlier 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…

There's a tricky balancing act here. I agree in general that it's good to not air dirty laundry and I personally would be very unlikely to publicly write something like this about a previous coworker.

At the same time not sharing information widely about a toxic member of your community can create a "missing stair"[0] effect where those with inside info know to steer away from the person. Meanwhile, newcomers to the community don't have that knowledge and end up getting burned.

I don't think there's any perfect solution here. We each have to judge for ourselves where to draw the line between public shaming and the duty to protect others from potential harm.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair

Re: How I Failed to Change Wasmer

#54

Post by fosk »

overgard wrote: post #49

I feel for the author, but he keeps talking about "love" and "passion". Perspective is needed. It's a way to run some code. It's alright to be excited by what you work on but it's just a mechanical thing. Don't wrap your self identity into it. If 80% of your engineers are leaving its just a bad workplace. You don't have to apologize for leaving.

I mean the "wheel" is also really a weird shaped object yet it advanced humanity.

The impact of what anybody is building expands beyond the technology itself to all the potential use cases that this new thing enables. It doesn't have a depth of 1. It has a depth of 100.

Re: How I Failed to Change Wasmer

#55

Post by patrec »

Wonder how his wife and children are feeling about him severely burning himself out on a quixotic mission to "save" a company with a CEO whom he paints in the most damning light. On a precarious freelance contract, after 85% of engineering talent bailed out.

Re: How I Failed to Change Wasmer

#56

Post by ska »

sushisource wrote: post #51
mmmpop wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a funny standard, and not that I disagree--quite the contrary--but once you get an undergrad in engineering you're an engineer right? Sure, there is an expectation to pass the FE exam but is being employed as an engineer a requirement to "be an engineer"? I hear a lot of people with a BS in Comp Science that call themselves computer scientists which seems mostly inaccurate too. It's just odd, these titles and…

It's just about how it's colloquially used. Even in industry we mostly call ourselves software engineers / developers, but if people say "Computer Scientist", especially in the context, it's generally understood you didn't mean PhD level research. Mathematician, OTOH, does kinda usually imply that, or at least implies you do something that likely requires beyond undergrad level education.

Sometimes people differentiate by, for example, saying "research mathematician" but I think the meaningful distinction is: do you spend (an appreciable fraction of) your time creating new mathematics...

Re: How I Failed to Change Wasmer

#58

Post by justshowpost »

I find it funny how today the measure of success is first and foremost GitHub stars and everything else comes later.

> At the time of writing, Wasmer has an incredible growth. In 2.5 years only, the runtime has more than 10’500 stars on Github, and is one of the most popular WebAssembly runtime in the world!

Re: How I Failed to Change Wasmer

#59

Post by amenghra »

> X stars on Github

If the runtime gets embedded in other pieces of software, the impact is a lot more than X stars on Github. You'd need to recursively count all the dependent repos. (Ignoring the fact that you can’t simply measure impact by counting stars).

Kudos to building awesome software and good luck finding your next gig!

Re: How I Failed to Change Wasmer

#60

Post by _dh54 »

The CEO first came onto my radar as a questionable individual some months ago in a thread where he was spreading FUD about former WASM engineers at Mozilla working at Fastly. Accusing them of being biased against him with very flimsy evidence. [1]

Later in that thread someone surfaced [2] the fact that the CEO had made a sockpuppet account [3] to praise his own projects.

So the OP is not surprising to me. At the same time all of the public communication I've read by the CEO has been polite so I wonder if he is just misunderstood but it's hard to say, it seems like there could also be a lot of bad things happening behind the scenes.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24900186

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24906498

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=peter998

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