

I'm Moving To San Francisco, I Need A Job - nailer
http://zedshaw.com/blog/2009-08-05.html
Of note for HN: "I am interested in working for a funded startup that has about 5-20 employees and is growing or would like to grow."
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yan
This is why having a well-known online presence is important.

~~~
apgwoz
But, will his online presence hurt him or help him in this case? Zed is
obviously intelligent, but his tendency to not "play nice" with others might
not fit with too many grow mode startups who don't want drama, and just want
to get the best stuff out the door as fast as possible. Though, maybe a little
Zed drama will help get _better_ stuff out the door. It's a tough call. I wish
him the best of luck and can't wait to see what happens with the lucky company
that he fits into.

~~~
yan
I think in the absolute, it will absolutely help him. It might detract _some_
companies from hiring him, but I think his contributions in software and
publications opened him up to a magnitude of potential employers, even if some
of them might not want that sort of exposure.

Let's say he didn't post or publish anything, would you say he'd be better
off? I'm positive he won't.

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0wned
It's hard to put email and blog posts into human context. What seems abrasive
in text only mediums, may not even seem remotely abrasive in real life where
we can see body language, facial expressions, etc. Even text as straight
forward as "Fuck you! I quit" may just be a joke directed at folks that get
it. But outsiders read it and immediately think, "wow, that guy is not nice"
when in actuality he's just goofing-off with others that 'get it'. Long story
short, I'd have to meet the guy several times and hang out with him in person
before I could pass any sort of judgment and I think other smart HR/mgrs would
agree. He would not be immediately ruled-out because his online comments seem
offensive.

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edw519
I dunno, Zed, maybe you should just look for a job as a "lone ranger".
Whenever I read one of your rants, I'd chuckle and say, "Gee, I'm glad he's
not talking about me." I wonder how other programmers would feel working with
you, never quite sure when they'd be fodder for one of your rants.

~~~
ori_b
Personally, I would have no problems working with him. I expect people to call
me out when I do stupid things, and I expect people to tell me what they
think.

I don't think Zed is much more abrasive than Linus, for example.

~~~
xenophanes
Also, has he been abrasive to people who were being nice to him?

~~~
gaius
The entire Ruby community, at one point. Why do you think he switched to
Python?

~~~
joevandyk
obviously because the entire Ruby community hated him.

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luckyland
I understand Netflix has one of the most generous severance package policies
in the industry.

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scott_s
Woah, buried in there was this claim:

 _Well, in a perfect world I’d just work on Lamson but the days of companies
actually paying people to work on open source are pretty much over._

Have I missed something? I thought that, at least, most of the kernel and gcc
devs were employed by companies to work on those projects. Is he right, and
something has fundamentally changed?

~~~
igorgue
That's very wrong... you could argue that most of the kernel maintainers are
employed by companies to work on the kernel, but not all the code gets written
by them, and some companies do not employ people to work full-time on the
kernel, otherwise do you think the Intel driver would be in the current state?

And of course Lamson is not GCC or the kernel. Those are very special cases,
look at the GNOME or KDE project... or Django for you web guys, who gets paid
to work on Django? not even JKM

~~~
adatta02
Hmm it doesn't _really_ count but JBoss is open source and has paid
developers. jQuery UI is maintained by a consulting group. Firefox's core
developers are paid. I'm pretty sure there are paid contributors on Hadoop and
Lucene.

And lets not forget Rails....

~~~
nwatson
Perhaps less well known are open-source reporting companies like Actuate
(sponsors/main developers of the top-level Eclipse BIRT project), Pentaho,
JasperSoft. Not sure about revenue models for others, but Actuate sells
support for their open-source tools and offers proprietary add-ons for those
that need to scale their deployments.

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idlewords
Curious that a person with such an abrasive online persona wants a job as a
team leader or 'technology evangelist'.

~~~
utku_karatas2
IMO that online persona is perfect for a technology evangelist. Make noise,
rake muck, profit.

~~~
edw519
x% of others would agree. (100-x)% would probably be put off. Solve for x.

~~~
dtf
The Marmite equation.

~~~
oconnor0
The Marmite equation?

~~~
joeyo
When considering the Marmite yeast extract product, in the UK _x_ is somewhat
above 50. In the US, _x_ is well below 50. Similar values of _x_ probably
apply to Vegemite between Australia and the US.

~~~
paulgb
I still didn't get it, until I read this: _This distinctive taste is reflected
in the British company's marketing slogan: "Love it or hate it."_ (from
Marmite wikipedia page)

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jherdman
Quick question to my fellow Rubyists who happen to do Rails: would you really
resent working with Zed? I've enjoyed Zed the few times I've met him in person
and find the prospect of working with him to be a desirable thing.

~~~
EvilTrout
I've said it before on HN, but I met Zed at RubyFringe and thought he was very
polite and professional. I wouldn't resent working with him at all.

~~~
jherdman
I had the same experience at RubyFringe with Zed. Stand up dude.

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nailer
Of note for HN: "I am interested in working for a funded startup that has
about 5-20 employees and is growing or would like to grow."

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geedee77
I don't mean to be negative about a fellow human (especially one in the tech
industry) but Zed comes across in that 'advert' as thinking he'd be doing a
company a favour by working for them. I don't know him, or his work, but in my
experience touting for general jobs by making out you're better than them
rarely works. It'd be ok with a company you know but in a general blog post?
It's a big 'no' from me.

Good luck to Zed though, I'm sure someone will snap him up just because of his
online status and it's certainly a different way to find a job!

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hypermatt
Zed is a really smart guy, I had the pleasure of going to his free hackers
union group here in NYC.

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andymoe
I'm looking forward to having him out this way. I'm sure he will pop up in the
community from time to time. Would love to see him speak.

