
Steve Singh stepping down as Docker CEO - akulkarni
https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/08/steve-singh-stepping-down-as-docker-ceo/
======
windexh8er
I worked for Docker under Steve. Steve is a nice guy, but a horrible CEO for
any current tech company. When I left Docker I told HR how disappointed I was
in his response as a CEO with regard to recent layoffs. He went on and on
about how this was about saving money to get to profitability in 2019 and he
blamed himself, as he should have for missing. But then he didn't actually
take any responsibility for his actions. He didn't take a pay cut, he had just
hired his buddy Neil Charney for marketing and that guy should exit stage left
right behind Steve. There's lots of leadership at Docker that's bad and Docker
is very misdirected internally. For an entire quarter they kept telling us
Microsoft was the path forward. Except most native Windows shops aren't doing
a ton of containers. And if they are they're moving to Azure because of the
credits. Then Microsoft kind of sort of vanished from the push. And it was
kind of sort of IoT - but Docker Enterprise doesn't run on ARM and they were
so far behind. Docker has bad leadership and nobody is steering the ship
towards a destination, unfortunately.

One last tidbit about Steve. Steve made his fortune off Concur being sold to
Amex. So Docker, obviously, had to use Concur internally. We were told not to
complain about Concur in Slack ever so as Steve would never see it. Well
Steve, Concur is a flaming pile of garbage compared to modern alternatives.
And that was where Steve was leading Docker. There are a lot of really good
people left at Docker. Get rid of Steve, get rid of Steve's buddies, get rid
of the sales leadership and circle back up with the product the team they have
can build. I think Steve's departure implies he knew he'd never hit his goal
of profitability this year. Bon voyage Steve! Hopefully it's not too late for
Docker.

~~~
mathattack
I don’t know about Docker but I concur about Concur. It’s 1990s technology
that’s only a quarter step above mainframe green screens.

I will say that Docker’s 2.9 on Glassdoor is very low for a tech company.

~~~
GordonS
We have to use Concur at the megacorp where I work - it truely is _awful_.
It's slow, clunky, and often just gets in your way.

For example, if I attach a receipt, the "receipt is attached" toggle remains
off - you still have to manually change it!

The "cost allocation" stuff is also an unnecessary waste of time, and things
often seem to be off by a penny, which causes Concur to complain and prevents
submission.

I could go on..

For such a large scale system, I just can't fathom the UX or performance.

~~~
twa927
For some reason many "enterprise" software products are clunky and buggy. I
guess this is because the decision to use the software is made by managers who
don't ever use it.

~~~
opsunit
I think it is more to do with the fact that "enterprise" software vendors have
done the boring legwork of ticking all of the necessary multi-jurisdiction
legal tick-boxes, implement that one insane export format, provide reports
required just-so by a given regulator and so-on. The value they provide to the
business is outside of the software in that sense.

~~~
twa927
It's good that the managers care for the higher-level "business" goals, but
shouldn't they care for their subordinates more? In the end it also
contributes to a business metric - employee happiness. When I was switching a
corporate job to a startup job the fact that I switched from a corporate
Outlook and a proprietary issue software to GMail and Github made me happier.

~~~
dragonwriter
> It's good that the managers care for the higher-level "business" goals, but
> shouldn't they care for their subordinates more?

Ideally, yes; rationally, given the incentives of the concrete eco omic system
they exist in, no. Managers work for higher level managers, or at the highest
level for capital owners of the business, not for their employees except to
the extent that the employees are also capital owners of the business.

Managers aren't union reps for their subordinates, they are agents of capital.
That's, literally, their job.

~~~
twa927
This sounds like early 20th century capitalism... I don't think it's very
applicable to the current programming industry, where companies have to fight
to retain good employees. Also, the top-down structure is no longer preserved
within the Agile's "self-organizing teams". So in this landscape I think it's
very reasonable to take seriously what programmers think about the given
internal software.

~~~
dragonwriter
> This sounds like early 20th century capitalism... I don't think it's very
> applicable to the current programming industry, where companies have to
> fight to retain good employees.

It absolutely does; just because capitalist are competing for labor doesn't
mean that management switches from being agents of capital to agents of labor.
Valuable, contested human resources are still resources, not owners.

> Also, the top-down structure is no longer preserved within the Agile's
> "self-organizing teams".

One of the most frequently reported problems with Agile in practice is that
the idea of empowered, self-organizing teams is, even in organizations that
give lip service to Agile development given limited, effect by management. In
any case, that concept applies mainly to how teams deliver on business goals,
not on _setting_ business goals, so even ideally it would not prioritize staff
opinions _over_ business goals.

~~~
twa927
> just because capitalist are competing for labor doesn't mean that management
> switches from being agents of capital to agents of labor. Valuable,
> contested human resources are still resources, not owners.

Yes, I generally agree, but it goes as follows:

1\. The business owners care only about achieving their business goals.

2\. To achieve the business goals the owners need to have good employees.

3\. To hire and retain good employees some business decisions should take into
cosiderations the needs of the employees.

So even from the purely economical point of view there should be some balance
between 1. and 3.

And overall your purely economical point of view seems too rigid to me. One
example that comes to my mind is the cultural shift happening at Microsoft.
The company made many decisions with little business sense like open sourcing
many projects and providing free developer tools. But the effect is that
developers like the company more. This has measurable effects like Azure
success or hiring better employees. I think this is an example of a bottom-up-
built success which doesn't fit your top-down viewpoint.

------
benjaminwootton
Has there ever been a bigger missed opportunity in business than Docker
managed to preside over? They could have created a huge business, but the
product and go to market strategy has been awful.

In my opinion, selling a PaaS was fundamentally the wrong call when they could
have licensed an enterprise version of the engine and taken a commission on
every server in existence. This is more a Microsoft or RHEL type business
rather than a second rate Pivotal or OpenShift, which in themselves are being
mullered by EKS/AKS in enterprise.

The whole pitch towards legacy apps was also short termist distraction when
investment dollars are all going to cloud native solutions. Legacy apps are a
big business case but getting companies to invest in their legacy estate is
still a tough ask. This angle should have been secondary to competing where
they are naturally strong.

~~~
jasallen
> Has there ever been a bigger missed opportunity in business than Docker
> managed to preside over?

Sun Microsystems

~~~
bcantrill
Sun made $200 billion of revenue over 28 years. Yes, Sun missed opportunities
-- but (as someone who worked at Sun during the internet boom) Sun definitely
took advantage of plenty of them. Or are you making the case that Sun's
technological output was so substantial that the $200 billion over the nearly
three decades represents a "bigger missed opportunity in business than
Docker"?

~~~
mromanuk
In 1999 I wanted to buy a Sun SPARCstation 5 (I worked with those). Was
fabulous how that machine never blocked, was super-stable, and fast. At that
time I had a linux PC box (red hat) at home, with IDE and PATA (if I remember
correctly) it was really difficult for the hardware to perform.

~~~
ska
The were good machines, but they were stupidly expensive a that time. The same
with SGI. I remember being quoted $18,000 for equivalent amount of memory I
had just put in a linux box of my own for about $300. Sure, it wasn't really
apples to apples ... but still. Intel based machines were eating their lunch
for good reason.

~~~
joncrane
They should have targeted a premium around what Apple charges for their
hardware, not the absurd multiple they were charging.

~~~
gumby
Both sun and sgi had business models built around premium margins and couldn’t
adapt the the mammals underfoot. This phenomenon is one of the things that The
Innovator’s Dilemma got right.

Apple’s in a slightly different position in that they bank a more profit
sun/sgi ever did and are pretty aggressive on COGS so if/when they lose their
exalted position they will have a lot more room to maneuver. This is how
Microsoft managed to survive its sag (decline is too strong anword) towards
irrelevance and recover.

IBM was in the same situation as Microsoft but though Gerstner managed to
right the ship, his successors were not able to re-ignite growth (to mix
metaphors)

------
nullwasamistake
IMO docker is the Myspace of containers.

There's so many bugs I've just stopped caring. Like many devs, I have a bash
alias to blow everything away when the daemon gets funky. And it behaves
differently enough between platforms that, at least at my company, we've given
up on running the same containers between different OS.

I really think the endgame will be a VM based container system backwards
compatible with docker. At VM level it's far easier to deal with kernel level
incompatibility. Not to mention the constant security bugs that come from
sharing a kernel. Somewhat ironically MS is already doing this in a way by
hosting a Linux kernel in a VM for their docker implementation. They're only a
step away from launching a kernel for each container.

With how cheap ram is these days, sharing a kernel is pointless. You save
maybe 50mb of ram per container in return for maddening implementation
complexity and worse performance

~~~
cyphar
You should check out LXD. It's containers, but they act like VMs (you have
proper systemd inside the container) and the tooling is far more sane than
anything Docker has. It's developed by the same folks that work on LXC (and
despite what you might've heard, LXC is very good).

~~~
aitchnyu
I used Lxdock to provision a dev environment as a LXC VM. It is now
unmaintained and changed file permission when sharing files from host to
guest. I changed to Vagrant, which has infuriating startup delays, needs
restarts and breaks inotify-based tools. At least its cross platform. Is there
an alternative?

------
mrmondo
"... our customers are materially reducing the costs of building, sharing and
running their applications and they are increasing their innovation cycles by
a factor of more than 10X."

I can't stand this kind of marketing dribble, phrases like "increasing their
innovation cycles by a factor of more than 10X" are not in themselves
quantifiable and without that or context can be misleading.

I don't (at all) disagree that the more wide-spread adoption of containerised
application deployment and related work-flows has sped up the release and
application life-cycle, but I think people should not aspire to talk about
such benefits with such 'greasy' wording (especially when it comes to the word
'innovation').

~~~
GordonS
I loathe this kind of language too - but in Enterprise it's all too often
management types that are the decision makers. As long as they keep lapping up
this BS, companies will continue to spew it forth.

------
jaequery
I just want to say, Docker for OSX is a joke! It's been over 4 years, when is
that (slow filesystem issue) ever going to get fixed? People are using
solutions like NFS/Dinghy, something Docker for OSX should have out of the
box. Cmon now.

And if I were leading Docker, I'd look into the direction of a built-in
virtual hosting solution, ie; jwilder-proxy and DNSMasq. I think that is what
still stopping them from mass adoption.

~~~
stingraycharles
I think Docker's highest priority right now is monetization, which explains
their lack of focus on OSX in favor for Windows; more enterprise users
theoretically would have led to more money.

Having said that, they didn't appear to be doing too well with that either.

~~~
bunderbunder
I'm not sure of the right path for monetization, but I am guessing, all the
same, that their neglect of the OS X edition of Docker has hindered it. A
decent number of Docker users are developing locally on OS X, even if they use
another platform upstream. I doubt the "bugs and misfeatures being ignored for
years on end" thing is making them particularly eager to just throw money at
the company.

------
thoman23
As someone who wants to pitch containerization at my enterprisey company, what
is the takeaway message here? Do I still assume Docker/kubernetes is the way
to go? Sounds like I don't want to stake my reputation on Docker Swarm? Is
there another container platform this community recommends other than Docker?

~~~
rodgerd
1\. Swarm lost, don't bother.

2\. The interesting part of containers is the tooling people have built around
them to make it easy to ship _and run_ software stacks easily.

3\. Building all this shit from primitives - downloading your own istio & k8s
- is painful and will waste a lot of time and frustrate people.

Go get an opinionated k8s+containers solution that you can plumb into your dev
tooling and will let you "commit code, spin up container fleet" easily,
because that's the value: reliably increasing velocity.

OpenShift is one example I've worked with and like. There are others. Don't
waste your time and money fucking around with individual bits of the stack.

~~~
thoman23
Thanks for the advice! Is there one opinionated offering that has solid
Windows Server support? It looks like OpenShift is working towards it, but
it’s not ready yet.

------
deanmoriarty
Anyone has any clues as to what the real reasons for his departure are?

~~~
nurettin
Well, this happened right after the news about one of docker's databases being
compromised, so perhaps he is being scapegoated.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19763413](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19763413)

~~~
dehrmann
That was my first thought, but they should have waited just a little longer so
it looks like it was at least a thought-out decision, or put this announcement
on hold for 6 weeks so no one's asking this question.

------
jzl
What happens, hypothetically, if Docker the company shuts down?

~~~
scaryclam
Not a lot really. The core parts aren't actually docker (containerd and runc
do all the work and are not docker owned), so it's more a problem of how fast
we can get tooling to replace the wrapper around them (that's docker, so the
bit that would be more of an issue). Local development would be hit the
hardest, though I'm sure things would carry on as-is for quite a while since
the parts of docker that are mainly used for building and pushing containers
is open source.

Kubernetes already doesn't need docker to run, so migrating wouldn't be a
nightmare. There are other image repositories everyone can use for the base
images.

CoreOS did a good thing by pushing for the OCI as it's made sure this exact
situation isn't a disaster.

------
segphault
I had a somewhat kafka-esque experience trying to install the Docker client on
Windows recently. I just wanted the standalone executable so I could connect
to Docker running on a headless Linux server on the local network. They don't
make that available anymore for the latest version and force you to install
Docker Desktop, which required two reboots and enabling Hyper-V, none of which
should actually be necessary if all you are doing is connecting to a Linux
box. It was a garbage experience. While I was trying, unsuccessfully, to
figure out how to get the standalone binary, I noticed that the Docker website
has been completely taken over by really low-signal marketing crap, and all of
the actual technical substance is now hidden away in the documentation. The
way that Docker is flailing around as it desperately seeks some kind of
enterprise traction is really a huge turn off to their core audience.

~~~
deanmoriarty
The website has really been a bunch of crap for a few years now! I always have
to access it via Google searches, even when I'm looking on extremely trivial
pieces of documentation.

~~~
lildoggo
Yes! My team has recently moved our services/applications into docker through
azure... Trying to understand what parts of docker we needed through their
site was an absolute nightmare, it's all marketing stuff and very little on
what each 'service' actually does.

------
Annatar
"Singh appeared tired, but a leader who was confident in his position and who
saw a bright future for his company."

A company (Docker) selling a product which you don't need because you can
simply package your application and its configuration as an OS package has no
future since it's selling snake oil.

