
Zed Shaw has Left Dropbox - byrneseyeview
http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1278121913.html
======
jrockway
My dream of having Zed come to an interview where the interviewers all have
their feet up on the conference table is this much closer to coming true!

~~~
zedshaw
Oh that'd be funny as shit. Actually, I've gotten used to it. Seems to be just
a damn stupid signifier that you're a start up guy.

~~~
jey
Congrats on creating a new cultural tradition.

------
joshu
Want to do a startup? I'm available

------
shin_lao
If you truly believe in Mongrel2, start your own company. Don't wait for the
company that's going to _truly open source it_ , it won't be the way you want
it if it's not your company.

~~~
dnsworks
How would you make a company around a webserver?

~~~
blasdel
Phusion is doing pretty OK.

There are still some companies left idling along from a group 10 years ago
that sold commercial event-driven webservers / reverse-proxies / caches /
load-balancers that were much better than Apache, but are heaps of shit
compared to the nginx ecosystem.

------
milesf
Sure hope Zed finishes <http://learnpythonthehardway.com/> Such a great primer
for pre-programmers.

~~~
nalbyuites
Agree. Just starting to learn pre-programming - unlearning bad habits from
school where every year we wrote the same bunch of programs, once in BASIC,
Pascal, C etc. The only thing I had liked then was Logo. :)

------
SlyShy
Nice of him to make that clear, unnecessary as that was.

~~~
zedshaw
Actually, there was an entire thread just right now about it, and if you don't
deal with the rumors right away they spread like herpes.

~~~
SlyShy
I read the thread. What I wrote was unclear though, sorry. What I meant was,
it's stupid that you'd have to do that, because people shouldn't be starting
rumor mills in the first place.

~~~
zedshaw
Well, it's stupid but I learned the hard way if you don't shut down people who
slander in the tech world then the rumor mongers take it to mean you're weak
and the slanderers are right. Sucks, but the alternative is to give folks with
no integrity a way to tear you down.

In other words, there really is no higher ground in tech unless you're already
rich.

~~~
pkaler
We live in a world where PageRank is truth. Whatever shows up higher in Google
is assumed to be true.

------
mml
They tried to give him a pager

------
j_baker
Dumb question time: what does it mean for Mongrel to not be _truly_ open
source? And why is it not already?

~~~
zedshaw
Right now I'm the only guy working on it. I like starting my projects that way
since I can lay down the playground for other people and avoid the
bikeshedding. Once it gets stable I then write up documentation and start
letting interested folks at the code to help me.

------
grandalf
I think heroku would be a good fit for Zed. Or maybe Railsmachine (if they
want to step up the competition)

~~~
blaix
Wow, I completely forgot railsmachine existed.

~~~
grandalf
They're doing a great job with their clients... and have a very strong group
of sysadmins so if they thought Zed was a good fit he'd surely be able to
focus on writing code.

------
iamwil
And here I was wondering where he had all this time to be doing Mongrel2, play
guitar, work at dropbox, blog about shedding bikes, etc.

------
mkramlich
Zed, you totally have to write some great new rants now.

(Not related to Dropbox, not what I'm implying. Just that you should have more
free time to write for a while, so we'd love to see the fruits of it.)

~~~
jrockway
I wish I could exchange Zed-rants for Yegge-rants.

~~~
stcredzero
This sounds like the start of another Magic the Gathering type game, only with
startups.

~~~
mhd
My "Fury of Naggum" beats your "Song of Stallman"!

(I can't for the heck of it remember who trolled comp.lang.c in the mid-
nineties. Same guy, always went on about assembly etc.)

------
alnayyir
>If you got something interesting that doesn't involve me being a _system
administrator_

Is it me, or is this a running meme/problem for him?

~~~
zedshaw
No it's not you, I do get asked to be a sysadmin quite often. I have _no_ idea
why. It's not something I'm good at. I did for a short time in college to pay
tuition a decade ago. I don't enjoy it. I never apply for it. For some bizarre
reason, people ask if I want to be a sysadmin out of the blue. Drives me
crazy.

~~~
starkfist
It's not that bizarre, you write software mainly used by systems
administrators. I used to work with one of the guys who wrote apache, and now
work with a guy who wrote most of one of the popular NOSQL engines. And they
both work as systems administrators. Not "useradd" systems administrators
(although they are technically in that part of the org chart) but more like
what Google calls "SREs." Rather than explaining what it is, this guy's google
groups post does a better job:

[http://www.sage.org/lists/sage-members-
archive/2005/msg02937...](http://www.sage.org/lists/sage-members-
archive/2005/msg02937.html)

If they just want you to add user accounts, that's weird. But SRE style jobs
are where a lot of guys who write famous open source systems software end up.

from the google groups post: _"Yes, sysadmin skills are essential here,
however we also require a very strong skillset in development, automation,
high-level systems architecture, networking, statistics and general problem-
solving."_

sounds like a description of zed!

~~~
jrockway
Google says something like that for every job. From what I know about SREs,
the "programming" you do is basically shell scripts to automate sysadmin
stuff. Programming, sure, but the most boring type possible.

~~~
nostrademons
Yeah, SREs don't do all that much hard-core programming, but they need a skill
that's almost harder: the ability to quickly evaluate whether a change is
likely to bring the system down or otherwise cause reliability problems. SREs
get consulted very often by engineers for questions like "Do we have enough
capacity to burn 15% more CPU for the next week?" or "Is this change likely to
cause an unacceptable risk of serving bad pages to users?" They also do code &
design reviews.

In that respect, the job description is pretty accurate. You _do_ need a
strong skillset in development, automation, high-level systems architecture,
networking, statistics, and problem-solving to perform well as an SRE. You
need to be able to think on your feet and evaluate the suggestions that
engineers are throwing at you before somebody does something stupid, as well
as the ability to figure out how to avoid having problems recur.

~~~
enneff
"SREs don't do all that much hard-core programming"

On the contrary, some of the code I've seen written by SREs has been among the
most delicate, finely tuned, and "hard core" (by my definition) I've seen.

~~~
sliverstorm
That's because the odds that a sysadmin is an absolute nut for delicate,
finely tuned, hard core code are orders of magnitude larger that the odds for
a standard programmer.

It's not required, but that pedantic nature seems to help make a good
sysadmin.

------
jacktang
Zed is hate to be system admin?

------
bdr
I heard they tried to make him be a sysadmin.

------
blasdel
So that's why you never got banned from news.yc — you had immunity :)

------
heresy
When are we getting a ZedCam?

I think the world deserves to know when Zed is taking a crap.

~~~
stcredzero
1st 6 words: could be considered witty. Words 7 to 19: complete turnaround!
Lesson: know when to stop.

------
jeb
And that's the problem with Rockstar Programmers. They know they are
rockstars, they know that they can get funding for their own product at a
moments notice, they know that they can always go on a speaking tour.

You need them, but they don't need you, and they know it. So they walk in and
want to do what they want to do, they have no intention of doing the shitty
stuff. But work in a company has a lot of shitty stuff to be done.

The problem with Zed is that though he is a good developer, he's also a good
writer and probably a good talker. Those last two are important to him, and
when people work at companies, they should not be having two big side projects
(writing and talking). It distracts from the work.

All the rockstar programmers of the last few years all seemed to have entered
CTO roles, have started their own companies, or are important people in very
big companies. Very few are still just slugging away at code at small
startups.

This story is basically why you should not hire rockstar programmers. Hire
normal people who depend on you for their income.

~~~
zedshaw
First off, you don't know me, so don't presume to know how I am to work with,
or what kind of employee I am. In fact, what you wrote here is borderline
slander, as you're basically telling people to not hire me. You and everyone
else needs to quit that shit because I don't do it to you, and it _does_ have
a major impact on my life.

Second, who the hell are you to say I shouldn't have a life outside of your
company? This is _not_ a damn salt mine, or a factory. Programmers are hired
based on their _visible_ experience. The projects they do and the things they
write are now a major deciding factor on whether they get jobs. To then tell
someone that all of that stops because you're paying them a piddly little
100k/year compared to your massive ownership in the company is down right
abusive.

Third, in the valley the trend of firing people at the drop of a hat because
they aren't a "good fit" cuts both ways. If you show no loyalty to your
employees then they owe you nothing. Expecting them to stick around and be
loyal, but then fire their peers for having a bad day with no warning is
completely unfair.

Basically, I think your entire comment smacks of business douchebag who has no
concept of worker's rights, fairness, or even basic capitalism.

~~~
jeb
Let me put it this way: You're a talented singer, songwriter, guitarist, and
producer. The company needs a person who plays bass. They could hire you as a
bassist, but that's not where you belong. You're a rockstar. You belong in the
front.

What I'm saying is not slander, it's the opposite. YOU are putting yourself in
the wrong spot, because you should not be playing bass when you have all these
other talents. You should form your own band and create your own vision.

Imagine you are casting a band and you put Carlos Santana as the guitarrist of
Britney Spears. Sure, he's an excellent guitar player, but that's now where he
belongs. He should not play guitar in Britneys band and dabble in experimental
rock music, he should be focusing on his own thing.

That's what I mean - many companies simply need a cog. They need some small
piece that will keep the machine turning smoothly. They need a pawn - and
though you could stick a queen in there to do the job of the pawn, it's not
where it belongs.

And when someone says the queen should not be used as a pawn, the queen should
not be arguing that it should be a pawn.

~~~
nailer
I think I get what you're trying to say. But perhaps:

'sorry, that wasn't meant to be an insult - I just think you're better suited
to running your own show'

would be a better way to put it.

