

Rails is a Ghetto... [NSFW for Language] - raju
http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html
Some pretty harsh words...
======
apathy
I posted this on reddit and was surprised that no one had observed the same
thing here (like, say, pg calling him out).

The arrogance contained in this rant is sad. He "almost" got his MS, he
"nearly" completed a formal education, and he twice decided he was too good to
be a Jr. Sysadmin at Google. What do Junior Sysadmins do at Google? They learn
how to work with one of the largest distributed systems on the planet, and
they become Senior Sysadmins or Production/SRE engineers. If you don't want to
work at Google that's one thing, but unless you've got your own Big Idea (and
no, "being homeless" does not count as a Big Idea), maybe it'd be worth the
initial indignity....

Burning bridges in public is one thing, but I worry a little that he's burnt a
bunch of bridges in front of him, not just behind. And the small satisfaction
of a rant like this is not worth it. For perspective -- would you expect to
see something like this out of Obie? Ever?

Make your own opportunities before you burn your bridges... the time for a
victory rant is after you win big, not before.

~~~
pius
_The arrogance contained in this rant is sad. He "almost" got his MS, he
"nearly" completed a formal education, and he twice decided he was too good to
be a Jr. Sysadmin at Google._

I didn't see his rant as arrogant . . . just pretty blunt. If you actually
read his technical work, it's quite clear that Zed is very good at what he
does and employs practical applications of computer science in his work. It's
no secret that Zed thinks there are too many bullshit "hackers" out there who
don't know basic computer science, yet they think they're God because they
learned Rails or Django. It looked like he was trying to highlight the irony
of (no offense to anyone here) English majors turned script kiddies trying to
lecture him on topics in which they are, frankly, out of their depth.

Having been in the consulting world at a major firm for a few years before
starting my company, I've seen it dozens of times. They'll pay, staff, and
bill out non-technical people like they're technical and vice versa. You
sometimes find yourself dealing with "superiors" and "peers" that think their
"IT experience" of writing Excel macros makes them computer scientists all of
a sudden. The water's just too deep for a lot of these people and they'll put
their feet in their mouths a thousand times before they learn it.

(Before I get flamed -- I applaud non-technical folks who are able to
crossover and start their businesses using frameworks and other tools. That's
truly awesome. The problem is when these people start thinking that because
they learned how to change a spark plug or bolt on a turbocharger, they're
suddenly automotive engineers and can design a car engine from scratch just
like their buddies who work at Ford. Formally trained engineers != mechanics,
no matter what the field. Hell, I remember a few months ago, someone on
News.YC had the audacity to declare that Computer Science is irrelevant to web
apps. That's the sort of bullshit that goes on in this field. There are people
who call themselves hackers and literally have no clue what they're talking
about and no reverence for the people who've built the tools that allow them
to get a foot in the door.)

 _They learn how to work with one of the largest distributed systems on the
planet, and they become Senior Sysadmins or Production/SRE engineers. If you
don't want to work at Google that's one thing, but unless you've got your own
Big Idea (and no, "being homeless" does not count as a Big Idea), maybe it'd
be worth the initial indignity...._

Meh. Any technical hiring manager who's researched what Zed's capabilities are
would know that he is overqualified for that role. Why exactly should someone
with twenty years of experience and Zed's skillset who also just happened to
have single-handledly wrote one of the most rock solid webservers around with
thousands of production deployments take some shit job just because it's
Google? Honestly, they're just another company ...

 _Make your own opportunities before you burn your bridges... the time for a
victory rant is after you win big, not before._

That's wise advice.

~~~
qaexl
I generally agree with you here.

I also think that undergraduate CS degrees today, are diluted. That's not to
say I have not met folks who know what they are doing with their CS degree.
They are also the ones paying attention in class. For those that don't really
know how to program ... they got about as much skill as a non-techie who goes
off to try to do their own thing.

With regards to the English major. It was very possible that he programmed
computer as a kid, tried to get a CS degree, and failing that dropped back to
English. I'm not saying that this is what happened to him. I do know of a few
folks at the local university it happened to. So far, they have not tried to
get a programming job.

~~~
blader
The "English major" Zed mentioned is a friend and co-worker of mine. Zed and
him has had some beef going way back.

Kevin is no script kiddy, I can guarantee you that. His 20% time project at
Powerset is contributing to Rubinius. I don't know how many people here are
hacking on the next generation of Ruby VMs, but I wouldn't call him a script
kiddy.

~~~
pius
I'm not calling the dude a script kiddie either. I was pointing out the more
general pattern of the sentiments Zed has shown in his posts.

Kevin's obviously done a lot of useful work for the Ruby and Rails communities
and I respect him on that basis the same way I respect Zed for his open source
contributions.

------
carpal
There's one thing that just doesn't seem right about this rant, which I think
will make his whole argument fall to pieces.

Before he wrote mongrel, it seemed like he had a pretty decent working
situation. After he wrote mongrel, he was jobless and nearly homeless for an
extended period if time.

That just doesn't sit right with me as being truthful. How can a person, who
is otherwise a qualified developer, write one of the most well-known pieces of
the Rails infrastructure, but suddenly be jobless? I wrote a shitty weather
app and got 3 gig offers within a day. How can you be a household name within
the Rails community and not have a job?

By being an arrogant asshole? By demanding outrageous fees? By demanding
outrageous control over projects? All three?

~~~
tx
I suspect his problem is geography. I haven't lived there, but I can imagine
that in NYC when you deal with Rails shops you get to talk to sleazy "MBA
types" as opposed to traditional startup hubs like SV and Boston, where you
typically have no problems finding cool hackers to work with.

BTW: I don't think he is an arrogant asshole, he's just just brutally honest,
NYC-style. And yes, Ruby/Rails folks often smell too much like "get-rich-
quick" in their blogs/posts online, so I am not surprised if they are indeed
shady in real life.

~~~
mhidalgo
If you haven't lived in NYC why is the assumption that only sleazy MBA types
work there. I am tired of people bashing the startup culture here in NYC, I
believe there is a healthy community of startups in NYC anything from etsy,
kaltura, tumblr, buglabs, amiestreet, delicious(started in NYC), hakia,
viewdle,teachthepeople,clickable, wixi, commandshift3, and more...The
concentration might not be like Boston or SF, but I think people forget there
are 10 million people in NYC and 2 major universities ( NYU and Columbia)
which make for a large number of developers.

------
neilc
Why is this interesting? It's just some guy calling people names, airing
personal dirty laundry on his petty little web log, and then complaining about
how poor he is ("I wrote Mongrel and then my career was _ruined_ ").

I'm sure he's a smart guy, but he manages to make himself look totally
unprofessional.

~~~
nonrecursive
If the main people who control the direction of the framework which you use to
make your living were acting in a shady way wouldn't YOU be interested? It's
not just "personal dirty laundry" in that what the people he's talking about
do, how they work, affects a lot of people.

Also, it's not just "some guy." Zed Shaw wrote Mongrel, which virtually every
Ruby on Rails project uses. Without him, Rails development would likely still
be a huge pain in the ass.

BTW, you should read his essay on statistics; it provides a good starting
point for figuring out how to analyze the performance of your sites.

~~~
pius
Yeah, that statistics essay is awesome. My favorite essay of his, though, is
how he uses finite state machines to implement protocols. It's pretty badass.

~~~
tptacek
You mean, like every intrusion detection system ever built?

~~~
pius
Your point?

~~~
tptacek
Parsing protocols with parser generators is not an original idea, despite the
fact that it's one of the top 3 value propositions Zed Shaw has for Mongrel.

------
mhartl
I'm grateful for Zed's work on Mongrel, and by all accounts he's a first-rate
hacker, but this rant just doesn't hold water. Though the Rails community can
certainly be a bit elitist, it's also full of friendly, supportive people, and
Zed doesn't produce any convincing evidence that there is a systemic problem.
This looks more like an airing of personal grievances, based on a small number
of encounters, and blown all out of proportion.

~~~
pius
_Though the Rails community can certainly be a bit elitist, it's also full of
friendly, supportive people_

QFT

------
asdf333
I have gotten help from zed a number of times, as an early adopter of rails
and mongrel. He's always been professional, extremely helpful and courteous.

I respect his contribution to rails (I am using at least 18 mongrels as we
speak) and I hope the rails community will be better because of this incident.

~~~
wehriam
Would you hire him?

~~~
asdf333
I would. Its like Richard Branson says. You don't want to lead sheep. You want
to herd cats.

I think its the job of the founder/leader to figure out how to make a team of
superstars work together. We ended up changing direction a few times midway
through our startup (which was acquired). If we didn't have a kickass team
that could switch strategies like that overnight (we had the prototype of the
newer idea ready in 1 day) we would've been dead in the water.

------
granderson
Zed is a talented developer and a committed open source contributor. It seems
that some of the negative aspects of the community got to him and he sort of
snapped...

But I suppose if you're the kind of cat who keeps IRC logs in anticipation of
future sour grapes, then I think you qualify as eccentric.

That's not a bad thing, but the rant is oddly reminiscent of some of Hans
Reiser's rants.

~~~
jsnx
Some of us just keep our logs. If you keep the same computer for awhile, and
leave the default logging on...

~~~
randallsquared
Indeed. With disk space cheap, there's no reason not to log everything on your
personal machine(s). I have many years of mail and IM logs, not because I
intend to use them against anyone, but just because it's so easy to keep them,
and I might need to know something in there one day.

------
mechanical_fish
I thought this was more concise as a T-shirt:

[http://www.offworlddesigns.com/pc-291-24-fools-i-will-
destro...](http://www.offworlddesigns.com/pc-291-24-fools-i-will-destroy-
you.aspx)

My apologies for the product placement.

And I gotta say: during the course of Zed Shaw's extensive business training,
did they never have a class called "What Not To Do When You Burn Out, Part I:
Cussing Out Your Former Colleagues on the Open Internet?" Because, if not, I
think the b-schools owe him his money back.

------
bayareaguy
_Sure people would contact me for their tiny little start-ups, but I'd
eventually catch on that they just want to use me to implement their ideas.
Their ideas were horrendously lame. I swear if someone says they're starting a
social network I'm gonna beat them with the heal of my shoe._

I wonder if it had ever occurred to Zed that most software jobs involve
getting paid to implement other people's horrendously lame ideas.

 _I don't want to be a "Ruby guy" anymore, and will probably start getting
into more Python, Factor, and Lua in the coming months._

Why is it that I find myself praying this guy doesn't try to get into Haskell,
OCaml, Erlang or any of the languages I hope to use?

Someone should tell him to stop taking charm lessons from TDR.

------
anaphoric
It took me 30 seconds to determine that this guy should be put on the
ignore/avoid list.

I have seen his type before. There basic line is, "I am the best, everyone
else is either stupid or recognizes how great I am. Are you stupid?"

Even if these types have talent, they fail to accept it in others, and thus
they are very difficult to deal with. They can become better once they go
through the school of hard knocks. And I thinks that this Zeb guy (was that
his name?) is about to get some knocks. Maybe he will learn some humility...
maybe not. Eventually he will learn, but it might take him 30 more years of
pain.

~~~
anaphoric
From his site:

"If you haven't noticed, I'm funny and enjoy having fun. Enjoy my site, tell
me if you use my projects. Don't take it too seriously though, it's all an
act."

OK at least this guy probably has the ability of self-parity. It's just that I
was first turned off by his seeming arrogance. But now that I look more
closely, yes he is probably being picked at by the vultures...

------
tptacek
The irony, if you can call it that, is that only in the Rails community could
someone make a name for themselves by writing a web server in Ruby.

------
nanijoe
If I knew where Zed lived, I would send him a copy of "How to win friends and
influence people".

------
gscott
When he gets over his God Complex he will be very successful.

------
rms
Is written language ever really NSFW? Spoken language and nudity seems a
little different to me.

~~~
boucher
Plenty of things, written or otherwise, are not safe for work. I don't think
this is one of them though.

~~~
raju
My apologies if I misled some of you. I was a little appalled by the language,
and felt it pertinent that most of you were aware of the foul nature of the
language used.

~~~
imsteve
I'd say that programmers have been exposed to more foul language in their
occupation than porn stars.

------
Zak
Zed seems to be proving his own point quite effectively with his foul-mouthed
rant.

------
tx
What does he mean by Facebook having CIA backing?

~~~
pius
Briefly, it's a reference to the fact that Facebook closed a round with Accel
Partners, which through its manager, Jim Breyer, et al has pretty close
connections to the DoD, DARPA, and the CIA. For example, Breyer was (IIRC) the
founding CEO of In-Q-Tel [1], the CIA's venture capital arm founded by Gilman
Louie. Indeed, some think that Facebook is also funded by In-Q-Tel. Because
In-Q-Tel makes a combination of public and secret investments, it's not the
sort of thing that would get covered on TechCrunch.

If one considers the data mining and correlation Facebook obviously has in the
works, one might think that the CIA is using the vast amounts of data as a
staging ground for techniques being employed in the recently black bagged
Total Information Awareness program [2] started by DARPA and initially headed
by (I shit you not) John Poindexter [3]. One might even argue that Mark
Zuckerberg is so blase about potential acquirers because, indeed, the company
will never allow itself to be acquired. One would probably be derided as a
conspiracy theorist, however. :)

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office>

[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poindexter>

------
sabat
This guy needs to take a good step back and gain some perspective. He may be
entirely right about these people (although he's the only one I've ever heard
say that Dave Thomas is anything but a super-nice guy).

Being right is not the same thing as doing the right thing. Right now he looks
every bit as ugly as the people he's vilifying. That's a shame.

