It's worth noting that it's an online presence backed by serious code, which makes Zed worth listening to (and hiring). It seems like many online presences have the attitude without supplying the code.
Zed Shaw's code is insignificant in the face of the contribution of many, many far more talented open source developers who are far less accomplished at leveraging controversy to drive traffic and attention.
The mileage that Zed Shaw has received on a simple well-designed Python SMTP library is absolutely astounding and totally disproportionate to the complexity, novelty, and general market need for the library. His only other notable contribution is a simple, feature-constrained single-purpose micro web server that uses a scaling-limited thread-per-request architecture.
Yeah, it's not like he wrote something that lots of people used like... mongrel, for example.
[Edit: This comment doesn't really make much sense now, since the parent updated his comment to note that Zed ALSO wrote mongrel. I'd delete this comment except for reply attached to it.]
Do you know -- off the top of your head -- who the primary contributors are to Apache? They wrote the HTTP server that runs the web.
[Edit] Why is the reply nonsense? The point is fairly clear -- there are far more established, widely used, complex and important projects that do not have such vitriolic personalities attached. Zed Shaw's known for his blog posts, not because of any proportionally notable contribution to the open source community.
(The original unmodified comment referred to this reply as "nonsense").
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.
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.
I'd hire Zed just for his online presence. I'd put him in the Technology Evangelist role he mentioned. Just having Zed on staff would mean instant publicity for a small startup. Even if he doesn't play nice (although he seems like a reasonable guy if you watch his talks), you could keep him relatively isolated in that type of role. Let him work on Lamson while he pimps your product all over the web and at conferences.
I'm sure he'll find something worthwhile, tho, because of his presence. So overall, it will help him.
If he wants a management position, not so much, IMO.
What qualities does he bring that would make him a good leader? It's his way or the highway, he's always right, everybody else are idiots, has a taste for drama...
Yep, just what any struggling organization needs. Dissent is fine, what Zed brings - just in a blog - would suck to work with.
I think he's a good programmer and self-promoter, but nothing of his that I've read would lead me to put him in charge of something. In a few years, when he's matured some, maybe.
It is one way to network. You can do it without a blog, too -- call up old clients/bosses/etc that you've overdelivered to and ask them what they've heard on the grapevine. (Works better if they remember you as someone they sincerely enjoyed working with and that they would recommend to friends.)
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.
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.
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.
I have no problem being told face-to-face when I'm doing stupid things, even in front of my peers if it happens that way, but someone blogging about the stupid things I do would definitely piss me off.
Personally, as someone without a ton of experience, I'd love the opportunity to work with Zed. With some of the position responsibilities he's looking for, I think the chance to be mentored by him would definitely be a plus.
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?
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
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.
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.
A large number of companies also pay developers to work on Eclipse as well.
In fact, IBM, one of the largest paying contributors to Eclipse, also pays people to work on a boatload of open source stuff. You don't realize until you actually dig into it yourself.
Most sysadmins need to know lots of different config file syntaxes, protocols, security etc. As a result they are unlikely to be that familiar with C, also there is a massive learning curve with knowing how the kernel works and how to fix it (I've tried). People who know much about the linux kernels and the low level in gerernal are in increasing short supply as more and more students gradate only knowing high level languages and concepts and then following careers in that direction. Also when your employed to run 100 or 1000s of servers it's probably for something business critical, so the employeer pays lots to RedHat and other for support, which in turn pays for kernel devs.
In contrast, for example, a PHP programmer who probably does PHP day-in-day out and not much else is going to find it pretty easy to fix a bug in a PHP framework him/herself and therefore his/her employer doesn't need to pay a big support contract. If problems are found they are probably in the development phase and if the team can't work around them, I would expect any number of freelancers could pick up the problem and fix it.
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.
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)
Long, long before he put up his infamous Rails rant, I spoke with him several times about Mongrel implementation, build issues and getting stuff running on different linux systems.
He seems to me to be a nice guy, a clean coder and yes, a guy who gets things done. Very much in contrast with the generally abrasive character he's built on his website.
Anyway, for what it's worth, I'd have no trouble hiring him.
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.
I've always been of the mind that whatever problems someone has with other persons is between that someone and the other persons. Just because I happen to use Ruby/Rails doesn't make any difference.
I've never met Zed but have been impressed with some of his talks that I have seen. I'd really value the chance to work with him.
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!
Zed is well known in the HN community and looking for a job in a funded startup with about 5 - 20 employees. It seems reasonable that this link ends up here don't you think?
Mmmm...never thought of HN as a job board, but hey! I just created my account 7 minutes ago. :)
thnks, didn't know he was "popular" around HN, just some random, though quite pretentious judging from his blog & linkedin, dude that somehow got squeezed to the front page,
I admit, my comment was a little short-sighted in a way. However, I think someone should be an active member of a community like HN in order to make such a judgement (i.e. not appropriate for HN).
Beyond that, the guidlines say not to post such comments and I strongly agree with it. Should've just downmod it in the first place...
