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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

I read Zed's post as being about recognition which can be a positive force. It is a smart move for a company or a language community to reward individuals who have made a positive contribution. This is an issue related to ego but is not exactly ego.

However, it is also true that often the contributions of certain people are not commensurate with their recognition. Sometimes they deserve more recognition and sometimes less. This is often a function of PR. I posit that Zed gets less recognition than he deserves in part because of mismanaged PR. This doesn't make him deserve the recognition any less. It also points to a way he might get some of the recognition he deserves.

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I posit that Zed gets far more recognition than he deserves because he puts himself out there and actually does manage his PR pretty well.

There are people at the Googleplex that have done amazing work - filesystems, webservers, machine-learning algorithms, core changes to the ranking algorithm, all significantly higher performance & quality than what Zed has written, stuff that gets millions of queries per day and is crucial to folks' everyday existence. If you Google their names, you might come up with a lone blog post on the Googleblog giving a 5-minute soundbite on what they do, or an academic paper from 1994 detailing some obscure technical contribution to a programming language that nobody knows.

I remember that when I was working for startups and small companies, I thought that most software development happens "out there", in the open-source cloud, and really looked up to the prominent figures in the open-source world. Then I got to Google, and realized that what I knew from the public papers was barely the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Now I have to assume that other large corporations - other tech companies, Wall St. - have similarly impressive secrets locked up behind their confidentiality walls, stuff that we'll never know about but that is far better than the best open-source alternatives around.

> Now I have to assume that other large corporations - other tech companies, Wall St. - have similarly impressive secrets locked up behind their confidentiality walls, stuff that we'll never know about but that is far better than the best open-source alternatives around.

Which also shows the power of open source, as a tool for enhancing your reputation.

No need to assume. I know such awesome stuff exists.

Until I read this comment, I didn't realize it was a Zed Shaw post. I must have skimmed right past the byline. I read the whole article without even knowing it was written by a famous programmer.

Probably because the headline of his blog is no longer "Zed's So Fucking Awesome", with the attendant imagery that complimented it so well.

He's remarkably relaxed these days. :)

I was just pissed that I got tricked into reading Yet Another Angry Zed rant. Changing domains lets him get around my brain's douche blocker.

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