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The only time I was ever fired from a job, it was for doing this. I rewrote an entire web crawler stack using parallel event driven programming, yielding a crawler that could crawl the same number of sites they currently needed 10+ EC2 instances for on my laptop without breaking a sweat. I did it in a one-week + weekend maniac code binge.

I was a little peeved, but looking back not so much. I was receiving pressure and what I felt were conflicting orders from the CTO and CEO, and any company that lets someone go for showing initiative is not a place I want to work. I found a more fitting job doing high-speed creative product prototyping (where they want that kind of thing) afterwords, and for more money.

(It was a startup, and I now see it as having had some funny politics going on. I also think that one of the co-founders wanted me gone since I didn't graduate from one of the "right schools." He was a huge school-snob.)

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I did the exact same thing a while back. The company I worked with used 4 fully-loaded servers driving Java spiders while I used 2 y/o laptop and 100 lines of Erlang.

Showed the code to my manager, he left the room saying I should do some "real" sysadmin work and stop playing around.

Just for a test, I started spidering big local news sites with I think 10000 threads and left it running for about 15 minutes.

Two things happened: 1. I consumed all bandwidth, rendering Internet unusable for the whole company, and 2. got about 10% of data other 4 Java servers could gather in a day

This stunt didn't get me fired, but my manager insisted I delete the program I wrote. Nobody was interested in results I got so nothing happened.

But it was fun watching bandwidth usage RRD graphs go through the roof :)

Interesting, the link to your blog in your profile goes to a parked domain (just FYI).

I hear these sorts of tales occasionally and I recognize a manager who is out of their league when comes to keeping someone with your skill set engaged. If crawling the big local news sites was something useful for the company, moving your application to a hosted machine where it had access to more bandwidth would have been a start, of course a demonstration is just that, a demonstration. The next step which is a bit harder might be to crunch the data into some sort of data structure for later analysis.

If this is the kind of problem you enjoy working on and are in the SF Bay area we should talk :-)

Yeah. In general, nobody knows how to write network code. I have seen tons of network apps that perform horribly and use utterly absurd amounts of resources for trivial tasks.

Used to work in a fortune 500 company that would send email notifications to customers telling them their monthly statements were available. Unfortunately, the monkeys who coded the email sending didn't understand the protocol, obviously had not read the RFC. The code would blindly send smtp commands without waiting for a response. One day the smtp server decided to change its behavior due to a dns misconfiguration and many emails were lost.

a startup fired you for showing initiative and doing more with less? messed up.

IMHO, I think they really fired me because I one of the co-founders didn't like me because graduated from the University of Cincinnati instead of MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc.

I figured this out later when I checked their blog and he had prominently mentioned how they like to make sure their candidates are the "right people" from the "right schools." It was a very explicit statement, essentially that being from the "right school" is part of being the "right person."

I encountered this a lot in Boston actually, to the point that I developed a complex about how I couldn't really do anything because I hadn't gone to Harvard. Then I moved away and realized that the rest of the world outside this bubble doesn't care about that.

Whoa, I'm in Cincinnati. Are you still in the area? What are your thoughts on UC nixing the ComSci program?

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