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Comment by rfmoz | Hacker News Reader

Maybe a coincidence, but Eric Allman is the developer of Sendmail [1] and the spouse of Marshall Kirk McKusick, one of the long-serving board members that left the FreeBSD Foundation this summer [2].

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Allman [2] - https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/foundation-elects-new-off...

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It's especially funny that Marshall said never tell anyone that your are good at writing drivers or sendmail-configuration because that will be your life's destination then ;)

Heh, similar to "never let your coworkers know you are good with Excel". Or, in non-tech offices, never let anyone know you understand technology at all.

I wonder if there's a name for that general sentiment, and how far back comments on that sort of thing go.

"The reward for a job well done is usually another job to do. Remember that if you're ever tempted to do a good job of something thankless and unpleasant."

I interviewed somewhere without a resume, because of a referral, but the CEO asked me what I did, so I started at the beginning without thinking... 12 years before I started there, I had worked at a rinky-dink ISP, and before that I did IT at a school district as a student worker.... guess who got to configure mail and manage the domains and own the GSuite account. Bah

McKusick is also known for the filesystem (FFS / UFS).

The use of sendmail in FreeBSD isn't exactly a coincidence -- it, too, was developed at Berkeley in the 70s and 80s. And it's probably unsurprising that people meet other people living and working in the same place (grad school).

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