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Comment by acjohnson55 | Hacker News Reader

This sure sounds nice, and I believe Paul when it comes to his perception. But I'd need more convincing that this is objectively and not just something Paul sees because he's good at filtering out the people he doesn't want to work with.

A couple counterexamples come to mind. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and the Uber executive team, the Github husband and wife with the Horvath incident. Of course I can't generalize these cases either, but these are prominent companies where the truism doesn't hold.

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This, and I suspect most people are smart enough to know they shouldn't be mean around (and especially) towards him or his wife.

They're real tough harassing an employee but what are they gonna do to me?

Don't make me laugh about some pathetic losers like TPW and wife. They're bullies and they got what they deserved, if not enough.

Sounds like pg needs to become an undercover employee to see the other side. Try being an Uber driver.

Forget Uber driver, what about a code monkey at some YC startup? I've seen the cable show "Undercover Boss" a handful of times and they manage to sneak in company founders with some minimal, reasonable makeup techniques.

Imagine pg entering some RoR shop (or better, Clojure) and getting his code reviewed by a CTO who's a few years out of college.

"You can't sleep, pg, until you implement these changes!"

Do you actually work at a RoR or Clojure shop, or are you speaking from "cable show watching experience" ? Having worked at a number of such places in the Valley, the number of times I've been told that I can't go home or to lunch or whatever until such-and-such a thing is done has been zero.

Now, a finance startup in New York where the stack is Java and .NET? Absolutely.

I meant it would be funny more from a technical perspective regarding his history with Lisp and as something of a programming luminary, other commenters appear to be talking more about brutal work schedules.

Can you expand on why you think Tom Preston-Werner is mean? From all I've seen he appears to be a good person.

GitHub reached 150 employees without having anyone quit, which hardly seems likely if the Founder and CEO is mean.

https://twitter.com/holman/status/303576839132164097

Tom's reputation was ruined because he was sexist or something (https://gigaom.com/2014/04/21/githubs-tom-preston-werner-res...)

There was another side to the story - https://medium.com/@geeekcore1/facts-conveniently-withheld-d... I don't think any of us in the peanut gallery can really know if Tom Preston is a good or bad person, without knowing what really happened from the inside, and without knowing who is lying or spinning and who is telling the truth.

I agree, and even if he did something wrong, that shouldn't taint the guy forever. "Linus is rude" is a similar problem.

It was ruined for the people who believed the other side, not for everyone.

And of course Kevin O'Leary.

Don't forget Vinod Khosla. From reading HN one could also be forgiven far thinking that every single amazon employee in management outside AWS is devoid of all positive human traits.

Ahahah. I don't think Kevin O'Leary is mean, he plays the persona for sure tho.

This GoDaddy guy?

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