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Comment by Cacti | Hacker News Reader

What's the point of being a Chief Engineer if you can't even get some software (the mod tools) written? That seems like an awfully low bar for someone in that position, and to throw in the towel after she barely started seems to speak more to her character than any problems with Reddit.

I mean... you hire someone for a top technical position and they quit when the first bump comes along? That's ridiculous.

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I would guess it's more like "I will be building out the product we needed all along, but now with intense board scrutiny, half the budget I wanted, a quarter the timeline we need, and a new CEO (who I may not like). I'm rich enough that I don't have to put up with this shit. See you guys."

Yeah, I don't blame her at all for leaving. Reddit seems like an incredibly poorly run company.

> and a new CEO (who I may not like)

Spez isn't just a "New CEO" he's the original programmer, CEO and co-founder of Reddit. He understands the community more than anyone could fathom someone could. Of all choices I think he's the best choice.

He's focusing on bringing better mod tools, so being the technical lead, I'd be excited for these bumps coming up, not running away with my tail between my legs.

Honestly, if I were Chief Engineer the idea of the original programmer becoming CEO would be a potential nightmare.

I think Spez is a good choice, probably the best choice, but remember that he's been working on a different, unrelated startup for 5 years now. A lot changes in 5 years. The Reddit community now absolutely isn't the Reddit community that existed 5 years ago, the Reddit codebase isn't the same as it was 5 years ago, the Reddit employee base and corporate structure isn't the same. It'll be interesting to see how well he adapts to the situation as it is now.

> That seems like an awfully low bar for someone in that position

Given that Reddit has repeatedly said "our infrastructure/codebase is super-complicated" every time users have complained about server stability and the lack of features, that might actually be the truth, and being Chief Engineer is a task that's doomed to fail.

The schema was written by Tony the Pony in collaboration with Zalgo. Everyone I've ever known to look at the codebase ran away screaming with bleeding eyeballs.

whoo boy, I recently did a contract job deploying a clone of reddit (directly using their source code on Github), and yes... it is a gigantic mess of ugly crap code and bizarre design decisions. I'm kind of surprised it works as well as it does.

It was last designed eight years ago and the design hasn't changed much since. It's not surprising that you found it messy.

Unless she got in the position, took one look around and realized there was no way to get to the goals stated... in the long term, better to move on, do something else than get stuck with the bag of poop once the musical chairs are done.

I have no idea what's going on inside reddit, just my two cents / devil's advocate thing.

A Chief Engineer still has a budget, a CEO and a board to answer to. The budget is especially important - if a promise is made to deliver X and Y within six months but you can't hire enough developers to get it done then even the most talented Engineer in the world is going to fail.

So move the dates. These things aren't set in stone and part of her job is to convince the board and everyone else what is realistic and what isn't, convince them that X requires Y budget and Z time and what the risks are and that the investment is worth it and so on.

It's possible that she resigned after she tried that and they blew her off.

True, and if that's why she left that's fine with me.

You'll be pleased to hear that she really values you being fine with it, as do we all.

spez the CEO has made public time commitments for certain updates.

You have no basis on which to attack her character. Circumstances have changed significantly since she started. Why is your first assumption that she's weak? Victoria was fired for standing up for users. Maybe Bethanye was being put in a similar position and wanted to leave on her own terms rather than compromise her ideals.

He now, I'm not attacking her character, and I'm not calling her weak.

What I'm saying is that there is no possible way anyone in that position, in that span of time, with all the personnel changes going on, could possibly understand the problem well enough both in technical terms and in terms of the management and resources and budget, to come to a reasonable conclusion that it's just impossible.

Now, perhaps there is something else going on, like you said, and in which case, well, that's her decision and right to do whatever she wants. But that's not what she's saying.

She may well just have no confidence in reddit's current leadership, of course. Given the recent amazing behaviour by the founder and various ex-CEOs, that would hardly be entirely unreasonable. The whole thing looks like a complete mess.

IMHO, a couple of months is plenty of time to survey a codebase and a company's political landscape.

It's possible she liked what pao was doing and she did say outright pao was setup (glass cliff) and "indirect" gender discrimination at play.

So, just sayin' what she may be sayin', it's not the technical, but social problems at play.

there is not only the fact that they need to be developed... if I remember correctly they gave dates to have them in production. maybe she felt she could not have them done on time.

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