8 ms·

Employee #1: Reddit

173 points by craigcannon 10y ago

a_small_island 10y ago
>"Craig : [Laughter]" I commented on the last article "Employee 1: Yahoo" [0] regarding interjection of "Hahaha" by the interviewer. Seems it was changed to [Laughter], which seems much more inline and professional. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12009360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12009360
- craigcannon 10y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. :)
- richforrester 10y ago
  I missed the "hahaha", but came into this comment section to see if anyone else thought the "Craig : [Laughter]" got awkward from the get-go. It is phrased like it's a response currently. Very staccato and interrupting the flow of the article. I'd actually do the opposite and go more candid than professional, since "laughter" isn't quite informative. Perhaps something that looks like it's a side note, and less formal. So maybe; (Chris laughs) (Prompting another laugh from the interviewer) etc.
  - type0 10y ago
    > (Chris laughs) (Prompting another laugh from the interviewer) etc. I think that's right, the same as in play writing.
elt0n 10y ago
I guess a touchy question I would've liked to see is "How was it working with Aaron Swartz?," because he seemed like a wonderful person to work with.
- redthrowaway 10y ago
  Except that the entire team hated him. They don't talk about it since his death, likely out of respect, but they were pretty open about him fucking off to Europe and deciding not to show up for a few weeks. They were really angry about him claiming to be a cofounder and insisted that he had very little to do with reddit outside of writing web.py. Funny how the accepted narrative changes after someone dies. Edit: Background: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Aaron-Swartz-and-Steve-Huffman-and-Alexis-Ohanian-not-get-along https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Aaron-Swartz-and-Steve-Huffman...
  - mkolodny 10y ago
    If Aaron Swartz isn't a cofounder of reddit, then Elon Musk isn't a cofounder of PayPal. [1] Edit: As far as I can see, the situation is almost exactly the same. Elon Musk's X.com and PayPal merged into PayPal. And Aaron's Infogami and reddit merged into reddit. The only difference I see is that the reddit founders don't like Aaron being a "cofounder". If they were both mergers, then I think it's fair to call both Elon and Aaron cofounders. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Early_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Early_history
    - redthrowaway 10y ago
      Two points, one minor and one major: 1) Reddit and Infogami merged into Not a Bug, not reddit. 2) Musk acted as a cofounder after the merge; Swartz did not. Swartz stuck around for a couple months post-merge then disappeared. So if you want to call him a "reddit cofounder", you can only do so in the loosest terms possible. He wasn't there for the founding and he didn't put in the work, but it says "cofounder" on the company papers.
      - hellomoto998 10y ago
        > company papers Technically correct... The best kind of correct.
  - the_watcher 10y ago
zoeysaurusrex 10y ago
"The thing about that time was we were all learning how to program web apps while we were building them and there wasn’t really a standard operating procedure or anything." I'm going to have to disagree and say 2005 wasn't all that much "wild west" when writing web apps. Maybe it was for them, but not the enterprise world.
- keysersosa 10y ago
  At the time, in late 2005, we were writing in (I believe) python 2.3 and had rolled our own web framework because it was otherwise normal behavior to hook straight into wscgi. "wild west" might have been a bit of an exaggeration, but the available toolkit was certainly pretty bare bones. It was also quite early in web 2.0, and I still remember when we switched up reddit's frontend to start using prototype.js (which had just come out earlier that year). Being able to use the same ajax call in both IE and Firefox! Magic!
- rimantas 10y ago
  Probably because enterprise was writing the web of 1998 in 2005. Outside it Firefox was gaining traction, web standards movement was in its golden years (IMHO what we have now is a big regression), AJAX was a fresh kid on the block… Fun times.
- justinlardinois 10y ago
  I'm not at all familiar with Reddit's history, but a quick Google search tells me it was originally written in Lisp and then was rewritten in Python and is still Python to this day. I don't think Lisp web apps ever became mainstream, and Python web apps were definitely a wild west back then. The enterprise world was using ASP and Java and Cold Fusion.
  - jandrese 10y ago
    It would be interesting to hear why they switched from Lisp to Python. Was it difficulty in finding qualified people when the company started to expand, or did they run into some other issue? Lisp proponents are always telling me how much better software would be if it were all written in Lisp, but it's really hard to find real world examples of it being used in production. It can't just be that most programmers are all just too dumb to understand the beauty of functional programming.
birken 10y ago
Great series. As a fellow early employee I love for their stories to get told! > That said, startups have culturally matured in the last ten years and it’s been fun to watch ... What’s really great to see is that all those people who were working 16 hours have now grown into their thirties and realized that, “Oh, sleep is really cool.” Something I've noticed as well, though I think it is much more-so the people and not the startup culture. I know some younger people in the early stages of their companies and it seems they are still working really hard and devoting a large section of their life to their company. It does seem natural though that when people get a little older they diversify their life a little bit more.
- wingerlang 10y ago
  Definitely not startup culture, more a computer/tech thing I think. Because this is accurate for anyone that grew up playing games. Also for LAN parties where initially you'd go 2-3 days without sleep but after a few of them you'd start sleeping.
vessenes 10y ago
Money Quote: "The Internet has a long memory!"
slimsag 10y ago
Interesting part to me: > Craig : So you were essentially working part-time? > Chris : Part-time in startup hours but it was like a full-time job. I would normally work from 6 to 2. Then go to sleep, get back up, and do it again. > You know, your 20s are a magical period of time. I could get by on four or five hours of sleep without any major side effects. Basically it was like that for all of 2006. It was like two full-time jobs.
- taneq 10y ago
  I dunno about most people but I can't function well on 5 hours sleep. I feel normal but after 2-3 days of that, I just start getting stupid. Things that I'd normally figure out instantly will stump me for ages. I'll find myself staring at my screen thinking "I know this is simple and I know I can do this." If I'm only doing easy stuff I can cruise by, but if I'm working on anything demanding my productivity plummets.
taurath 10y ago
I would've liked to hear about more of his earlier life, pre-cambridge. How a person working on a phd at cambridge happened to have 2 open rooms in their apartment. A lot of what I'd be interested in is how people actually end up getting the ideas, or meeting the people, or being in the position to take the leap to the success that people have had.
- antisthenes 10y ago
  Luck and being born to well-off parents.
pmarreck 10y ago
When they cover "Employee #1: Thredup.com", let me know lol
- zackkitzmiller 10y ago
  I couldn't get the damn modal to go away so I gave up. Too bad, seemed like a reasonable site.
  - mikestew 10y ago
    I'd suggest running an ad blocker for that modal, but that just renders the unusable (what the hell are they doing over there to pull that off?).
  - pmarreck 10y ago
    A lot of startups are going to this forced-signup model. I'm not a fan (I don't work there anymore), but it does at least make the "funnel" look better on paper, sigh
stevebmark 10y ago
Joining early stage tech startups is a gamble. Being an early employee at a highly successful company is 99.9% luck. I'd rather hear about the early employees at the hundreds of tire-fire startups without business models that investors sink millions into. I think a lot of unshared knowledge lies in those war-torn employees.
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  Reddit has a business model?
  - celticninja 10y ago
    Yeah burn VC money for as long as possible. Seems to be the way things work for many companies.
    - xiaoma 10y ago
      There have been other theories about that: http://gawker.com/did-reddits-former-ceo-just-reveal-a-long-con-plan-to-1717334704 http://gawker.com/did-reddits-former-ceo-just-reveal-a-long-...
- mathattack 10y ago
  An interviewer once told me (when I mentioned a startup that I had worked at imploded) "You need some road rash to understand how to do things." I agree with your point - it's worth learning about how things go at the failures too.
  - amelius 10y ago
    > You need some road rash to understand how to do things This is assuming there is a guaranteed way to become a successful company. What the road rash will teach you is probably that starting an IT company right now is more like being a golddigger. It is all gambling, and the VCs are laughing their way to the bank because they know this, and they wisely spread their money.
mathattack 10y ago
I would say the first three to six months is gonna be a slog. It’s gonna be a tough slog. For better or worse this seems to capture a lot of early startup experience. It's not all the glory of sunshine, rainbows and TEDx talks.
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
> I think the thing we learned most of all there was that breaking into travel is really hard. There are a lot of big players and most travel companies aren’t technology companies. I can’t tell you how many times I was on a call and the other person on the phone was referring to their engineering staff as “IT.” And then they both laugh about it for several lines. I don't get it. Is IT not what they're doing? I like being called an "engineer" as much as the next coder, but there's been plenty of ink spilled over how modern dev work has none of the discipline and care found in "real" engineering disciplines, which is why shit breaks all the time. Insisting that you do "engineering" instead of IT seems like naive egotism at best.
- erik 10y ago
  IT is often used to refer to working with technology in a supporting role in an organization. For example, someone who makes sure the files are backed up and the anti-virus is up to date on the desktops of a company is part of the IT department. Someone in a group that develops software, particularly if it is part of a customer facing product or service, is not considered to be in IT. I think it comes down to the naming convention in common use, as opposed to the literal meaning of the words. The reason why they are laughing about it is presumably because the person on the phone is referring to the people that fix the printers, when they should be talking about the people that write the software, and that these are different groups.
- jnbiche 10y ago
  In the US at least, "IT" is the support staff that maintains networks, provides staff support, approves/rejects new employee software requests (mostly rejects), etc. Software developers/engineers design new products for a company. It's a significant difference. I personally don't mind being called "coder", "programmer", "software developer", or "software engineer" (the last two have been part of my formal titles), but please don't call me "IT".
  - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
    I'm a coder and I've done all of those things, often at the same job where I was coding. Insisting on a sharply-drawn distinction sounds like it's just a way for coders to tell themselves that they're better than support monkeys.
size12font 10y ago
He got offended by the term "IT" when talking about engineers. In Europe and most of the world that's actually the proper term for an engineering department.
- jeroen94704 10y ago
  No, it's not. Maybe where you're at, but not where I'm at.
  - qmr 10y ago
    Writing buggy code does not an engineer make. The pervasive, wanton disrespect for the title in the valley and the tech industry at large is absolutely disgusting.

173 points by craigcannon 10y ago

>"Craig : [Laughter]" I commented on the last article "Employee 1: Yahoo" [0] regarding interjection of "Hahaha" by the interviewer. Seems it was changed to [Laughter], which seems much more inline and professional. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12009360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12009360

craigcannon 10y ago
Thanks for the feedback. :)
richforrester 10y ago
I missed the "hahaha", but came into this comment section to see if anyone else thought the "Craig : [Laughter]" got awkward from the get-go. It is phrased like it's a response currently. Very staccato and interrupting the flow of the article. I'd actually do the opposite and go more candid than professional, since "laughter" isn't quite informative. Perhaps something that looks like it's a side note, and less formal. So maybe; (Chris laughs) (Prompting another laugh from the interviewer) etc.
- type0 10y ago
  > (Chris laughs) (Prompting another laugh from the interviewer) etc. I think that's right, the same as in play writing.

elt0n 10y ago

I guess a touchy question I would've liked to see is "How was it working with Aaron Swartz?," because he seemed like a wonderful person to work with.

redthrowaway 10y ago
Except that the entire team hated him. They don't talk about it since his death, likely out of respect, but they were pretty open about him fucking off to Europe and deciding not to show up for a few weeks. They were really angry about him claiming to be a cofounder and insisted that he had very little to do with reddit outside of writing web.py. Funny how the accepted narrative changes after someone dies. Edit: Background: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Aaron-Swartz-and-Steve-Huffman-and-Alexis-Ohanian-not-get-along https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Aaron-Swartz-and-Steve-Huffman...
- mkolodny 10y ago
  If Aaron Swartz isn't a cofounder of reddit, then Elon Musk isn't a cofounder of PayPal. [1] Edit: As far as I can see, the situation is almost exactly the same. Elon Musk's X.com and PayPal merged into PayPal. And Aaron's Infogami and reddit merged into reddit. The only difference I see is that the reddit founders don't like Aaron being a "cofounder". If they were both mergers, then I think it's fair to call both Elon and Aaron cofounders. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Early_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Early_history
  - redthrowaway 10y ago
    Two points, one minor and one major: 1) Reddit and Infogami merged into Not a Bug, not reddit. 2) Musk acted as a cofounder after the merge; Swartz did not. Swartz stuck around for a couple months post-merge then disappeared. So if you want to call him a "reddit cofounder", you can only do so in the loosest terms possible. He wasn't there for the founding and he didn't put in the work, but it says "cofounder" on the company papers.
    - hellomoto998 10y ago
      > company papers Technically correct... The best kind of correct.
- the_watcher 10y ago

zoeysaurusrex 10y ago

"The thing about that time was we were all learning how to program web apps while we were building them and there wasn’t really a standard operating procedure or anything." I'm going to have to disagree and say 2005 wasn't all that much "wild west" when writing web apps. Maybe it was for them, but not the enterprise world.

keysersosa 10y ago
At the time, in late 2005, we were writing in (I believe) python 2.3 and had rolled our own web framework because it was otherwise normal behavior to hook straight into wscgi. "wild west" might have been a bit of an exaggeration, but the available toolkit was certainly pretty bare bones. It was also quite early in web 2.0, and I still remember when we switched up reddit's frontend to start using prototype.js (which had just come out earlier that year). Being able to use the same ajax call in both IE and Firefox! Magic!
rimantas 10y ago
Probably because enterprise was writing the web of 1998 in 2005. Outside it Firefox was gaining traction, web standards movement was in its golden years (IMHO what we have now is a big regression), AJAX was a fresh kid on the block… Fun times.
justinlardinois 10y ago
I'm not at all familiar with Reddit's history, but a quick Google search tells me it was originally written in Lisp and then was rewritten in Python and is still Python to this day. I don't think Lisp web apps ever became mainstream, and Python web apps were definitely a wild west back then. The enterprise world was using ASP and Java and Cold Fusion.
- jandrese 10y ago
  It would be interesting to hear why they switched from Lisp to Python. Was it difficulty in finding qualified people when the company started to expand, or did they run into some other issue? Lisp proponents are always telling me how much better software would be if it were all written in Lisp, but it's really hard to find real world examples of it being used in production. It can't just be that most programmers are all just too dumb to understand the beauty of functional programming.

birken 10y ago

Great series. As a fellow early employee I love for their stories to get told! > That said, startups have culturally matured in the last ten years and it’s been fun to watch ... What’s really great to see is that all those people who were working 16 hours have now grown into their thirties and realized that, “Oh, sleep is really cool.” Something I've noticed as well, though I think it is much more-so the people and not the startup culture. I know some younger people in the early stages of their companies and it seems they are still working really hard and devoting a large section of their life to their company. It does seem natural though that when people get a little older they diversify their life a little bit more.

wingerlang 10y ago
Definitely not startup culture, more a computer/tech thing I think. Because this is accurate for anyone that grew up playing games. Also for LAN parties where initially you'd go 2-3 days without sleep but after a few of them you'd start sleeping.

vessenes 10y ago

Money Quote: "The Internet has a long memory!"

slimsag 10y ago

Interesting part to me: > Craig : So you were essentially working part-time? > Chris : Part-time in startup hours but it was like a full-time job. I would normally work from 6 to 2. Then go to sleep, get back up, and do it again. > You know, your 20s are a magical period of time. I could get by on four or five hours of sleep without any major side effects. Basically it was like that for all of 2006. It was like two full-time jobs.

taneq 10y ago
I dunno about most people but I can't function well on 5 hours sleep. I feel normal but after 2-3 days of that, I just start getting stupid. Things that I'd normally figure out instantly will stump me for ages. I'll find myself staring at my screen thinking "I know this is simple and I know I can do this." If I'm only doing easy stuff I can cruise by, but if I'm working on anything demanding my productivity plummets.

taurath 10y ago

I would've liked to hear about more of his earlier life, pre-cambridge. How a person working on a phd at cambridge happened to have 2 open rooms in their apartment. A lot of what I'd be interested in is how people actually end up getting the ideas, or meeting the people, or being in the position to take the leap to the success that people have had.

antisthenes 10y ago
Luck and being born to well-off parents.

pmarreck 10y ago

When they cover "Employee #1: Thredup.com", let me know lol

zackkitzmiller 10y ago
I couldn't get the damn modal to go away so I gave up. Too bad, seemed like a reasonable site.
- mikestew 10y ago
  I'd suggest running an ad blocker for that modal, but that just renders the unusable (what the hell are they doing over there to pull that off?).
- pmarreck 10y ago
  A lot of startups are going to this forced-signup model. I'm not a fan (I don't work there anymore), but it does at least make the "funnel" look better on paper, sigh

stevebmark 10y ago

Joining early stage tech startups is a gamble. Being an early employee at a highly successful company is 99.9% luck. I'd rather hear about the early employees at the hundreds of tire-fire startups without business models that investors sink millions into. I think a lot of unshared knowledge lies in those war-torn employees.

Hydraulix989 10y ago
Reddit has a business model?
- celticninja 10y ago
  Yeah burn VC money for as long as possible. Seems to be the way things work for many companies.
  - xiaoma 10y ago
    There have been other theories about that: http://gawker.com/did-reddits-former-ceo-just-reveal-a-long-con-plan-to-1717334704 http://gawker.com/did-reddits-former-ceo-just-reveal-a-long-...
mathattack 10y ago
An interviewer once told me (when I mentioned a startup that I had worked at imploded) "You need some road rash to understand how to do things." I agree with your point - it's worth learning about how things go at the failures too.
- amelius 10y ago
  > You need some road rash to understand how to do things This is assuming there is a guaranteed way to become a successful company. What the road rash will teach you is probably that starting an IT company right now is more like being a golddigger. It is all gambling, and the VCs are laughing their way to the bank because they know this, and they wisely spread their money.

mathattack 10y ago

I would say the first three to six months is gonna be a slog. It’s gonna be a tough slog. For better or worse this seems to capture a lot of early startup experience. It's not all the glory of sunshine, rainbows and TEDx talks.

PhasmaFelis 10y ago

> I think the thing we learned most of all there was that breaking into travel is really hard. There are a lot of big players and most travel companies aren’t technology companies. I can’t tell you how many times I was on a call and the other person on the phone was referring to their engineering staff as “IT.” And then they both laugh about it for several lines. I don't get it. Is IT not what they're doing? I like being called an "engineer" as much as the next coder, but there's been plenty of ink spilled over how modern dev work has none of the discipline and care found in "real" engineering disciplines, which is why shit breaks all the time. Insisting that you do "engineering" instead of IT seems like naive egotism at best.

erik 10y ago
IT is often used to refer to working with technology in a supporting role in an organization. For example, someone who makes sure the files are backed up and the anti-virus is up to date on the desktops of a company is part of the IT department. Someone in a group that develops software, particularly if it is part of a customer facing product or service, is not considered to be in IT. I think it comes down to the naming convention in common use, as opposed to the literal meaning of the words. The reason why they are laughing about it is presumably because the person on the phone is referring to the people that fix the printers, when they should be talking about the people that write the software, and that these are different groups.
jnbiche 10y ago
In the US at least, "IT" is the support staff that maintains networks, provides staff support, approves/rejects new employee software requests (mostly rejects), etc. Software developers/engineers design new products for a company. It's a significant difference. I personally don't mind being called "coder", "programmer", "software developer", or "software engineer" (the last two have been part of my formal titles), but please don't call me "IT".
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  I'm a coder and I've done all of those things, often at the same job where I was coding. Insisting on a sharply-drawn distinction sounds like it's just a way for coders to tell themselves that they're better than support monkeys.

size12font 10y ago

He got offended by the term "IT" when talking about engineers. In Europe and most of the world that's actually the proper term for an engineering department.

jeroen94704 10y ago
No, it's not. Maybe where you're at, but not where I'm at.
- qmr 10y ago
  Writing buggy code does not an engineer make. The pervasive, wanton disrespect for the title in the valley and the tech industry at large is absolutely disgusting.