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Jedberg leaves reddit
- starnix17 15y agoWhat are the odds he ends up at Hipmunk? It's not mentioned at all in the post, but it seems like a lot of ex-reddit employees end up there.
- rottencupcakes 15y agoHe confirms he isn't in the thread: > Not leaving to work at Hipmunk? Breaking tradition eh? > Jedberg: Nah, they're full up on awesomeness already. http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/i29yk/all_good_things/c20anqk http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/i29yk/all_good_things/...
- Hovertruck 15y agoWow, I just watched him give a presentation on reddit architecture at Velocity yesterday. Shame to see him go.
- jedberg 15y agoAnd let me tell you how awkward that was knowing that I was going to post this today! And not being able to say anything.
- phlux 15y agoLink / video to said presentation please?
- malnourish 15y agoWere you able to make arrangements with the team to make the transition easier? Do they know the ropes as well as you? Was there much camaraderie among the team members? It seemed that way. Did you have to agree to/sign anything from Conde Nast to proceed with your resignation? I wish you the best of luck and I hope you succeed both personally and in future ventures.
- jedberg 15y agoWe all got along very well and I'm confident that they will be able to handle it. Also, I'm not dropping off the face of the planet -- they can still ask me questions. :)
- mscarborough 15y agoI was at your talk and gotta give you all props for trying out pretty much every new technology under the sun -- from all the Amazon services, to memcachedb, to Cassandra. And for sharing what went wrong with various components.
- jedberg 15y agoWell, one of the ways we try to stay lean is by using new technologies that solve problems so we didn't have to. I guess this was a nice side effect.
- Hovertruck 15y agoWell, the included cat and transformer pictures must have helped.
- jedberg 15y agoI'm glad at least someone liked those. It was hard to tell from the stage. I imagine people were a bit more subdued given the late hour of the day. At least, that is what I hope!
- kacy 15y agoHe was employee number one and I think the last remaining link to the founding team (not sure). I've got a lot of respect for him, especially after meeting him in person when I toured the office earlier this year. His commute was over 2 hours each day, and he had to deal with all the scaling issues with amazon almost single-handedly, not to mention the Saturday nights that were devoted to keeping the site up. I wish you the best, dude. Hopefully you'll join hipmunk! :-)
- jedberg 15y agoFirst I have to clarify that nothing I did was single handed. I couldn't possibly have done what I did without the support of the awesomeness that was the rest of team reddit. As for hipmunk, I think they already have too much talent, since they have the rest of reddit. :)
- phlux 15y agoWhere were you commuting from?
- jedberg 15y agoCupertino.
- holdenk 15y agoYou should come swing by the foursquare offices sometime if your bored, I'll get you a fresh pack of bacon if you give me a heads up :)
- jedberg 15y agoEverything up to the bacon sounded good. :) I think you sent me an email, I'll hit you up there.
- emmett 15y agoJedberg was not on the founding team of Reddit. The founding team of reddit was Steve Huffman (spez) and Alexis Ohanian (kn0thing). Jedberg was their first hire after acquisition, though they'd acquired two other team members via merger (Chris Slowe and Aaron Swartz) prior to that.
- blhack 15y agoIMHO, this is a major, major loss for reddit. Jedberg, I know you read HN -- you were a hugely important part of that community; any time there was about to be a user revolt, it seemed like a red-lettered Jedberg would pop up in the thread to calm everybody down. I don't think you were technically a community manager (were you?) but you did a damn good job at it anyway.
- notatoad 15y agojedberg was officially the sysadmin. but when you have a staff of ~5, everybody kind of fills all the roles no matter what their title is.
- jedberg 15y agoThank you. That really means a lot to me.
- blhack 15y agoGood, man. You deserve every word of praise that you get, especially for keeping that site running with the team you had (5, was it? And you were the only SA?). Good luck at whatever it is that you decide to do :)
- jedberg 15y agoThank you. That's very kind of you. The most dire time was right after raldi left, when I had just two tech people, a programmer and a sysadmin.
- bxr 15y agojedberg - Its sad to see you go, I remember when you came on at reddit. Whats next for you?
- jedberg 15y agoRight now I'm going to enjoy the nice summer weather and take care of some things that I've been neglecting for a while. Then we'll see where the wind takes me. :) The last paragraph of the blog post has details.
- ivanbernat 15y agoA guy with so much knowledge about running such a huge site probably has hundreds of job offers. Best of luck Jedberg, wish you all the best!
- jcol 15y agoReddit has quite a few stability/uptime problems. Probably not his fault, but a scary prospect nonetheless. EDIT: Did I get downvoted by someone who thinks Reddit is stable? It clearly isn't and anyone who thinks otherwise is dreaming. I guess I'll stop going against the HN hivemind just to keep my account in good standing. This place feels more like Reddit every day.
- younata 15y ago> This place feels more like Reddit every day. That's why I downmodded you.
- pbhjpbhj 15y agoDidn't you prove him right ...?
- radioactive21 15y agoPretty much HN reminds me of Reddit before Digg imploded.
- esun 15y agoYeah, just like reddit. Especially posts complaining about downvotes.
- recoiledsnake 15y agoI think it's off base to blame someone that has meager personnel running such a highly trafficked site, especially since Conde Nast is/was reluctant to hire more. Read his blogs on his dedication to putting out fires. He didn't get enough resources to manage the complexity. I think most of HN's readers would hire him in a heartbeat, if they only got the chance. This is the reason that you're getting downvoted, not because people think it's stable.
- fragsworth 15y ago4 years, I wonder if his shares just fully vested and he's been waiting for it.
- brown9-2 15y agoI might be mistaken but Conde Nast is a privately owned company.
- eggbrain 15y agoThe biggest question I have is: why are so many people leaving Reddit? Over the past few months, the site has grown continuously yet the people that have been the driving force of the site seem to be leaving just as the site is hitting its peak. What has changed?
- Hovertruck 15y agoThere's a lot to be said for wanting to work in small teams. I know the growth isn't that dramatic, but it's perfectly reasonable to step away and start something new if the new environment isn't ideal for you.
- brown9-2 15y agoI think it might actually be a different aspect of having (or having had) a small team: that the churn over time is more noticeable when the number of employees is just a handful. Jedberg has been with reddit for over 4 years, as he mentions.
- wccrawford 15y agoMaybe nothing has changed other than the obvious. People who work for small companies tend to do so because they like it. The same goes for those who work for big companies. Reddit is not a small company any more. The massive growth would have brought a lot of internal changes. It doesn't surprise me that people are out seeking what they like again.
- wccrawford 15y agoWhile I'm not nearly so famous as he is, and the job wasn't either, I know how he feels... I had the same routine as him. Check things all day from the time you wake until you go to sleep, and when you do sleep, fear that you'll be woken up by a problem. And I know what a relief it was when it was gone. It really does feel like a weight has been lifted from your shoulders.
- sidcool 15y agoJedber will be missed.
- staunch 15y agoFrom someone that spent years sysadmining very high traffic systems: Well done sir. Well done. Been using Reddit since launch. Somewhat nervous that the new people running Reddit will get overrun by the corporate overlords now that they see the "hockey stick" traffic charts. I can see some bean counter doing the math: Slap 4 teeth whitening ads on every page = 4 ad impressions * 1.2 billion page views = 4.8 billion ad impressions * $0.30 - $0.50 eCPM = $17 - $28 million/year.
- blhack 15y agoI've said it before, so I apologize for repeating myself, but it shocks me (shocks!) that reddit doesn't append affiliate IDs to all of the outbound links to amazon that are generated. I've probably made well over $100 in purchases just in the last few months via links I've seen on reddit. ("Can you recommend a good book on welding/bicycles/iOS dev/etc.") Hopefully they don't do what you're suggesting, because I think if they did, the users would leave almost immediately (and probably flood HN).
- patrickyeon 15y agoLast time I saw this suggested, the more-or-less official response was along the lines of "we thought about it, but we'd be unable to convince everyone that those types of links aren't being tampered with (ranking-wise)" from which I inferred that the trust of their community was (is) worth more than that revenue stream.
- drivebyacct2 15y agoAds are one thing. Manipulating user content for profit is seedy
- antirez 15y agoThere is something sounding very wrong about that: the work of a sysadmin that is of value for a big site should never reach the point to be so stressful that you have to wake up on alerts too many times. It may happen 4 or 5 days every year maybe, if it is worse than that then there is something wrong. It is not impossible that jedberg is actually leaving because that kind of condition is not good in the long time. But here the problem is, a better employer would fix the root cause instead of letting good people go. I'm saying that as I think this happens in many places actually, and is a huge mistake. A lot of work and traffic should never turn into a nightmare for a few guys.
- Joakal 15y agoThat's a good point, why can't responses be automated to alerts? I wonder what critical parts he needs to fix.
- redthrowaway 15y agoThey did automate most of it. They need to get off EBS, as there are simply too many issues with it that have a negative effect on performance and stability. Doing that, however, is a bit of a task.
- fourply 15y agoi actually got a little teary-eyed about this. i know i'll "see him around" as much as anyone can in communities like these but it really is sad.
- ohashi 15y agoWhat would you like to do now Jedberg?