8 ms·

How I Failed to Change Wasmer

197 points by qprofyeh 5y ago

overgard 5y ago
I feel for the author, but he keeps talking about "love" and "passion". Perspective is needed. It's a way to run some code. It's alright to be excited by what you work on but it's just a mechanical thing. Don't wrap your self identity into it. If 80% of your engineers are leaving its just a bad workplace. You don't have to apologize for leaving.
- fosk 5y ago
  I mean the "wheel" is also really a weird shaped object yet it advanced humanity. The impact of what anybody is building expands beyond the technology itself to all the potential use cases that this new thing enables. It doesn't have a depth of 1. It has a depth of 100.
  - overgard 5y ago
    Well, if you think a web assembly runtime is the same thing as the wheel then I'm probably wrong. But I'm going to venture a guess that the web assembly runtime isn't /quite/ that important.
    - fosk 5y ago
      Reality is that nobody knows what is the long lasting impact of web assembly in our industry in the years (or decades) to come, unless somebody can predict the future. As such, if somebody is passionate about it and gives all their heart and mind to it, I see where they are coming from and I respect their commitment. To imply that "It is just XYZ" in dismissive tone, well that is quite rude and disrespectful at this point in time.
PaulHoule 5y ago
How is a company like that supposed to make money? Without a plan to be sustainable doesn’t it have to end in tears?
- moocowtruck 5y ago
  no you ride on rainbows with fixies and drink chai latte...and then taking care of the money part is the "toxic" part
- outside1234 5y ago
  You sell the talent at the company to Google.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    Isn't that "end in tears?"
    - outside1234 5y ago
      Amen brother
astlouis44 5y ago
Syrus Akbary the founder clearly has issues, as evidenced by his public smackdown and disrespect of Mozilla employees working on WASM which was hinted at in this blog post.
- cute_boi 5y ago
  Is that something to do with lin clark (forgive me if there is mistake in name). But yes this is not the first time I have heard bad about wasmer. I don't know if ceo was involved in that impertinent act. Its really painful to see people suffer :(
  - astlouis44 5y ago
    It is indeed, sadly because Lin is awesome. So is the entire Mozilla team doing pioneering work with WASM, fyi they mostly moved over to Fastly where they're continuing their work.
kreetx 5y ago
Looks like CEO's expectations were way too high? Wonder why, as he seemes to be a developer himself.
idan 5y ago
It physically hurt to read this story.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
The author seems to be making live changes to the article. It started as “How I failed to Change Wasmer” but it’s now titled “I’ve loved Wasmer, I still love Wasmer”. This is a tough story to read for anyone who has been passionate about a startup only to watch it decline under management quarrels. However, I have mixed feelings about this article because the author appears to be a co-founder of the company despite writing much of the article from the perspective of an IC engineer who was taken advantage of. He downplays the role of co-founder later by explaining that he was a “late co-founder” but he also writes about he was responsible for many founder-level activities later in the article. The only thing worse than startup leadership quarrels is watching one of the founders turn around and try to sink the company by airing all of their dirty laundry on the way out. I don’t necessarily doubt that the environment was toxic, but we’re also only getting one side of the story. If there were any engineers or managers still working at Wasmer and hoping to turn the ship around, this blog post may have destroyed any chance of that. Imagine joining this company only to have a co-founder turn around and advertise to the world how terrible the company is. I also wish the author would have elaborated more on their original title (“How I failed to change Wasmer”) instead of laying all of the blame on the other co-founder and alluding to toxicities. I suppose the real lesson here is to avoid becoming a co-founder in a company where you know you’re incompatible with the other founders. It never ends well.
- Floegipoky 5y ago
  It seemed to me like the author was not actually a cofounder, he was an early hire working under a freelance contract who was retroactively named a "late-cofounder", whatever that means, once the whole thing started to go off the rails. And it also sounded like he was a victim of wage theft and other abusive management behaviors. The CEO may not have displayed such toxic tendencies in the beginning when things were going well.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- joshstrange 5y ago
  > The only thing worse than startup leadership quarrels is watching one of the founder exit the company and air all of their dirty laundry on the way out. If there were any engineers or managers still working at Wasmer and hoping to turn the ship around, this blog post may have destroyed any chance of that. What is the alternative though? I mean this developer, at least from their telling of it, had held almost every role in the company up to and including co-founder (at least in title, it sounds like the founder continued to hold him at arms length), if that's all true then what else could this person do other than air out the dirty laundry? They, by their own admission, tried everything they could from within the company and so now they are leaving and letting their truth be known. At worst nothing changes at Wasmer, at best it's a wake-up call that gives the remaining engineers/mangers the opportunity to make the needed changes (if that's even possible).
laszlo_kovacs 5y ago
I interviewed with Wasmer a few weeks ago. It wasn't enough time to get a real inner view into the company but I saw enough to give me pause. They set up an interview for 3 hours, which stretched into 4 hours. During this interview both interviewers had to leave at points to attend other meetings. After this, they wanted another interview. Sure, I guess one 3 hour interview isn't enough. They first scheduled it in the middle of the night my time, but meh time zones are hard. Most egregiously, the interview was to work on the wasmer runtime and fix a bug. Put politely, wasmer is an evolving codebase at a startup. Basically, it's not in the most clean state. This was a bug involving a virtual file system using WASI. I was fortunate enough to be somewhat equipped to handle this bug. I've sat in on WASI meetings; I remember my file systems; and I've touched a lot of raw WebAssembly. It was still freaking hard as hell. Not to mention, the bug turned out to actually be two bugs sitting next to each other, and partially caused by an unused variable which Rust should warn you about, except for some reason they turned that warning off. Oh yeah and the CEO tried to argue with me about whether Rust warns you for unused variables. Yeah dude, anybody with half a second of experience in Rust can tell you that. That interview took 2 hours stretching into 3. After that fun experience, they asked me for yet another interview. I'm sorry but if you're a seed startup hiring anybody with qualifications, you do not get to give me two, 2+ hour long grueling interviews, then ask about a third. You do not get to give me a question that you only solved in the middle of the interview. Your job is to convince me to work for you as much as it is my job to convince you to hire me. Don't waste my time. If you think I'm stupid or lazy or whatever, just reject me. Maybe it was because I was tired and irritable, but the spirit of the interview did not feel like a collaborative "let's solve this together", but more a "let's see if you're as smart as me". Which just sucks man. I want interviews to be encouraging and emotionally healthy, not just grueling beat downs. One last petty tidbit, I find it really disingenuous how the CEO markets himself as a "mathematician". I asked about it in the interview and the dude had an undergrad degree in math. Maybe this is my elitism showing but an undergraduate degree is not enough to call yourself a mathematician. There's so much damn work that you need to do to get a PhD. I got pretty damn far in undergraduate math and I still only know a fraction of a fraction of what a PhD knows.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Interesting perspective. Was the author of this blog post still involved at the time? Or was this after his departure? Having the CEO try to dunk on applicants during interviews is not a great sign for any company.
brabel 5y ago
Really sorry to hear this. I was kind of cheering for Wasmer as it seemed to be making a really nice WASM runtime and adding great tooling around it, including the package manager. I had always thought that Mozilla and the WASM WG were being a little bit "jealous" of Wasmer, intentionally making things difficult for them by moving repositories together with their competing (actually, the standard WASM runtime) wasmtime... now, I'm not so sure! Good luck to the author, but I would just say one thing if I could meet him: never put so much energy on a job, no matter how much you love the project... it's NEVER worth it. Unless you're one of the real founders, and even then, you're always running the much higher risk of losing everything than of becoming a millionaire. Go to work. Enjoy it, have fun, but never become emotionally involved with it. If you need social ties, try your local community, working as a volunteer at a school or whatever... at work, you're there to provide your services at a certain agreed time. After that, get out! Go home to your family. Don't let them make you think they're also your family! They're not and they'll forget you as soon as you leave (and you, them). Everyone will be better off by recognizing that.
- tomsmeding 5y ago
  > They're not and they'll forget you as soon as you leave (and you, them). This may well be true in lots of places; I wouldn't know, having only limited working experience at this point. But I worked for a while at a startup of 5-10 people, and this was very much _not_ the case. Perhaps it was the size of the company. I still have good memories of working there (even if the application domain eventually proved to not suit me well), and even now I have mostly-inactive but still very friendly contact with one of the founders. There are also good people on this planet.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nynx 5y ago
I was a very early employee at Wasmer and worked with Ivan for part of that, though I ended up leaving after roughly four months to go back to university. At the time, it didn't seem too bad but, in hindsight, it was a pretty toxic environment. That was partly a result of a lot of pressure from larger companies that didn't want to work with Wasmer because Syrus, the founder, was publically rude to other people working on WASM (among other things). Ivan is a really awesome guy and deserves work that values him. I wish him the best and can vouch for his technical ability.
dwohnitmok 5y ago
Wasmer has had some controversy on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24900186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24900186
- paulgb 5y ago
  As someone pointed out in that thread, there's also an HN account that appears to be a sockpuppet of the CEO[1], used to astroturf his projects (wasmer and a previous one). For me, finding that was one of the things that made me pick wasmtime over wasmer for my own project. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=peter998 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=peter998
  - slimsag 5y ago
    8 months ago I was evaluating Wasmer vs. wasmtime for my personal use and for a team I was working with at my work (Sourcegraph) Ultimately I went with wasmtime (we ended up using neither at work, too premature) because I just found a frankly disturbing amount of controversy surrounding Wasmer vs. wasmtime, and Wasmer hyping itself up far too much and trying to put down wasmtime. I'll say as I did 3 months ago[0]. I don't know what's wrong with Wasmer, but there's something _weird_ going on there. I'm not surprised to see this thread. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/o1838v/the_webassembly_runtime_wasmer_20_is_released_up/h21rpzp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/o1838v/the_web...
seibelj 5y ago
CEO in the weeds interviewing engineers and trying to solve bugs as as part of an interview process for 10 combined hours? CEO needs to reevaluate his job and priorities.
hinkley 5y ago
I tried and tried to fix a dysfunctional environment on a contract and my boss (also from the contract company) kept telling me “you can’t fix stupid”. Oddly despite being upbeat he was the first to quit. I have driven culture forward before, but a couple lucky breaks can make you think you have more control than you really have and subsequently failing to change other people can feel like a personal failing instead of their issues being the problem. Internalizing that is toxic and that’s what my boss was trying to say but didn’t have the words.
- milesvp 5y ago
  Yeah, my experience with company culture, is that you can exude a positive aura. You can make the people around you less miserable. You can put gentle pressure on other parts of the org to be just a little better. This all helps. A lot. But, it wasn't until certain toxic people left or were put in their place by upper management, that the real improvements came at the places I worked. These are things you just can't control. And if the toxicity is coming from the highest levels, there's just nothing to be done but try to buffer it best you can from those around you, and find ways to let it fall off your back so you don't internalize it.
aazaa 5y ago
> I’ve joined the Wasmer company at its early beginning, in March 2019. The company was 3 months old. I had no idea that Wasmer, Inc. was a company. The home page, wasmer.io, says nothing about a company and reads like an open source project landing page. Way at the bottom is a banana button to "Contact Sales" that's just an email address. What's the product Wasmer is selling? Clicking through to "about," I see nothing about products, just bios of the team members: https://wasmer.io/about https://wasmer.io/about > The CEO, Syrus Akbary, had evidently a lot of pressure on its shoulders. I suspect that pressure had to do with not having a product for sale in the traditional sense. Maybe the company was viewed as a product, with another company as the customer. If so, it's clear how this could become a pressure cooker. No product + investor money + team to support = pressure and bad work environment.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > What's the product Wasmer is selling? Wasmer is an implementation of Wasm.
  - IshKebab 5y ago
    Yeah a free open source implementation. How are they planning on making money?
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      For example how does Oracle make money from MySQL, a free open source implementation of a database? They sell support.
      - lwb 5y ago
        "Selling support" is one way to make money from OpenSource, but a) it's not clear that Wasmer is even doing that, and b) there's loads of other ways too (hosting, open core, freemium, etc).
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
patrec 5y ago
Wonder how his wife and children are feeling about him severely burning himself out on a quixotic mission to "save" a company with a CEO whom he paints in the most damning light. On a precarious freelance contract, after 85% of engineering talent bailed out.
- mst 5y ago
  I don't honestly feel this is appropriate or any of our business.
  - iammisc 5y ago
    On an individual level it's really not. On a macro level, given the comments I frequently read on HN, I think it is. Lots of engineers seem overly devoted to their employers. Personally, I believe it's because many engineers were not the most popular kids in high school, thus constantly seek other's approval, but that's my armchair psychology.
    - mst 5y ago
      I think that there's absolutely a point there, though I don't have anything substatntive to add beyond that about the actual point. I do however think that to have that discussion, it would've been much better form to start with the macro level point rather than mentioning his individual family first. (I know you're not the person I initially replied to)
justshowpost 5y ago
I find it funny how today the measure of success is first and foremost GitHub stars and everything else comes later. > At the time of writing, Wasmer has an incredible growth. In 2.5 years only, the runtime has more than 10’500 stars on Github, and is one of the most popular WebAssembly runtime in the world!
amenghra 5y ago
> X stars on Github If the runtime gets embedded in other pieces of software, the impact is a lot more than X stars on Github. You'd need to recursively count all the dependent repos. (Ignoring the fact that you can’t simply measure impact by counting stars). Kudos to building awesome software and good luck finding your next gig!
_dh54 5y ago
The CEO first came onto my radar as a questionable individual some months ago in a thread where he was spreading FUD about former WASM engineers at Mozilla working at Fastly. Accusing them of being biased against him with very flimsy evidence. [1] Later in that thread someone surfaced [2] the fact that the CEO had made a sockpuppet account [3] to praise his own projects. So the OP is not surprising to me. At the same time all of the public communication I've read by the CEO has been polite so I wonder if he is just misunderstood but it's hard to say, it seems like there could also be a lot of bad things happening behind the scenes. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24900186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24900186 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24906498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24906498 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=peter998 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=peter998
justusw 5y ago
It's not worth it to sacrifice everything over a WASM runtime. I hope the author takes more than just a couple of months to gain some perspective on what is important and get out of his burnout. I've been in a similar situation and burnout really sucks. Hope you get better!

197 points by qprofyeh 5y ago

I feel for the author, but he keeps talking about "love" and "passion". Perspective is needed. It's a way to run some code. It's alright to be excited by what you work on but it's just a mechanical thing. Don't wrap your self identity into it. If 80% of your engineers are leaving its just a bad workplace. You don't have to apologize for leaving.

fosk 5y ago
I mean the "wheel" is also really a weird shaped object yet it advanced humanity. The impact of what anybody is building expands beyond the technology itself to all the potential use cases that this new thing enables. It doesn't have a depth of 1. It has a depth of 100.
- overgard 5y ago
  Well, if you think a web assembly runtime is the same thing as the wheel then I'm probably wrong. But I'm going to venture a guess that the web assembly runtime isn't /quite/ that important.
  - fosk 5y ago
    Reality is that nobody knows what is the long lasting impact of web assembly in our industry in the years (or decades) to come, unless somebody can predict the future. As such, if somebody is passionate about it and gives all their heart and mind to it, I see where they are coming from and I respect their commitment. To imply that "It is just XYZ" in dismissive tone, well that is quite rude and disrespectful at this point in time.

PaulHoule 5y ago

How is a company like that supposed to make money? Without a plan to be sustainable doesn’t it have to end in tears?

moocowtruck 5y ago
no you ride on rainbows with fixies and drink chai latte...and then taking care of the money part is the "toxic" part
outside1234 5y ago
You sell the talent at the company to Google.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  Isn't that "end in tears?"
  - outside1234 5y ago
    Amen brother

astlouis44 5y ago

Syrus Akbary the founder clearly has issues, as evidenced by his public smackdown and disrespect of Mozilla employees working on WASM which was hinted at in this blog post.

cute_boi 5y ago
Is that something to do with lin clark (forgive me if there is mistake in name). But yes this is not the first time I have heard bad about wasmer. I don't know if ceo was involved in that impertinent act. Its really painful to see people suffer :(
- astlouis44 5y ago
  It is indeed, sadly because Lin is awesome. So is the entire Mozilla team doing pioneering work with WASM, fyi they mostly moved over to Fastly where they're continuing their work.

kreetx 5y ago

Looks like CEO's expectations were way too high? Wonder why, as he seemes to be a developer himself.

idan 5y ago

It physically hurt to read this story.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

The author seems to be making live changes to the article. It started as “How I failed to Change Wasmer” but it’s now titled “I’ve loved Wasmer, I still love Wasmer”. This is a tough story to read for anyone who has been passionate about a startup only to watch it decline under management quarrels. However, I have mixed feelings about this article because the author appears to be a co-founder of the company despite writing much of the article from the perspective of an IC engineer who was taken advantage of. He downplays the role of co-founder later by explaining that he was a “late co-founder” but he also writes about he was responsible for many founder-level activities later in the article. The only thing worse than startup leadership quarrels is watching one of the founders turn around and try to sink the company by airing all of their dirty laundry on the way out. I don’t necessarily doubt that the environment was toxic, but we’re also only getting one side of the story. If there were any engineers or managers still working at Wasmer and hoping to turn the ship around, this blog post may have destroyed any chance of that. Imagine joining this company only to have a co-founder turn around and advertise to the world how terrible the company is. I also wish the author would have elaborated more on their original title (“How I failed to change Wasmer”) instead of laying all of the blame on the other co-founder and alluding to toxicities. I suppose the real lesson here is to avoid becoming a co-founder in a company where you know you’re incompatible with the other founders. It never ends well.

Floegipoky 5y ago
It seemed to me like the author was not actually a cofounder, he was an early hire working under a freelance contract who was retroactively named a "late-cofounder", whatever that means, once the whole thing started to go off the rails. And it also sounded like he was a victim of wage theft and other abusive management behaviors. The CEO may not have displayed such toxic tendencies in the beginning when things were going well.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
joshstrange 5y ago
> The only thing worse than startup leadership quarrels is watching one of the founder exit the company and air all of their dirty laundry on the way out. If there were any engineers or managers still working at Wasmer and hoping to turn the ship around, this blog post may have destroyed any chance of that. What is the alternative though? I mean this developer, at least from their telling of it, had held almost every role in the company up to and including co-founder (at least in title, it sounds like the founder continued to hold him at arms length), if that's all true then what else could this person do other than air out the dirty laundry? They, by their own admission, tried everything they could from within the company and so now they are leaving and letting their truth be known. At worst nothing changes at Wasmer, at best it's a wake-up call that gives the remaining engineers/mangers the opportunity to make the needed changes (if that's even possible).

laszlo_kovacs 5y ago

I interviewed with Wasmer a few weeks ago. It wasn't enough time to get a real inner view into the company but I saw enough to give me pause. They set up an interview for 3 hours, which stretched into 4 hours. During this interview both interviewers had to leave at points to attend other meetings. After this, they wanted another interview. Sure, I guess one 3 hour interview isn't enough. They first scheduled it in the middle of the night my time, but meh time zones are hard. Most egregiously, the interview was to work on the wasmer runtime and fix a bug. Put politely, wasmer is an evolving codebase at a startup. Basically, it's not in the most clean state. This was a bug involving a virtual file system using WASI. I was fortunate enough to be somewhat equipped to handle this bug. I've sat in on WASI meetings; I remember my file systems; and I've touched a lot of raw WebAssembly. It was still freaking hard as hell. Not to mention, the bug turned out to actually be two bugs sitting next to each other, and partially caused by an unused variable which Rust should warn you about, except for some reason they turned that warning off. Oh yeah and the CEO tried to argue with me about whether Rust warns you for unused variables. Yeah dude, anybody with half a second of experience in Rust can tell you that. That interview took 2 hours stretching into 3. After that fun experience, they asked me for yet another interview. I'm sorry but if you're a seed startup hiring anybody with qualifications, you do not get to give me two, 2+ hour long grueling interviews, then ask about a third. You do not get to give me a question that you only solved in the middle of the interview. Your job is to convince me to work for you as much as it is my job to convince you to hire me. Don't waste my time. If you think I'm stupid or lazy or whatever, just reject me. Maybe it was because I was tired and irritable, but the spirit of the interview did not feel like a collaborative "let's solve this together", but more a "let's see if you're as smart as me". Which just sucks man. I want interviews to be encouraging and emotionally healthy, not just grueling beat downs. One last petty tidbit, I find it really disingenuous how the CEO markets himself as a "mathematician". I asked about it in the interview and the dude had an undergrad degree in math. Maybe this is my elitism showing but an undergraduate degree is not enough to call yourself a mathematician. There's so much damn work that you need to do to get a PhD. I got pretty damn far in undergraduate math and I still only know a fraction of a fraction of what a PhD knows.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Interesting perspective. Was the author of this blog post still involved at the time? Or was this after his departure? Having the CEO try to dunk on applicants during interviews is not a great sign for any company.

brabel 5y ago

Really sorry to hear this. I was kind of cheering for Wasmer as it seemed to be making a really nice WASM runtime and adding great tooling around it, including the package manager. I had always thought that Mozilla and the WASM WG were being a little bit "jealous" of Wasmer, intentionally making things difficult for them by moving repositories together with their competing (actually, the standard WASM runtime) wasmtime... now, I'm not so sure! Good luck to the author, but I would just say one thing if I could meet him: never put so much energy on a job, no matter how much you love the project... it's NEVER worth it. Unless you're one of the real founders, and even then, you're always running the much higher risk of losing everything than of becoming a millionaire. Go to work. Enjoy it, have fun, but never become emotionally involved with it. If you need social ties, try your local community, working as a volunteer at a school or whatever... at work, you're there to provide your services at a certain agreed time. After that, get out! Go home to your family. Don't let them make you think they're also your family! They're not and they'll forget you as soon as you leave (and you, them). Everyone will be better off by recognizing that.

tomsmeding 5y ago
> They're not and they'll forget you as soon as you leave (and you, them). This may well be true in lots of places; I wouldn't know, having only limited working experience at this point. But I worked for a while at a startup of 5-10 people, and this was very much _not_ the case. Perhaps it was the size of the company. I still have good memories of working there (even if the application domain eventually proved to not suit me well), and even now I have mostly-inactive but still very friendly contact with one of the founders. There are also good people on this planet.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nynx 5y ago

I was a very early employee at Wasmer and worked with Ivan for part of that, though I ended up leaving after roughly four months to go back to university. At the time, it didn't seem too bad but, in hindsight, it was a pretty toxic environment. That was partly a result of a lot of pressure from larger companies that didn't want to work with Wasmer because Syrus, the founder, was publically rude to other people working on WASM (among other things). Ivan is a really awesome guy and deserves work that values him. I wish him the best and can vouch for his technical ability.

dwohnitmok 5y ago

Wasmer has had some controversy on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24900186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24900186

paulgb 5y ago
As someone pointed out in that thread, there's also an HN account that appears to be a sockpuppet of the CEO[1], used to astroturf his projects (wasmer and a previous one). For me, finding that was one of the things that made me pick wasmtime over wasmer for my own project. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=peter998 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=peter998
- slimsag 5y ago
  8 months ago I was evaluating Wasmer vs. wasmtime for my personal use and for a team I was working with at my work (Sourcegraph) Ultimately I went with wasmtime (we ended up using neither at work, too premature) because I just found a frankly disturbing amount of controversy surrounding Wasmer vs. wasmtime, and Wasmer hyping itself up far too much and trying to put down wasmtime. I'll say as I did 3 months ago[0]. I don't know what's wrong with Wasmer, but there's something _weird_ going on there. I'm not surprised to see this thread. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/o1838v/the_webassembly_runtime_wasmer_20_is_released_up/h21rpzp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/o1838v/the_web...

seibelj 5y ago

CEO in the weeds interviewing engineers and trying to solve bugs as as part of an interview process for 10 combined hours? CEO needs to reevaluate his job and priorities.

hinkley 5y ago

I tried and tried to fix a dysfunctional environment on a contract and my boss (also from the contract company) kept telling me “you can’t fix stupid”. Oddly despite being upbeat he was the first to quit. I have driven culture forward before, but a couple lucky breaks can make you think you have more control than you really have and subsequently failing to change other people can feel like a personal failing instead of their issues being the problem. Internalizing that is toxic and that’s what my boss was trying to say but didn’t have the words.

milesvp 5y ago
Yeah, my experience with company culture, is that you can exude a positive aura. You can make the people around you less miserable. You can put gentle pressure on other parts of the org to be just a little better. This all helps. A lot. But, it wasn't until certain toxic people left or were put in their place by upper management, that the real improvements came at the places I worked. These are things you just can't control. And if the toxicity is coming from the highest levels, there's just nothing to be done but try to buffer it best you can from those around you, and find ways to let it fall off your back so you don't internalize it.

aazaa 5y ago

> I’ve joined the Wasmer company at its early beginning, in March 2019. The company was 3 months old. I had no idea that Wasmer, Inc. was a company. The home page, wasmer.io, says nothing about a company and reads like an open source project landing page. Way at the bottom is a banana button to "Contact Sales" that's just an email address. What's the product Wasmer is selling? Clicking through to "about," I see nothing about products, just bios of the team members: https://wasmer.io/about https://wasmer.io/about > The CEO, Syrus Akbary, had evidently a lot of pressure on its shoulders. I suspect that pressure had to do with not having a product for sale in the traditional sense. Maybe the company was viewed as a product, with another company as the customer. If so, it's clear how this could become a pressure cooker. No product + investor money + team to support = pressure and bad work environment.

chrisseaton 5y ago
> What's the product Wasmer is selling? Wasmer is an implementation of Wasm.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  Yeah a free open source implementation. How are they planning on making money?
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    For example how does Oracle make money from MySQL, a free open source implementation of a database? They sell support.
    - lwb 5y ago
      "Selling support" is one way to make money from OpenSource, but a) it's not clear that Wasmer is even doing that, and b) there's loads of other ways too (hosting, open core, freemium, etc).
nyanpasu64 5y ago

patrec 5y ago

Wonder how his wife and children are feeling about him severely burning himself out on a quixotic mission to "save" a company with a CEO whom he paints in the most damning light. On a precarious freelance contract, after 85% of engineering talent bailed out.

mst 5y ago
I don't honestly feel this is appropriate or any of our business.
- iammisc 5y ago
  On an individual level it's really not. On a macro level, given the comments I frequently read on HN, I think it is. Lots of engineers seem overly devoted to their employers. Personally, I believe it's because many engineers were not the most popular kids in high school, thus constantly seek other's approval, but that's my armchair psychology.
  - mst 5y ago
    I think that there's absolutely a point there, though I don't have anything substatntive to add beyond that about the actual point. I do however think that to have that discussion, it would've been much better form to start with the macro level point rather than mentioning his individual family first. (I know you're not the person I initially replied to)

justshowpost 5y ago

I find it funny how today the measure of success is first and foremost GitHub stars and everything else comes later. > At the time of writing, Wasmer has an incredible growth. In 2.5 years only, the runtime has more than 10’500 stars on Github, and is one of the most popular WebAssembly runtime in the world!

amenghra 5y ago

> X stars on Github If the runtime gets embedded in other pieces of software, the impact is a lot more than X stars on Github. You'd need to recursively count all the dependent repos. (Ignoring the fact that you can’t simply measure impact by counting stars). Kudos to building awesome software and good luck finding your next gig!

_dh54 5y ago

The CEO first came onto my radar as a questionable individual some months ago in a thread where he was spreading FUD about former WASM engineers at Mozilla working at Fastly. Accusing them of being biased against him with very flimsy evidence. [1] Later in that thread someone surfaced [2] the fact that the CEO had made a sockpuppet account [3] to praise his own projects. So the OP is not surprising to me. At the same time all of the public communication I've read by the CEO has been polite so I wonder if he is just misunderstood but it's hard to say, it seems like there could also be a lot of bad things happening behind the scenes. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24900186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24900186 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24906498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24906498 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=peter998 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=peter998

justusw 5y ago

It's not worth it to sacrifice everything over a WASM runtime. I hope the author takes more than just a couple of months to gain some perspective on what is important and get out of his burnout. I've been in a similar situation and burnout really sucks. Hope you get better!