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Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job

129 points by 001sky 11y ago

minimaxir 11y ago
To repost my comment from a previous submission: There's been a lot of meta discussion how Yishan Wong, Alexis Ohanian, and Ellen Pao have been talking trash to each other about Reddit and seemingly ignoring every NDA in the book. The comments made in the linked interview trashing a former employer seem to perpetuate this culture. It's weird. (although if you're planning on starting your own startup after a bad job, burning bridges isn't as drastic)
- hellofunk 11y ago
  It is weird, but when you consider the entire point of Reddit and its role in society, it's not strange that its gossip culture penetrated to its very core.
- Vexs 11y ago
  The whole recent controversy has been strange in general. There's this incredibly pervasive sense that the management in general is completely disconnected from the community, only stepping down from on high to dish out shadowbans. I don't know what to think honestly, but it seems like the reddit administration is walking close to the cliff currently. Maybe the newOld ceo can turn that around.
  - HannibalLecter 11y ago
    The reddit board wanted the facebook success story, but the problem with reddit has always been that they can't control the users like facebook can. They needed to usurp power back from mods into admin hands in order to bring online very unpopular features that will enable reddit to be a commercially viable operation. Gold wasn't enough for them and they are struggling now even to get past 50% of gold required per day... so they are thrashing around in the water right now. Pao was a glass cliff employee meant to be there during this crisis period. Any formal investigation might uncover evidence that reddit higher ups encouraged Pao's villain status through sock puppets. If the world hates one person they ignore the corrosive policies. Now they have usurped control over the mods and the structure of reddit itself, they can dismiss any posts that are negative fairly soon and make it look like the front page algorithm is just doing housekeeping... which is required if you want advertisers to feel good about money changing hands. The next phase will be some more staff shuffling and some very very unpopular changes that the team will seem very over-excited about introducing (fauxgasms ensue) and we'll be left wondering what the hell is going on long enough for the changes to be irreversible. This recent front page revolt of mods shutting down all their subreddits was tactical. The admins wanted everyone to get over-saturated with the revolt before the new changes became apparent. Over the next six months reddit will become more and more like facebook in terms of forcing us to see what they want us to see on the front page. They've been gaming this system from the top since the beginning. One needs only look at r/hailcorporate to see story after story of astro-turfing and fadvertising. Reddit is a company that sells entertainment in the form of conversation. That's their goal. They are succeeding because even if we're all complaining about them we're all having a conversation about them. So like everyone who isn't square, I'm over now on voat.co having my own conversation about movies and programming with people who want to talk to me... not sell me something.
  - IBM 11y ago
    HannibalLecter your comment is dead
    - HannibalLecter 11y ago
      They deleted my comment because they don't want you to know. http://i.imgur.com/f15zbNO.png http://i.imgur.com/f15zbNO.png
  - yokohama11 11y ago
    They are fortunate that at present the core users (the people doing the vast majority of the moderating, submitting, and commenting) are somewhat captive, there isn't a logical successor waiting in the wings to shine. Thus far Voat, Snapzu, etc are far too immature for anyone to really switch to. As long as that continues to be the case, the core will probably keep coming back short of literally pulling a Digg V4 and outright breaking the site/removing everything about it that people liked. ------ It'll be a while still before any competitor gets their act together enough to start siphoning users in a noticeable manner. So I'd say they've got quite a bit more room to go....but they are getting closer to that cliff.
- caractacus 11y ago
  It's /r/subredditdrama played out in real life. It has to promote the strangest company culture when your just-departed CEO has been suing another firm for gender discrimination in a wildly high profile and contentious court case (quite apart from the fact that it would take her gaze from reddit); when your previous CEO left in a huff after he wasn't allowed to move the office closer to his home; and when the founders hover in obscure and unclear board positions. And then talk trash about each other on the site that they all controlled at different points. So many levels of meta oddness.
- Balgair 11y ago
  I know, right!? I'll posit Occam's Razor here and say that it is likely just children being children. From what I have seen on the /r/subredditdrama board they really are just sniping each other. It's like Mean Girls and these people really need to get out more. I have not seen this level of immaturity in a long time. However, my BS klaxon is screaming. These are major players in a top 25 website. They should be more cautious, or have people around them that will urge them to be more cautions (like some 'Memento Mori' roman serf). I feel they should know better; it all seems TOO childish. So, possibly there is an angle being worked here we are not privy to see as of yet. This one is going to take a few months to play out, but not before Halloween I figure.
  - VLM 11y ago
    "These are major players in a top 25 website." This may indicate the business model is dead. top 25 but no ability to monetize because the business model died while no one was looking. Think about it.. Consider a much more lofty position, like US News and World Report in the newsweekly market, they were top 3 at one point, out of business today. Have to face the facts, the reason for lack of execution in the marketplace might be because the biz model is dead. Close up now, give the money back to the investors. The general public liking something doesn't mean its a guaranteed success or a rational business model.
    - Balgair 11y ago
      I agree that the biz model is struggling and that monetization is tough here. However, I was more talking to the maturity of the people there when mentioning a top 25 website. One would think the board would have hired people that are not so petty, but alas.
    - 001sky 11y ago
      This is why what Sheryl Sandberg did at facebook is hard. Places like reddit and twitter are fundamentally successful products. The content creators, who are basically working for free, creating stuff that grabs other people's attention.
- onedev 11y ago
  Even Sam Altman became furious and started talking trash to Yishan. Though to be fair it was after Yishan accused him of perpetrating a "long con" to regain control of reddit.
  - LandoCalrissian 11y ago
    That one kind of surprised me, I expected Altman to be above that.
seunosewa 11y ago
3 female employees gone from the Reddit team in such a short time. This could create the probably false perception that Reddit seems like a hostile working environment for women. I wonder what they'll do to address this probably false perception.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- fredfoobar42 11y ago
  I know exactly what they'll do: nothing.
- nateberkopec 11y ago
  I think they've turned over something like a third of their workforce in the last nine months. It isn't just these people leaving, though they've certainly been the most public.
  - arprocter 11y ago
    The media seems to like the gender war angle - the cynic in me wonders how many news stories have been written about the male employees who have left.
    - juliangregorian 11y ago
      There was that leukemia guy a couple weeks ago.
    - rsynnott 11y ago
      Well, the women who've left have been more prominent, by and large. In the case of Pao and Taylor, they were also extremely abrupt. The guy who organised the secret santa thing got some press, though.
- AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
  Honestly, it sounds like Bethanye dodged a bullet by getting out now.
untog 11y ago
The way she describes it, it was a sensible choice. Various things are being promised that she, as Chief Engineer, does not think will happen. Given what happened with Ellen Pao it's not unreasonable for her to assume that responsibility for those failures could easily be put on her when the inevitable happens.
- Cacti 11y ago
  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.
  - untog 11y ago
    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.
    - Cacti 11y ago
      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.
      - amyjess 11y ago
        It's possible that she resigned after she tried that and they blew her off.
        Cacti 11y ago
vessenes 11y ago
A recurring, and not-commented-on theme in each of these communications is that the board wants more growth. Reddit closed a $50MM round in fall of 2014, and has never had a strong monetization story. If the investors came in expecting major growth (since this is not a business with a great monetization story) it's not surprising that there's pressure and turnover right now, almost a year later. And, it may well be that what's needed is a CEO with enough credibility to tell the board "you won't get that growth yet, we have some work to do." Saying that to the board is obviously going to be hard to do for Ellen, or anyone in Ellen's shoes if they brought her in to deliver growth, and she promised to deliver that growth. So, lots of drama, yadda yadda, but I would bet 100:1 that drama has, at it's fundamental source, intense pressure from the board, and I would also bet you that this kind of pressure is new for reddit as a company. To me, that's likely at least some of the context for the rumors that Ohanian intervened directly to get rid of Victoria, the former AMA lead at Reddit. AMAs are one of Reddit's most visible branding / marketing measures. If you need to deliver growth, and aren't seeing it, it is completely natural to be looking at your premier product lines and trying to get them to do more. And, I would be surprised if this kind of thinking weren't informing senior management as they're struggling to deliver on these promises.
- jn1234 11y ago
  They aren't in that bad of a position. They already have $8.3 million. http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/18/reddit-charity/#.nwugnp:l4SS http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/18/reddit-charity/#.nwugnp:l4S... It's just a matter of growing the community and not pissing them off too much when they are able to successfully do so.
- cgearhart 11y ago
  From the outside it looked more like Ellen was focused on improving the monetization prospects rather than focusing on growth. In particular, placing limits on abusive content and users would make the site more attractive to advertisers. Firing Victoria fit the same motive -- monetize the most popular product (AMAs). Reddit leadership wanted to explore ways to monetize that feature, and for some undisclosed reason Victoria didn't fit with that plan. The return of Huffman signals a shift back to the Cult of Growth, in the hopes that investors won't worry as much about monetization so long as the site is growing. One thing the board won't settle for is neither growth nor profitability.
jgrowl 11y ago
From what I've seen, being a CEO, CTO, etc is almost inherently a glass cliff. You either keep things running smoothly or you will get let go. Besides, Ellen wasn't even fired. She resigned no?
- ThrustVectoring 11y ago
  "Resigned" is how executives get fired.
  - amyjess 11y ago
    So, I used to work at a company where the VP of Engineering actually declined to take the resignation option. I'm not naming the company or any of the people involved, partially for their privacy, and partially in case I misremembered some of the details (this was five and a half years ago). A little background: at this company, "engineering" included not just development and QA, but also customer support, IT, and shipping & receiving (but not documentation or product management, both of which were under marketing). Also, for some reason, the operations people of our offshore office also reported to the VP of Engineering instead of our corporate management. He had a lot of power just based on of how much of the company reported to him. The VP basically turned the technical side of the company into his own personal fiefdom. He took the idea of acting as a filter (which is a good thing) and took that to such an extreme that he was acting as a brick wall (which is a bad thing). It was almost impossible for product management or sales to find out what we were doing, and we were mostly kept in the dark and drip-fed small details about the business side of things. Worse, he would start projects without the rest of the company's knowledge and tell us the order to create them came directly from the board (in reality, he was trying to impress the board). At one point, he conceived a project, sold it to a customer, and then started development all without sales, marketing (including product management), or the CEO knowing about it. Eventually, the CEO had enough and asked him to resign. He gave the VP a month to announce his resignation and leave. Guess what? The VP just sat on it and acted like it was business as normal. A month later, the CEO had him walked out first thing in the morning and had one of his most loyal executives distribute the new org chart containing a massive amount of changes to prevent so much of the company from being centralized under a single VP ever again. (In case you're wondering, the company has since had a successful exit, by the way.)
tzakrajs 11y ago
I highly doubt that Reddit leadership is/will be responsible for their massive rise or fall in popularity. The people have coalesced around this platform in such numbers that as long as the most basic needs are met for the community to thrive, they will continue to thrive. The few who leave because of this executive turmoil or changes in moderation have already been supplanted by new users who enjoy the system as it is today.
- mwill 11y ago
  People thought the same about Digg. That said, I do agree that it will take more than just community / company politics to have a big impact, but if Reddit is pushing for growth and make enough missteps in the actual functionality of the site, that combined with the already unhappy userbase could spell trouble in my eyes.
Keyframe 11y ago
Apparently reddit has 71 employees. I would really like to know why reddit needs that many employees. It looks to me like an operation of maybe 20 people at most. That includes devops, engineering, social stuff and ads.
- dimino 11y ago
  What's that quote about when Digg invited them to lunch awhile back? That Digg had a few floors, and were blown away by the fact that Reddit's staff could fit in a car? I'm guessing the old Reddit guys aren't touching this comment section with a 10 ft pole, but they tell it better than what I just wrote. I wish I could find the comment...
  - eco 11y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9768166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9768166
  - jedberg 11y ago
    > I'm guessing the old Reddit guys aren't touching this comment section with a 10 ft pole I'm a glutton for punishment. :) The comment was that they were shocked that the entire reddit team fit in a Toyota Yaris, including the beer we brought.
- eco 11y ago
  Alexa ranks reddit at 24. The other user content focused stuff high on the list are: 2. Facebook (10,082 employees) 3. YouTube (a lot of employees) 6. Wikipedia (~250 employees) 8. Twitter (3,900 employees) 13. LinkedIn (7,600 employees) 15. Sina Weibo (unknown employees) 24. reddit (71 employees) 30. Tumblr (306 employees) 32. Imgur (<50 employees) Given this, I think it's rather impressive that they only have 71 employees (imgur is impressive too).
  - smrtinsert 11y ago
    To be fair, Facebook tends to hire 1 engineer per 1000 lines of php code.
abalone 11y ago
So features were promised that she can't deliver on schedule. Was engineering not consulted before publicly committing to features? If so I'd probably quit too. Just before her departure Pao set up a process to figure out with the mods what features to build.[1] Did something go terribly wrong with that process? Was engineering approval not required? [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_apologize/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...
malandrew 11y ago
"The company is growing, and we have the opportunity to improve in many areas — including the number of women in leadership positions. I am confident in our ability to recruit women at the executive level, as we have made a point to do so at Hipmunk, where more than half of the executives are women." I don't know about anyone else, but comments like that make a company less desirable as a place to work because factors like skill, talent, productivity and effectiveness become de-emphasized in recruiting and promotion relative to issues surrounding identity politics. I don't see how permitting (or worse yet fostering) an environment where office politics or identity politics can flourish is a good thing. I am seeing identity politics issues creeping into decision making more and more often and find it positively toxic. When you "make a point" to recruit/promote one group over any other on the basis of a demographic box they fit into, you are implicitly discriminating against people who don't fit into that box. Furthermore, when "making a point" goes so far that you've exceeded the 50% mark ("more than half are [insert identifier for someone that belongs to a particular group]") then that certainly qualifies as active discrimination. I'm 100% in favor of equal opportunity, but ham-fisted hypocritical approaches like this are as bad as what they are trying to fix. Politicking in any form is toxic. If someone created a petition to now remove Steve Huffman, I'd sign it. I highly recommend this recent peer-reviewed academic study demonstrating discrimination in Academia: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract
- smrtinsert 11y ago
  How is it toxic if representation doesn't even equal general populace? Men are clearly getting in no problem. This isn't a case of over correction, it's about seeing if they can look past historical biases towards men and be more open towards hiring for the future. The study you linked describes current faculty expressing a desire to bring it towards a balance. I'm not sure where the toxicity is created.
  - malandrew 11y ago
    "more than half of the executives are women" === over-correction Would it be okay for a company to only hire women as executives since women are a minority of the executives in this industry? Technically that isn't over-correction using your definition. "The study you linked describes current faculty expressing a desire to bring it towards a balance." So if you've got XY chromosomes and you're finishing your post-graduate degree who is a solid candidate for a position in academia and that is where you want to work, then you're getting screwed right now through absolutely no fault of your own just because you happen to have XY chromosomes. That candidate is paying for the failures of past generations. Do you think that is fair?
tosseraccount 11y ago
Blount also said she believed Pao’s exit was an indirect consequence of gender discrimination Sounds like she backed the wrong horse.
geebee 11y ago
This is a very interesting departure. I understand that in the media, especially with the litigation around Pao and the scarcity of women in leadership and technical positions in high tech, that this would take over much of the discussion. Bethanye also mentioned a "glass cliff", so it's reasonable that this would be a big part of the discussion. I am very interested in Bethanye's business-related decisions to leave as well, though. I'm nowhere near her level in any corporate hierarchy, but I am very frustrated with how difficult it often is for engineers, even senior or director (or "chief engineer") level tech workers to operate with the level of autonomy and decision authority that is often explicitly promised. Maybe when the dust settles, if people are still interested, a journalist will have the opportunity to talk with Ms Blount about this. As a dweller on the lower levels of the hierarchy, although with "senior" in my title and all kinds of autonomy spelled out, I can see now that aggressively asserting this kind of autonomy is essential to a strong career, and you need to be prepared to 1) fight it up the chain, and 2) walk away, if other wings of the business try to cram you in a box and tell you that your job is purely to execute a technical vision that may collapse, and the upper level decision makers don't have your back. Unfortunately, low on the ladder often means fewer options, which makes it harder to fight this fight. Higher usually means better severance, stronger networks, a better chance of a good placement in the next gig. Anyway, as an engineer, this is the conversation I'd really like to have… though again, I understand that the issue of women in technical and managerial positions is also very important (and isn't necessarily unrelated, either).

129 points by 001sky 11y ago

To repost my comment from a previous submission: There's been a lot of meta discussion how Yishan Wong, Alexis Ohanian, and Ellen Pao have been talking trash to each other about Reddit and seemingly ignoring every NDA in the book. The comments made in the linked interview trashing a former employer seem to perpetuate this culture. It's weird. (although if you're planning on starting your own startup after a bad job, burning bridges isn't as drastic)

hellofunk 11y ago
It is weird, but when you consider the entire point of Reddit and its role in society, it's not strange that its gossip culture penetrated to its very core.
Vexs 11y ago
The whole recent controversy has been strange in general. There's this incredibly pervasive sense that the management in general is completely disconnected from the community, only stepping down from on high to dish out shadowbans. I don't know what to think honestly, but it seems like the reddit administration is walking close to the cliff currently. Maybe the newOld ceo can turn that around.
- HannibalLecter 11y ago
  The reddit board wanted the facebook success story, but the problem with reddit has always been that they can't control the users like facebook can. They needed to usurp power back from mods into admin hands in order to bring online very unpopular features that will enable reddit to be a commercially viable operation. Gold wasn't enough for them and they are struggling now even to get past 50% of gold required per day... so they are thrashing around in the water right now. Pao was a glass cliff employee meant to be there during this crisis period. Any formal investigation might uncover evidence that reddit higher ups encouraged Pao's villain status through sock puppets. If the world hates one person they ignore the corrosive policies. Now they have usurped control over the mods and the structure of reddit itself, they can dismiss any posts that are negative fairly soon and make it look like the front page algorithm is just doing housekeeping... which is required if you want advertisers to feel good about money changing hands. The next phase will be some more staff shuffling and some very very unpopular changes that the team will seem very over-excited about introducing (fauxgasms ensue) and we'll be left wondering what the hell is going on long enough for the changes to be irreversible. This recent front page revolt of mods shutting down all their subreddits was tactical. The admins wanted everyone to get over-saturated with the revolt before the new changes became apparent. Over the next six months reddit will become more and more like facebook in terms of forcing us to see what they want us to see on the front page. They've been gaming this system from the top since the beginning. One needs only look at r/hailcorporate to see story after story of astro-turfing and fadvertising. Reddit is a company that sells entertainment in the form of conversation. That's their goal. They are succeeding because even if we're all complaining about them we're all having a conversation about them. So like everyone who isn't square, I'm over now on voat.co having my own conversation about movies and programming with people who want to talk to me... not sell me something.
- IBM 11y ago
  HannibalLecter your comment is dead
  - HannibalLecter 11y ago
    They deleted my comment because they don't want you to know. http://i.imgur.com/f15zbNO.png http://i.imgur.com/f15zbNO.png
- yokohama11 11y ago
  They are fortunate that at present the core users (the people doing the vast majority of the moderating, submitting, and commenting) are somewhat captive, there isn't a logical successor waiting in the wings to shine. Thus far Voat, Snapzu, etc are far too immature for anyone to really switch to. As long as that continues to be the case, the core will probably keep coming back short of literally pulling a Digg V4 and outright breaking the site/removing everything about it that people liked. ------ It'll be a while still before any competitor gets their act together enough to start siphoning users in a noticeable manner. So I'd say they've got quite a bit more room to go....but they are getting closer to that cliff.
caractacus 11y ago
It's /r/subredditdrama played out in real life. It has to promote the strangest company culture when your just-departed CEO has been suing another firm for gender discrimination in a wildly high profile and contentious court case (quite apart from the fact that it would take her gaze from reddit); when your previous CEO left in a huff after he wasn't allowed to move the office closer to his home; and when the founders hover in obscure and unclear board positions. And then talk trash about each other on the site that they all controlled at different points. So many levels of meta oddness.
Balgair 11y ago
I know, right!? I'll posit Occam's Razor here and say that it is likely just children being children. From what I have seen on the /r/subredditdrama board they really are just sniping each other. It's like Mean Girls and these people really need to get out more. I have not seen this level of immaturity in a long time. However, my BS klaxon is screaming. These are major players in a top 25 website. They should be more cautious, or have people around them that will urge them to be more cautions (like some 'Memento Mori' roman serf). I feel they should know better; it all seems TOO childish. So, possibly there is an angle being worked here we are not privy to see as of yet. This one is going to take a few months to play out, but not before Halloween I figure.
- VLM 11y ago
  "These are major players in a top 25 website." This may indicate the business model is dead. top 25 but no ability to monetize because the business model died while no one was looking. Think about it.. Consider a much more lofty position, like US News and World Report in the newsweekly market, they were top 3 at one point, out of business today. Have to face the facts, the reason for lack of execution in the marketplace might be because the biz model is dead. Close up now, give the money back to the investors. The general public liking something doesn't mean its a guaranteed success or a rational business model.
  - Balgair 11y ago
    I agree that the biz model is struggling and that monetization is tough here. However, I was more talking to the maturity of the people there when mentioning a top 25 website. One would think the board would have hired people that are not so petty, but alas.
  - 001sky 11y ago
    This is why what Sheryl Sandberg did at facebook is hard. Places like reddit and twitter are fundamentally successful products. The content creators, who are basically working for free, creating stuff that grabs other people's attention.
onedev 11y ago
Even Sam Altman became furious and started talking trash to Yishan. Though to be fair it was after Yishan accused him of perpetrating a "long con" to regain control of reddit.
- LandoCalrissian 11y ago
  That one kind of surprised me, I expected Altman to be above that.

seunosewa 11y ago

3 female employees gone from the Reddit team in such a short time. This could create the probably false perception that Reddit seems like a hostile working environment for women. I wonder what they'll do to address this probably false perception.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
fredfoobar42 11y ago
I know exactly what they'll do: nothing.
nateberkopec 11y ago
I think they've turned over something like a third of their workforce in the last nine months. It isn't just these people leaving, though they've certainly been the most public.
- arprocter 11y ago
  The media seems to like the gender war angle - the cynic in me wonders how many news stories have been written about the male employees who have left.
  - juliangregorian 11y ago
    There was that leukemia guy a couple weeks ago.
  - rsynnott 11y ago
    Well, the women who've left have been more prominent, by and large. In the case of Pao and Taylor, they were also extremely abrupt. The guy who organised the secret santa thing got some press, though.
AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
Honestly, it sounds like Bethanye dodged a bullet by getting out now.

untog 11y ago

The way she describes it, it was a sensible choice. Various things are being promised that she, as Chief Engineer, does not think will happen. Given what happened with Ellen Pao it's not unreasonable for her to assume that responsibility for those failures could easily be put on her when the inevitable happens.

Cacti 11y ago
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.
- untog 11y ago
  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.
  - Cacti 11y ago
    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.
    - amyjess 11y ago
      It's possible that she resigned after she tried that and they blew her off.
      - Cacti 11y ago

vessenes 11y ago

A recurring, and not-commented-on theme in each of these communications is that the board wants more growth. Reddit closed a $50MM round in fall of 2014, and has never had a strong monetization story. If the investors came in expecting major growth (since this is not a business with a great monetization story) it's not surprising that there's pressure and turnover right now, almost a year later. And, it may well be that what's needed is a CEO with enough credibility to tell the board "you won't get that growth yet, we have some work to do." Saying that to the board is obviously going to be hard to do for Ellen, or anyone in Ellen's shoes if they brought her in to deliver growth, and she promised to deliver that growth. So, lots of drama, yadda yadda, but I would bet 100:1 that drama has, at it's fundamental source, intense pressure from the board, and I would also bet you that this kind of pressure is new for reddit as a company. To me, that's likely at least some of the context for the rumors that Ohanian intervened directly to get rid of Victoria, the former AMA lead at Reddit. AMAs are one of Reddit's most visible branding / marketing measures. If you need to deliver growth, and aren't seeing it, it is completely natural to be looking at your premier product lines and trying to get them to do more. And, I would be surprised if this kind of thinking weren't informing senior management as they're struggling to deliver on these promises.

jn1234 11y ago
They aren't in that bad of a position. They already have $8.3 million. http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/18/reddit-charity/#.nwugnp:l4SS http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/18/reddit-charity/#.nwugnp:l4S... It's just a matter of growing the community and not pissing them off too much when they are able to successfully do so.
cgearhart 11y ago
From the outside it looked more like Ellen was focused on improving the monetization prospects rather than focusing on growth. In particular, placing limits on abusive content and users would make the site more attractive to advertisers. Firing Victoria fit the same motive -- monetize the most popular product (AMAs). Reddit leadership wanted to explore ways to monetize that feature, and for some undisclosed reason Victoria didn't fit with that plan. The return of Huffman signals a shift back to the Cult of Growth, in the hopes that investors won't worry as much about monetization so long as the site is growing. One thing the board won't settle for is neither growth nor profitability.

jgrowl 11y ago

From what I've seen, being a CEO, CTO, etc is almost inherently a glass cliff. You either keep things running smoothly or you will get let go. Besides, Ellen wasn't even fired. She resigned no?

ThrustVectoring 11y ago
"Resigned" is how executives get fired.
- amyjess 11y ago
  So, I used to work at a company where the VP of Engineering actually declined to take the resignation option. I'm not naming the company or any of the people involved, partially for their privacy, and partially in case I misremembered some of the details (this was five and a half years ago). A little background: at this company, "engineering" included not just development and QA, but also customer support, IT, and shipping & receiving (but not documentation or product management, both of which were under marketing). Also, for some reason, the operations people of our offshore office also reported to the VP of Engineering instead of our corporate management. He had a lot of power just based on of how much of the company reported to him. The VP basically turned the technical side of the company into his own personal fiefdom. He took the idea of acting as a filter (which is a good thing) and took that to such an extreme that he was acting as a brick wall (which is a bad thing). It was almost impossible for product management or sales to find out what we were doing, and we were mostly kept in the dark and drip-fed small details about the business side of things. Worse, he would start projects without the rest of the company's knowledge and tell us the order to create them came directly from the board (in reality, he was trying to impress the board). At one point, he conceived a project, sold it to a customer, and then started development all without sales, marketing (including product management), or the CEO knowing about it. Eventually, the CEO had enough and asked him to resign. He gave the VP a month to announce his resignation and leave. Guess what? The VP just sat on it and acted like it was business as normal. A month later, the CEO had him walked out first thing in the morning and had one of his most loyal executives distribute the new org chart containing a massive amount of changes to prevent so much of the company from being centralized under a single VP ever again. (In case you're wondering, the company has since had a successful exit, by the way.)

tzakrajs 11y ago

I highly doubt that Reddit leadership is/will be responsible for their massive rise or fall in popularity. The people have coalesced around this platform in such numbers that as long as the most basic needs are met for the community to thrive, they will continue to thrive. The few who leave because of this executive turmoil or changes in moderation have already been supplanted by new users who enjoy the system as it is today.

mwill 11y ago
People thought the same about Digg. That said, I do agree that it will take more than just community / company politics to have a big impact, but if Reddit is pushing for growth and make enough missteps in the actual functionality of the site, that combined with the already unhappy userbase could spell trouble in my eyes.

Keyframe 11y ago

Apparently reddit has 71 employees. I would really like to know why reddit needs that many employees. It looks to me like an operation of maybe 20 people at most. That includes devops, engineering, social stuff and ads.

dimino 11y ago
What's that quote about when Digg invited them to lunch awhile back? That Digg had a few floors, and were blown away by the fact that Reddit's staff could fit in a car? I'm guessing the old Reddit guys aren't touching this comment section with a 10 ft pole, but they tell it better than what I just wrote. I wish I could find the comment...
- eco 11y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9768166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9768166
- jedberg 11y ago
  > I'm guessing the old Reddit guys aren't touching this comment section with a 10 ft pole I'm a glutton for punishment. :) The comment was that they were shocked that the entire reddit team fit in a Toyota Yaris, including the beer we brought.
eco 11y ago
Alexa ranks reddit at 24. The other user content focused stuff high on the list are: 2. Facebook (10,082 employees) 3. YouTube (a lot of employees) 6. Wikipedia (~250 employees) 8. Twitter (3,900 employees) 13. LinkedIn (7,600 employees) 15. Sina Weibo (unknown employees) 24. reddit (71 employees) 30. Tumblr (306 employees) 32. Imgur (<50 employees) Given this, I think it's rather impressive that they only have 71 employees (imgur is impressive too).
- smrtinsert 11y ago
  To be fair, Facebook tends to hire 1 engineer per 1000 lines of php code.

abalone 11y ago

So features were promised that she can't deliver on schedule. Was engineering not consulted before publicly committing to features? If so I'd probably quit too. Just before her departure Pao set up a process to figure out with the mods what features to build.[1] Did something go terribly wrong with that process? Was engineering approval not required? [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_apologize/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...

malandrew 11y ago

"The company is growing, and we have the opportunity to improve in many areas — including the number of women in leadership positions. I am confident in our ability to recruit women at the executive level, as we have made a point to do so at Hipmunk, where more than half of the executives are women." I don't know about anyone else, but comments like that make a company less desirable as a place to work because factors like skill, talent, productivity and effectiveness become de-emphasized in recruiting and promotion relative to issues surrounding identity politics. I don't see how permitting (or worse yet fostering) an environment where office politics or identity politics can flourish is a good thing. I am seeing identity politics issues creeping into decision making more and more often and find it positively toxic. When you "make a point" to recruit/promote one group over any other on the basis of a demographic box they fit into, you are implicitly discriminating against people who don't fit into that box. Furthermore, when "making a point" goes so far that you've exceeded the 50% mark ("more than half are [insert identifier for someone that belongs to a particular group]") then that certainly qualifies as active discrimination. I'm 100% in favor of equal opportunity, but ham-fisted hypocritical approaches like this are as bad as what they are trying to fix. Politicking in any form is toxic. If someone created a petition to now remove Steve Huffman, I'd sign it. I highly recommend this recent peer-reviewed academic study demonstrating discrimination in Academia: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract

smrtinsert 11y ago
How is it toxic if representation doesn't even equal general populace? Men are clearly getting in no problem. This isn't a case of over correction, it's about seeing if they can look past historical biases towards men and be more open towards hiring for the future. The study you linked describes current faculty expressing a desire to bring it towards a balance. I'm not sure where the toxicity is created.
- malandrew 11y ago
  "more than half of the executives are women" === over-correction Would it be okay for a company to only hire women as executives since women are a minority of the executives in this industry? Technically that isn't over-correction using your definition. "The study you linked describes current faculty expressing a desire to bring it towards a balance." So if you've got XY chromosomes and you're finishing your post-graduate degree who is a solid candidate for a position in academia and that is where you want to work, then you're getting screwed right now through absolutely no fault of your own just because you happen to have XY chromosomes. That candidate is paying for the failures of past generations. Do you think that is fair?

tosseraccount 11y ago

Blount also said she believed Pao’s exit was an indirect consequence of gender discrimination Sounds like she backed the wrong horse.

geebee 11y ago

This is a very interesting departure. I understand that in the media, especially with the litigation around Pao and the scarcity of women in leadership and technical positions in high tech, that this would take over much of the discussion. Bethanye also mentioned a "glass cliff", so it's reasonable that this would be a big part of the discussion. I am very interested in Bethanye's business-related decisions to leave as well, though. I'm nowhere near her level in any corporate hierarchy, but I am very frustrated with how difficult it often is for engineers, even senior or director (or "chief engineer") level tech workers to operate with the level of autonomy and decision authority that is often explicitly promised. Maybe when the dust settles, if people are still interested, a journalist will have the opportunity to talk with Ms Blount about this. As a dweller on the lower levels of the hierarchy, although with "senior" in my title and all kinds of autonomy spelled out, I can see now that aggressively asserting this kind of autonomy is essential to a strong career, and you need to be prepared to 1) fight it up the chain, and 2) walk away, if other wings of the business try to cram you in a box and tell you that your job is purely to execute a technical vision that may collapse, and the upper level decision makers don't have your back. Unfortunately, low on the ladder often means fewer options, which makes it harder to fight this fight. Higher usually means better severance, stronger networks, a better chance of a good placement in the next gig. Anyway, as an engineer, this is the conversation I'd really like to have… though again, I understand that the issue of women in technical and managerial positions is also very important (and isn't necessarily unrelated, either).