[HN Gopher] How I Failed to Change Wasmer
___________________________________________________________________
How I Failed to Change Wasmer
Author : Rygu
Score : 159 points
Date : 2021-10-06 13:25 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mnt.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (mnt.io)
| justshowpost wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Kudos to building awesome software and good luck finding your
| next gig!
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| 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.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > 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).
| bborud wrote:
| When someone feels sufficiently burnt out to leave a company
| they play a key role in, and are passionate about, I wouldn't
| judge them too harshly when they feel the need to vent their
| frustration.
|
| The mature thing to do is to see it for what it is. Not to
| judge people who've had a hard time.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > if that's all true then what else could this person do
| other than air out the dirty laundry?
|
| Simply leaving the company quietly is a huge statement in
| itself. A founder who leaves an active company and tactfully
| announces that they've chosen to move on speaks volumes.
|
| Airing dirty laundry like this is politics, plain and simple.
| It doesn't benefit the author to advertise his issues as a
| co-founder and it doesn't benefit the remaining employees who
| are now at a company known primarily for founder drama.
| Floegipoky wrote:
| It might give somebody enough information to decide not to
| work for that CEO.
| slibhb wrote:
| Ah, so the author of this blog is a humanitarian
| munificent wrote:
| There's a tricky balancing act here. I agree in general
| that it's good to not air dirty laundry and I personally
| would be very unlikely to publicly write something like
| this about a previous coworker.
|
| At the same time _not_ sharing information widely about a
| toxic member of your community can create a "missing
| stair"[0] effect where those with inside info know to steer
| away from the person. Meanwhile, newcomers to the community
| don't have that knowledge and end up getting burned.
|
| I don't think there's any perfect solution here. We each
| have to judge for ourselves where to draw the line between
| public shaming and the duty to protect others from
| potential harm.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair
| stilist wrote:
| If there's no public acknowledgement that the CEO ran an
| awful workplace, there's not much to stop him doing it
| again with another company.
| andrewingram wrote:
| My reading of the article suggest the "co-founder" title was a
| late addition to the author's responsibilities, and not a co-
| founder in the "starting a company together" sense.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Regardless, he identifies himself as a co-founder and took
| the co-founder responsibilities during the time period this
| article describes.
| hitekker wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Wait, why is that a problem? Let all be aired and let us figure
| it out for ourselves. We're all adults. If the situation is
| indeed as the cofounder claims, a cleaned, distilled version of
| events is untruthful and patronizing.
|
| And if the events aren't as claimed, startups are evaluated on
| their ability to hire the right people. If the CEO chose a
| cofounder who would lie and destroy the startup for no good
| reason, then that also reflects poorly on the CEO.
|
| I, for one, appreciate the signal that Wasmer is a startup to
| avoid doing business with
| sam0x17 wrote:
| > 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".
|
| People second guess themselves when they write something
| emotionally charged and it goes semi-viral. So what? Wouldn't
| you? That doesn't make the article any less valid. A title
| change is very different from materially changing the actual
| events discussed, yet you imply something of this magnitude is
| going on (it isn't).
|
| > The only thing worse than startup leadership quarrels is
| watching one of the founders turn around and try to sink the
| company
|
| Maybe for you. For the rest of us, being a toxic founder who
| exhibits even a third of the bad behaviors mentioned in the
| article would be grounds for forced removal. Looking over the
| timeline and events that took place at Wasmer, it's pretty
| clear this dirty laundry needed to be aired, and everyone (the
| users, the employees) would benefit if this CEO is actually
| removed. Perhaps this idea makes you uncomfortable? It's also
| super disingenuous to paint this as an attempt to sink the
| company -- clearly it's an attempt to say the product has tons
| of promise but the CEO needs to go. All other options have been
| exercised at this point, so going to a public forum with huge
| industry influence is exactly the kind of thing that could
| solve this problem that otherwise probably has no solution
| other than the company floundering. The CEO could quit
| tomorrow, and then this entire endeavor would obviously be
| justified and well worth it.
|
| > 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
|
| In a literal sense you are right to say that the author doesn't
| discuss this much, but come on man, it's super obvious -- this
| "late co-founder" was not given enough control or say in the
| first place to make any of the changes that needed to be made.
| Heck, he couldn't even take a sick day without incurring
| tremendous ire. Most of the article is about that. Did we read
| different articles? It's like you're going way out of your way
| to trash this for no real reason other than it makes you feel
| uncomfortable. Airings of grievances like this are one of the
| good things about Hacker News and have a positive impact on the
| industry. I dare you to come up with a single example where
| that isn't the case. Show me an example of a startup that
| floundered because of disingenuous HN exposure that wasn't
| caught until way too late. If anything they'll have a sales
| bump today.
| brabel wrote:
| > 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.
|
| With all respect to the author, I think, from reading this,
| they gave him the title of co-founder to try to try to stop him
| from leaving earlier, given 85% of the engineering team had
| left (it's implied this happend before he became a co-founder).
| He jokes about it himself, asking "have you ever seen a co-
| founder on a free-lancer contract?".
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| He writes further down that he was handling founder-level
| responsibilities. That's actually part of his complaint about
| his workload.
|
| If he has the title of co-founder within the company,
| describes himself as co-founder in his blog, and was
| responsible for founder-level activities then I think it's
| clear that he was, indeed, a cofounder.
|
| I sympathize with his experience, but I also think we need to
| be careful about letting someone claim the prestige of a
| cofounder title while disclaiming the responsibilities that
| come with that title.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| I can definitely sympathize with this. I've been in a
| situation before where I was employee #1, hired an entire
| team of developers and built a complete product all the
| while being baited along with promises of "we'll discuss
| equity later", "we'll incorporate later" etc. Originally
| our understanding was I'd be a co-founder with double-digit
| equity (this was the main motivation for being OK with
| taking a salary 30% below my typical market value, even
| though we supposedly had "millions in the bank"). All the
| while this was intermixed with the most toxic
| micromanagement, gaslighting, and unrealistic expectations
| disguised as performance shaming that I've ever seen at any
| company ever (though strictly speaking this was not a
| company -- we were all self-employed because the guy was
| too lazy to incorporate or provide benefits). Eventually I
| left when none of these promises panned out and morale was
| at an all-time low because of the constant negativity and
| direction changes from the CEO.
| brabel wrote:
| Not saying that he wasn't... as much as a "late" co-founder
| is a thing... just that the motivation for making hime that
| might have been a little bit sinister.
| Floegipoky wrote:
| 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]
| laszlo_kovacs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| _jal wrote:
| > Having the CEO try to dunk on applicants during interviews
|
| Wasn't the CEO, but the CTO at a startup I was applying with
| years ago swooped into an interview at a place I was pretty
| sure I wasn't going to accept an offer from, while I was at
| the whiteboard solving some stupid thing.
|
| He immediately started arguing with me about some code on the
| side that was from a previous question, kept interrupting me
| when I tried to correct him, and then told me I should be
| cleaner about my work when he finally figured out his
| mistake.
|
| I thanked the person actually interviewing me (not Mr. CTO)
| for his time, picked up my stuff and walked out without
| another word.
| dkarl wrote:
| Since half the purpose of an interview is to see whether _you_
| want to work for _them_ , I'd call that interview a success.
| gavinray wrote:
| Thanks for posting this, genuinely. Sorry you had to go through
| that.
| sushisource wrote:
| What an awful story, I'm sorry you had to endure that. My
| undergrad is in applied math and I would never even dream of
| calling myself a "mathematician", so, yeah, tells you a lot
| about the guy.
| mmmpop wrote:
| That's a funny standard, and not that I disagree--quite the
| contrary--but once you get an undergrad in engineering you're
| an engineer right? Sure, there is an expectation to pass the
| FE exam but is being employed as an engineer a requirement to
| "be an engineer"?
|
| I hear a lot of people with a BS in Comp Science that call
| themselves computer scientists which seems mostly inaccurate
| too.
|
| It's just odd, these titles and what qualifies you to call
| yourself a thing.
| sushisource wrote:
| It's just about how it's colloquially used. Even in
| industry we mostly call ourselves software engineers /
| developers, but if people say "Computer Scientist",
| especially in the context, it's generally understood you
| didn't mean PhD level research.
|
| Mathematician, OTOH, does kinda usually imply that, or at
| least implies you do something that likely requires beyond
| undergrad level education.
| ska wrote:
| Sometimes people differentiate by, for example, saying
| "research mathematician" but I think the meaningful
| distinction is: do you spend (an appreciable fraction of)
| your time creating new mathematics...
| jnsie wrote:
| > the bug turned out to actually be two bugs sitting next to
| each other
|
| I have to ask...did you check github after the fact to see if
| these were real bugs that they used your interview time to
| solve? Would be funny if there was a commit shortly
| therafter...
| hinkley wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| brabel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| no you ride on rainbows with fixies and drink chai latte...and
| then taking care of the money part is the "toxic" part
| outside1234 wrote:
| You sell the talent at the company to Google.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Isn't that "end in tears?"
| outside1234 wrote:
| Amen brother
| idan wrote:
| It physically hurt to read this story.
| nynx wrote:
| 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.
| patrec wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| Wasmer has had some controversy on HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24900186
| paulgb wrote:
| 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
| slimsag wrote:
| 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_
| web...
| aazaa wrote:
| > 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
|
| > 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 wrote:
| > What's the product Wasmer is selling?
|
| Wasmer is an implementation of Wasm.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah a free open source implementation. How are they planning
| on making money?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| For example how does Oracle make money from MySQL, a free
| open source implementation of a database? They sell
| support.
| lwb wrote:
| "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).
| kreetx wrote:
| Looks like CEO's expectations were way too high? Wonder why, as
| he seemes to be a developer himself.
| seibelj wrote:
| 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.
| overgard wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I mean the "wheel" it's 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.
| astlouis44 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-10-06 23:01 UTC)