[mupuff1234]

Am I the only one who finds that type of phrasing distasteful?

I'm sure he didn't build any of those alone, and as a "leader" and a product person he probably didn't do much of the "building".

Seems like he was mostly in an advisory role for Drupal, Docker and MongoDB, he didn't exactly build them.

[spf13]

I never intended this statement to be taken as if I built these alone. Thanks for this candid feedback.

Perhaps a more accurate wording is:

"You may know me from helping to build the Go Language, Docker, MongoDB, and Drupal & creating Hugo, Cobra and spf13-vim"

[bombcar]

This much more clear and honestly more impressive (because the first four are so obviously group effort that I discounted the last two - I had my suspicions about spf13-vim, though).

[mbd64]

No, Steve that is not accurate. You didn't build MongoDB, Docker or Go. They were all wildly successful before you came on board. It's dishonest of you to insinuate that you built or helped build the core products. I can speak first hand for 10gen. For Docker you were not even there for a year, and for Go Rob was pretty clear who helped build it - Ian, Russ, Adam and a long list of people. You were ancillary involved around the periphery of all these.

Having worked on all these should be good enough you don't need to embellish and constantly overstate and lie about your contributions. Let other people talk about how great you are.

[salmo]

I think your wording was fine. I didn’t read that into it at all. Of course you worked with folks to do them. You also spent the majority of the post thanking people you worked with.

I’ve also read your code. I enjoy it and learned a lot more of go that way.

Whatever. Thanks for helping make Go so much fun for me. I look for excuses to write CLIs with Cobra/Viper. They’re of a very few set of libraries I look forward to using.

I use Hugo for much more than it was intended for.

Heck, I wrote a CLI with Cobra around Hugo and a simple theme for my personal note taking and todo management. I was annoyed with other markdown note tools and DIY was a fun waste of time :).

[ignoramous]

Helped building it or actually built it... Impressive just the same!

Congratulations on your new role. Two Sigma seems super-exciting.

[tony]

I contribute to open source projects as well - in various capacities - and it's fine for a maintainer of a huge project to use that wording.

He pushed hugo and viper in 2013-2014: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/commits/v0.7, viper: https://github.com/spf13/viper/commit/98be071

Steve is a very accomplished programmer, with what hugo / viper became in the go ecosystem by itself. In my view, the projects also jumpstarted a lot of new users who were trying out golang who weren't sold on it yet. I didn't really notice his leadership or advisory roles until now, that's just icing on the cake.

Thanks for your contributions, Steve!

Edit: If it's really big ecosystem, _indirect_ contributions also matter. e.g. in python, even if you're not writing CPython patches or PEPs, community based projects do a lot to shape best practices and even bubble up into standard library.

[xcambar]

This specific, quoted, phrase doesn't bother memuch, but I agree that reading the whole article gave me, from top to bottom, a sour taste of personal branding and developer marketing that really doesn't sell it (to me).

[alecbz]

Afaik the last 3-4 are actually largely his personal projects that he probably built most of himself. But yeah, kinda agree for the other ones, the phrasing feels a little self-aggrandizing to my ear. Not sure how intentional it is though, that kind of phrasing I think sort just sneaks into the lexicon for some.

[1-6]

So basically a Googler, nonetheless.

[alecbz]

Have you found Googlers to be self-aggrandizing on average? That's not been my experience working there. (But might be different for "Googlers who talk a lot/are well-known publicly".)

[MonkeyMalarky]

From the outside peering in, the only Googlers are the ones who talk a lot or loudly leverage their ex-googler status on other projects.

[cmrdporcupine]

It's our way of trying to make something out of all the lost years working away in the salt^H^H^H^Hprotobuf mines. We have to use the 'leverage' because all else we'd have left is money in the bank account and skill sets incompatible with most other places in the industry.

[fragmede]

Well but the ones who aren't loud and don't bring it up constantly, you wouldn't know that about them.

[MonkeyMalarky]

That's exactly my point.

[alecbz]

Right, that's what I meant. I don't think the average Googler is self-aggrandizing, but if you don't work at Google or have a big friend circle that works there, then there's a selection bias for the Googlers you do know.

[hnfong]

I'm just speculating, but it might be due to all the practice with writing promo packets...

[seneca]

Heh, as much as I hate painting with that wide of a brush it does seem accurate. Something about Google breeds hubris and self aggrandizement.

[dylan604]

There are certain phrases that just saying them as a matter of fact will always risk sounding self aggrandizing.

"I work for Google" has become one. "I'm a Googler" just has me pivot and walk away.

Another infamous one, "I work at the White House."

[pm90]

> Something about Google breeds hubris and self aggrandizement.

This is true about any successful institution in general. I noticed it first with Universities but it applies to jobs as well.

[wawjgreen]

I know an MIT PhD (natural sciences) who thinks too highly of herself--when I beat her in the Chinese game of Wuziqi (She's Chinese and has beaten the computer and played nearly all her 20+ years), she was so pissed off....She still had that hubris and self-aggrandizement though, until she discovered by chance, that I used to teach mathematics at one of her Alma maters. After that she became sort of an enemy. This is the problem with self-aggrandizing people.

[sleepytimetea]

Yeah, wow, exaggerations everywhere ! Very distasteful. His LinkedIn profile says: "I’m responsible for taking Go Language, Docker and MongoDB from niche technologies to widespread mainstream enterprise adoption."

W O W, really ?

[mbd64]

Yeah, he's a consummate self-promoter and exaggerator I was at Mongo at the same time. He worked on the drupal website which was a godawful mess. Then there was the Drivers team. He spent 3 years there, was absent most of the time working on Hugo while employed at Mongo. Mongo probably owns most of the IP for it. I am not sure what he did at Docker but he'd like you to believe the 10 months he spent there was pivotal to docker adoption, nevermind the fact it was already on fire.

[pm90]

Thanks for taking the time to leave this comment.

While it may be read as some sort of Jealous screed, I have observed similar behaviors from people who fall under this collection of traits. People that might at first be seen as having accomplished a lot, but on further examination, its maybe a few things, and the rest of the things are generally exaggerations.

To a certain extent I understand the need to self promote if one wants to continue to work on OSS but without corporate sponsorship/funding.

[anewpersonality]

Thank you for calling out this behavior!

[h4ckth3pl4n3t]

Wow! Jealous much.

His LinkedIn says he started at MongoDB in 2011. The first commit to Hugo was in 2013, a full two years later. Your story doesn't add up at all.

[mbd64]

Jealous? NO. Someone just needed to finally call him out on his bullshit.

He left in the middle of 2014. He was checked out for a long time. I'd say that timeline adds up pretty nicely.

So while Steve would like take credit for Mongo's enterprise adoption he barely had anything to do with it. Not with the Server, not with Cloud, not with Sales, Marketing or Education.

[10genvictim]

What a strange world 2022 is, wherein former employees of MongoDB openly catfight on HN over who was most responsible for suckering some of the Fortune 500 into buying a truckload of technical debt. Arguing over that like it’s taking principal credit for achieving sustained cold fusion. Baffling.

We all contribute to poop. Our level of contribution to said poop does not diminish that, in fact, we all work on poop so we’re all in the same poop boat. Take it easy on each other, and reserve the bullshit calling for those who really earn it, like the folks who initially built the poop you’re claiming by cleverly offshoring their minimum maturity on the financial and sweat equity of every early adopter. Like, say, for example, for no particular reason, my team at the exact time you’re arguing about.

It’s fine, though, I get it, that’s valley capital, fake it until you make it, give us ops teams ulcers, we make goodish money. Just weird to see resentment over who can claim MongoDB success with that kind of perspective is all. Particularly since the success at the time was all lazy developer mindshare (no disrespect, I’m lazy too), and the technical weaknesses started a few ten-year roadmaps that are now in the market and obsolete MongoDB.

[anewpersonality]

It would serve you better to become clearer in what you are trying to say.

Are you agreeing with the "whistleblower" or not?

[tony]

> responsible for taking Go Language, Docker and MongoDB from niche technologies to widespread mainstream enterprise adoption.

In terms of proliferating Go I think that statement is fair. spf13 is like brand name in open source.

I recall years back on GitHub, spf13 was like a name you were guaranteed to come across if you were sinking your teeth into Go. I ended up using cast / viper: https://github.com/tony/vcsync/commit/a76681b. (Not that I'm anything special at golang)

[pm90]

To be clear, nobody is claiming that he didn’t write viper, or that he isn’t a brand name in OSS. The claim is that he was responsible for “taking go language from niche technologies to widespread adoption”, which seems like a pretty big one to make.

No doubt his contributions did in fact help that process, but as I read it, the claim asserts him as the driver of that process, which he was not.

[stackpush]

I mean not only did he create Cobra and Viper, two of the most popular Go libraries, but he also led the Go project for the last 6 years.

Did you not read the post?

The post is full of evidence of the things that he did or the team that he led did that drove Go's growth.

He definitely was a major contributor to Go's widespread adoption both as an OSS contributor and as a project leader.

[userbinator]

In contrast, I think someone like Fabrice Bellard could absolutely use such phrasing without overselling himself... but then again, Bellard doesn't seem to exactly brag about his accomplishments either.

[seneca]

> Am I the only one who finds that type of phrasing distasteful?

Generally, I'm with you. In this case, I'm only half with you (the phrasing around Go and Docker could use some humility), but he really did build Hugo and Cobra. He contributed quite a bit to the Go ecosystem, he's not just some product person taking credit for work other people actually did.

[bogota]

These comments are why i stopped sharing my work. You can clearly tell that it is not the authors intent but someone (you) will always take things personal when given the chance.

[rubygloomed]

Creating something is often just a small group, but teams build things.

Linus created Linux, but 1000s of people built it.

This guy isn't claiming to have built any of these alone, just claiming that these projects are where you'd recognize him from.