Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sleepytimetea 1425 days ago
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 ?

2 comments

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.
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.

Thank you for calling out this behavior!
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.

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.

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.

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

Are you agreeing with the "whistleblower" or not?

> 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)

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.

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.