[bradly]

I got a similar feeling. The article’s title and closing paragraph reference not taking a side, but sandwiched between those are a lot of words that to me clearly indicate a “side” taken by the author.

Through all this I will say that Ruby Central hired a non-technical director whose responsibilities I would expect to include communication and operational expertise to not let these situations happen or at least contain the volatility. That was a failure by Ruby Central regardless of the actions of engineers.

[lamontcg]

Yeah, you can total up all the things he's said about Andre Arko, and even just accepting all of his spin and framing, I don't understand how it adds up to Shopify's actions being legitimate.

And I was part of the Ruby community for the period being addressed in the blog post, and I interacted with him back then, and he was certainly at a minimum difficult to deal with. None of it seems to be relevant at all to what just happened. Whatever Andre did or didn't do with Ruby Together funds, that organization no longer exists.

Also, in not into the faux shock at him paying himself $200-$250/hr as his rate for RT. He's presumably paying his own health care and living in SF so that actually seems pretty reasonable. If he was employed at a tech company earning that much, nobody would bat an eyelash.

[cyphar]

> Also, in not into the faux shock at him paying himself $200-$250/hr as his rate for RT.

The article has been updated and the correct figure appears to have been $150/hr. That seems very cheap for a contracting rate -- another comment[1] went through RT's public disclosures and it seems that he was getting paid ~$30k/yr on average (with a maximum of $60k for one year) which paints a completely different picture to TFA.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45408505

[dmurray]

He's explaining why he's not taking André Arko's side, which one can infer he's been asked to do.

No one is expecting him to speak out in favour of Ruby Central's side, and he several times mentions how poorly they've executed and communicated whatever they're trying to do. And the complaints about that are well-known to anyone reading this post, and don't need to be rehashed.

So no, I think he is indeed reserving judgment, but because of what he feels the need to emphasize given the narrative so far, it looks disproportionately critical of one side.

[bradly]

Huh. I just don’t read that post and think, this is an unbiased take by someone reserving judgment.

[dmurray]

Well, let's say he's clearly not taking Arko's side but he's reserving judgment on whether Ruby Central did a reasonable thing or whether it's "a plague on both your houses".

[bradly]

I think what bumps me is the reserving judgment bit. Why? And until when? Is there an exception that some revelation from Ruby Central or Shopify is going to be released that will clarify all of this? We have actions that have happened and we can form opinions based on those right now.

Given Shopify's strong internal culture of "Strong Opinions, Weakly Held" I feel comfortable holding them accountable to that same standard.