Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience.
(emphasis mine)
I would describe these as personal criticisms. I think a less charitable reading would describe most of the professional criticisms as personal criticisms. If “He doesn’t value empathy.” was “He doesn’t value empathy in the workplace.” (granted the 2nd quote is followed by “from an employment perspective”) I would read it as a professional criticism. To me, “low empathy” translates to “asshole” and “low empathy in the workplace” translates to “asshole in the workplace” which, while still bad, doesn’t make me think this guy would steal candy from a baby in his free time or whatever.
Two, I actually don’t have any personal criticisms of Jarred. He has different taste …
I think there would be less feedback about “gosh just dont be so coy about it stand by your words LIKE A MAN!” (apologies im just trying to get in the hacker news commenter mindset) if this section was reworded to read less as a takey backy to those who don’t understand what you mean by personal criticism.
Honestly, I think he did well for himself
I am reading this as the “for him(self)” and “by his own standards” are load-bearing and that the statements are not true when the qualifiers are dropped. If I’m correct about that, then I think that that should follow the statements, the statements should be reworded to say “I think he did not do good by my standards”, or the statements should be removed. If I’m not correct about that, then you would be in contradiction with yourself because you state that your values are different than his. To me, as the statements are in the blog post they only weaken the message and cause confusion.
I think there would be less feedback about “why is this post so gosh darn emotional grr this should only be talking about technical shit” if instead of being titled “My Thoughts on the Bun Rust Rewrite” it was titled “My Thoughts on Bun”. To me, the title “My Thoughts on the Bun Rust Rewrite” evokes technical discussion about the rewrite itself rather than discussion about the Zig community’s/your history with Bun and discussion about the blog post about the rust rewrite.
The audience of the JetBrains interview is different than the audience that’s tuned into the Bun drama and the subject matter of this blog post is more divisive than the JetBrains interview. I would assume that the feedback for a more divisive topic is more divisive and that an audience more interested in drama is more dramatic.
Personally helping community members is always a good thing. I am not against that. I might misunderstood the monthly meeting thing.
But I reserve my opinion about the donation and money part. Some activities may be very likely to create bad relationship when it includes money. Even it was not in this case, it may happen.
And yes, if you transparently share and disclose more information in a timely manner, that will help for sure. But if you do it after bad things happened, it would sound more like a complain or something like that.
I really don’t think it’s that complicated. The Jetbrains interview wasn’t personal, while your blog clearly was. The thing I roll my eyes at is that you demand people play along with some poorly employed rhetorical tricks.
You claim to be the authority on his values, which are clearly read as “bad” while juxtaposing those against your values, which are clearly read to be “good.” Would Jarred agree that those are his values? Almost certainly not.
You air anonymous grievances that Jarred can’t meaningfully defend against. And then you insult the intelligence of your audience when you demand that verbal assurances that you “respect” him be taken at face value.
Personally, I don’t think this article contains any personal attacks; it’s more about disagreement on engineering decisions, which isn’t a big deal. This is a personal blog, so there’s no need to worry too much about political correctness. You can speak your mind more freely.
What I will say is that I don’t think it’s spent on everyone, it’s banked in my eyes. This project and the Zig foundation has been as much about technical excellence as it is about being a good judge on the social politics of open source. This blog post demonstrated you’re on the right side of that, to my eyes, and it is appreciated.
I think many people here are triggered by those single words without understanding the whole thing.
Andrew said the “Stinky” word that was from some of their employees’ complains. As my discussion with Krist in my previous reply, they try to help some of Bun’s employees, but the employees had some hard time to work with the owner.
When Andrew said he still respect the owner, he specifically mentioned about that he respects the owner’s working towards his own value.
So when Andrew said the bad word that you don’t like, that was from other people, not himself, although that might give him some hard time too, so he might still have the similar thought.
When Andrew said he respects him, he only respect his abilities to achieve his values, not all of him.
He doesn’t like the way the owner treated his employees, but he likes the owner’s ability to make such a achievement. He likes something, he doesn’t like some other things… That’s totally okay right?
I don’t think he was trying to play to fool anyone’s intelligence here.
Or maybe it is my English is so bad, so it’s me misunderstood what Andrew said, and also my intelligence is so low, so I don’t have much intelligence to be insulted by Andrew? Maybe…
Personally, I find it distasteful how heavily people are dissecting and misrepresenting Andrew’s words in what is meant to be a personal blog where one should be afforded the ability to let their inner voice leak a little bit.
Being under the microscope of the internet is not easy — so much anti-social and parasocial behavior — and, if you do not use words with the utmost precision, people will judge. Yet, I find Andrew’s courage to still come out with his inner feelings commendable, even if some of his words may not “reflect well” on him.
An interesting thought experiment is removing the “Andrew who is BDFL of Zig” from your mind: to me, the article then comes off as just someone who has had a bad experience with a particular entity and is giving their side of the story. This isn’t some thesis on why Bun is in the wrong and why Zig is in the right, but people will still conflate his opinions and thoughts with his role as the leader and make it about the Zig language. Perhaps that is just the weight of his responsibility, but I find it sad that everything has to be watered down to objective arguments and tone policing online. Let people express themselves; humans are emotional beings and can be irrational!
Apologies if I’m being anti-social and parasocial. Obviously not the intention.
I was responding to this which I probably should have clarified in my post. I may have misunderstood what the correct response to this should have been.
I’ve exceeded my internet drama quota for the day, so the last thing I’ll say about this whole debacle:
I talked to those who interviewed for a job at Oven. I talked to people who worked there. Those people talked to each other. Everybody talked to everybody. The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective.
This is gossip used as evidence that Jarred holds a bunch of unsavory values. If you believe that these sorts of things should be adjudicated fairly, there’s really no misinterpreting this.
When I read Andrew article, I was supprised why he wrote something like that. I am not native English, but the article sound something not good to me. Honestly, those words are unnecessary. If Bun found other tool makes things easier and mistakes harder to happen it is fair. What should Zig do is how to make things easier in Zig, more safety features that is enforced not based on a guide, instead of bad words. Keep things in technical then reader also read it well, no unnecessary words
I recognize that communication is a two way street, so if people are not understanding my point, that’s largely my fault as the author of the post, but Jarred’s savoryness was not the point being made. The point being made was:
Bun had limited access to the talent pool
The damaged relationship with Zig project and community
I explicitly say in the post that his savoryness is not the point, but you are calling that insulting your intelligence rather than taking it at face value. If you choose to believe me that I am being genuine then I think you will find the post makes a lot more sense.
Well that post was truly something. I think by know andrew heard all of our feedback (from and outside the zig community). And I hope we all reflect on it.
I hope Andrew doesn’t get harrased over this, and take this harsh feedback on the chin.
What I especially take issue with is how it decides to take a public shit on Jarred by airing dirty laundry about his management skills with a claim everyone thinks he sucks behind his back, and label him as “groomed” just because he has a different set of priorities, goals and software development philosophies
Maybe dirty laundry was aired, but its a positive because if someone was applying for a job there, they probably wouldn’t.
“Grooming” is not a harsh word if you were to look into the people behind the Thiel Fellowship.
If I personally was in a leadership position for a project/software movement with tens of thousands of users, I would probably try to avoid needlessly fueling resentment for it by getting involved in catty retarded techbro e-drama.
I dont think personal opinions should be interpreted this way. The Zig community has grown and Andrew’s opinion doesn’t paint one or more Zig communities a certain way.
I read Jarred’s post however many years back talking about how “if you value work/life balance then do not come work for me” and I gotta say I concur that Jarred does not value empathy. By my reading he has publicly as good as said “I don’t value empathy.” and repeating that is not fighting words.
That’s just being honest and setting expectations. It says nothing about empathy. He’s in a high-risk, high-reward business. Find an employee that stuck around until the buyout who’s on record as saying they haven’t been handsomely compensated and I’ll concede the point.
My impression of what you’re trying to communicate that people will see that Zig core maintainers had a direct connection to Bun core maintainers, and assume that the Bun guys were getting special treatment because they’re more financially valuable to Zig.
So, in light of that, it would be a tactically sound decision for Andrew/ZSF to point out that almost anyone can get a direct connection to the Zig core maintainers, even people who don’t donate a cent to ZSF or develop particularly popular software.
Please rebuff my claims if I’m putting words in your mouth.
Andrew is a developer of a language that I love, not my spiritual leader, nor moral guide. I know enough about him to assume that we likely have very different perspectives on a wide array of issues, and I am perfectly okay with that.
Let’s just grant all the criticisms being levied his way, and assume he is holding some deep resentments towards the Bun guy… and? Why exactly does this matter to me/us again?
Tone-policing his personal opinions about some e-drama like it matters just feels strange to me. Actually worse: it is what is makes it e-drama in the first place.
It’s true that from a strictly intellectual perspective, Zig’s focus should be “How can we make Zig a more attractive/safer option than Rust”.
The problem is that from Andrew/ZSF’s perspective, as Andrew expressed in the blog post, Zig was already a better and safer option for Bun than Rust was, and Bun failed to see that and is now expressing that lack of insight publicly.
Something that makes Zig falsely look bad, as Bun is ascribing negative qualities to Zig that it doesn’t actually have.