You and other people in this thread who think that it’s about corporate speak or tone policing are completely missing the mark. The offensiveness/impoliteness/directness of the language used is not the problem, nor is the fact that he decided to tell his side of a story that has been in the spotlight instead of keeping quiet about a possibly controversial subject like some good fence-sitting little saint.
The criticism is that the post brings up unnecessary personal grievances with Jarred that weaken the core thesis and would have been better left out and cleared out in private, and that the post indirectly signals a message that if you engage yourself with Zig’s development and collaborate with Andrew, and you later have a falling out, he may make an emotionally charged public blog post dissecting and psychoanalyzing your character and abilities for the world to see, and then as a cherry on top act oblivious when people tell him that’s unleaderlike behavior that erodes trust.
All of this hinges on you thinking Andrew’s criticisms are pure speculation or personal grievances though? If Jarred is genuinely (and provably) a bad manager, I don’t see anything wrong in calling that out and letting people know. I read it more as “here are the facts, Jarred was a bad manager, following bad engineering practices, deceitful about Zig’s influence on why Bun had so many issues, and had ridiculous demands of ZSF, and all of these things are related”. That is not a personal grievance. If you are so afraid Andrew might make a blog post about you when a relationship goes sour, at least make sure you have not left a trail of provably bad actions you took. Is he expected to just let all of these things slide? Sounds ridiculous if you ask me.
Andrew just stirred the VCs nest.
Everyone on twitter who follows the Thiel school of thought is going to be up in arms
Expect more slander in the future.
I love zig even more now.
Bun is a sloppy piece of codebase now with the AI slop added it’s even worse.
I think you misunderstand me, I don’t think they’re unnecessary or even that they’re personal in the way you’re implying. I’m very happy they’ve been raised and discussed.
It says nothing about empathy. He’s in a high-risk, high-reward business.
That’s a major difference in value, you seeing this as neutral speaks to the difference and why you see it unrelated to empathy.
The VC environment “high-risk, high-rewards” is inherently non-empathetic and detached from any sense of sustainability and good business sense in an economics perspective — VC is a lottery, not a traditional business where you make a sustainable living with clear lines between employee-employer — the culture in it makes it really hard to have a sustainable life and stable business.
An employee should not work overtime and weekends on someone else’s business while sacrificing their relationships and health for a chance to win big. That’s a lottery with an expensive ticket, not a 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.
Find a lottery winner that hasn’t been handsomely compensated and I’ll concede the premise.
It’s ironic that we’re discussing a project’s failure that AI marketing turned into a success story. Yet people seem more interested in a few irrelevant details than in understanding Andrew’s technical explanation. What a difficult time it is to tell the truth when it doesn’t align with the AI dominant narrative.
I cannot find a single thing that could be considered an irrelevant personal grievance. Anything Andrew said that could be considered personal is relevant to what he was talking about.
I think he was certainly a harsh at times, but I would expect him to be as Andrew/zig have been consistently spit in the face by bun and jarred and the community around them.
Yeah, obviously Trump should not define our social guidelines, if we aim for decency, empathy or basically any other positive qualities. I firmly believe that Trump is not a role model for Andrew.
That’s ridiculous. Some people deserve to get badmouthed. And sometimes, you need to tell the truth about something, and the truth is insulting to someone. @andrewrk needed to talk about Zig, he backed everything with receipts, and the truth is insulting to Jarred.
Not everyone needs to get along.
People are so afraid to speak their minds now-a-days that we never get a full picture of things. That’s why problems never get solved and incompetence and bad character thrive.
You say this during a period of time where there historically never been MORE wealth disparity. You act as though we are operating in some Ayn Rand dream where everyone has agency and there aren’t literal secret societies of billionaires creating wage slaves around the world. Jared’s behavior, And expectations, high number of hours worked, and low wages, part of a larger movement to suppress the working class. Heck Jared is a literal member of these groups. You defend the very people who actively subvert democracy and wish to rule you from their corporate techno facist thrones.
First of all, I think its totally fine if @andrewrk critizises some of Jarred Sumners skills since he’s only talking about skills regarding programming and leading a buisness etc. He did not talk about truly personal abilities, but about (missing) skills everyone could guess from official comments of Jarred Sumner. If Andrews thoughts are kind of insulting to some specific skills of Jarred Sumner, thats how it is. You don’t have to be over-polite all the time, just don’t be low down; and Andrew wasn’t in my eyes.
In general, the Bun-Rust-rewrite-drama shows (once again) a big contradiction: open source software development and business thinking driven by a capitalist theories of the “West” don’t play well together. If you want to accumulate much capital fast with a business idea based on programming/code/whatever-tech, sooner or later you’ll collide with the guidelines and ethics of the open source community. Its no coincidence that many beloved OSS projects form a non-profit-organization to deal with their economic aspects: its not about making big money in the first place, its about the project itself and maybe the social ethics connected to it or its technical foundation. (This doesn’t mean, the main maintainer can’t earn their livings with it. I think Andrew is in this admirable situation. But its not about becoming a b/millionaire as fast as possible.) Unfortunately, many people opt for the money-making. And that money-centric part, which becomes the main aspect for many projects like Bun (resp. their owners/maintainers) if the chance pops up, is the most unappealing one; at least to me.
Thats why it feels kind of awkward for me to read something like Jarred Sumners “work-life-balance” comment or the comment by @wbrian:
Our chancellor over here in Germany would be proud of people dropping such claims since he seems to assume that by default all employees are lazy and try to avoid working as much as possible (but as a politician he’s a d**khead who, as a millionaire, ranks himself in the middle class…[1]). Furthermore, this belief is a very privileged one. In our countries we can decide wether we want to work a lot in a high-risk VC business to (hopefully) earn a lot, or don’t do that and still live a good live in most cases.We own these privileges because on one hand generations of blue-collar workers fought for it, which we should appreciate much more, and on the other hand millions of people in the so-called “third world” are forced to work their’s asses off to make resources and commercial goods as cheap as possible for us while only earning the absolute minimum for living; or even less.
So long story short: open source projects and capitalist views and values don’t fit well with each other. To criticize people who try to turn their OSS projects into fast money and by-doing-so contravene and harm OSS idead and projects is absolutely legitimate, even if its insulting sometimes. I don’t know Jarred Sumner and from what I’ve read about and from him, I’m happy about that. I think our societies don’t need those kind of business people (including the Thieles, Musks, Huangs and many others) and would be better off without them (as businessmen, not as individual humans) and their products.
Many people value empathy. Many people do not value empathy. I’m not going to get sidetracked here:
I absolutely believe that Jarred has publicly stated that he is among those who do not value empathy. Thus, it is fair to refer to him as someone who has publicly stated that he does not value empathy.
I said “unnecessary”, not “irrelevant”. Something can be vaguely relevant to a subject but still unnecessary.
This attention could have been harnessed in a few different ways. For example, he could have easily achieved a solid living via crowdfunding, even for San Francisco standards. But having graduated from the Thiel Fellowship school of thought rather than university, he was essentially groomed from a young age into uncritically embracing the Silicon Valley mindset, and he took venture capital.
This is a personal grievance with an unnecessary framing and detracts from the remainder of the post. It communicates a bitterness and disappointment in Jarred that he, as someone who Andrew once saw potential in, chose a career path that Andrew thinks lowly of instead of one that more closely resembles Andrew’s own, and because the reader isn’t stupid and knows what Andrew thinks of people like Thiel, it ascribes a particular set of bad morals and values to Jarred’s person instead of just letting the things that Jarred has said and done speak for themselves.
It would have been more effective to just simply state that Andrew/the Zig foundation values craftsmanship and despises exploiting of underprivileged workers and that while they initially got along, with time it became clear that Bun/Jarred didn’t align with those values and that’s that why there became this clash.
Fun fact: people talk to each other.
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.
I fully understand and sympathize with the distaste for exploitative startups, but if you’re going to call someone out for lacking empathy and being a bad manager, at least back it up with receipts, otherwise leave it out. Claims like “I’ve spoken to people who I care for and they all agree that X” that are unverifiable to the reader don’t strengthen your cause. The quoted tweet and concrete examples of the dishonest ways in which Bun/Jarred have conducted themselves in public, both in the past and in the present surrounding this recent Rust vs Zig/pro- vs anti-LLM dick measuring contest, already stand on their own.
I thought the Thiel Fellowship was absolutely worth mentioning. Jarred Sumner participating in a Thiel Fellowship is an objectively true thing that I hadn’t known about, and it could explain some of the difference in values.
This is good advice for a prosecutor. This is good advice for a PR department. This is good advice for a journalist.
But I’m not sure it’s good advice for a human out in the world.
I would instead say “don’t bet the farm on things for which you won’t provide receipts”, but certainly I wouldn’t say “never mention things for which you won’t provide receipts”.
Also as I’ve said elsewhere, Jarred has provided his own receipt on the ‘empathy’ point.
I think its one of the best parts of the post. But as you can see from my comment above, my mindset is very anti to money-first business settings and Big Tech wannabe-monarchs
Its indeed a very interesting information. The modern equivalent to the medieval habit “selling your soul to the devil in exchange for fast glory and/or gold”[1]
I’ve been monitoring this thread, and it’s been pretty civil. I think it’s important to allow discussions to occur, and let everyone’s opinions be made, I frequently don’t want to put a moderators thumb on the scales to stifle discussion.
That being said, I worry that the thread is starting to stagnate between two(+) opinions, that are not really going to change, while also inviting further strife. Furthermore it has become an exercise in dissecting two individuals mental states (Andrew and Jarred), I don’t see any good discussion in that line.
With that being said, if there is new discussion to be had I’ll keep the thread open, otherwise it is probably time to close it.
I also been monitoring this thread, it’s been refreshingly civil. However, I think we exhausted the topic, and we said everything that needs to be said and it’s time to move on.
