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I was working late and half my company is in California so I was still at work when that rumour hit. My boss is former YC. Anyway, I don’t want to fan something that might not be true, but it doesn’t matter because the way people reacted really affected me. It’s almost 2 and I can’t stop thinking about it and just the gloating. I obviously knew who he was back when he posted here and I remembered he got some BS ban but nothing that justified people saying they hoped it was true, they hoped they “finally got him.” Maybe that’s normal in the Valley but I come from a more traditional culture where it’s not normal to root for someone to get sick or die.
I was supposed to move to the west coast in December for my company but now I’m having my doubts. I don’t think all Americans are like that, because half my family is American so I know they’re not, or even all programmers, but what I learned about venture capital tech, this community, is really bothering me.
I think I want out. I wouldn’t mind living in the States but not if I’m going to be working for people I can’t trust. And I’m having issues of conscience too because I remember when Dan and the others went after MOC and I obviously knew what they were trying to make happen and now that it seems they may have, I just don’t want to be part of this industry or community anymore.
Thoughts? Anyone in the same space about all this?
This dead HN comment says:
There’s a rumour going around Silicon Valley that MOC died today. As far as I know it’s still completely unsubstantiated, but the reactions I’ve heard have been sickening. And I feel bad because I should have stood up for him against you know who.
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@washingtoncom Put as neutrally as I can, his relatively brief time at Google was marked by extremely loud and somewhat ranty posts which can be summarised as "I am very intelligent, everyone else is mediocre, most of you are also mediocre, if only I were in charge of everything it would all be much better and less mediocre". Definitely a smart guy, probably a great engineer, but pissed literally everyone off so much that a) it even made cynical SREs like me feel a bit of sympathy for middle management and b) he was gone in fairly short order.
Definitely not in *any* way entirely wrong - some of what he said about the arbitrary and random nature of company management and about how becoming rich in tech was as much a matter of pure luck and who you know as it was a matter of intellectual greatness was completely correct - but leavened with so much "My genius vision is too brilliant for mediocre mortals to understand" type stuff that it overshadowed everything else. Something of a conspiracy theorist. Has been seen making assertions such as "Software engineers are the manual workers of the 21st century" which will be a surprise to a lot of actual manual workers. Will say with a straight face that his detractors are envious of his intellectual ability.
Sounds like a normal person dropped into the narcisssistic hellscape of SV. Judging from the average orange poster he probably was smarter than the rest of them lol.
Without disclosing anything specific from my time at Google, I want to emphasize that he's a narcissist. Most of his posts were dripping with delusions about himself, the industry, the nature of software engineering, and the metaphysics of computing. It is a minor surprise that he is not a cult leader like Yudkowsky or a right-wing talking head like Damore. From the inside, Googlers might say "he lacks impact;" out here, we say that he lacks focus.