At the time he was viewed as critical to the project. They indulged him. A very steady stream of very good devs leaving the company occurred because of such invented rules and irrational behaviour. He was a truly great dev, but a fairly insane architect and gatekeeper.
He took a rare example of a mission focused and open source tech organization and turned it into just another proprietary silicon valley cash-grab grift.
That alone should be reason enough to fire him and not look back.
It goes both ways. The other founder dropped him and left him with nothing but a useless codebase, he can’t even get any kind of recognition because he’s expected to not release the code he wrote. He’s been fucked.
He had personal and financial issues. The pay was cash + profit share. When the cash was fulfilled he had to make ends meet because the profit share was negligible. He was a good developer and a good guy and I don't blame him for going AWOL.
[s]he regrets the hiring of the developer. And if they're hired at all and then leave quickly, that's an awful lot of money (even it was all in people's time) wasted.
I'd like a little more detail on what happened with the cofounder. WTF? Did he have a mental illness? I mean, I could understand some decline in performance or something, but totally stopping? What was he thinking?
He did an AMA of sorts in the Discord Server a few days after the "launch" mostly a sob story about how it "was all his fault" and how he felt bad everyone was let down. No mention of a number of the systemic or toxic issues mentioned in this article.
The Discord Server has since been deleted.
I can attest to the beta seeming like something I'd expect from a college kid and a few friends after a hackathon, definitely not something you hired a "team" to work on.
I'm curious why anyone else joined the team in late 2019 other than to attach themselves to a "cool and trendy" startup mess.
It should also be mentioned that his personal twitter has been scrubbed.
VMware (Pivotal, if I remember correctly, which was part of VMware) hired him for a while, about a decade ago. They did a huge mistake as well, because they didn't take advantage of him at all.
He was funding a Pro-Trump, Anti-Hillary Clinton troll campaign [1], which drew a lot of controversy, as the early Oculus VR audience (developers and technologists) were demographically opposed to that type of ideology.
I think he was fired because he was generating a lot of negative press/attention for what was at that time a burgeoning VR project dependent on adoption by a crowd that largely wasn't a fan of his political leanings...basically office politics.
But...he was fired with a $100 million severance [2], so it's not much of a pity situation.
Or maybe they fired him precisely because of the type of bugs that showed up. You wouldn't want a "move fast and break things" guy to manage billions in cash flow ;)
I remember when it happened, and all the following memes, but I had never actually heard the whole story.
On a related note, has there been any development around the author of Faker.js? He rug-pulled faker.js in a similar matter, leaving only a cryptic message about Aaron Swartz. There was some additional drama about how their open collective funding was sketchily transferred to a new group of maintainers following. Always wondered if there was a story behind his decision to pull it, or if it was just some personal issues they were going through.
He kicked out 100% of people who actually contribute code, so I'm not sure what the heck you're talking about. To the contrary, the sole person left in the project is the one who was all political about it.
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