I’d love to hear more about this. What happened to this guy and the debugger?
I’m guessing he got fired and moved to a cabin in the woods. No way talent of that level can exist in a corporate environment too long. Too much jealousy, etc and the higher ups usually can’t stand someone who won’t play by their rules even if the results speak for themselves.
Another possibility is that he regains his old job. I've seen that happen recently - guy left our org for a hotshot startup in a different domain, politics happened and his position was essentially rendered unviable. He rejoined our group and didn't lose status or reputation for his 1 month stint.
At least this guy didn't get hired before that happened. IMHO he's dodged a bullet. If he was good with his old place they'd probably be good to hire him back.
Why haven't they just hired him? It's not like this company's products is worth anything as they are shutting everything down. It's shameless acquihire.
He probably left because he learned that the project was going to be killed. Sad he didn't share that news with the rest of the team so you could all be hunting for a job while on the corporate payroll just like he did.
I saw something that was sort of the inverse of this. A teammate quit with zero notice in a 3 AM email. In that email, he indicated he'd made the decision to open source all the code that he had written in his last year or so with the company. It was in a public github repo in his personal account. The company had a lot of open source, but this was never expected to be part of that.
We were able to get it taken down and no other action was taken against him, but it was an interesting move on his part. His motivation didn't seem to be bad blood - he continued pleasant interactions with several of us, including those in his management chain, long after leaving.
The CEO of one of the companies I worked for hired without any consultation with technical folks. The company barely exists, and he is no longer the CEO.
There is a lot of speculation here. There could be plenty of plausible reasons as to why he would leave the company e.g. a better offer from elsewhere, family reasons.
I've been an employer, and even though stuff like that happens, that's life and you have to calculate that in.
But Evan clearly does not seem to be aware of any reason like that, he's literally clearly confused about the amount of venom that gets thrown his way, for exercising a right that every employee has, to hand in their notice.
To go to work for a large company like Yahoo and to be allowed to work on an open source project is in and off itself plenty of reason to switch and any mature employer would recognize that.
This doesn't really tell us anything, only that he liked an executive he was working with, and is no longer working with him. There's a bigger backstory here that we're not hearing about.
I lost touch but in the first 2 years he said he loved it, and it was the best job he ever had. A current check of LinkedIn shows he left but I don't know the reason.
I feel like if we knew who he quit to go work for, we'd have a better idea of why Mr. Calacanis was so upset. Must have been a powerful direct competitor - I hope..
This may have been uncomfortably close to his closed-source day-job.
Without details we don't know.
And eventually everyone moves on. Company loyalty is dead.
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