Oh I know, I run into this often. Wont stop me- someone at the top can ban me if they want to badly enough.
One user took so much offense to a simple crack, that they spent weeks replying my thread, while I continued to crack on with them. So weird, like problematic weird.
It's a tabloid. Facts aren't particularly relevant to them. Basically the pre-internet equivalent of clickbait (although of course they do have an online presence now).
When I was creating https://github.com/GrantMatejka/rasm I initially wanted to add a Wasm target to the Chez Scheme backend for Racket. Ultimately didn’t work out, but the paper goes over the process a bit
Projects like these are great, and absolutely in traditions of Scheme, PL research, hobbies/learning, and sometimes startups.
Not everything has to be overtly adopted to be worth doing.
Historically, when someone makes some advancement that doesn't lead to adoption, it seems often because:
* there's no follow-through to production-grade (maybe the norm with PL dissertations, if the next job isn't industry and directly involving that same platform);
* the market applicability is too niche/nonexistent, at least at the time (e.g., someday people will realize better DSLs were figured out a long time ago); or
Does Oxide face a challenge of feeling the need to creatively compensate especially motivated team members, or do the company values and hiring process promote a general and widespread highly motivated and quality team, with maybe a more consistent level of contributions from each individual than a traditional org structure? Or a different alternative entirely?
Love to hear your thoughts on this as you said you hire people 'if we saw them contributing to the company as much as anyone else', but what if some people just don't contribute as clearly/observably?
Also are we going to get more On the Metal episodes?
Our hiring process more or less selects for intrinsic motivation at every stage -- that's very important to us. As for "judging" the output of folks: I would say Oxide is just a more extreme example of something that one sees in lots of places, where it is exceedingly difficult (and dangerous!) to make those kinds of comparisons. Not only because the work is highly varied (though certainly that) and not only because it is deeply technical (though that too!), but also because we rely so much on helping one another out. How does one evaluate that? And perhaps a blunter question: what would be the purpose of that evaluation?
When I talk about "seeing someone contribute to the company as much as anyone else", I very much mean in the future tense -- namely, during the hiring process. I think it's not an unfair characterization to say that we would much rather take the energy typically wasted on comp, and spend that energy on careful hiring.
As for more On the Metal, yes definitely: Steve, Jess, and I very much look forward to being vaccinated and back in the garage!
