I was a very early employee at Wasmer and worked with Ivan for part of that, though I ended up leaving after roughly four months to go back to university. At the time, it didn't seem too bad but, in hindsight, it was a pretty toxic environment.<p>That was partly a result of a lot of pressure from larger companies that didn't want to work with Wasmer because Syrus, the founder, was publically rude to other people working on WASM (among other things).<p>Ivan is a really awesome guy and deserves work that values him. I wish him the best and can vouch for his technical ability.
I interviewed with Wasmer a few weeks ago. It wasn't enough time to get a real inner view into the company but I saw enough to give me pause. They set up an interview for 3 hours, which stretched into 4 hours. During this interview both interviewers had to leave at points to attend other meetings.<p>After this, they wanted another interview. Sure, I guess one 3 hour interview isn't enough. They first scheduled it in the middle of the night my time, but meh time zones are hard. Most egregiously, the interview was to work on the wasmer runtime and fix a bug. Put politely, wasmer is an evolving codebase at a startup. Basically, it's not in the most clean state.<p>This was a bug involving a virtual file system using WASI. I was fortunate enough to be somewhat equipped to handle this bug. I've sat in on WASI meetings; I remember my file systems; and I've touched a lot of raw WebAssembly. It was still freaking hard as hell. Not to mention, the bug turned out to actually be <i>two</i> bugs sitting next to each other, and partially caused by an unused variable which Rust should warn you about, except for some reason they turned that warning off. Oh yeah and the CEO tried to argue with me about whether Rust warns you for unused variables. Yeah dude, anybody with half a second of experience in Rust can tell you that.<p>That interview took 2 hours stretching into 3.<p>After that fun experience, they asked me for yet another interview. I'm sorry but if you're a seed startup hiring anybody with qualifications, you do not get to give me two, 2+ hour long grueling interviews, then ask about a third. You do not get to give me a question that you only solved in the middle of the interview. Your job is to convince me to work for you as much as it is my job to convince you to hire me. Don't waste my time. If you think I'm stupid or lazy or whatever, just reject me.<p>Maybe it was because I was tired and irritable, but the spirit of the interview did not feel like a collaborative "let's solve this together", but more a "let's see if you're as smart as me". Which just sucks man. I want interviews to be encouraging and emotionally healthy, not just grueling beat downs.<p>One last petty tidbit, I find it really disingenuous how the CEO markets himself as a "mathematician". I asked about it in the interview and the dude had an undergrad degree in math. Maybe this is my elitism showing but an undergraduate degree is not enough to call yourself a mathematician. There's so much damn work that you need to do to get a PhD. I got pretty damn far in undergraduate math and I still only know a fraction of a fraction of what a PhD knows.
> I’ve joined the Wasmer company at its early beginning, in March 2019. The company was 3 months old.<p>I had no idea that Wasmer, Inc. was a company. The home page, wasmer.io, says nothing about a company and reads like an open source project landing page.<p>Way at the bottom is a banana button to "Contact Sales" that's just an email address.<p>What's the product Wasmer is selling?<p>Clicking through to "about," I see nothing about products, just bios of the team members:<p><a href="https://wasmer.io/about" rel="nofollow">https://wasmer.io/about</a><p>> The CEO, Syrus Akbary, had evidently a lot of pressure on its shoulders.<p>I suspect that pressure had to do with not having a product for sale in the traditional sense. Maybe the company was viewed as a product, with another company as the customer. If so, it's clear how this could become a pressure cooker.<p>No product + investor money + team to support = pressure and bad work environment.
Really sorry to hear this. I was kind of cheering for Wasmer as it seemed to be making a really nice WASM runtime and adding great tooling around it, including the package manager. I had always thought that Mozilla and the WASM WG were being a little bit "jealous" of Wasmer, intentionally making things difficult for them by moving repositories together with their competing (actually, the standard WASM runtime) wasmtime... now, I'm not so sure!<p>Good luck to the author, but I would just say one thing if I could meet him: never put so much energy on a job, no matter how much you love the project... it's NEVER worth it. Unless you're one of the real founders, and even then, you're always running the much higher risk of losing everything than of becoming a millionaire.<p>Go to work. Enjoy it, have fun, but never become emotionally involved with it. If you need social ties, try your local community, working as a volunteer at a school or whatever... at work, you're there to provide your services at a certain agreed time. After that, get out! Go home to your family. Don't let them make you think they're also your family! They're not and they'll forget you as soon as you leave (and you, them). Everyone will be better off by recognizing that.
Syrus Akbary the founder clearly has issues, as evidenced by his public smackdown and disrespect of Mozilla employees working on WASM which was hinted at in this blog post.
I tried and tried to fix a dysfunctional environment on a contract and my boss (also from the contract company) kept telling me “you can’t fix stupid”. Oddly despite being upbeat he was the first to quit.<p>I have driven culture forward before, but a couple lucky breaks can make you think you have more control than you really have and subsequently failing to change other people can feel like a personal failing instead of their issues being the problem. Internalizing that is toxic and that’s what my boss was trying to say but didn’t have the words.
Wasmer has had some controversy on HN: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24900186" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24900186</a>
I feel for the author, but he keeps talking about "love" and "passion". Perspective is needed. It's a way to run some code. It's alright to be excited by what you work on but it's just a mechanical thing. Don't wrap your self identity into it.<p>If 80% of your engineers are leaving its just a bad workplace. You don't have to apologize for leaving.
The CEO first came onto my radar as a questionable individual some months ago in a thread where he was spreading FUD about former WASM engineers at Mozilla working at Fastly. Accusing them of being biased against him with very flimsy evidence. [1]<p>Later in that thread someone surfaced [2] the fact that the CEO had made a sockpuppet account [3] to praise his own projects.<p>So the OP is not surprising to me. At the same time all of the public communication I've read by the CEO has been polite so I wonder if he is just misunderstood but it's hard to say, it seems like there could also be a lot of bad things happening behind the scenes.<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24900186" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24900186</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24906498" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24906498</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=peter998" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=peter998</a>
The author seems to be making live changes to the article. It started as “How I failed to Change Wasmer” but it’s now titled “I’ve loved Wasmer, I still love Wasmer”.<p>This is a tough story to read for anyone who has been passionate about a startup only to watch it decline under management quarrels. However, I have mixed feelings about this article because the author appears to be a co-founder of the company despite writing much of the article from the perspective of an IC engineer who was taken advantage of. He downplays the role of co-founder later by explaining that he was a “late co-founder” but he also writes about he was responsible for many founder-level activities later in the article.<p>The only thing worse than startup leadership quarrels is watching one of the founders turn around and try to sink the company by airing all of their dirty laundry on the way out. I don’t necessarily doubt that the environment was toxic, but we’re also only getting one side of the story. If there were any engineers or managers still working at Wasmer and hoping to turn the ship around, this blog post may have destroyed any chance of that. Imagine joining this company only to have a co-founder turn around and advertise to the world how terrible the company is.<p>I also wish the author would have elaborated more on their original title (“How I failed to change Wasmer”) instead of laying all of the blame on the other co-founder and alluding to toxicities. I suppose the real lesson here is to avoid becoming a co-founder in a company where you know you’re incompatible with the other founders. It never ends well.
Wonder how his wife and children are feeling about him severely burning himself out on a quixotic mission to "save" a company with a CEO whom he paints in the most damning light. On a precarious freelance contract, after 85% of engineering talent bailed out.
> X stars on Github<p>If the runtime gets embedded in other pieces of software, the impact is a lot more than X stars on Github. You'd need to recursively count all the dependent repos. (Ignoring the fact that you can’t simply measure impact by counting stars).<p>Kudos to building awesome software and good luck finding your next gig!
I find it funny how today the measure of success is first and foremost GitHub stars and everything else comes later.<p>> At the time of writing, Wasmer has an incredible growth. In 2.5 years only, the runtime has more than 10’500 stars on Github, and is one of the most popular WebAssembly runtime in the world!
It's not worth it to sacrifice everything over a WASM runtime. I hope the author takes more than just a couple of months to gain some perspective on what is important and get out of his burnout. I've been in a similar situation and burnout really sucks. Hope you get better!
CEO in the weeds interviewing engineers and trying to solve bugs as as part of an interview process for 10 combined hours? CEO needs to reevaluate his job and priorities.