So since leaving digg I've heard the following phrase from many competent software dev managers - any good software engineer can learn a new language - but to Kevin - those same software engineers can't learn anything new, while he, of course, can easily learn from his mistakes.
Just to be clear - those engineers, dismissed as "PHP devs" have numerous degrees, decades of experience, and at least one published book. Kevin dropped out of a PC repair school that he likes to refer to as a "CS program."
Anyway he seems to be doing his best to expose his lack of competence.
Kevin learned how to walk away with millions even if your startup is, on net, a failure.
^^ that's a key fucking learning
edit: just to be clear, I don't begrudge him anything. Kevin negotiated the best deal for himself that he could and that's what everyone should be doing. I hope the employees got taken care of as well, but it is what it is. Being an employee at a startup, and I'm on my third, is gambling.
Is there more to the story that you know (considering you used to work at Digg?). You're claiming that leadership at Digg didn't attempt to retrain these programmers new projects, which is a pretty substantial claim. Also, I don't see why Rose's educational background is relevant to his leadership ability, and that statement seems like a superfluous ad-hominem. I'm not necessarily defending Digg leadership in this case, but I certainly question an emotionally heated top post in an HN thread.
Perhaps its an ad-hominem, but I used it as an example of things that Kevin has misrepresented.
In my time at digg, there was no retraining, nor really any feedback from management at all. As far as I could tell the leadership team spent most of their time working on Revision3.
So since leaving digg I've heard the following phrase from many competent software dev managers - any good software engineer can learn a new language - but to Kevin - those same software engineers can't learn anything new, while he, of course, can easily learn from his mistakes.
Just to be clear - those engineers, dismissed as "PHP devs" have numerous degrees, decades of experience, and at least one published book. Kevin dropped out of a PC repair school that he likes to refer to as a "CS program."
Anyway he seems to be doing his best to expose his lack of competence.