alt Hacker NewsCongrats to the founders but honestly feel bad for the team. Hearing so many not good things coming from inside AWS these days. Place sounds like a total mess. Seems like a constant stream of top talent fleeing on my LinkedIn this past year.
I hope they just let the team carry on and don’t contaminate it with all the other craziness going on.
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> Place sounds like a total mess.
What big corp is not a total mess?
Honestly, there's just a huge amount of thrash across the cloud & SaaS industries as a whole. It's not a lot better at Google (way behind OAI & Anthropic on coding & local AI harnesses), Microsoft (no meaningful frontier model R&D to speak of, and a constantly eroding Windows business), the neoclouds (impossible to source adequate infrastructure and are existentially threatened by the hyperscalers (especially Google) if they can't keep up with demand, chipmakers (NVIDIA vs AMD vs Qualcomm vs Apple vs the long tail of specialty shops like Cerebras), data center pure plays (legislative & community pushback, natural resources, infrastructure availability), and the SaaS folks ("let's see if AI can do it").
It's both a great time to be gold mining in tech, and also a terrible time to be a bit employee.
I started using DuckDB last year and I loved it. Small, focused, crackling with competence, no bullshit. I think what I liked about it had a lot to do with it being made by a small group of technical people who weren't interested in "maximizing share holder value" (that is, maximizing executive promotions and bonuses).
Maybe this will be the rare case where founders survive corporate shenanigans and keep on doing their thing. But I'm bummed, as I've heard that optimism many more times than I've seen it happen.
They built something amazing and now have a nice exit. The code remains open under a non profit foundation. I don't think it is that bad. If working conditions are too bad people will just quit and work for the foundation.