Douglas Crockford now at PayPal

http://looksgoodworkswell.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/welcome-crock.html

by petercooper • 14 years ago

88 48 14 years ago

looksgoodworkswell.blogspot.co.uk

benatkin• 14 years ago

I believe it. He seems to have done quite well at Yahoo! so I'm not surprised to hear about him going to another large company. I don't know too much about eBay's development community but there's http://ql.io/ so there's something. I can imagine Crockford helping to grow it.

fennecfoxen• 14 years ago

PayPal? Wow. And, eh, I dunno, I'd prefer someplace more widely regarded as ethical. You know, like AIG or Goldman Sachs. :)

eli2• 14 years ago

PayPal has some customer-unfriendly policies but are they really unethical? I would assume the people working there are just as good and honest as at any similar company.

phillmv• 14 years ago

By customer unfriendly you mean "arbitrarily freeze people's money for indefinite amounts of time without giving them any recourse in the matter". I think that might strike some people as unethical.

stevewilhelm• 14 years ago

> The IT Department welcome's you to eBay, Inc.

First order of business, get them to use punctuation correctly.

blake8086• 14 years ago

The IT Department welcome's you to eBay, Inc.;

TazeTSchnitzel4• 14 years ago

No No No!

    (function () {
        'use strict';
        The IT Department welcome's you to eBay, Inc.;
    }());

marco_salvatori• 14 years ago

I'm really sorry to hear that. I'm afraid its going to be a cultural and technical disappointment for him.

zafriedman2• 14 years ago

I can't imagine a bigger cultural disappointment than Yahoo! quite frankly. Crock was probably the best thing about that entire organization. I've been quietly thinking he should leave for awhile now, but haven't said anything on the internet because seriously who am I to say what he should or shouldn't do. We know he didn't lie about his college degree so I think the move away from Yahoo! is smart.

lopatin• 14 years ago

Yahoo may be losing users on some of their have-been web services, but to say that the developer culture is one of the worst is the funniest thing I ever heard. Yahoo is doing more for developers than almost any company out there. Ever heard of YUI or Mojito? How about YQL, Hadoop, or YSlow? With so much open source effort on their part, and the enormous success of some of those mentioned, I don't really see how Yahoo is a "cultural" step down from PayPal, especially when talking Javascript.

res0nat0r• 14 years ago

I might agree, but what about the fact that Paypal has a user base that many companies can only dream of, so working with / developing new technology that can handle problems at this scale has to have some interesting and challenging projects somewhere?

mkopinsky3• 14 years ago

The idea of Douglas Crockford going through some generic new hire orientation process amuses me.

wyclif• 14 years ago

That was my thought exactly. "Doug, your LAPTOP and laptop accessory bag can be picked up from the IT Lab." Yeah.

Michiel• 14 years ago

"Doug, it's important that, when writing JavaScript, your use JSLint to verify it. Do you know it? If you need any help, refer to our internal wiki."

ExpiredLink2• 14 years ago

"How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?

adambyrtek• 14 years ago

Why should he be treated differently than any other talented programmer? The goal of the orientation process is to familiarize one with the company, not to teach programming skills.

petercooper• 14 years ago

Title updated as I received confirmation from this post's author: https://twitter.com/#!/billwscott/status/201547332934828032

DevMonkey• 14 years ago

Wow, I thought he would have stuck around a lot longer. He seemed to really like it there. Friday was my last day at Yahoo, it's unbelievable how many people are leaving.

fruchtose• 14 years ago

I'm not very surprised people are leaving. The company looks like it has lost its direction, investors no longer take the company seriously, and the CEO lied about his academic credentials. I would not want to be there when Yahoo is sold for scrap.

eta_carinae• 14 years ago

> it's unbelievable how many people are leaving.

Where have you been? Yahoo! has been in limbo for half a decade, there has been a constant brain drain for all that time. The only engineers still working at Yahoo! are probably there because they can't find a job somewhere else.

I wonder why Crockford stayed there for so long, to be honest.

magnars• 14 years ago

So I guess the "Use for good, not evil" clause will finally be removed from jsmin and jslint now.

TazeTSchnitzel4• 14 years ago

He gave IBM a special license to do evil with it. IBM complained that, whilst they thought they were doing good things, they were not so sure there customers would.

TazeTSchnitzel4• 14 years ago

Crockford speaking about this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C-JoyNuQJs&t=39m45s

bstar77• 14 years ago

Could you imagine having to work under Douglas and being required to have all your js lint on strict settings?

TazeTSchnitzel4• 14 years ago

JSLint isn't that bad. Some people disagree with his opinions, but I quite like them. I write all my code with JSLint on strict mode and, while I hate how picky it is about whitespace, my code is nicer as a result.

subbu• 14 years ago

Crockford working for an IT department! It would be interesting to see what his views would be in a few months.

jaredsohn• 14 years ago

I doubt he's working for the IT department; I'd assume he's working R&D. I'm sure he also received a letter welcoming him from HR but that doesn't mean he will be working in HR.

digitalzombie• 14 years ago

LOL paypal. I wouldn't even want to put that on my resume.

They froze my account and kept my info (SSN and all). I had to subpeona them to get them to tell me why my account is locked. Their reason was I was associated to another person that owe them money. They won't tell me who this person is.

I've asked them to just delete my info and I won't ever create another paypal account and I have not done anything wrong. They stated no. I asked them if my information will be encrypted they said it's SSL encrypted (wtf). A month later their server got hacked.

They screwed so many people over that the person looking over your resume will be like ugh this guy works for that horrible company. Next!

j79• 14 years ago

Funny enough, I had a similar thought when I applied to eBay. The idea of working for the parent company of PayPal turned me off (I hadn't used my PayPal account in years after getting burned!)

However, since joining, I've met some amazing people (including Bill - He's a wicked smart, cool guy!) and seen some of the projects in the pipeline. The stuff they're working on is top-notch!

It may not be a "sexy" start up and PayPal's business practices may turn people off (I know first hand!) but at the end of the day, you'll be doing some cool stuff working with some amazing people (who know other amazing people and so on and so on...)

Personally, I'm ecstatic Crockford has joined the company!

forcer• 14 years ago

Me neither. Over the years I have grown to passionately hate them. I wonder if they ever be able to turn around themselves.

Just recently this week they reminded me again of their incompentence.It seems they no longer allow Mass Payments for small businesses. Why is it so difficult to let users upload CSV with list of payments to be made? I guess they want their customers to suffer as much as possible, by doing payments one by one.

culturestate• 14 years ago

Somehow, I don't think PayPal is going to be a drag on Douglas Crockford's resumé.

zg• 14 years ago

Slightly worrying to see the conversation in the twitter widget between Bill Scott and a Techcrunch editor about this story where he has to explain that Java is not the same as JavaScript...

atomical2• 14 years ago

Common problem in the tech world. I have this conversation with every tech recruiter I talk to.

ExpiredLink2• 14 years ago

I have seen programmers who worked in both languages but couldn't tell the difference.

driverdan• 14 years ago

Why would you even bother talking to them? I'd hang up / kick them out.

eli2• 14 years ago

Neat. Their web UI could use some serious help.

Douglas Crockford now at PayPal

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