Jeremy Edberg, Reddit’s former chief architect, announced Monday that he has joined movie-streaming site Netflix as the company’s “lead cloud reliability” engineer.
But for many redditors the hire of the much-beloved former admin hasn’t assuaged their anger towards the company — anger that has been building since the company announced a rate hike last week and which reached an apex on Sunday after the service blacked out for more than eight hours.
Redditors, in fact, immediately poked fun at the hire.
“No, Netflix, I don’t think this is going to fix your service outages,” wrote one in the title of a post linking to the news of Edberg’s hire.
“He must have been working last night,” wrote another. “My TV and Bluray[sic] box were down but my phone could still get Netflix.”
Edberg spent four years at Reddit. As the site’s chief architect, he was at the forefront of the site’s battle to stay online as it received record growth over the past year — a battle frequently lost, as the site suffered a series of major outages.
But as many redditors observed, those outages were not necessarily Edberg’s fault. Not only are Reddit’s servers hosted on Amazon, but Edberg was, at times, the only engineer working on the problem — a monumental task for a site that receives more than a billion page views month..
So while some redditors poked fun at Edberg (who goes by jedberg on the site), others saw value in Netlflix’s hire:
“Anybody that knows anything about the scale of the problem he faced,” wrote redditor Pandalicious, “will tell you that Jedberg is a god amongst men and that people like that are worth their weight in gold in the IT world.”
And the thread didn’t escape the attention of Edberg himself, who had promised to stay active in the Reddit community after leaving.
“I was affected by that outage too,” he wrote. “It’ll probably be a couple months before you want to start blaming me. ;)”
