You're right though that the process in practice can be more fuzzy (e.g., you weren't looking, but heard of an attractive opportunity and then applied that way).
Two fun facts: ObjectID's are like Discord snowflakes: you can get a timestamp of when they were generated, you can also generate them client side, so you can filter items in a collection by when they were created.
The other one, that I always enjoyed is, you can take an existing ObjectId, and reinsert it into another document, you dont have to nest all your data, you can go kinda sorta relational about it.
Used it at a previous job, the first project could have just used a SQL db but because the person who made the intial one tried to do NoSQL using something in the cloud, they migrated it to MongoDB to keep it simple and consistent. The second project, well, we really discovered all the limits if you aren't Google with unlimited server memory available, like indexing as I mentioned. MongoDB pipelines are probably my favorite feature on the other hand.
Aphyr's original examination [0] took them to task so much so that I always think of it as the start of the "end", at least of the "web scale" obsession.
Well, this could end meta :) Once I get the Cloudflare prompt I bail assuming the site does not what me to read their content.
Yes, the number of sites I go to is decreasing daily, but gopher, gemini and USENET is still around and seems to be slowly growing.
I wonder if they’ll pair him with another acquisition like Porcupine. META has now realized how much money there is in selling a picks and shovels (as we see with Muse Spark).
One reason might be the share price has collapsed and he has no confidence in it coming back (pretty scandalous if he's the CEO!), or Meta has offered him inducements > what he's walking away from.
Good way to burn a lot of bridges. He's never going to be hired as CEO by anybody for the rest of his career.
Maybe he had enough.
I wish I had your belief in sensible logic like that.
But I suspect you're wrong, even though you shouldn't be.
I'd eat my shorts if this was true. But even then he is likely set for life with his wealth, pre Meta offer.
"Hey the MongoDB guy left, is MongoDB okay?.... wait, no, of course it isn't. It's in that space that is completely screwed."
One interpretation is that senior leadership (e.g. CEO) matters a lot. But it flies against the idea that CEOs are overpaid. From a quick search, it looks like his total stock comp was ~$52m which was a bargain considering his departure cost the company billions. Perhaps he would not have left if he had a higher pay, more in line with the value the market ascribes to him.
However I imagine those that are upset about CEO pay will find this unconvincing. Is there any other way to interpret this?
In short: is it this particular CEO who is that valuable? Should I pay 100m to some Joe off the street since I know they will stay put?
CEOs leave all the time. Average tenure has dropped over the years suggesting a fierce competition for senior talent
Just now in 2026 we start to see glimpses of AI supremacy, e.g. navier stokes.
It’s similar to the deep blue moment. It took a while before consumer hardware could beat Kasparov, but the watershed moment was deep blue.
I reckon some private demos using far more compute than is available to us peasants convinced the tech oligarchs 3 years ago to pursue their seemingly coordinated AI push.
I can't imagine the future is bright for MongoDB as AI makes it much less painful to move off of legacy and/or overpriced software.
In US and English law, "specific performance", so a court ordering you to do what you promised, isn't available for personal service contracts. In the US that's reinforced by the 13th Amendment's ban on involuntary servitude. So even if a CEO signed a contract promising 6 months notice and a smooth handover, the company can't make them do it, they can only enforce any financial penalties that are contracted.
Sometimes a new employer will offer compensation for any loss of stock options and/or to indemnify against any claim for breach of contract or similar.
But it could also be that Mongo have simply agreed to release him - he was only there for 10 months, and might not have turned out to be a great fit. Their share price has been more or less level in that time whilst competitors have been rising so it's not as if he had notable immediate success in boosting their appeal to enterprise customers.
https://stripe.dev/blog/how-stripes-document-databases-suppo...
just need to spin the departure as being decisive and able to make tough decisions and he'll be back in the ceo seat in no time. especially if muse does well.
But possible it could have been over-valued before, unbeknownst to low-information external investors. After all, right now it as a PE of 450+. (Google PE is 17, Meta PE is 27, Tesla PE is 330)
The stock dropping on CEO departure had nothing to do with his personal performance, and everything to do with the information that he revealed on the way out. Why would the CEO leave a rising and successful company on the verge of innovation?
And thus tying it back to pay - people should be paid based on their output and their personal performance, not based on simply serving as a signal which any warm body can do. That said, I don't think truly amazing CEOs are overpaid, e.g. steve jobs of old.
Sure: Destructive actions have a lower bar than constructive ones.
My company doesn't pay me millions, but I were motivated to do so, I could probably cost my company millions. Similar principle here: regardless of whether the CEO is any good, simply by virtue of their position they can tank the stock by making wild moves that undermine confidence.
Imagine a generic human blob CEO with minimal VORP[0], you could swap him out with anyone else in the organisation and get the same results. But if he gets on twitter and announces, "This company is trash and I'm leaving this trash fire," he's going to cost them millions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_over_replacement_player
I would argue that at most he's a signal about company value that people reacted to. Maybe the company lost 6 billion dollars in underlying value, but it wasn't from the CEO change itself.
this same things can happen with any employee at any company and does not bolster your argument.
a $10/hr worker flipping burgers can take actions that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. burger king foot lettuce guy probably cost the company millions.
i could cause millions of dollars in damage this afternoon (i am not paid millions).
or, in other words, looking at the 6B loss and working backwards to say that the CEO was underpaid at 52MM is nonsensical
1: Obviously exceptions will exist for unexpected major life events, etc.
The stock dropped because it’s not a good sign when a company’s CEO abruptly leaves to be a not-CEO at another company. Doing it without a transition period is a wild signal.
Insanity•1h ago
bombcar•50m ago
dagmx•49m ago
Meta hires in strange ways. I’m convinced it’s more about your sales pitch going in.
Pxtl•18m ago
From a technical standpoint? Very different. From a marketing standpoint when selling to software-development clients? Same space.
saalweachter•12m ago
Which is like, not as weird as most AI company headlines, to be honest?
Pxtl•8m ago
Both AI and Mongo can be used for good and quality code but that's not how they get sales.