This is honestly quite a trip to read (I'm the Benjamin Pollack in the movie). I did want to make two small corrections, though:
In one scene, she’s being interviewed on her birthday. Nobody remembered,
so she had to buy herself a birthday hat. While she’s explaining this to the
camera, one of her co-workers shushes her for making too much noise. On her
birthday!
No, this coworker right here was starting to say "shit fuck shit dammit" on camera as he discovered that a stale precompiled header was getting picked up on the build box and then realized Lerone was rolling, so you're hearing me halt myself before saying a pile of profanity on film. In retrospect, Liz talking about her birthday and me suddenly cussing like a drunk sailor would've been a much better take. I regret the error.
[Benjamin Pollack] seems to have never caught the startup bug, mainly working
at larger, more established companies.
I worked at Fog Creek (max ~60 employees during my tenure, usually more like 40) from 2005 to 2014, Khan Academy (~120 if you count contractors) from 2015 to 2017, Spreedly (~40) from 2017 to 2018, and Bakpax (there were a dozen of us) from 2018 to 2021 (we got acquired, I wanted to stay at startups, so I didn't stay once we were bought), and another small startup briefly after that before settling at The Knot Worldwide. Yes, I'm currently at a very large company (~6500), but I'm a bit confused at how you'd come up with that summary of my career.
I honestly really enjoyed the article, though, and neither of these are exactly big errors; just some extra color I wanted to provide.
[Edit: I'm also happy to answer any questions anyone has about the movie or about that time at Fog Creek.]
>I'm a bit confused at how you'd come up with that summary of my career.
I worded that poorly, you're right. I meant early-stage startups at the scale of Fog Creek when you started. I've updated the post.
>No, this coworker right here was starting to say "shit fuck shit dammit" on camera as he discovered that a stale precompiled header was getting picked up on the build box and then realized Lerone was rolling, so you're hearing me halt myself before saying a pile of profanity on camera.
Ah, thanks for the context!
I watched that scene over and over trying to figure out what happened. It sounds like a "shush" but it's also weirdly stretched out. Liz seems to have heard it as a shush, as she shushes herself after. It shows Michael look over at you, but it's not clear if he was reacting to the noise.
There's an imdb trivia item[0] about how you and Liz disagree about whether it was a shush, but it's unsourced, so it was hard to put much stock in it. This is a much more satisfying answer.
I've updated the post to link to your comment here.
>I'm also happy to answer any questions anyone has about the movie or about that time at Fog Creek.
How do you feel about the movie looking back? I notice on your website that you recommend people watch it "if [they]’re feeling masochistic." Is it just the awkwardness of being the focus of a film at that age or were there things you disliked about how it came out?
What did you like/dislike about working at Fog Creek? How'd it change during your tenure?
One other bit of trivia, Alexis Ohanian drew one of the versions of Fog Creek’s kiwi mascot that was featured on some t-shirts and merch, though never in any of the products.
At that time Alexis was drawing logos or art for products he advised or knew the founders of, including most notably Hipmunk. I’m not sure if Joel asked him to draw it, or he volunteered, but it happened and then early in my time at Fog Creek, Alexis and I were catching up about some other stuff and he told me that version of the kiwi was his.
There's an imdb trivia item[0] about how you and Liz disagree about whether
it was a shush, but it's unsourced, so it was hard to put much stock in it.
This is a much more satisfying answer.
Liz thought I shushed her for a long time, but I didn't even know that until years later, at which point I apologized and explained what actually happened. So I guess there was disagreement in the sense that I didn't know she thought that, but we talked that through many years ago.
I am aware of the IMDB factoid. Since they also had my bio wrong and gave me a Bacon number of two for years, I have generally just concluded IMDB doesn't care about having accurate data, and never felt a need to correct it.
How do you feel about the movie looking back? I notice on your website that
you recommend people watch it "if [they]’re feeling masochistic." Is it just
the awkwardness of being the focus of a film at that age or were there
things you disliked about how it came out?
On a personal level, there's a lot I dislike. There was a lot of pressure on us to have reality-TV-show-like conflicts, which we mostly just didn't have. As a result, I end up being the antagonist in quite a few scenes (the building jump experiment is the main one), where it looks like I'm a bit of an asshole due to how things got edited together. So, normal reality TV show stuff.
(Me being awkward and arrogant also does play into it, but, like everyone else, I've grown a lot since then. Seeing how far I've come is at worst a reminder not to let myself be like that again, but usually just ends up making me feel happy I've been able to learn from my mistakes and grow. I can't say it bothers me.)
I also just kind of feel like it's a lousy movie. The soundtrack was literally written on the way to the recording studio, and you can tell. The interviews are usually not asking great questions, as much as rehashing Joel's and Paul's blogs via interviews. And there's the fact the movie is so close to being about reddit and Y Combinator right at their inception, but somehow, just...misses it.
I should tone down the "masochistic" comment so it doesn't sound like I'm bitter or hate the film. I don't. I just don't really know it's worth a watch in 2023.
What did you like/dislike about working at Fog Creek? How'd it change during your tenure?
I learned a lot about tech, I got incredible freedom to work how I wanted on what I wanted, I had great coworkers, and I really believed in and used all of our products. They all brought me joy. That was all good. And it wasn't a grindstone like some of my friends went through at thefacebook and Google, so I had time to genuinely enjoy my hobbies and be with friends.
The dislikes are mostly just versions of me noting that working in an anarchistic environment is great only if you shout loudest and care more than the next person, but I will add that that company was so young in so many ways. We often were figuring out how to do things from base principles instead of hiring people who knew what they were doing, because we weren't sure if we knew how to tell that someone knew what they were doing. And when we started to hire our way out, we made Some Mistakes. So, things that fell out of those bits.
>(Me being awkward and arrogant also does play into it, but, like everyone else, I've grown a lot since then. Seeing how far I've come is at worst a reminder not to let myself be like that again, but usually just ends up making me feel happy I've been able to learn from my mistakes and grow. I can't say it bothers me.)
Yeah, there were definitely lines where my first reaction was that the interns come across badly. But I was a year or two younger than you guys at the time, and I thought about how I'd probably sound if someone asked me to talk on camera about working on software. I'm thankful that nobody did.
>The soundtrack was literally written on the way to the recording studio, and you can tell.
Oh, yeah, that does explain the soundtrack.
While I was listening to it, I felt like it was written by someone who didn't know any programmers, but they were trying to write a song that would appeal to the geeky stereotype of a programmer.
> I am aware of the IMDB factoid. Since they also had my bio wrong and gave me a Bacon number of two for years, I have generally just concluded IMDB doesn't care about having accurate data, and never felt a need to correct it.
I feel like Amazon treats IMDB user submitted data just like reviews on the retail site. They just don't care. Anything goes. I've tried to get data corrected on multiple occasions for it to fall on deaf ears. Much like wikipedia where changes are reverted to previously incorrect data because of editor fiefdom turf wars. So you can't win either way.
I had an internship at Fog Creek and would add that it was probably the most friendly and harmonious place I worked, which made it very reality-show-incompatible (and very 21-year-old-me incompatible, I wasn't asked back lol). Certainly the representation of you as an asshole was ridiculous IMO.
(Since you're answering arbitrary Fog Creek questions) In retrospect, do you think it was a mistake to make kiln hg-centric at first?
(Since you're answering arbitrary Fog Creek questions) In retrospect, do you
think it was a mistake to make kiln hg-centric at first?
No; I think it was a mistake to not also support Subversion out-of-the-box.
Our customers were overwhelmingly Windows shops, and Git on Windows in 2007 was just unusably bad. It really would not have been a viable option. (I did look at Bazaar and Fossil, which were good players on both Windows and Unix, but neither seemed like a good fit for other reasons.) But Kiln's core value prop at the beginning was actually code review, and I think we could've found a cool way to bring in a Phabricator-like patch workflow that would've meshed just fine with Subversion and given our customers a much easier way to get access to Kiln's goodness. In that world, Mercurial would be a kind of bonus feature you could use, not the only way into Kiln. The resulting product would've been very different, mind, but I think it would've gone way better.
The other three technical mistakes we made, since you didn't ask me, were having FogBugz target .NET instead of Java (given the immaturity of Mono at the time only; I love .NET); having Wasabi compile to C# instead of IL (especially given the previous note); and having Copilot directly modifying VNC and its protocol instead of just jacketing it with a small wrapper app. These three decisions collectively slowed the company down a ton at a time when we shouldn't have let ourselves do that.
I enjoyed working with you, Alex. Glad to see you doing well!
It's a bit harsh but I always feel like Fog Creek might be the cautionary tale in "what happens if you over hire for capability vs. your requirements?" I think that a less capable team would have never landed on the "let's maintain our own programming language" approach w.r.t. Wasabi.
As an aside, I do think that targeting Mono was the right thing to do for the universe, as it butterfly-effected tedu into writing weird and wonderful technical blog posts for the next ten years :p
As an aside, I do think that targeting Mono was the right thing to do for
the universe, as it butterfly-effected tedu into writing weird and wonderful
technical blog posts for the next ten years :p
I've never figured out whether that work broke him or was simply his muse, but I also do confess to liking the result. So not a complete loss.
I am always happy when I look back on the monobugz days. I think it was a formative experience in evaluating claims like well, of course it works, so many other people already use and depend on it. O RLY?
I still remember when I came to you with my “attachments shouldn’t live in the mssql database” plan and you said “yeah, probably, but doing it any other way would be a million times harder to maintain.” You were 100% right and I think of it often when I encounter someone who is about to do a similar dumb thing for “the right reasons.”
wait - context? why? i'm sure you're right, as obviously I wasn't there don't have the clearly important context, but why was it 1000000x harder to maintain if attachments didn't live in mssql?
Not 100% sure of the rationale in this case. I imagine it might have to do with everyone who runs an instance needs to maintain an additional storage system along with all the associated costs, which is not just storage alone.
Databases store stuff really well. If get to the level of needing to configure storage for different tiers of access they can do that, it just takes a bit of work. Of course if your blob data is stored in tables that have OLTP data in them, then you have a bit of work to do to separate it out.
This is speaking from recent experience of having to manage random blobs of sensitive data in s3 buckets that engineers have created rather than bothering to put in the main application data store.
The punchline, I suppose, is that we did switch from MSSQL to Mogile and, eventually, S3. But we still had the code to sometimes store attachments in the DB because that’s how we shipped complete backups to customers!
With no context, but much experience with databases...
Storing attachments as a blob in a database has all sorts of disadvantages I'm sure you're aware of, but it has the major advantage that if you can see the reference to the attachment, you can fetch the attachment. With links to a filesystem, you have to deal with issues like the frontends can't access the files because they're on the wrong system, or the network filesystem is down or .... There's a lot of possibilities.
I was at the strategic offsite where we decided to go with .NET. Java wasn’t installed on Windows by default.
The original version of Wasabi, known as Thistle, was written in Java, by the intern in the class before Aardvark’d. It transpiled ASP to PHP.
Every intern class was named after an animal with the next consecutive letter. I don’t remember any of them except Aardvark, and I was a “B????” intern!
From memory and a little grepping of the Weekly Kiwi archives, I found: "Project Null Terminator", Aardvark, B??, Caribou, Dingo, E??, Flying Fox, Giganotosaurus, ??
>I'm also happy to answer any questions anyone has about the movie or about that time at Fog Creek
Why was FogBugz for your server discontinued silently? I think you had build something really great at the end with the change to .net and the plugin architecture (which would have made it possible to do customizations even in the cloud). Also how kiln integrated was great.
Did key people leave so that FogBugz basically stopped to be maintained anymore? Where you still around when they removed the plugins and tried to put it back and maybe switched to elastic search etc.?
Everything you're asking about happened after I left, so I have no idea. I didn't even know they'd discontinued FogBugz for Your Server.
[Edit: We did discontinue Kiln for Your Server while I was there. We nuked that because the support burden was monstrous, to the point we needed three extra SDETs/sales engineers purely to handle testing and on-prem bug fixes. It threatened Kiln's ability to be profitable. The FogBugz team may've made the same calculus a few years later.]
Do you think there's anything the development team could have done to reduce the support burden, or that a team developing what we now call an on-prem product should do to minimize the support burden today? I know we have tools now that weren't available back then, e.g. containers. And .NET is open source and runs on Linux now, so that might have also helped.
Shipping a VM would have simplified things, but nobody did that, and nobody was going to download that. For Linux, we packaged everything we could, but it was still bring your own MySQL, and people had all sorts of terrible configs.
And it was kinda pre-cloud, so usually we got provisioned on some pentium ii forgotten in a closet.
God, every time I think it's gotten better to ship appliances, it really... hasn't.
We had an on-prem solution at Tinfoil, because some of our customers needed it (gov, finance, healthcare, random big enterprise co, etc.)
We were lucky, in that we at least had Docker; or so we thought. Right up until top 5 investment bank decides to write their own orchestrator and use an internal container repository. Ugh, fine.
Oh, and also wants to use their own MySQL db? But, uh, we use Postgres... and Mongo (tech debt)... and... no?
So what did we do? We shipped a VM. You told us your VM solution of choice, we handed you a file, you set up our .ovf or .ova or whatever, it phoned home (only while setting up), got licensed, and off you went.
Debugging was miserable. We later started adding remote debugging capabilities into our contracts because the support burden was ridiculous.
Thing is, we were at least a little smart about it; single codebase, lots of feature flags, lots of internal testing (and our saas customers bled first, before VM customers), etc. I honestly might even do it again, but now there are much better solutions.
But all of this is to say: people did install VMs, and people did download them. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I'd be mightily surprised if less than nearly 70% of our revenue (but not our customer base!) came from on-prem appliances. We sold them at a very significant premium, for obvious reasons.
Huge respect for making that work in the first place! Would love to hear some kind of retrospective about what wa involved in that - I'm super curious.
We still had about a dozen developers combined on FogBugz+Kiln at the very end.
The plug-in API was very bad for performance and security, especially in a multitenant cloud application. That led a team to experimentally reimplement the entire frontend as a single-page app (code named Project Ocelot, whose shirt I am wearing today). Webhooks and a well-designed web API would have been a much tidier solution than the plug-in API.
FogBugz For Your Server had constant support costs, like Ben said, but also the application started growing all sorts of supporting services (a QueueService, an ElasticSearch cluster, Redis…) that made the existing InstallerShieid installer a huge cost to maintain.
Later, I wrote an “autosetup” script in PowerShell to help developers and support engineers onboard faster, which later became the new installer for FogBugz On-Site / Manuscript On Premises. It was designed for a single edition of Windows (Server 2012 iirc?) and SQL Server. We sold a million bucks worth of licenses for that.
I just assumed they followed the usual commercial trajectory: build server software, realize it's much more profitable to sell as service, discontinue on-prem sales.
I am fascinated with the trajectory of Joel and his company. Maybe because I followed it so closely from Joel's earliest essays (which are classics and have become commonly accepted wisdom, the source mostly forgotten) and the Fog Creek forums (the Business of software) which had a great cast of characters and drama (tail of the g!) for a couple of years.
One of the interesting things is it seems to me like Joel, for all his wisdom, always made weird (I would say wrong but the man is a legend after all) decisions. Like his whole premise was to hire great programmers, give them an office with a door that closes, and watch great software appear. Which would take at least ten years. It was clear that this software was originally CityDesk (a content management system, say no more), then FogBugz (the issue tracker doomed from the start by its name alone), and even Copilot, to circle back to the documentary.
The magic never happened, but lo and behold, out of nowhere comes Stack Overflow and makes all of those other ventures an only slightly relevant footnote. And not from any clever Strategy, but completely serendipitously! Turns out Joel was more right than even he probably thought - just press on being great, something great will come out of it. Though not necessarily what you had planned. There is something beautiful about this, to me.
I am sure people will tell me how ridiculously mistaken and misunderstood my take is, but it's how I read the story.
I forget even who the competitors were, but FAUGUEBOGGEZ (as we called it then) was wildly popular for being less shitty than the #1 at that time. (Maybe it was JIRA, or maybe my memories of having to use JIRA have overwritten every other shitty bug tracking system I hated...?)
Anyway, it didn't remain so, but IIIRC FogBugz was on top (in terms of being the consensus-better-than-the-actual-market-leader) for at least a few years.
Which, if you didn't take 50 or 100 million in VC money, is probably a massive success for 99.99% of people.
But yeah, nothing compared to the most-used website in the history of programming.
IIRC, there were several competitors with no clear leader [1] but Bugzilla was pretty popular. Then Trac [2] showed up with a clean UI which allowed it to gain mindshare among OSS projects.
JIRA ultimately became the market leader due to having a product that sucked less than what was out there and being infinitely customizable.
One of the things Atlassian did to gain mindshare was to gift large OSS projects, often under the ASF (Apache Software Foundation) banner, free licenses to JIRA and Confluence.
FogBugz was popular if you were a regular reader of Joel’s blog or if you had heard of the Business of Software community. Outside of that bubble, it wasn’t that well known.
We looked at FogBugz as a replacement for RT, but it had some severely opinionated limitation on release flow/version numbers that meant it didn't fit our existing product releases, let alone our future plans. (I think we were pretty interested in it for the UI and the dynamic velocity modelling? But the presentation/demo pretty much ended with the "so don't do that" discussion :-)
The office with a door thing was how Microsoft was back in the day, if I remember correct. From the stories I heard, some of the offices were ridiculously small/narrow but they still had a door.
Joel was a Program Manager for Excel at MS so my guess is he brought that mindset over.
Really, I wish more places would go back to that. Being able to work with minimal interruptions is great.
> Fog Creek forums (the Business of software) which had a great cast of characters and drama (tail of the g!) for a couple of years.
If you know where to look, some of that cast of characters is still going strong on a forum of a similar design to this day. It's a bit crazy.
Stack Overflow came right out of Joel's complaints about Experts Exchange and is probably the best example of being with the right people at the right time with the right idea.
I would guess this one, but I don't think any usernames carried over. Except maybe the one I can't recall right now (startup related to streaming video over .gif back in late 90s iirc).
I actually know which one he is talking about, but since he didn't call it out, I won't either (maybe they like it quiet).
But what happened was that Joel freaked a bit out over some of the drama on the Business of Software forums and shuttered them, in spite of them being very popular and having a huge community - another one of those weird decisions. In an alternate timeline, they would have been HN.
Not to drag up dirt, but the drama was someone’s quite public suicide and I suspect Joel concluded the bad PR wasn’t worth the good will generated otherwise.
When Joel stopped publishing articles there wasn't any content to drive the conversation. However, it was still a pretty popular forum when it was closed by Joel.
I think it's successor peaked in popularity way after that but started to drop off as there was no obvious way to get new users. The old method of people checking their HTTP logs for referrers to see who was linking to their content and then joining the conversation stopped being a thing.
I actually liked Fogbugz a hell of a lot more than Jira... Sadly it's been sold and is barely a shell of what it was but it had a lot of a premise and was a lot more developer friendly.
I also followed Joel's essays and was more into it back then. But as I look at it now it is generic startup setup. They pivoted enough times to land gold mine. With getting developers do what they like they were able to pivot quite easily and they were onto hiring smart people.
In the end that is what sane business person should do, pivot, pivot, pivot until you land great idea. Only thing you cannot pivot are great people because there is limited amount of those and there is unlimited amount of ideas.
What bad companies do is sticking to some bad idea that maybe earns money but then they burn through legions of junior devs to keep train going.
There was a podcast with Joel and Jeff as they talked through the development of Stackoverflow. It seemed that Joel had hired Jeff to code it, and then discussed what it should be like, and then as Jeff had something to show they talked about where it would go.
Meanwhile, there is plenty of software physiology sprinkled all throughout. It was a fascinating podcast.
At least that's what I remember from it, I haven't listened to it since it came out, what... 15 years ago??
"hired" is a bit of a stretch! Joel had some design input, and the original "let's replace this terrible thing with something better" idea for sure, and Expert-sex-change was the mimeograph, but it was me, Jarrod Dixon and Geoff Dalgas and then Kevin Dente in the earliest days.
I think that's the right take. If you're are legitimately good, and you press on long enough, (and admittedly you have some luck), you'll often win eventually.
Fogbugz didn't dominate the market like Jira did, but it had a dedicated customer base. It's revenue was used to fund the development of Trello in the early days, and to fund the first 2~ years of development on Glitch.
When FogBugz was sold off, it was still a modestly profitable business that a better acquirer could have stewarded into a better performer but the bug/issue tracking market is/was really tough.
Source: I used to work at Fogcreek, did some light dev/design work for FogBugz, and was the co-creator of Glitch.
A forum member started a topic to point out an issue with the Fog Creek website: On the top-left Fog Creek logo (which could be clicked to go to the main page), the tail of the letter 'g' was non-clickable. The poster pointed out that this should be fixed. Joel himself (who rarely participated on the forums) commented along the lines that the guy should immediately check himself into a mental hospital.
It was pretty hilarious, a lot of people took issue with Joel's comment and it was the drama for a few days. Standard web forum stuff :) Hmm, now I wonder if that kind of comment would be judged harder in today's climate!
Maybe this is lost to time now, but YC started in Boston. They used to do the summers in Boston, and winter batches in SF. But then PG didn't want some other copycat accelerator to call themselves "the YC of SF", so they just moved to SF. Perhaps around 2009/2010 or so.
Anyway, if you want to know what the Boston YC looked like, that's where PG is being interviewed. Since Reddit is there, it's the first batch, which should be 2005.
PG is making chili because it's the way he feeds a whole bunch of people at once. YC kept it up throughout the years, and chili is one of the things to remain from the early days, last I heard. Dunno if they're still doing that.
I can't recall where I read it, but I thought they moved because they didn't see a future in Boston. They thought the VC community just wasn't viable there (which seems like a bet that panned out - not many prominent VCs in Boston compared to their peers).
> We funded the second batch in Silicon Valley. That was a last minute decision. In retrospect I think what pushed me over the edge was going to Foo Camp that fall. The density of startup people in the Bay Area was so much greater than in Boston, and the weather was so nice. I remembered that from living there in the 90s. Plus I didn't want someone else to copy us and describe it as the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley. I wanted YC to be the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley. So doing the winter batch in California seemed like one of those rare cases where the self-indulgent choice and the ambitious one were the same.
> If we'd had enough time to do what we wanted, Y Combinator would have been in Berkeley. That was our favorite part of the Bay Area. But we didn't have time to get a building in Berkeley. We didn't have time to get our own building anywhere. The only way to get enough space in time was to convince Trevor to let us take over part of his (as it then seemed) giant building in Mountain View. Yet again we lucked out, because Mountain View turned out to be the ideal place to put something like YC. But even then we barely made it. The first dinner in California, we had to warn all the founders not to touch the walls, because the paint was still wet. [0]
and, from 2007:
> The idea that startups would do better to move to Silicon Valley is not even a nationalistic one. It's the same thing I say to startups in the US. Y Combinator alternates between coasts every 6 months. Every other funding cycle is in Boston. And even though Boston is the second biggest startup hub in the US (and the world), we tell the startups from those cycles that their best bet is to move to Silicon Valley. If that's true of Boston, it's even more true of every other city. [1]
He goes on in the second essay about why VCs in the valley are more aggressive and more deals get done than in Boston or anywhere else, but I suspect that was a huge part of the reason for the move from Boston
The Social Radars has an episode where they interview PG, covering much of the history of YC: https://www.thesocialradars.com/episodes (second from the bottom).
"The YC of Pittsburgh" for instance wouldn't attract the best talent worldwide, but SF and SV is known globally as the center of tech. If someone replicated YC in the global center of tech, they'd have a big advantage over YC.
Oh, interesting. I'd seen it pop up on YouTube before, but the versions I saw were all pretty bad DVD rips. Some of the old threads mention that the versions were uploaded by Boondoggle Media, the film's producer and the same uploader here. So maybe the producer took down the old versions and replaced them with a high-quality version, or maybe the official high-quality version was available before and I just never discovered it.
I remember when he made a splash by designing the office so that every developer had a window and a door. I think they later abandoned the idea, but it felt like the first time someone had actually put real thought into developer's ergonomics when building an office.
Other classics from his blog: why you should never do a Big Rewrite (he was scathing of Mozilla), "Fire and motion", relentless advocacy for "boring" tech, the historical bits about Excel and Lotus... I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot more. It really was a blog worth reading, when most of them were already turning into the "microblogging" spam that eventually begat Twitter.
Off the back of Joel's blog posts I convinced my employer to go with FogCreek CoPilot (remote control / remote assist software), and it was such a disappointment; after all the blog posts about how to Do Software Right(tm) I has raised my expectations that the result of all this process and care would surely be as good as anything could reasonably be. It had few features, was unreliable and slow from the UK, and comparatively expensive.
It's a long time ago so I can't remember the details, but it's stuck with me for ~15 years as a lesson in not believing the hype, and ... I dunno, you can't procedure your way into building amazing things, maybe? Post-hoc looking back from the outside, FogCreek building somewhat generic tools for developers seems very navel-gazing like they didn't have a burningly compelling idea (such as StackOverflow was) and you can't add more private offices unto business/market success.
The compelling idea was supposed to be CityDesk. This was pre-Wordpress, when everyone was building a CMS because normies were paying top dollar to be able to write on the web. Joel described it in a post as "the future belongs to people who can make JavaScript sing", which was slightly ahead of time.
As many developers did at the time (and still do), they built their own tools, and eventually realized their bugtracker was decent enough to sell to Joel's blog readers. FogBugz sales quickly outstripped CityDesk, so they pivoted to selling Dev tools. From there onwards, they were a bit all over the place. They still managed to score StackOverflow and Trello, though...
Joel started his career at Microsoft in Redmond, WA, where it was common for developers to have their own private offices.
I was there from 2007-2010, long after Joel had left, but I mostly had a private office the whole time. I had to share an office for the first six months, but then after that, I had my own private office for the rest of my time there. My last year, I got a window office. Most of my co-workers had private offices, too.
I got spoiled because that was my first job out of college, and I've never had such a good office setup as I did there.
I worked at Microsoft from 2005-2017 and mostly had a private office during that entire period. There were some teams that I joined in the later years that were more "startupish" that worked in open spaces, which I really didn't like, and you could see the company moving to that model in the mid-2010s.
Having a private office spoiled me as well, although I had come from companies that had cubicles. There was nothing like being able to close the door and turn up your music while you were coding. Nowadays, everyone is out in the open with headphones on, of course.
I worked for Microsoft (not in Redmond) in 2020-2022, and remember seeing on Yammer posts about “Hey look, we’re turning these old abandoned offices (nobody wants to work in a private office anymore, amirite?) into [touchdown spaces/mini conference rooms/storage areas]!”
I don’t know if it was all private offices, but the general feeling was that private offices were going away. Moot point for us as we were a satellite office that never had private offices to begin with.
Yeah, Yammer was used pretty extensively within Microsoft. I didn’t use it much, but if you were at Microsoft but not based in Redmond, it was probably the best way to keep up with what was going on company-wide (for those that actually cared).
> I remember when he made a splash by designing the office so that every developer had a window and a door.
I can't believe it's been 20 years since I read this post[0], but I remember how clever it was that each office had a only a single window, but had sight lines to other windows also, making it look like each one was a corner office.
> I remember when he made a splash by designing the office so that every developer had a window and a door. I think they later abandoned the idea, but it felt like the first time someone had actually put real thought into developer's ergonomics when building an office.
I think Tom DeMarco wrote about this in the 80s. Interesting how we've now even managed to make the computer system itself a high-interrupt environment for developers. OTOH, the trade-off between collaboration and focus is a touch one.
Wasn’t Mozilla/Firefox started as a complete rewrite of Netscape? So the complaint was something like “why not just fix the recently OSSed Netscape instead of writing Firefox from scratch.”
I've never understood the obsession with Aaron Swartz. He clearly violated the IP of many hundreds of people (could be thousands) by releasing content he didn't own. He also trespassed on university property to do it.
From the stories I heard, he was a complete asshole to people that didn't agree with him and was even fired from Reddit at one point.
This is authoritarian behavior: I'm going to do what I want regardless of the law and what you believe because it's what I want. I have found that many of the hackers from the 90s and early 2000s that I read about in 2600 were like this. They masqueraded as freedom fighters, but in reality were just authoritarians without power. When their side is in power, they have no problem trampling on the freedoms and rights of the people they dislike.
It kind of makes sense to me as an adult. Hackers are authoritarians without power. You don't do what they want, so they are going to destroy your website/livelihood/life. Petty kings without a kingdom. This morphed into the cancel culture we see today and groups like Antifa.
His suicide was tragic, but we don't need more people with this attitude running a lemonade stand, let alone a tech company or anything important.
> It kind of makes sense to me as an adult. Hackers are authoritarians without power. You don't do what they want, so they are going to destroy your website/livelihood/life. Petty kings without a kingdom. This morphed into the cancel culture we see today and groups like Antifa.
Yeah of course hackers from 90s and cancel culture people on Twitter are the same kind of people.
You have no idea what you’re talking about. Aaron was the furthest thing from an authoritarian. Just because freedom fighters break the law does not equate them to authoritarians, and the rest of this is similarly mistaken.
That you have no compassion for someone who committed suicide due to copying bits shows a lack of humanity that I hope no one emulates.
Liz (Gordon) Hall over here. Your blog post made my day. I couldn't stop laughing and smiling. Seriously, best thing in a while so thank you!
Ok, some things:
- Considering Ben P. was the one who sent me the article I'm contractually obliged to agree with the updated "shh" being a cut-off "sh*t". But, please don't edit or change one thing in the article regarding the great shh debate of 2005, it's perfect the way it is :)
- I was going to say we sold way more copies than 5,000 but after fact checking myself via emails from 2005/2006 it is, in fact, around 5,000. It felt more though because many were international copies and I had to find a way to convert the film to PAL, then we all spent like a week hand packaging each dvd leading up to Thanksgiving.
- Aardvark'd was actually Google Video's FIRST documentary. And to prove it, I found my old resume circa 2006 which, is so insanely hysterical I will bravely share this part here:
• Work directly with CEO Joel Spolsky and CFO Michael Pryor
• Contributed to the growth of the company by becoming the abstract layer: I do everything but code
• Manage the summer internship program including the: recruiting, interview schedules, travel, living arrangements, and plan the summer event calendar
• Oversaw construction expansion as we doubled our office space
• Deal directly with building management to maintain office needs
• Organize catering schedule, keep kitchen stocked and anticipate all needs of the programmers
• Project/Production Manager on “Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks With Geeks”, Google Video’s first feature length film, sold over 5,000 copies worldwide
- I will swim upstream here and declare I think it's a perfect film lol. Seriously though, for me it captures a moment in time that I will forever look fondly upon. I had no idea that it was the starting point for my career in tech. I also love Lerone, the film marker, who has gone on to make great films featured on PBS :) Plus, no one in my life believed the stories I would come home and tell and with the film I finally had proof.
- Some key players missing from the post: Ben Kamens and Michael Pryor. Ben went on to be the VP of Eng at Khan Academy and is the CEO of his own company Spring Discovery (https://www.springdiscovery.com/) so basically, a badass and nicest guy I know.
And Michael... in a million years I never thought I'd have a career at Fog Creek. My plan was to stay a year then move back into TV Production. But Joel and Michael, they created a company that was way ahead of its time in terms of not only tech but company culture. It was special and I knew I was lucky stumbling into this other world. Michale and Joel pioneered so many things but after 18 years in this industry I can say with confidence they pioneered a people-first culture. I'm forever grateful to those two.
Hi, Liz! Really glad to hear you enjoyed the post!
>I will swim upstream here and declare I think it's a perfect film lol. Seriously though, for me it captures a moment in time that I will forever look fondly upon.
The documentary does a great job of capturing that. In all your scenes, you seem like you're having a great time. Your responses in the interviews are so fun and positive, even when you're reading mean blog comments about Fog Creek or maybe-or-maybe-not being shushed.
I mentioned this in the blog post, but it was satisfying to see how you grew your career as Fog Creek became more successful, and it's great to hear how positive an experience you had working there.
Liz we had another couple hundred of those still sitting in boxes in the office as late as when we gave over the space to Trello around 2018. How many did you make?!
Even if it only sold 5000 copies, I remember getting the DVD in the swag bag for StackOverflow dev days, so it must have reached a pretty big international audience over time.
>It's crazy looking back and seeing how different everything was.
Yeah, that struck me as well. For some reason, I expected their tooling to be much more modern, but then you see them running Windows XP, and I have this visceral reaction like, "Oh no! You can't be running that!"
They also go to a "trade show" which you find out is actually a ColdFusion conference. But even at the time, that was pretty dated, and the interns admit they're not sure what ColdFusion is.
I was impressed reading Joel's functional spec at how well it holds up. I don't think it's a very popular way of designing software anymore, but I still prefer big design up front (BDUF), and I suspect Joel probably still works that way. The only thing that felt dated to me about the functional spec was 1) the emphasis on code conventions, which he admitted at the time didn't belong in the spec, and 2) how it focused a lot on what would happen in v2 rather than aggressively keeping scope to the MVP.
You can't corral a bunch of interns -- of potentially unknown skills levels, even with our hindsight of where they wound up -- and expect them to wing their way through a "greenfield" project to launch in 10-or-so weeks. Especially not when you're filming them also.
Imagine them arguing endlessly about how many points to give to the VNC extensions they needed? And at a time when most businesses had maybe heard of agile, but never used it.
Functional specs are super-duper common still. I do (often fixed-cost) bespoke software for clients: can you imagine a non-tech client and me handwaving our way through a complex project one sprint at a time? No, thank you.
Having said all that, Joel's a talented guy, and he probably had a really good idea of what he'd have to do to build the whole thing. When people like that write the functional spec, you're going to wind up with a high-quality document.
I think that is my main issue with "Business Analysts" I have to work with. Most of the time they have no clue at all about the system and no writing ability.
They just throw ideas in Jira tickets and if you start asking questions or clarifications to put ticket back for rewrite they nag you are not agile enough and dragging whole company back to waterfall.
Having read most of Spolsky's blog posts, I'll make the inference that the spec being functional and having reference to code conventions isn't a far stretch for him.
Microsoft devs, at least in certain groups, used the Hungarian coding convention (Systems aka DOS/Windows group had one dialect, Apps aka Office had another dialect) see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation
Thank you for this comment - I'm a physical systems engineer working with software engineers and trying to bridge the gap from a "Systems Engineering" perspective - where on the HW side we use Functional (what the system should do) and Allocated specifications (how the system is physically architected). I struggle with that bridge - it's largely a terminology mismatch, which is oddly much more difficult than I expected to overcome. Sometimes finding the right words makes all the difference. I'd never heard the term BDUF before.
I can see that there's a belief that the BDUF approach implies the design must be perfected before starting to code. I like a healthy concept sketch to use as a roadmap, and evolving accompanying documentation along the way. I use MBSE tools. I certainly would never say a system design is perfected nor are all requirements ever set in stone (under config control - yes, immutable - no). This helps me see where push back is coming from of the SW Dev side.
This is so fun. Thanks for sharing. Does anyone else remember the 6-episode TechStars TV series for Bloomberg from back in 2011? I'd love to rewatch that, too. https://vimeo.com/27175079
I watched Startup.com many years ago and haven't seen another movie about startups since. I highly recommend it for anyone that wants to be inoculated.
That's a good bout of nostalgia - almost felt like watching an episode of Halt and Catch Fire. Joel, PG and Steve Yegge where some of the influential writers of that time who seemed to have a big impact on how people thought about careers, startups and corporate life.
Fun article! I bought this DVD back in college, when I was studying computer science then. I was a long time reader of Joel's blog, going back to high school. I was going to be working in NYC after college. Back then, there were no real "tech jobs" in NYC. It was after dotcom 1.0 crash, but before the post-Google boom. The main companies you could work for in NYC as a programmer were Wall St firms, unless you wanted to end up in a general "IT department" for a BigCo.
I then got a job offer at Fog Creek when graduating college, incidentally for their Software Management Training Program. I turned down the offer, but one funny detail is that in the job offer package, which Fog Creek FedEx'ed to my NYC apartment, there was a printed copy of the Aardvark'd DVD in a DVD case.
As for the documentary itself, I remember liking it, but I watched it at that moment. The connection to YCombinator makes total sense to me. Joel was trying to get smart CS grads to stop taking boring internships with BigCo's outside of tech where they wouldn't actually get end-to-end software product build-and-launch experience. His primary competition in NYC? The Wall St firms (Goldman, Morgan, Lehman, etc.) whose summer internships involved apprenticing on a big internal software system for a couple of months while being marketed to by HR to join that Wall St firm full time after college. YCombinator was trying to convince this same cohort of ambitious CS grads to start startups instead (e.g. the reddit founders at UVa).
Today, the competitive landscape for startup summer talent is totally different. The tech companies are the BigCo's, in NYC or SV. It's probably the Wall St firms who need some help convincing summer interns to join today.
Ironically, I turned down the Fog Creek full-time job to work at Morgan Stanley. The latter felt like a more Linux-y job to me, and I was big into Linux and F/OSS -- also, student debt bills needed paying.
But then just a few years later I ended up quitting that Wall St job to start a startup that went all the way from seed through venture financing and eventually to exit. Fog Creek and Joel remained an inspiration in terms of how we built our engineering culture. See e.g. slides 11-13 here: https://speakerdeck.com/amontalenti/fully-distributed-and-as...
Wow this is a blast from the past. I remember watching this in college around 2008 or so, and it leading me to apply for their internship program. I guess as marketing material it worked!
I didn't get the job, and don't honestly remember anything about the technical side of the interview, but I do remember them being very kind and gracious. I happened to be studying abroad in London and they didn't bat an eye when they had to buy what I'm sure was a way more expensive ticket than usual for the on-site.
Thanks for posting this - very interesting to see where everyone ended up!
Great documentary. I remember seeing it years ago though so it must have been published elsewhere and seen by many more people becuase I doubt that “300 views” count is right
Yeah, I recall seeing a low-quality DVD rip on YouTube a few years ago. When I was researching the article, I found lots of places online where Joel and the other people in the documentary had linked to YouTube URLs that are now dead, so I think there were definitely copies on YouTube floating around for a while.
Swartz, Huffman, and Ohanian are the only YC participants they interview, and they show them all working side-by-side, so I assumed they were all working on Reddit, but I just checked how they introduce Swartz and his title card doesn't say Reddit whereas Huffman and Ohanian's do.
I've corrected the post.
Wasn't he involved sooner than a year after? I thought it launched in Summer 2005, and then Swartz joined the same year.
>Over at reddit.com, we rewrote the site from Lisp to Python in the past week.
Aaron Swartz's blog post, "Rewriting Reddit," published 2005-12-06
Are there any good documentaries about the tech industry from the perspective of companies building themselves?
I’ve seen a few about notable blowups and some about big tech, but nothing that follows a startup through their lifecycle or covers the in day to day innards of the business like this one tries to.
I saw RevolutionOS and it was good but there aren’t any others I’ve been able to find like it either.
Interesting article. I enjoyed watching that movie not too long ago which made it even better.
A small correction:
In the picture of the reddit co-founders the caption is incorrect, it says "reddit co-founders (right to left) Alexis Ohanian, Aaron Swartz, and Steve Huffman in 2005". It should be "left to right".
His posts used to drive me crazy in a love-to-hate way, but I read them regularly because he's a good writer. I just disagreed with him about everything.
One day I clicked on a link that took me to one of PG's Lisp essays. Who was this guy? I'd never read anything like it.
That's how I found out about PG, it's what nudged me to finally learn Lisp, it's what led me to follow YC before it was YC (and HN before it was HN), and thus it's why I'm here. Thanks Joel!
I believe that Joel's ideas like using source control, making a build in one step, having a bug database, having the best tools that money can buy, and writing a spec resonated with me in great part because I worked on ERP-style projects that were often built to support large and complex business processes that were well defined.
Startups in the valley were a thing well before low interest rates were even imagined. Interest rates change the landscape, but it's hardly a prerequisite.
The funny thing to me is, knowing Joel, the interns and developers being interviewed where the few, the proud, who could solve fizzbuzz. Nowadays that's... quaint given the prevalence of leetcode style interiews.
Having passed a Fog Creek internship interview a few years later, I can say the questions were definitely harder than fizzbuzz. I don't remember the exact questions (One was a technical design question about how to do some sort of optimal screen layout, which ended up being an NP-hard problem). Very similar to the questions asked by Microsoft and Google and many other companies around the same time -- whiteboard coding in C to do some sort of data structure manipulation, etc.
Joel has leapt into Burning Man with both feet, building a gorgeous and (of course) technically impressive one-dimensional light show out of a giant military whip antenna.
I honestly really enjoyed the article, though, and neither of these are exactly big errors; just some extra color I wanted to provide.
[Edit: I'm also happy to answer any questions anyone has about the movie or about that time at Fog Creek.]