4 ms·

How many times can this blowhard say "I'm the CEO" in one blog post? He & his CEOness are not the story here.

osium598 10y ago
Anil Dash is one of the most notorious social justice warriors in the tech world. It's unfortunate Fog Creek made him its CEO - I don't predict the company will flourish under him, since he seems more concerned with promoting an airy political agenda than with making good products. He's non-technical (I don't think he's ever written a line of code in his life, and knows next to nothing about the actual craft of building software), yet he's somehow been able to parlay his way into positions of influence by guilt tripping white liberals into giving him power. A few examples (among many) from his sterling career: 1. He was part of the SJW lynch mob, started by Gawker, that got Pax Dickinson (CTO of Business Insider) fired for out of context joking tweets Pax had written years prior. 2. He only retweets women on Twitter and has been quite explicit about it, dressing it up as 'fighting sexism.' I guess you fight sexism by adopting sexist policies? Kind of bizarre. 3. He coerced a journalist into changing a story to make himself look better: http://www.lorenfeldman.com/how-nick-bilton-compromised-himself-and-the-ny-times-for-anil-dash/ http://www.lorenfeldman.com/how-nick-bilton-compromised-hims... As far as I can tell, Dash's only real skills are self-promotion and virtue signaling. From my moderate amount of research, I can't find any actual products he's released that have been successful or widely adopted. Good luck Fog Creek, you're gonna need it!
- eldavido 10y ago
  So, two things. I used to really respect Joel Spolsky. I've read all of his stuff and really liked it. But I can't help thinking that Fog Creek just isn't that important of a company. As a decidedly "technical" person, I don't know a single person that uses any of their products. And I really do mean, zero. I know plenty of people that use git, IntelliJ, github, Stack Overflow, Twilio, AWS, Firebase, Google Cloud Platform, MongoDB, Pivotal Tracker, hell even JIRA, but nothing from Fog Creek. Ten years in the trenches, writing software, and never have I even once used, or even _met_ anyone that uses their stuff. Furthermore, the world has kinda moved on. We aren't shipping desktop software anymore and also, it's not enough to release to the web, either. These days people expect mobile apps, complex responsive design, and 1000 other things you didn't need to do 10 years ago. Software is increasingly becoming a field dominated by teams of specialists in all areas, and I just don't get the sense that Gomix was built with this new reality in mind. Second. I first heard of this guy (Anil) only about a month ago, when I came upon Joel's blog. I heard that he became CEO and yeah, I agree with a lot of what you've written -- a windbag with a political agenda who's great at self-promotion. Honest question though, does this make for a great CEO? We can certainly look to really cerebral guys like Bill Gates as a model for a tech CEO, but consider that Jeff Bezos apparently wasn't a developer. Also consider that more problems in tech are basically "solved" at this point, and as the industry matures, things like promotion and marketing are getting increasingly important. Satya Nadella (Microsoft) himself acknowledged this; I just read last week that Microsoft had some kind of senior meeting, and Satya was on a rant about how MS's culture is too engineering-driven for today's world. I don't have the temperament to be as much of a self-promoter as a guy like Anil, but I know plenty of companies that seem to be run by these guys, like Buffer, Groove, or anyone else specializing in "content marketing", and it seems to be working for them. So before you dismiss this guy, think of what it takes to make a good tech CEO. I fucking loathe self-promoters, really I do, but I'm becoming increasingly convinced that's what it takes to make it in the sort of CRUDdy "tech" that isn't too research-heavy, which is most of software, these days (not autonomous vehicles, genetics, deep learning, thorium reactors, etc)
  - aassddffasdf 10y ago
    You do realize that Stack Overflow and Twilio are Fog Creek products yea?
    - oarfish 10y ago
      You mean Trello, not Twilio right?
      - favadi 10y ago
        maybe auto correct? :)
    - jdross 10y ago
      Twilio (SMS and voice infra and APIs) is not related to Fog Creek. Trello (project management) and Stack Overflow were spun off from Fog Creek parent company, but are not run by Fog Creek.
      - aassddffasdf 10y ago
        Does it matter who runs them? Are the various subsidiaries of abc now not to ever be associated with 'Google'? That's naive and shortsighted.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - EugeneOZ 10y ago
    Even if somebody will agree with this opinion, 2 questions are not solved: 1) non-tech person shouldn't present product for programmers; 2) his "I'm CEO" is still too annoyingly repetitive.
  - ransom1538 10y ago
    "I don't know a single person that uses any of their products." I would say, Fog Creek created one of the most important pieces of software in history and one of the most used. It is called "Stack Overflow". Sure. Quote how they are technically are not owned by FogCreek and Joel is just a CEO there. But that is lawyers, you know, lawyer-ing. "In 2008, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky created Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer Web site for computer programming questions, which they described as an alternative to the programmer forum Experts-Exchange." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_Creek_Software#Stack_Overflow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_Creek_Software#Stack_Overf...
- notfreeyet 10y ago
  According to this other post this Anil guy has attempted to bully and blackball a founder from our industry. http://www.lorenfeldman.com/anil-dash-is-a-coward-liar-and-bully-heres-why/ http://www.lorenfeldman.com/anil-dash-is-a-coward-liar-and-b... If this is true, and it seems true, no founder in Silicon Valley should do business or in any way support Anil Dash in anything. I would chastise Joel Spolsky and that other guy too, but it seems unnecessary given the destruction they're inflicting on their own business by letting him run it. Hah.
  - m_myers 10y ago
    This is a time when I'm glad HN highlights new accounts. A train of green accounts making personal attacks is pretty self-explanatory.
    - notfreeyet 10y ago
      Yeah HN has anonymous accounts so people can speak more freely. I have a day job and I bet this guy knows the CEO at my company and could probably get me fired. I just want to state my position, not create an escalating personal war with the guy. But if I was wealthy I would call him out in my own name as loudly as possible. In my opinion there are few worse things you can do then try to blackball someone from an industry. I think it's grounds for your own excommunication. From his own web site: http://anildash.com/2013/09/my-meeting-with-pax.html http://anildash.com/2013/09/my-meeting-with-pax.html "He flat out said that he wants his startup to be funded and wasn't sure if it'd be possible after all of his, and I replied that it realistically wasn't going to happen without the say-so of someone like me, and I wasn't inclined to give some VC the nod on this. On reflection, I'll be explicit: If you're a venture capitalist, and you invest in Pax's startup without a profound, meaningful and years-long demonstration of responsibility from Pax beforehand, you're complicit in extending the tech industry's awful track record of exclusion, and it's unacceptable." This is clearly a threat that Anil Dash will make trouble for any VC that funds him. This truly sounds so unethical that it might be criminal extortion. I have no history or relationship with him. I just came across someone publicly trying to use his power against a fellow founder and I wanted to publicly (and anonymously) despise him for it.
- throwaway_374 10y ago
  Equally I hate it when tech C-execs have never written a line of code, but you come across as politically charged with personal attacks rather than recognising his suitability for the role based on direct and relevant experience. And if we're going to be frank about pd's "out of context joking tweets" here they are: "In The Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of niggers. It's his own fault for dressing like a whore though." "aw, you can't feed your family on minimum wage? well who told you to start a fucking family when your skills are only worth minimum wage?" "feminism in tech remains the champion topic for my block list. my finger is getting tired."
- etchalon 10y ago
  1. Calling the tweets that got Pax Dickinson fired "out of context" is fairly hilarious. Pax was a contrarian, who enjoyed making provocative statements. Eventually, those bit him in the ass. Reason did a fairly fair-minded article on the whole thing: http://reason.com/archives/2015/07/09/the-social-media-shaming-of-pax-dickinso http://reason.com/archives/2015/07/09/the-social-media-shami... 2. Not even sort of bizarre. 3. Anil reached out to a journalist and apparently made a valid point. The accusation of "coercion" has no basis in known facts. Your link is literally a guy quoting three tweets and making wild claims about what MIGHT have happened behind the scenes.
  - cryptarch 10y ago
    2. Why?
- throwaway_374 10y ago
  >"yet he's somehow been able to parlay his way into positions of influence by guilt tripping white liberals into giving him power". So this is what HN has deteriorated into? Really? Might want to check your blood pressure cause all that salt can't be good for you.
- no_wizard 10y ago
  I'm not going to pick on you specifically here, but this is a great place for me to highlight something. I think folks in tech (and society at large, frankly) have a bit of a fundamental misunderstanding of what comprises discrimination and sexism. The systematic disenfranchisement of a gender/race/ethnicity whatever term you want to use, often is not remedied without some kind of equality of status, that's what 'retweeting only women' is doing. Its giving equality of status to women that they likely would not usually have. Fundamentally I think its hard for a lot of folks to grasp this, even those who have historically been discriminated against when it comes to something they don't understand, part of that is human nature, but over and over again actual psychological studies and sociology studies show again and again that when you give people equality of status only then do things change. [0][1][2][3] As far as Pax goes, CTO of a growing (and arguably large at the time even) should have known better, and frankly, his comments, joke or not, were inexcusable. I also don't care what people may say about what people say in private, because that is something I cannot react to, because I'm not party to that conversation, but this took place on a public forum, and it was in very poor taste at a minimum, and given an executive at a company, likely someone with such poor taste on a public forum as such I can't imagine was doing much for bettering workplace standards. This may be complete conjecture which I acknowledge. With that said, in my experience dealing with people who tend to act the same way in a public forum, in private they're more often than not just as inexcusable. [0] http://commons.emich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1408&context=honors http://commons.emich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1408&co... [1] http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-diversity-matters http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-... [2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/ruchikatulshyan/2015/01/30/racially-diverse-companies-outperform-industry-norms-by-30/#5d3540955742 http://www.forbes.com/sites/ruchikatulshyan/2015/01/30/racia... [3] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/02/10/business-gender-diversity-solved-more-women-means-more-profits/#4df548d44b0f http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/02/10/business-...
- WhitneyLand 10y ago
  Point 1 is ridiculous. What company in the public eye would allow an exec to tweet the n* word, jesus, and sex acts all at the same time and do nothing about it? Anil could have begged BI to forgive him and it wouldn't have helped. Pax placed a time bomb under his own bed with that tweet and it was destined to go off if BI ever found it.
anildash 10y ago
Hey throwaway, this is a link to my personal blog. Our official company posts aren't about me, just the one on my site is. You'll also find my personal Instagram has pictures of me & my kid and my personal Tumblr has some songs and pictures that I like.

Anil Dash is one of the most notorious social justice warriors in the tech world. It's unfortunate Fog Creek made him its CEO - I don't predict the company will flourish under him, since he seems more concerned with promoting an airy political agenda than with making good products. He's non-technical (I don't think he's ever written a line of code in his life, and knows next to nothing about the actual craft of building software), yet he's somehow been able to parlay his way into positions of influence by guilt tripping white liberals into giving him power. A few examples (among many) from his sterling career: 1. He was part of the SJW lynch mob, started by Gawker, that got Pax Dickinson (CTO of Business Insider) fired for out of context joking tweets Pax had written years prior. 2. He only retweets women on Twitter and has been quite explicit about it, dressing it up as 'fighting sexism.' I guess you fight sexism by adopting sexist policies? Kind of bizarre. 3. He coerced a journalist into changing a story to make himself look better: http://www.lorenfeldman.com/how-nick-bilton-compromised-himself-and-the-ny-times-for-anil-dash/ http://www.lorenfeldman.com/how-nick-bilton-compromised-hims... As far as I can tell, Dash's only real skills are self-promotion and virtue signaling. From my moderate amount of research, I can't find any actual products he's released that have been successful or widely adopted. Good luck Fog Creek, you're gonna need it!

eldavido 10y ago
So, two things. I used to really respect Joel Spolsky. I've read all of his stuff and really liked it. But I can't help thinking that Fog Creek just isn't that important of a company. As a decidedly "technical" person, I don't know a single person that uses any of their products. And I really do mean, zero. I know plenty of people that use git, IntelliJ, github, Stack Overflow, Twilio, AWS, Firebase, Google Cloud Platform, MongoDB, Pivotal Tracker, hell even JIRA, but nothing from Fog Creek. Ten years in the trenches, writing software, and never have I even once used, or even _met_ anyone that uses their stuff. Furthermore, the world has kinda moved on. We aren't shipping desktop software anymore and also, it's not enough to release to the web, either. These days people expect mobile apps, complex responsive design, and 1000 other things you didn't need to do 10 years ago. Software is increasingly becoming a field dominated by teams of specialists in all areas, and I just don't get the sense that Gomix was built with this new reality in mind. Second. I first heard of this guy (Anil) only about a month ago, when I came upon Joel's blog. I heard that he became CEO and yeah, I agree with a lot of what you've written -- a windbag with a political agenda who's great at self-promotion. Honest question though, does this make for a great CEO? We can certainly look to really cerebral guys like Bill Gates as a model for a tech CEO, but consider that Jeff Bezos apparently wasn't a developer. Also consider that more problems in tech are basically "solved" at this point, and as the industry matures, things like promotion and marketing are getting increasingly important. Satya Nadella (Microsoft) himself acknowledged this; I just read last week that Microsoft had some kind of senior meeting, and Satya was on a rant about how MS's culture is too engineering-driven for today's world. I don't have the temperament to be as much of a self-promoter as a guy like Anil, but I know plenty of companies that seem to be run by these guys, like Buffer, Groove, or anyone else specializing in "content marketing", and it seems to be working for them. So before you dismiss this guy, think of what it takes to make a good tech CEO. I fucking loathe self-promoters, really I do, but I'm becoming increasingly convinced that's what it takes to make it in the sort of CRUDdy "tech" that isn't too research-heavy, which is most of software, these days (not autonomous vehicles, genetics, deep learning, thorium reactors, etc)
- aassddffasdf 10y ago
  You do realize that Stack Overflow and Twilio are Fog Creek products yea?
  - oarfish 10y ago
    You mean Trello, not Twilio right?
    - favadi 10y ago
      maybe auto correct? :)
  - jdross 10y ago
    Twilio (SMS and voice infra and APIs) is not related to Fog Creek. Trello (project management) and Stack Overflow were spun off from Fog Creek parent company, but are not run by Fog Creek.
    - aassddffasdf 10y ago
      Does it matter who runs them? Are the various subsidiaries of abc now not to ever be associated with 'Google'? That's naive and shortsighted.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- EugeneOZ 10y ago
  Even if somebody will agree with this opinion, 2 questions are not solved: 1) non-tech person shouldn't present product for programmers; 2) his "I'm CEO" is still too annoyingly repetitive.
- ransom1538 10y ago
  "I don't know a single person that uses any of their products." I would say, Fog Creek created one of the most important pieces of software in history and one of the most used. It is called "Stack Overflow". Sure. Quote how they are technically are not owned by FogCreek and Joel is just a CEO there. But that is lawyers, you know, lawyer-ing. "In 2008, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky created Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer Web site for computer programming questions, which they described as an alternative to the programmer forum Experts-Exchange." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_Creek_Software#Stack_Overflow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_Creek_Software#Stack_Overf...
notfreeyet 10y ago
According to this other post this Anil guy has attempted to bully and blackball a founder from our industry. http://www.lorenfeldman.com/anil-dash-is-a-coward-liar-and-bully-heres-why/ http://www.lorenfeldman.com/anil-dash-is-a-coward-liar-and-b... If this is true, and it seems true, no founder in Silicon Valley should do business or in any way support Anil Dash in anything. I would chastise Joel Spolsky and that other guy too, but it seems unnecessary given the destruction they're inflicting on their own business by letting him run it. Hah.
- m_myers 10y ago
  This is a time when I'm glad HN highlights new accounts. A train of green accounts making personal attacks is pretty self-explanatory.
  - notfreeyet 10y ago
    Yeah HN has anonymous accounts so people can speak more freely. I have a day job and I bet this guy knows the CEO at my company and could probably get me fired. I just want to state my position, not create an escalating personal war with the guy. But if I was wealthy I would call him out in my own name as loudly as possible. In my opinion there are few worse things you can do then try to blackball someone from an industry. I think it's grounds for your own excommunication. From his own web site: http://anildash.com/2013/09/my-meeting-with-pax.html http://anildash.com/2013/09/my-meeting-with-pax.html "He flat out said that he wants his startup to be funded and wasn't sure if it'd be possible after all of his, and I replied that it realistically wasn't going to happen without the say-so of someone like me, and I wasn't inclined to give some VC the nod on this. On reflection, I'll be explicit: If you're a venture capitalist, and you invest in Pax's startup without a profound, meaningful and years-long demonstration of responsibility from Pax beforehand, you're complicit in extending the tech industry's awful track record of exclusion, and it's unacceptable." This is clearly a threat that Anil Dash will make trouble for any VC that funds him. This truly sounds so unethical that it might be criminal extortion. I have no history or relationship with him. I just came across someone publicly trying to use his power against a fellow founder and I wanted to publicly (and anonymously) despise him for it.
throwaway_374 10y ago
Equally I hate it when tech C-execs have never written a line of code, but you come across as politically charged with personal attacks rather than recognising his suitability for the role based on direct and relevant experience. And if we're going to be frank about pd's "out of context joking tweets" here they are: "In The Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of niggers. It's his own fault for dressing like a whore though." "aw, you can't feed your family on minimum wage? well who told you to start a fucking family when your skills are only worth minimum wage?" "feminism in tech remains the champion topic for my block list. my finger is getting tired."
etchalon 10y ago
1. Calling the tweets that got Pax Dickinson fired "out of context" is fairly hilarious. Pax was a contrarian, who enjoyed making provocative statements. Eventually, those bit him in the ass. Reason did a fairly fair-minded article on the whole thing: http://reason.com/archives/2015/07/09/the-social-media-shaming-of-pax-dickinso http://reason.com/archives/2015/07/09/the-social-media-shami... 2. Not even sort of bizarre. 3. Anil reached out to a journalist and apparently made a valid point. The accusation of "coercion" has no basis in known facts. Your link is literally a guy quoting three tweets and making wild claims about what MIGHT have happened behind the scenes.
- cryptarch 10y ago
  2. Why?
throwaway_374 10y ago
>"yet he's somehow been able to parlay his way into positions of influence by guilt tripping white liberals into giving him power". So this is what HN has deteriorated into? Really? Might want to check your blood pressure cause all that salt can't be good for you.
no_wizard 10y ago
I'm not going to pick on you specifically here, but this is a great place for me to highlight something. I think folks in tech (and society at large, frankly) have a bit of a fundamental misunderstanding of what comprises discrimination and sexism. The systematic disenfranchisement of a gender/race/ethnicity whatever term you want to use, often is not remedied without some kind of equality of status, that's what 'retweeting only women' is doing. Its giving equality of status to women that they likely would not usually have. Fundamentally I think its hard for a lot of folks to grasp this, even those who have historically been discriminated against when it comes to something they don't understand, part of that is human nature, but over and over again actual psychological studies and sociology studies show again and again that when you give people equality of status only then do things change. [0][1][2][3] As far as Pax goes, CTO of a growing (and arguably large at the time even) should have known better, and frankly, his comments, joke or not, were inexcusable. I also don't care what people may say about what people say in private, because that is something I cannot react to, because I'm not party to that conversation, but this took place on a public forum, and it was in very poor taste at a minimum, and given an executive at a company, likely someone with such poor taste on a public forum as such I can't imagine was doing much for bettering workplace standards. This may be complete conjecture which I acknowledge. With that said, in my experience dealing with people who tend to act the same way in a public forum, in private they're more often than not just as inexcusable. [0] http://commons.emich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1408&context=honors http://commons.emich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1408&co... [1] http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-diversity-matters http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-... [2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/ruchikatulshyan/2015/01/30/racially-diverse-companies-outperform-industry-norms-by-30/#5d3540955742 http://www.forbes.com/sites/ruchikatulshyan/2015/01/30/racia... [3] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/02/10/business-gender-diversity-solved-more-women-means-more-profits/#4df548d44b0f http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/02/10/business-...
WhitneyLand 10y ago
Point 1 is ridiculous. What company in the public eye would allow an exec to tweet the n* word, jesus, and sex acts all at the same time and do nothing about it? Anil could have begged BI to forgive him and it wouldn't have helped. Pax placed a time bomb under his own bed with that tweet and it was destined to go off if BI ever found it.

anildash 10y ago

Hey throwaway, this is a link to my personal blog. Our official company posts aren't about me, just the one on my site is. You'll also find my personal Instagram has pictures of me & my kid and my personal Tumblr has some songs and pictures that I like.