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I actually had an internship at Fog Creek in 2010. Ted Unangst (mentioned in the article) was my mentor. One thing I noticed about the folks there were that the

I actually had an internship at Fog Creek in 2010. Ted Unangst (mentioned in the article) was my mentor. One thing I noticed about the folks there were that they were all crazy fucking smart. Joel had built this amazing recruiting machine that could pull down some of the real best of the best -- definitely a team that rivals any I've worked with at Facebook. The drawback to this though was that the best are easily bored. FogBugz was an important cash cow for the company, but there were few truly novel problems to solve. This was not a "web scale" effort -- it was self-hosted software for tens to hundreds of seats. So I speculate that they okay'ed the project just because it was an interesting thing to do that solved the underlying problem (albeit in a bit of a convoluted way). The simple cost/benefit analysis from a management point of view is simple; pros: your devs are happy and you get linux support; cons: it's a little more complicated and people make fun of you on the Internet. Over time, Fog Creek came up with better outlets for this kind of nerd energy -- kiln was fun because there were mercurial nerds around; trello was a foray into server-side javascript. There was still a bit of that "the nerds rule" bad decision making that made FogCreek an awesome place to work, but it was more constrained. Since then (and I'm way out of it now), a lot of the old school "just badass" programmers have kind of gone their own way and Fog Creek has hired folks who are better aligned with what they do and how they do it. I'm not sure if this is because of a masterful shift in recruiting philosophy or if the diminishing recruiting brand (due to Joel's blogging pause) led to the right kind of developers becoming interested naturally. In either event, it was definitely a very interesting culture, and I'm happy to have been able to play along for a summer :)

z3t4 9y ago
I guess the dot com crash in 2000 helped them cherry pick talents. A summer intern created their compiler ...
shoover 9y ago
There was a time when one of their blogs (one of the founders, I think) touted the fact that they had never lost an engineer to attrition. It seemed like a strange fact to use to promote the work environment because, even if true and impressive over any length of time, it would certainly have to be retracted sooner or later. I know at least one of the original Kiln engineers has moved on and Trello has been sold. Anyway, I was always curious just how elite of a team they managed to maintain, so thanks for your comment. Edit to add: whoever the devs were and are, hat tip for a remarkably stable system that does what it’s supposed to do. Since Kiln 2.2 or so landed way back when, the FogBugz/Kiln combo has done everything we need for support and development. Much to their sales team’s chagrin, it can be difficult to justify an upgrade, despite the allure of feature and performance updates.
- krallja 9y ago
  That article about zero attrition was written in 2007: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/category/reading-lists/tech-lead/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/category/reading-lists/tech-l... At this point I think everyone who was working at Fog Creek in 2007 has left, including me. (Though I came back in 2013 and am still here.) We have an excellent team, continuing to innovate on Manuscript and Glitch. We spun off Trello, which was acquired by Atlassian for almost half a billion dollars. We co-created Stack Overflow, which continues to be incredible.
  - shoover 9y ago
    Good point. Trello and SO are both phenomenal pieces of software that I use all the time and recommend to others. All of this stuff is fits a need and does its job reliably. Well done.

z3t4 9y ago

I guess the dot com crash in 2000 helped them cherry pick talents. A summer intern created their compiler ...

shoover 9y ago

There was a time when one of their blogs (one of the founders, I think) touted the fact that they had never lost an engineer to attrition. It seemed like a strange fact to use to promote the work environment because, even if true and impressive over any length of time, it would certainly have to be retracted sooner or later. I know at least one of the original Kiln engineers has moved on and Trello has been sold. Anyway, I was always curious just how elite of a team they managed to maintain, so thanks for your comment. Edit to add: whoever the devs were and are, hat tip for a remarkably stable system that does what it’s supposed to do. Since Kiln 2.2 or so landed way back when, the FogBugz/Kiln combo has done everything we need for support and development. Much to their sales team’s chagrin, it can be difficult to justify an upgrade, despite the allure of feature and performance updates.

krallja 9y ago
That article about zero attrition was written in 2007: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/category/reading-lists/tech-lead/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/category/reading-lists/tech-l... At this point I think everyone who was working at Fog Creek in 2007 has left, including me. (Though I came back in 2013 and am still here.) We have an excellent team, continuing to innovate on Manuscript and Glitch. We spun off Trello, which was acquired by Atlassian for almost half a billion dollars. We co-created Stack Overflow, which continues to be incredible.
- shoover 9y ago
  Good point. Trello and SO are both phenomenal pieces of software that I use all the time and recommend to others. All of this stuff is fits a need and does its job reliably. Well done.