I led the engineering team for FogBugz and Kiln at Fog Creek from 2017-2018, and worked there for almost a decade prior. Joel Spolsky hasn’t been involved in F

I led the engineering team for FogBugz and Kiln at Fog Creek from 2017-2018, and worked there for almost a decade prior. Joel Spolsky hasn’t been involved in FogBugz at all since 2018, when it was acquired by DevFactory. Forbes calls their parent company a “software sweatshop.” None of the engineers at Fog Creek even bothered to interview to stay on after the knowledge transfer, if that gives you an idea of the corporate culture difference. Before the acquisition, Joel gave Anil Dash the CEO role in 2016. Jordan Harris (COO) and Rich Armstrong (GM) led FogBugz/Kiln operations before then. And even before that, it was fairly clear (at least to us employees) that Joel was more focused on his other companies: Stack Overflow, Trello, Glitch. Trello spinning off into its own company in 2014 was a huge relief for Creekers, because we felt like we could finally focus on our own company again. We were operating with a small, self-funded, crew, which made it very hard to compete with Jira and GitHub. With hindsight, I can say we bit off 1000% of what we could chew. Kiln was a maintenance nightmare, yet didn’t provide a quarter of the revenue FogBugz alone did. The FogBugz Plug-in API was a plain mistake (Second System Syndrome plus running user code in-app?!?). FogBugz’ database tenancy model was always a pain. ElasticSearch was fantastic for speed, but maintainability wasn’t great. We had a real bad case of The Lava Layer Anti-Pattern. Oh, and we were about infinity years late to the cloud: on my very last day, we were still on seven racks of hardware in a DC in the most expensive real estate in the country. I would say the last “Joel” version of FogBugz was 7.0, announced July 20, 2009. Lots of customer excitement with that release.