11 ms·

Aardvark'd: The Fog Creek documentary, 18 years later

505 points by mtlynch 3y ago

ekanes 3y ago
Software leaders who want to succeed long-term could learn a lot from Spolky's leadership style.
nwoli 3y ago
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
- mtlynch 3y ago
  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.
tibbydudeza 3y ago
They still using Wasabi (inhouse programming language based on VB) ???.
- mathgeek 3y ago
  Fog Creek ceased to exist and became Glitch several years ago, which was when they split off from anything using Wasabi (I was working on the FogBugz team at the time): https://medium.com/make-better-software/fog-creek-is-now-glitch-8d0308aaf69e https://medium.com/make-better-software/fog-creek-is-now-gli... It' now a part of Fastly: https://www.fastly.com/press/press-releases/fastly-announces-acquisition-of-glitch https://www.fastly.com/press/press-releases/fastly-announces...
- krallja 3y ago
  No, I killed Wasabi https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9777829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9777829 FogBugz and Kiln were acquired by a private equity firm five years ago.
marktangotango 3y ago
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.
- meatmanek 3y ago
  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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
LizGH 3y ago
Hi! 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/ 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.
iamgopal 3y ago
Was Trello from the same company ? It was first awesome sass product I have seen.
- krallja 3y ago
  Yes, Trello was spun out from Fog Creek in 2014 and acquired by Atlassian three years later.
pixelmonkey 3y ago
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-asynchronous-building-eventually-coordinated-teams-that-ship https://speakerdeck.com/amontalenti/fully-distributed-and-as...
no_wizard 3y ago
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.
- wallflower 3y ago
  While it is not what you are looking for exactly, if you have not seen it, the General Magic documentary is extraordinary. It might make you cry. https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com/ https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com/
hermitcrab 3y ago
So what are Joel and Michael up to these days? Have they retired to roll around in piles of money, Scrooge McDuck style? ;0)
- raldi 3y ago
  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.
- krallja 3y ago
  Michael finally left Atlassian last year. Based on the Trello sale I have to imagine he was there mostly for fun not money.
  - hermitcrab 3y ago
    'Atlassian' and 'fun' are 2 words I'm not sure I've heard together before.
Uptrenda 3y ago
Maybe this is a dumb question: but what happened to the software they built? Did they end up shipping it? Did it become a Fog Creek product?
- hermitcrab 3y ago
  Co-Pilot became a real product.
PeterStuer 3y ago
In those days I spend way too much time reading and posting on the JoS forum.
theresapeter609 3y ago
[dead]
rezmason 3y ago
I own one of only 5,000 copies?!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
Thanks for this write-up. This is absolute gold. It's crazy looking back and seeing how different everything was.
- mtlynch 3y ago
  >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.
  - mickeyp 3y ago
    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.
    - ozim 3y ago
manicennui 3y ago
I actually bought this on DVD. I miss Joel on Software and hearing about Fog Creek.
- kcartlidge 3y ago
  > I actually bought this on DVD Same here. Bought it back when it was released, and still have it. Thoroughly enjoyed it, but I agree with the article in that it was very much all over the place in terms of scripting.
- mattl 3y ago
  I was given a copy on DVD when visiting Fog Creek around this time. I vaguely recall it was for sale on Google Video when that was a thing.
- drjasonharrison 3y ago
  The follow-up blog post about automating / streamlining the postal form printing just to ship out the ordered DVDs was another great article.
- tailspin2019 3y ago
  > I actually bought this on DVD I did too. It was quite motivating to watch at the time!
- amerine 3y ago
  Same!!!! I still have it knocking around somewhere in the basement. Wild to think about where we’ve all gone since that era. Amazing ride.
- toyg 3y ago
  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.
manicennui 3y ago
RIP Aaron Swartz. His being mentioned still makes me feel a bit emotional.
- endgame 3y ago
  I can't believe that all happened over ten years ago. MIT hung him out to dry, and who knows what he could've achieved if that hadn't happened?
  - manicennui 3y ago
    Even if he never achieved anything, I rather that he be alive.
- johnny99k 3y ago
  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.
  - raincole 3y ago
    > 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. LMAO.
dannb 3y ago
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 https://vimeo.com/27175079
- c17r 3y ago
  I don't have that one but I do have the 8-episode "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley" from 2012. Also "Startup.com" from 2001 And "e-Dreams" from 2001
  - dannb 3y ago
    Are these available to watch online anywhere? Would love to check them out.
nickpp 3y ago
Loved this energy at the time. So inspiring, even for folks far far away from Joel’s world. Could credit it for quite a few people’s future success. So different from today's sentiment of "Only rich kids can play with startups, you shouldn’t even bother. You need universal healthcare/UBI first".
- facorreia 3y ago
  I followed Joel’s posts and learned a lot from them. He inspired me and had a concrete impact on my career and what I value as a software engineer.
  - dang 3y ago
    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! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=791989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=791989
    - facorreia 3y ago
      Great story, thanks for sharing. 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.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  No one says that about startups these days. What they do want is low-to-near-zero interest rates.
  - 3y ago
iamwil 3y ago
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.
- 2arrs2ells 3y ago
  The chili & other crockpot recipes were still going strong in S12 ("crockpots scale linearly with number of startups") - but pg was no longer cooking. Batch dinners are catered these days and have been for a while.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  That's a rather unbelievable reason to relocate a company.
  - lowkey_ 3y ago
    It's more of a loaded term than meant literally. "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.
- ryanSrich 3y ago
  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).
  - borski 3y ago
sagarkamat 3y ago
I remember watching this documentary a few years ago and thinking 1) this concept had so much promise but man they could have made this docu better 2) those are some famous names before they became famous 3) we need more such docus that capture forever the daily office life at a particular point in time
sfjailbird 3y ago
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.
- JoyfulTurkey 3y ago
  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.
  - Calamitous 3y ago
    Ironically, after working in cubicles and hurk open floor plans for most of my career, now I have an office with a door. Ten feet from my bedroom. ;)
  - borski 3y ago
    Also how Apple was.
gecko 3y ago
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.]
- codinghorror 3y ago
  Hi Ben! We'll always have London..
  - gecko 3y ago
    I'm happy to always have London, but I could do with forgetting most of Cambridge.
    - krallja 3y ago
      What about Cockfosters?
nikhilgk 3y ago
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.
jedberg 3y ago
> Aaron Swartz, Steve Huffman, and Alexis Ohanian, months after they launched reddit Aaron didn't launch reddit. He wasn't even involved until six months in.
- mtlynch 3y ago
  Oh, I didn't realize it was that late. 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 http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit And then this profile of Swartz said he joined in November 2005: >Ohanian and Huffman bought in, and by November 2005, Infogami and Reddit had merged, forming a new umbrella company called Not A Bug. https://qz.com/594715/when-aaron-swartz-met-paul-graham-his-life-and-the-entire-internet-changed-forever https://qz.com/594715/when-aaron-swartz-met-paul-graham-his-...
  - jedberg 3y ago
    Yes you're right, he joined them six months in. I'll fix my comment.
pdovy 3y ago
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!
itronitron 3y ago
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. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/?ref_=ttls_li_tt https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/?ref_=ttls_li_tt
- c17r 3y ago
  There's also "E-Dreams" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0262021/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0262021/
Alex3917 3y ago
To be fair, the reason this has so few views is because the original was deleted. There are earlier HN threads on this, e.g. here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236711 Regardless, still a great post and highly worth watching.
- mtlynch 3y ago
  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.
- dang 3y ago
  Thanks! Also: Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13794989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13794989 - March 2017 (1 comment) Aardvark'd (Fog Creek documentary) is now up on YouTube for free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2539337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2539337 - May 2011 (4 comments) Ask YC: Anyone seen the Aardvark'd movie with Paul Graham? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=518580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=518580 - March 2009 (1 comment)
bufordtwain 3y ago
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".
- mtlynch 3y ago
  Thanks for reading and for the correction! I've updated the post.

505 points by mtlynch 3y ago

Software leaders who want to succeed long-term could learn a lot from Spolky's leadership style.

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

mtlynch 3y ago
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.

tibbydudeza 3y ago

They still using Wasabi (inhouse programming language based on VB) ???.

mathgeek 3y ago
Fog Creek ceased to exist and became Glitch several years ago, which was when they split off from anything using Wasabi (I was working on the FogBugz team at the time): https://medium.com/make-better-software/fog-creek-is-now-glitch-8d0308aaf69e https://medium.com/make-better-software/fog-creek-is-now-gli... It' now a part of Fastly: https://www.fastly.com/press/press-releases/fastly-announces-acquisition-of-glitch https://www.fastly.com/press/press-releases/fastly-announces...
krallja 3y ago
No, I killed Wasabi https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9777829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9777829 FogBugz and Kiln were acquired by a private equity firm five years ago.

marktangotango 3y ago

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.

meatmanek 3y ago
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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

LizGH 3y ago

Hi! 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/ 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.

iamgopal 3y ago

Was Trello from the same company ? It was first awesome sass product I have seen.

krallja 3y ago
Yes, Trello was spun out from Fog Creek in 2014 and acquired by Atlassian three years later.

pixelmonkey 3y ago

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-asynchronous-building-eventually-coordinated-teams-that-ship https://speakerdeck.com/amontalenti/fully-distributed-and-as...

no_wizard 3y ago

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.

wallflower 3y ago
While it is not what you are looking for exactly, if you have not seen it, the General Magic documentary is extraordinary. It might make you cry. https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com/ https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com/

hermitcrab 3y ago

So what are Joel and Michael up to these days? Have they retired to roll around in piles of money, Scrooge McDuck style? ;0)

raldi 3y ago
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.
krallja 3y ago
Michael finally left Atlassian last year. Based on the Trello sale I have to imagine he was there mostly for fun not money.
- hermitcrab 3y ago
  'Atlassian' and 'fun' are 2 words I'm not sure I've heard together before.

Uptrenda 3y ago

Maybe this is a dumb question: but what happened to the software they built? Did they end up shipping it? Did it become a Fog Creek product?

hermitcrab 3y ago
Co-Pilot became a real product.

PeterStuer 3y ago

In those days I spend way too much time reading and posting on the JoS forum.

theresapeter609 3y ago

[dead]

rezmason 3y ago

I own one of only 5,000 copies?!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

Thanks for this write-up. This is absolute gold. It's crazy looking back and seeing how different everything was.

mtlynch 3y ago
>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.
- mickeyp 3y ago
  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.
  - ozim 3y ago

manicennui 3y ago

I actually bought this on DVD. I miss Joel on Software and hearing about Fog Creek.

kcartlidge 3y ago
> I actually bought this on DVD Same here. Bought it back when it was released, and still have it. Thoroughly enjoyed it, but I agree with the article in that it was very much all over the place in terms of scripting.
mattl 3y ago
I was given a copy on DVD when visiting Fog Creek around this time. I vaguely recall it was for sale on Google Video when that was a thing.
drjasonharrison 3y ago
The follow-up blog post about automating / streamlining the postal form printing just to ship out the ordered DVDs was another great article.
tailspin2019 3y ago
> I actually bought this on DVD I did too. It was quite motivating to watch at the time!
amerine 3y ago
Same!!!! I still have it knocking around somewhere in the basement. Wild to think about where we’ve all gone since that era. Amazing ride.
toyg 3y ago
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.

manicennui 3y ago

RIP Aaron Swartz. His being mentioned still makes me feel a bit emotional.

endgame 3y ago
I can't believe that all happened over ten years ago. MIT hung him out to dry, and who knows what he could've achieved if that hadn't happened?
- manicennui 3y ago
  Even if he never achieved anything, I rather that he be alive.
johnny99k 3y ago
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.
- raincole 3y ago
  > 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. LMAO.

dannb 3y ago

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 https://vimeo.com/27175079

c17r 3y ago
I don't have that one but I do have the 8-episode "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley" from 2012. Also "Startup.com" from 2001 And "e-Dreams" from 2001
- dannb 3y ago
  Are these available to watch online anywhere? Would love to check them out.

nickpp 3y ago

Loved this energy at the time. So inspiring, even for folks far far away from Joel’s world. Could credit it for quite a few people’s future success. So different from today's sentiment of "Only rich kids can play with startups, you shouldn’t even bother. You need universal healthcare/UBI first".

facorreia 3y ago
I followed Joel’s posts and learned a lot from them. He inspired me and had a concrete impact on my career and what I value as a software engineer.
- dang 3y ago
  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! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=791989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=791989
  - facorreia 3y ago
    Great story, thanks for sharing. 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.
Apocryphon 3y ago
No one says that about startups these days. What they do want is low-to-near-zero interest rates.
- 3y ago

iamwil 3y ago

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.

2arrs2ells 3y ago
The chili & other crockpot recipes were still going strong in S12 ("crockpots scale linearly with number of startups") - but pg was no longer cooking. Batch dinners are catered these days and have been for a while.
The_Colonel 3y ago
That's a rather unbelievable reason to relocate a company.
- lowkey_ 3y ago
  It's more of a loaded term than meant literally. "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.
ryanSrich 3y ago
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).
- borski 3y ago

sagarkamat 3y ago

I remember watching this documentary a few years ago and thinking 1) this concept had so much promise but man they could have made this docu better 2) those are some famous names before they became famous 3) we need more such docus that capture forever the daily office life at a particular point in time

sfjailbird 3y ago

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.

JoyfulTurkey 3y ago
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.
- Calamitous 3y ago
  Ironically, after working in cubicles and hurk open floor plans for most of my career, now I have an office with a door. Ten feet from my bedroom. ;)
- borski 3y ago
  Also how Apple was.

gecko 3y ago

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.]

codinghorror 3y ago
Hi Ben! We'll always have London..
- gecko 3y ago
  I'm happy to always have London, but I could do with forgetting most of Cambridge.
  - krallja 3y ago
    What about Cockfosters?

nikhilgk 3y ago

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.

jedberg 3y ago

> Aaron Swartz, Steve Huffman, and Alexis Ohanian, months after they launched reddit Aaron didn't launch reddit. He wasn't even involved until six months in.

mtlynch 3y ago
Oh, I didn't realize it was that late. 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 http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit And then this profile of Swartz said he joined in November 2005: >Ohanian and Huffman bought in, and by November 2005, Infogami and Reddit had merged, forming a new umbrella company called Not A Bug. https://qz.com/594715/when-aaron-swartz-met-paul-graham-his-life-and-the-entire-internet-changed-forever https://qz.com/594715/when-aaron-swartz-met-paul-graham-his-...
- jedberg 3y ago
  Yes you're right, he joined them six months in. I'll fix my comment.

pdovy 3y ago

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!

itronitron 3y ago

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. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/?ref_=ttls_li_tt https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/?ref_=ttls_li_tt

c17r 3y ago
There's also "E-Dreams" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0262021/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0262021/

Alex3917 3y ago

To be fair, the reason this has so few views is because the original was deleted. There are earlier HN threads on this, e.g. here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236711 Regardless, still a great post and highly worth watching.

mtlynch 3y ago
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.
dang 3y ago
Thanks! Also: Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13794989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13794989 - March 2017 (1 comment) Aardvark'd (Fog Creek documentary) is now up on YouTube for free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2539337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2539337 - May 2011 (4 comments) Ask YC: Anyone seen the Aardvark'd movie with Paul Graham? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=518580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=518580 - March 2009 (1 comment)

bufordtwain 3y ago

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".

mtlynch 3y ago
Thanks for reading and for the correction! I've updated the post.