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

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...