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)
> I used to really respect Joel Spolsky. I've read all of his stuff and really liked it.
After reading the rest of your post, I'm not sure why.
Joel Spolsky always seemed to me like he was all hat and no cattle -- he had rather strong opinions (and a high opinion of himself) for someone who ran a small company that never did anything of significance.
He has always seemed rather fixated on some kind of superiority complex and separating good programmers from bad, but why should anyone believe that he is one of the good ones? What is he an authority on -- writing software nobody wants to use?
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.
At the end of the day, as industries mature, you can, in aggregate, segregate things into a couple of platitudes. You have those products that will absolutely require marketing and promotion to move forward, because incremental progress on a product is not enough alone to move it forward (Think of your average ICE car, how different are they nowadays really? If you take the emotion out of the equation, they're really not too different). Then there will be those that are on the cutting edge frontier, where the action and innovation happens (Again, cars, where there is a different is something like Tesla or the chevy bolt, and that requires a LOT of pure research, development, engineering etc). If you don't like one, you should probably pursue the other. There isn't as much middle ground as things mature. Financial services is another great example of this. Cutting edge privately held funds is where all the quants go because it's interesting (with some exceptions, i'm talking in aggregate), where as your JP Morgans or your Bank of Americas tend to be all about marketing (even on the various other services they provide that you don't usually see TV commercials for, or web ads, or what have you).
"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."
"Retrofitting" SO to have been made by FogCreek is obviously to put the company in some better light. It was Jeff that came to Joel and had this idea, and it was not implemented within FogCreek.
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-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.
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.
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.
"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.
Oh my. I almost wish you hadn't posted that link, or that I hadn't clicked it. But I guess I'm grateful.
> I hope that Pax's friends in the pick up artist community take a few moments away from writing date rape manuals and sending me death threats to reflect on the fact that their new hero has at least some tiny bit of respect for the wife he's been married to for 15 years. How crushed they will be.
> Pax showed up about 10 minutes late, having been busy with the latest stop on his press tour, and as I had agreed, I called him an asshole to his face and paid for his coffee. We talked for about 20 minutes. He offered up a pretty boringly conventional defense of male privilege, and when I described the role of actual satire and comedy in punching up instead of punching down, he revealed that he sees attacking feminists and equality activists as punching up. There was some pointless bickering from me about the inanity of that perspective, but overall things were fairly civil; I've met guys like this before and I didn't have any illusion that I was going to dissuade him from a perspective which his social group rewards with attention and the perverse impression that acting like an asshole is somehow being brave.
This is the new CEO of Fog Creek? In all fairness, he did say he was "fighting off a brutal chest cold". But WTF? I've had chest colds too, so has everyone. They never provoked me to being this nasty, whatever the reason.
I am sad. I thought Joel had some interesting insights, and Fog Creek was involved in some truly interesting and useful products like Stack Overflow and Trello.
But if someone like that is now running the show, it doesn't give me much hope for their future products.
> More broadly, I am trying to live a life where I am as unreasonably kind as I can be.
Yeah, sounds exactly like the guy he is. I mean what else could someone be that thinks people who don't share his world-view are "supremacist assholes", that blacklisting others (or trying to blacklist them, whatever) is completely okay be than "trying to live a life where I am as unreasonably kind as I can be".
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.
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."
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.
