Separate, support, serve
bitquabit.com3 pointsby gecko0 comments
As an aside, I do think that targeting Mono was the right thing to do for
the universe, as it butterfly-effected tedu into writing weird and wonderful
technical blog posts for the next ten years :p
I've never figured out whether that work broke him or was simply his muse, but I also do confess to liking the result. So not a complete loss. (Since you're answering arbitrary Fog Creek questions) In retrospect, do you
think it was a mistake to make kiln hg-centric at first?
No; I think it was a mistake to not also support Subversion out-of-the-box. There's an imdb trivia item[0] about how you and Liz disagree about whether
it was a shush, but it's unsourced, so it was hard to put much stock in it.
This is a much more satisfying answer.
Liz thought I shushed her for a long time, but I didn't even know that until years later, at which point I apologized and explained what actually happened. So I guess there was disagreement in the sense that I didn't know she thought that, but we talked that through many years ago. How do you feel about the movie looking back? I notice on your website that
you recommend people watch it "if [they]’re feeling masochistic." Is it just
the awkwardness of being the focus of a film at that age or were there
things you disliked about how it came out?
On a personal level, there's a lot I dislike. There was a lot of pressure on us to have reality-TV-show-like conflicts, which we mostly just didn't have. As a result, I end up being the antagonist in quite a few scenes (the building jump experiment is the main one), where it looks like I'm a bit of an asshole due to how things got edited together. So, normal reality TV show stuff. What did you like/dislike about working at Fog Creek? How'd it change during your tenure?
I learned a lot about tech, I got incredible freedom to work how I wanted on what I wanted, I had great coworkers, and I really believed in and used all of our products. They all brought me joy. That was all good. And it wasn't a grindstone like some of my friends went through at thefacebook and Google, so I had time to genuinely enjoy my hobbies and be with friends. 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.