Fog creek

TLDR: We’ve renamed Fog Creek to Glitch, Inc. to represent our single-minded focus on Glitch. We’re hiring for a bunch of new positions (with more to come!) and welcoming a slate of new advisors. And it’s all in service of making Glitch one of the most important creative communities on the Internet, and having our company set the standard for thoughtful, ethical technology.Back in 2000, two visionary founders, Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor, envisioned a new tech company that would distinguish itself by the way it treated people — both its employees and its customers. Their belief was that being better to people would yield more invention, more innovation, and a much more pleasant place to work.Well, they were right. The company they created, Fog Creek Software, has gone on to create multiple groundbreaking products and to help change the entire tech industry along the way.From inventing Trello to co-creating Stack Overflow to pioneering bug tracking with FogBugz and launching other successful and influential products like Manuscript and Kiln and Copilot and CityDesk and many other experiments. Fog Creek has been a bastion of innovation for nearly two decades.And today, we’re turning the page on that chapter for something new.Becoming Glitch #When we started working on the project that would become Glitch, it was originally just part of our regular “Creek Week” process — the internal hackathons where members on our team come up with new ideas and try to inspire each other with cool projects. It became obvious pretty

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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: 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

To the noise.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.I've updated the post to link to your comment here.>I'm also happy to answer any questions anyone has about the movie or about that time at Fog Creek.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?What did you like/dislike about working at Fog Creek? How'd it change during your tenure?[0] One other bit of trivia, Alexis Ohanian drew one of the versions of Fog Creek’s kiwi mascot that was featured on some t-shirts and merch, though never in any of the products. Wow, I never expected to hear from so many Fog Creek folks!Thanks for sharing that bit of trivia, Anil. How'd that happen? At that time Alexis was drawing logos or art for products he advised or knew the founders of, including most notably Hipmunk. I’m not sure if Joel asked him to draw it, or he volunteered, but it happened and then early in my time at Fog Creek, Alexis and I were catching up about some other stuff and he told me that version of the kiwi was his. logos aren't just trademarks, they are also themselves copyrighted, and if he never explicitly gave up the rights... 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.I am aware of the IMDB factoid. Since they also had my bio wrong and gave me a Bacon number of two for years, I have generally just concluded IMDB doesn't care about having accurate data, and never felt a need to correct it. 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

Kill it dead no matter how good it is. And suddenly the music industry has a lot more leverage over their artists in negotiations: the kind of leverage they are used to having. Their favorite kind of leverage. The “we won’t promote your music if you don’t let us put rootkits on your CDs” kind of leverage.And Apple? Apple wants the signaling to come from what they promote on the front page of the iTunes Music Store. In the battle between Apple and the recording industry over who gets to manipulate what songs you buy, Apple (like movie theaters) is going to be in favor of fixed prices, while the recording industry is going to want variable prices.Brief NewsThe Fog Creek Copilot team has launched monthly subscriptions. This lets you remote control computers over the Internet whenever you need to without entering payment information each time. There are a variety of plans offering 0 – 5000 minutes per month.If you’re interested in watching the story of the summer interns who built Fog Creek Copilot 1.0, or watching my silver-screen premiere, we’re taking orders for the movie Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks With Geeks on DVD. You can watch the trailer on Google Video. The number of orders we’ve received has surprised us; even though we tripled our order for DVDs it looks like we’re pretty close to selling out.If you are a student looking for a summer internship in software development, hurry up and apply; applications are due February 1.

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.] Author here. Cool to see your response here!>I'm a bit confused at how you'd come up with that summary of my career.I worded that poorly, you're right. I meant early-stage startups at the scale of Fog Creek when you started. I've updated the post.>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 camera.Ah, thanks for the context!I watched that scene over and over trying to figure out what happened. It sounds like a "shush" but it's also weirdly stretched out. Liz seems to have heard it as a shush, as she shushes herself after. It shows Michael look over at you, but it's not clear if he was reacting