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Author here, surprising to see this blog post of mine trending, but it has held up pretty well! Happy to answer any questions about my time at Stack Overflow.

I've since moved on to Heap (https://heap.io/) and we are hiring. We're virtual first so we don't have private offices, but we have the same values about treating developers well and giving them the space they need to do deep work. We're hiring for basically everything https://heap.io/careers/departments/engineering-product-and-...

The blog was down for a bit and falling through to the generic Stack Exchange network handler, which is what you saw. It should be working now.

This is exactly what we did to diagnose (source: I was on the call). The only tricky part was figuring out which post it was, since it wasn't in the stacktrace. To do that, we grabbed the 3000 most recent posts and ran the regex against them. By that point we already had the code fix (another dev working on it in parallel), but if we hadn't we also could have gotten back up by just deleting the post.

The comment is here if you're curious about this (as I was):

http://avc.com/2015/06/two-charts/#comment-2108986922

Direct link to the comparison chart:

http://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/2217/5785/o...

Good news, I actually do know everyone who was part of the original build of Wasabi! None of them left because of the language. I think this accounts for everyone who was there at the time:

1. Original author left because his wife was going to medical school out-of-country and Fog Creek didn't allow remote work at the time.

2. Second author left because his wife was going to medical school out-of-state and Fog Creek didn't allow remote work at the time (see a pattern?). Later came back because Fog Creek offered remote work. Went on to author the blog post we're talking about.

3. Developer left to go work on Stack Exchange (me!)

4. Developer left to go make the world a better place at Khan Academy

5. 2x developer left to go work on Trello

I think that was all of us. People move on in the course of 5+ years. Turns out most of those reasons don't have to do with programming language.

FWIW, I think Wasabi was a bad decision and I'm not going to defend it. But I really don't like these massive assumptions about people's motivations for leaving.

They are not paying us :) They did work with us to develop a new schema.org type for Questions (http://schema.org/Question) and Answers (http://schema.org/Answer) which we implemented.

I wrote the article and I probably end up working through lunch (or most of lunch) at least 2-3 days a week. It's definitely optional.

Stack Exchange's office is very similar. Starting to feel like Joel is the only one who still believes in private offices.

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.708933,-74.006578,3a,75y,203...

I used to think this was right (trained in the school of Joel), but now I'm not so sure. I look at it this way: the best predictor of future success is past success. School is pretty non-predictive of your success in industry. General "intelligence" is as well. The best thing I can look at is: do you have a track record of tackling problems and delivering solutions? If you do, you'll probably keep doing that. If not, you're at best a gamble.

Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow) - Remote!

Full Stack Web Developer: https://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/34229/full-stack-web-...

Site Reliability Engineer, Networking (sysadmin): https://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/47588/site-reliabilit...

http://stackexchange.com/work-here

The main difference we've seen is between retained vs. contingency recruiters. Contingency recruiters don't get paid unless they find you a hire, which sounds great in theory but turns it into a lottery for them: spam as many developers and companies as you can, hoping for a big jackpot. It also leads to some of the scummier practices of hiding names and contact information (wouldn't want to lose that commission!), and paying for referrals (after all, if I'm getting $20k for a hire, I can afford to pay out $2k to the person who did the work). They don't really care if you fire the person after 6 months because they'll be on to the next thing (or, even better, they can make another commission off of you!).

Retained recruiters, whether they're contract or full-time, are ones you pay to represent your company. They work off a salary or an hourly rate, like normal employees. They expect to be there in a year or two, so if the hire doesn't work out they'll hear about it. They represent you as a company and don't have any incentive to hide who they're working for or who they're talking to. You can still get clueless recruiters here, but at least the relationship is much better.

Try Dapper for a simple .NET ORM. We created and use it for Stack Overflow. https://code.google.com/p/dapper-dot-net/

Here's the original post describing how we made it: http://samsaffron.com/archive/2011/03/30/How+I+learned+to+st...

Give the system time to work. It's already been taken off hold.

The only thing that really hurts are the SQL Server licenses. Everything else (MSDN licenses for devs, OS licenses, etc.) are small percentages on the cost of hiring a dev or building a server. SQL Server pricing is a beast -- they know you're locked in, and it's carefully priced just under the "what if we just hired several people to do nothing but move us off of SQL Server" price point.

With that said, we're getting amazing performance out of SQL Server without having to shard, etc: all of Stack Overflow runs off a single server, and most of the rest of Stack Exchange runs off a second server.

We release an XML data dump every 3 months. It'd only be a bit of work to make it presentable and load it into something searchable. http://www.clearbits.net/creators/146-stack-exchange-data-du...

Yes, that is exactly what we do. Create an event far in the future and attach a hangout to it. We then use a URL shortener to give it an easier URL.

(Author, here) Regarding #1 and #2, I have to say that one of the most surprising things about Google Hangouts is that they've really make it easy to... hang out! It's pretty standard on Fridays (or during the week) to kick back for an hour or two and just talk in the hangout. A lot of people just keep it open sort of half-listening while they work, and if they need to do something that requires a lot of concentration, they just drop out. In fact, I have it open right now and all I hear is a bit of breathing and typing...

You have to think about it differently than "Oh, we go here for meetings". It's more like a watercooler -- pop in every now and then and see what's going on.

Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow) barely made it out. We are in the same datacenter but we just finished building out and testing a secondary datacenter in Oregon literally last weekend. We did an emergency failover last night after the datacenter went to generators. Read more at http://blog.serverfault.com

Stack Exchange - NYC / telecommute (remote) - Full-time

Stack Exchange is growing like crazy, and we have more ideas than people to do them. We're two rounds of financing in and aiming for profitability. Come help us change how the world gets answers to their questions.

* Web Developer - Q&A Team: Work on Stack Overflow, Server Fault, etc. http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/16279/stack-overflow-c...

* Web Developer - Careers Team (NYC only): Work on Stack Overflow Careers http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/16279/stack-overflow-c...

* Product Manager - Q&A Team: Design features, ship software http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/23227/stack-exchange-p...

* UI / UX / Product Designer: Design experiences http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/24481/product-designer...

* Senior Systems Administrator: Work on an infrastructure serving 275M page views per month http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/24001/senior-systems-a...

There's a Stack Exchange for that! http://askpatents.com/ Just ask them as separate questions.

This is taken completely out of context. He was referring to a fake stock market for conference attendees at http://secondmarket.com where Stack Overflow "closed" at something ridiculous like $365/share

Whoops, looks like it's just going by the order you're displaying them in (assuming you'd show newest first). Will fix soon...

The ranking is based on visitors, not page views. Based on the graphs posted a few weeks ago at http://imgur.com/a/haHHz, it looks like you have about 2.8 million unique visitors per month to SO's 8.6 million in Quantcast

Within 4 minutes you received the correct reply:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/54264/search-doesnt-...

"how" and "to" are stop words, so they're stripped from your search.

In the tag box on the create new question form it tells you to use the tag "bug":

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/ask

I have no idea why editing your profile failed, but it works fine for me.

Your accounts were not automatically associated because Area 51 is new and does not auto-associate with the other sites yet.

Since the formula is based on number of days worked, I've always assumed that they just use the same formulas for themselves (and they get a lot more because they've worked at Fog Creek much longer than anyone else), but I guess I've never asked.

But I think the point is more that I know I'm not getting screwed over compared to my peers in the company -- it wouldn't really bother me to find out that they take extra for themselves since it is their company and all...

I work at Fog Creek, and this is just incorrect. Profit sharing is a simple formula known to everyone in the company, so you can easily figure out how much everyone made in profit sharing at the end of the year.

Honestly, I know it sounds too good to be true, but all compensation is completely open and honest.

The article linked as the source (http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/history5.html) actually says that the William of Orange story is probably apocryphal:

"Though the stabilised orange carrot does date from around seventeenth century Netherlands, it is unlikely that honouring William of Orange had anything to do with it"

I have to say that this talk played out basically exactly like pg's "List of N Things" article (http://www.paulgraham.com/nthings.html). In particular, these quotes seemed apt: "a few main points with few to no subordinate ones, and no particular connection between them", and "I use it when I get close to a deadline. If I have to give a talk and I haven't started it a few days beforehand, I'll sometimes play it safe and make the talk a list of n things".

It wasn't very useful, or interesting, and just seemed like a talk for the sake of giving a talk, with maybe years of knowledge behind it, but very little useful or new information actually conveyed.

Anything in particular? As Joel said, this is mostly a beta testing site, but feedback on the colors would be useful for picking some nice preset color schemes.

It's partly the framework, and partly because Joel threw this together on a Friday afternoon. The only thing customized on this site is the colors and the logo, but you can also add blocks of HTML in a bunch of places where ads are usually shown.