

Redefining Professionalism for Software Engineers - tjr
http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/professionalism-for-software-engineers

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aswanson
It's a real shame ADUni was destroyed by idiot VCs.

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bayareaguy
I thought the VCs were only involved in ArsDigita.

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aswanson
You may be right, but I thought the courses were part of the company.

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apathy
They brought it on themselves. A well-conceived and well-run company which
fell prey to greed and was destroyed by it.

The VCs would never have destroyed anything if the original vision had
remained in place and expansion proceeded apace with what the market would
bear (obviating VC funding).

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DaniFong
That's your impression? I don't think it was greed that motivated him.

ArsDigita _grew at market pace without VC money_. Unfortunately, during the
dot-bubble, so many companies were going public that individual options
holders were barking at Phil, demanding an exit. Greed you might condemn, but
daily annoyance at your place of work? They wouldn't have been any easy
acquisition, they were basically too large. They were also after all a
consulting company. An exit meant going public.

They took VC money because underwriters refused to them public, despite their
massive profits! Underwriters didn't want to manually verify the company: they
were already operating at capacity. They wanted to scan for some large VC firm
and sign of.

Greenspun didn't understand the danger. Once he did, he acted on it, and made
a public warning in hopes that people would see it coming.

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bayareaguy
Apathy wasn't really wrong since even if Greenspun himself wasn't greedy he
didn't have what it took to cope with the greed of others.

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mechanical_fish
Were you at work during the dotcom boom? You don't sound like someone with
firsthand knowledge of the bubble environment.

In a bubble, your attempts to swim against the tide are thwarted at every
turn. The herd is moving toward the big cash IPO. Everyone talks about nothing
but stocks (and, my god, is it annoying). Unless you want to work by yourself,
ignore your colleagues, and get paid in cash, you're going to find yourself
making bubble-type decisions, because you live in a bubble universe. Your
salary is counted in bubble units, your colleagues harbor bubble expectations,
your investors value your company in bubble terms, and your expenses come with
bubble price tags.

This is what makes bubbles bubbles: _the smartest people you know_ start
acting like complete suckers. It's the professional gambler's dream.

Here's Greenspun himself, from the excellent _Founders at Work_ :

"...the original sales pitch I made to employees was, 'Come work here. You'll
make $150k, maybe $200k a year if you do a great job and you make your
customer really happy. We can just do that forever, making the customers
happy, not spending too much. We'll pocket the profits, and have fun offices,
a beach and ski house that everybody can go enjoy... we'll collaboratively
have this great lifestyle.'

"...But they felt like they were dumb because every day they were reading the
newspaper about people who had worked for 6 months at some company and now
they were worth $20 million because of an IPO. They'd ask me, 'Why aren't we
doing an IPO?' And I'd say, 'Because we have profits.' "

That was just the programmers. Greenspun claims that recruiting managers was
even harder: in the bubble, why would anyone with half a brain want to work
for a company that was never going to IPO?

The sad thing is, I signed up to work at aD based on sales pitch A, and by the
time I actually arrived they had taken the VC money and were in the throes of
Bubblemania B. I think I would have had a lot more fun at the old aD.

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bayareaguy
I avoided the extremes by consulting for dotcoms. It sounds like you tried to
do the same indirectly by working at aD (sorry that didn't work out).

I have a lot of respect for what Greenspun was doing back then ( particularly
things like arsDigita university, photo.net and Scorecard -
<http://www.scorecard.org> ). Even his Tcl AOLserver abomination had its good
points :-)

I never understood why he needed to take VC money. With his business he could
have grown it and sold it or eventually gone public on his own.

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aswanson
He goes into why he took VC money here:
<http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail94.html>

