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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...