alt Hacker NewsYes. And as someone who worked at Fog Creek at the time, that was a completely avoidable situation that should never have happened, and I'm absolutely gobsmacked we nearly had a repeat of it over a decade later.
Context: in 2012, I literally quit Fog Creek, largely over the fact that we had no backup strategy and I was told that a backup strategy was not feasible. I was "convinced" (paid a lot) to stay on for another two years to see if Kiln would succeed. On my way out of that meeting, I commented to a coworker, "I mean, what's the chance a hurricane hits Manhattan in the next 24 months?"
100%. The chance was 100%. And the only reason people had to haul open containers of diesel up 17 flights of stairs was because no one wanted to admit that the chance wasn't 0%.
Anyway, not sure what was going on with Jane Street here, but holding up that Fog Creek/Trello/SquareSpace story as a positive always drives me somewhat nuts. It lionizes a failure.
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> in 2012, I literally quit Fog Creek, largely over the fact that we had no backup strategy and I was told that a backup strategy was not feasible
This anecdote hits differently for me. I grew up reading about Fog Creek and consuming all of their writings (and that one film) as an example of what a software development company should look like. It feels strange to have the curtain peeled back to reveal that something like backups, which would be considered basic requirements today, were not part of their early operations.
I don’t mean to glorify the poor planning or risk management, but still have a ton of respect for the people who organized the response and who did that hard work, just because it was what people needed.
My company during Sandy was operated in both NY and SF, and our experience was a bunch of us on the west coast filling in for those who were not only unable to get to the office, but without power themselves in NYC. It was all unfamiliar stuff for us (different business functions were done there, but the NYC office’s work was time critical) but did build camaraderie.
Nit: the fact that an event occurred does not mean that the chance was 100% (although I guess this does depend on how one understands probability).
It was sometime in the mid-2000s when I went from an admirer Joel's writings and what Fog Creek was doing to suddenly realizing it was all just very slick marketing on top of very mediocre stuff.
It really was a shocking wake up period for me in the realities of the real world vs. how we often perceive things.
IIRC it was the whole "Wasabi" thing that kind of opened up my eyes that there was a lot more smoke and mirrors involved than I had realized before.
Speaking of Fog Creek, I didn’t realize that they renamed to Glitch and are totally out of business now.
It's hero culture and it's a curse people beg to keep.
Your comment brings back the times I've been on teams that worked double the hours a full time job should be, or spent 18 hours in a data center because a migration/data transfer was failing, and, and and.
So many times it's taken herculean effort to make things happen, usually because of poor planning and poor leadership.
Why these are viewed as "successes" or "heroic" baffles me as well.
The probability of a rare event does not go down after one happens. Especially with weather.
Oh, hi Gecko! Wild to see you in writing again.
Anyway, I was the first Fog Creek employee on site at 55 broadway (one of our founders got their first, and two peer1 employees were also on site) and also part of the first wave of the "bucket brigade". Another dozen of us showed up over the coming hours as we assessed and fixed things.
The media coverage on this was never super accurate-- we were carrying (and later, relaying) 5 gallon covered plastic buckets (like the home depot buckets with sealed lids) up to the landing where the generator was to top up its reserve tank. At one point SquareSpace (who was also running exclusively out of this DC) hired a group of muscle to bring a 55 gallon drum up, but that wasn't us.
I don't view this as lionizing failure, though I can see your perspective. Across our products (then FogBugz, Kiln, Trello) we had different backup strategies in play, but we were definitely putting a lot of eggs in the local-datacenter-that-claimed-to-have-resilient-power basket. Kiln in particular had decided to use SANs for data resilience, and that proved particularly troublesome for trying to find a workaround once the storm hit-- FogBugz on the other hand was able to spin up an EC2 version and start a slow-but-would-have-worked-eventually migration (and we even had an employee hit the road for us-east-1 location with a bunch of encrypted backups so that we could get a fast data restore online), and Trello fast-tracked-and-completed its local-to-cloud migration. While it was true that the DC had a backup generator, the fuel tanks for the generator being in the basement and becoming unavailable was not part of their resiliency plan. I don't fault us for not catching that.
...although I did have to later write the dreaded "I'm sorry, we've been hacked" blog post as a direct consequence of us not properly deprovisioning a "temporary" AWS credential that we created during that sprint. I will fault us for not catching that.
Shortly after Sandy, I switched my role from core dev on FogBugz over to DevOps, and I built out the backup and restore resiliency we had been missing. It wouldn't have kept us online during Sandy, though.
It was dangerous, and a couple folks slipped and fell. That's not a good thing and I won't celebrate that. Many employees opted out of the bucket brigade for family, safety, or personal reasons. I threw out all the clothes I wore that week as they reeked of diesel... not great.
I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone, but having come through it with fortune and no slip-and-falls, I still think about:
- Walking around FiDi post storm and seeing the flooded tunnels, clogged with cars that had been washed into them from the street parking.
- Dropping off big armfuls of coffee and bagels in the lobby for the building work crews. The folks who were essentially dredging out the basement and getting the building back online did much harder work than us.
- Going shopping for aquarium supplies in order to best jerry-rig the pump that our founder has repurposed from the office fish tank in order to transfer diesel from the drums on the curb into our 5g buckets.
Something that kept me going was that I knew that one of our FogBugz customers was the emergency response service in Haiti, and they got absolutely walloped by the storm. They were using FogBugz to coordinate relief, so there wasn't any way I was going to let FogBugz go offline if I could help it. Turns out that meant climbing a lot of stairs.
> holding up that Fog Creek/Trello/SquareSpace story as a positive always drives me somewhat nuts. It lionizes a failure.
Firefighters are heroes who bravely enter burning buildings, beloved by children and adults alike, muscular figures who get pictured on sexy calendars and thanked by tearful families.
Officious paper-pushers who make a fuss about a few cardboard boxes stored under the fire escape stairs (like me!) seldom get pictured on sexy calendars.
To play devil's advocate, paying some dudes to haul diesel for a few days every decade might be a lot cheaper than maintaining a fully redundant failover site 24/7.
It's such a familiar engineering story. Heroic effort means someone, somewhere, screwed up. I aim for boring competence so nobody has to plugs gaps in systems and processes with their literal body sometimes.
> I literally quit Fog Creek, largely over the fact that we had no backup strategy and I was told that a backup strategy was not feasible.
Quitting a job because of this is so funny to me. 2012 was truly a different time.
I'm surprised they didn't put a window washing crane on the roof as DR to simplify the raising of the diesel. The strange ass shit I've seen implemented to make the failure mode easier instead of eliminating the failure has limited my faith in our system as a whole.
Seems to me it is more likely that someone did the calculations and figured it is cheaper to send a bunch of unlucky morons up the stairs with jerrycans in case of flooding.
Startup bullshit. People at "scrappy companies" make cutting corners look like heroism and practical-mindedness. Meanwhile the little people suffer and prop everything up as the business almost implodes.
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I can understand your frustration, but let’s consider:
The chance of a hurricane within 24 months was never 100%. Looking back, it did happen, but you can’t judge future-facing decisions on post-hoc information that you didn’t have at the time.
There is a difference between “no one wanted to admit it wasn’t 0%” and “no one else thought the risk-adjusted return was positive.” When people decline to take some preventative measure, that’s usually what they’re saying implicitly.
I’ve been where you are—frustrated that you predicted and told people exactly what would happen, they didn’t listen, and you were right—many times in my career. It’s infuriating. Part of learning from it is figuring out how to get people to change, not merely figuring out how to be right.
My guess is that this kind of black/white Strong Opinions approach has bitten you throughout your career.
> holding up that Fog Creek/Trello/SquareSpace story as a positive always drives me somewhat nuts. It lionizes a failure.
That's a common bias in management. Heroic fire fighting gets rewarded while silently preventing a crisis with proper planning isn't. Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened.