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.