Somehow I missed the news from over two months ago that the software company "Glitch" laid off a third of its employees (https://archive.is/TgOJY). Of course, this actually isn't a surprise to me at all. For those who aren't familiar, Glitch used to be called Fog Creek Software. They started as a consulting firm and then moved on to selling software products and services like FogBugz (bug tracking and project management system), Copilot (a remote computer support/assistance service), Trello (which they spun off and was later acquired by Atlassian), and, perhaps most famously, Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow (also later spun off into a separate company).

You may or may not be familiar with any of these applications/services, but the important point is that Fog Creek was a small but successful, money making software business. One of the two original founders, Joel Spolsky, used to write quite comprehensively (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/) on how he structured his company to support developer excellence. His developers were all given private offices and other perks to support the core mission: creating excellent software. Because in a rationally operated software business, this is what ultimately matters.

Unfortunately, around 2016 or so, Joel Spolsky lost the plot. I don't know the man, so I can't speak to his motivations, but I suspect there was a combination of boredom, burnout, and spreading himself too thin between Fog Creek and his Stack Overflow spin-off company that led him to to decide to step down as CEO. This wouldn't have necessarily been a big deal, but he decided to bring in a total asshole to replace himself:

Anil Dash, a Twitter bluecheck, social justice warrior, and racist. Dash never wrote a line of computer code in his entire life. His entire "career" consists of blogging, "consulting," and screaming loudly or leading cancel campaigns (https://web.archive.org/web/20160421062947/http://lorenfeldman.com/anil-dash-is-a-coward-liar-and-bully-heres-why/) on Twitter.

As you can imagine, this Dash fellow isn't exactly the kind of guy who cares about fostering a healthy software development culture. What has he done since taking over the reigns? Let me summarize:

1. He made a silly decision to "rebrand" their flagship FogBugz product into "Manuscript," bloviated about how visionary this "new" product was going to be, pissed off a bunch of customers with changes they never wanted, and then almost immediately sold the whole thing off to a company that, shockingly, renamed it back to FogBugz (and probably isn't pissing off its customers). I'm sure they made a bundle of money on this sale, but it also eliminated a steady and reliable revenue stream for Fog Creek.

2. He oversaw the introduction of service called "Glitch." It's basically an online IDE with no clear revenue model. They offer subscriptions at various tiers, but it's personally unclear to me how this thing is supposed to really make enough money to sustain the company. The product bears all the hallmarks of yet another "no plans to actually make any money startup in search of VC funding."

   On his personal Medium page he spends a lot of time spouting off nonsense about "social coding" and various other stupid things that sound good to the uninitiated but make no practical sense in reality. To me, this is typical of the kind of talentless hacks who have no actual plan beyond finding some cucked venture capitalist to throw them some money.

3. He renamed the company from Fog Creek to Glitch. The company built up the Fog Creek brand for nearly two decades before Dash threw it away. I suspect this was mostly smoke and mirrors to simultaneously bring in a slew of his SJW Twitter friends as "advisors." Couched in paragraph after paragraph of PR speak bullshit, Dash wrote the following (https://archive.is/tBnjF):

   And we’re ecstatic to welcome a formidable slate of new advisors to help us grow Glitch, and expand our vision, and ensure that we practice the values we aspire to exemplify. Kimberly Bryant, Alan Cooper, Jason Goldman, and Franklin Leonard have a broad set of backgrounds covering everything from education to policy, user experience to filmmaking, social networks to social justice.

These are the main points I observed as an outsider. The company's Glassdoor reviews (https://archive.is/Qfcuz) shed some more light on what was going on internally since Dash took over. Some choice quotes:

1:

The staff that worked on the product was forced to leave after the sale of FogBugz to ESW with no choice in the matter. I didn’t believe I was working for FogBugz, I thought I was working for Fog Creek.

2:

Mr. Dash is incompetent for many reasons:

Fog Creek was, since the beginning, a company focused on creating a good product. Instead of focusing on recruiting talent Mr. Dash politicized the company and started creating a type of cult. The cult of inclusivity and over-hiring. I agree that it is healthy that a company doesn’t discriminate potential employees based on race, sexual orientation or even age but this shouldn’t be the primary goal of a tech company. Mr. Dash was hired based on his masterful ability for social media speeches and propaganda. In other words: his ability for academic BS. He wouldn’t have been able to found a successful company himself. He is insecure and he took that company and turned it into a circus.

Mr. Dash lacks identity, lacks vision. This recent massive layoff is just an act. The company is not making money. They have taken advantage of this social panic/phenomenon to get rid of people. Severance or not, healthcare or not, he hasn’t been able to take the company to a healthy and successful place. The fact is that the company is a house of cards. To the person that attacked the ex-employee that voiced her opinion, with distasteful and low comments about her personal life I tell them: You are a reflection of how diverse Glitch really is! The more equality is preached, the more repression is exerted.

3:

Anil Dash (Glitch's CEO) is a dishonest, incompetent, egomaniac who exploits the performance of allyship for self promotion. He has used his brand as a 'thought leader' to trick people who care about diversity and inclusion into joining a toxic workplace.

On a number of occasions when I raised issues related to diversity and inclusion with Anil, he responded simply that the company was "the best place in the industry for diversity and inclusion", a truly absurd claim.

His brand has allowed him to diversify the staff, but I've heard from many sources that the company is not inclusive and in fact quite toxic. About 80% of the staff members who worked at the company when he started late 2016 have left or been fired, and that understates the rate of turnover because it does not include the people who have come and gone since he started.

You absolutely cannot trust the public image projected by Anil and Glitch. Anil believes it ok to flatly lie about the how Glitch functions as long as the lie is 'aspirational'. One notable example is with the company's representations about salary transparency and negotiations. They claim that they do not negotiate salaries (they do). For a long time they also claimed to have transparent salaries when they absolutely did not. Now, they've walked that back to a claim of having transparent salary bands, but my understanding is that even those are incredibly wide and often misleading.

Beyond that, Anil has demonstrated no competence in the role. The product is stagnant, and resources are devoted to the company's media side. Glitch seems to exists almost purely in service of promoting the Anil Dash brand, not the other way around. Podcasts and marketing efforts are focused on the only product the company will ever sell - Anil Dash.

I cannot possibly hope to catalog the lies that Anil told internally while I worked there or the false representations he makes publicly, but I would discourage you from boarding this sinking ship.

4:

Rant time. The people-first culture of the old Fog Creek is gone under the new CEO Anil. There are too many examples of this to list here. From stopping commission payments to the sales team without even telling them to the focus on hiring Twitter-famous personalities while laying off fantastic employees who had been working on Manuscript (frankly, the way the Manuscript people were treated was completely appalling from start to finish but Anil and Jordan will never take responsibility for that), Glitch is clearly working toward making themselves appealing to potential VC backers at the expense of the people who have worked there for years.

My personal opinion, considering Anil Dash's history and reading this insider comments, is that he sold off the company's most successful product in order to purge the old guard of people who probably weren't on board with his new social justice mission.

We see now how well that works out.