I was an aD employee during most of the period between the VC deal and when Philip started to be phased out. I agree with what all the other inside people are saying -- Philip was a terrible manager and a loose cannon. Philip has terrible people skills and is easily the most arrogant, narcissistic person I've ever met. I imagine management got tired of putting out the fires he was causing on an almost daily basis.
The company was a disaster while I was there. It grew way too fast. Philip's girlfriend had about half the company reporting to her. While Philip had that palatial beach house on Cape Cod, those of us who were in Cambridge from out of town were sleeping either on futons on the floor of their old office, or in MIT frat houses. When we weren't at the office, that is. 60 hour weeks were a minimum, and the office was mostly full at 8 and 9pm most nights.
What finally drove me out were some particularly nasty security holes that were discovered in the ACS over the summer, and the amateur and unprofessional manner in which they were dealt with internally. It made me realize how much Philip's arrogant "We're smarter than everyone else" attitude had permeated the corporate culture. That arrogance led the writers of the ACS to repeat the same mistakes that other web developers had made -- and fixed -- years ago. I'm talking simple things that Perl CGI programmers have been using for years like taint checking and using bind variables in SQL calls. If you're going to reinvent the wheel, you need to do some research into what's wrong -- and right -- about current wheels.
Now I'm working for a small consulting firm with clients who are actually making money. I may not be making the big dotcom bucks anymore, but I'm working sane hours and earning a lot more per hour than I ever did working in Philip's sweatshop.
I'm one of the founding members of phl.pm, and we're always open to discuss the merits of other languages. Not only did we invited mjd to talk about ML, we've even had someone in to talk about Python.
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Perhaps you're referring to Peter's boss, "J. Jonah Jameson"? :-)
The company was a disaster while I was there. It grew way too fast. Philip's girlfriend had about half the company reporting to her. While Philip had that palatial beach house on Cape Cod, those of us who were in Cambridge from out of town were sleeping either on futons on the floor of their old office, or in MIT frat houses. When we weren't at the office, that is. 60 hour weeks were a minimum, and the office was mostly full at 8 and 9pm most nights.
What finally drove me out were some particularly nasty security holes that were discovered in the ACS over the summer, and the amateur and unprofessional manner in which they were dealt with internally. It made me realize how much Philip's arrogant "We're smarter than everyone else" attitude had permeated the corporate culture. That arrogance led the writers of the ACS to repeat the same mistakes that other web developers had made -- and fixed -- years ago. I'm talking simple things that Perl CGI programmers have been using for years like taint checking and using bind variables in SQL calls. If you're going to reinvent the wheel, you need to do some research into what's wrong -- and right -- about current wheels.
Now I'm working for a small consulting firm with clients who are actually making money. I may not be making the big dotcom bucks anymore, but I'm working sane hours and earning a lot more per hour than I ever did working in Philip's sweatshop.
I'm one of the founding members of phl.pm, and we're always open to discuss the merits of other languages. Not only did we invited mjd to talk about ML, we've even had someone in to talk about Python.