Comment by RadiozRadioz
3 days ago
This must have taken them a really long time. That worries me, don't they have other things to do? If engineers have so much free time that they can work on nice & fun things like this that aren't totally necessary, they must have overhired (which is wasteful and a sign of impending layoffs) or they don't have enough actual work to do (which is a sign the company is stagnating).
Or the time and money required to do this is coming out of a very large advertising bucket. In which case my gut is still not cool with it, but I don't know enough about advertising to make a judgment on if this is a waste of money.
Hi, OP here. I was employee #13 at PostHog, joining as a designer (who now moonlights as a design engineer). I'm responsible for the website. I've been part of crafting the brand for 4.5 years – joined when the company just started monetizing.
There are only two of us who work on the website, myself and a front end engineer. (He was hired to work on the website and doesn't directly work in the product.)
We've spent roughly half of the last six months on this site. Other than our incredible graphic designer, no other resources were brought in.
A lot of our time is spent on brand-related side quests – they're consistently a net positive for the brand. You can see some examples under "Some things we've shipped" at https://posthog.com/teams/brand
This was a passion project of mine. I'm the one who ultimately chose to spend time I did on it. I think what we built is really cool, and I hope it serves as inspiration for other designers to think outside the box when it comes to solving their unique challenges.
Every company operates differently. Yes, many companies do have employees with too much time on their hands. Others do waste a lot of money in advertising. And a lot of companies are stagnating.
But I can assure you, PostHog is none of those.
The teams window seems to be broken for me, on a non latest version of Firefox. However the blog posts window in the submission works flawlessly.
In the teams window, The first page doesn't load the images but does the content, clicking another item in the menu does show the expected page but again with no images. At some point, clicking the menu items does not load the correct page. At some point after that the images load in, however the correct link to the correct post does not appear. I have to click about 6 times on the same menu link to see a cycling of different posts (possibly the ones I was clicking before) to see the expected post.
Oof...! A lot of innovation originates in engineers' "boredom".
I've been at a company that mandated innovation by having a mandatory annual innovation day, and full productivity for the rest of the year. "Be innovative for 8 hours, damn it!". That never worked. Not once. Never ever. Innovation was limited to evolution, and evolution was so slow that our customers had started implementing what we provided in house instead. Stagnation, as you call it.
I've also been at a company where people got... bored (didn't have enough to do). A guy single handedly re-wrote the firmware for a neat little hardware box that ended up saving the company an absolute ridiculous amount of money as they no longer needed to buy another much, much more expensive proprietary box.
So in my opinion having bored engineers around could very well be a sign of great success.
i can agree, but this doesnt seem like engineer boredom, more like manager or higher
I disagree. I think it might even be a positive signal, especially for startups.
Imagine a startup with an engineering team that has this much creative energy, ingenuity, and vision unencumbered by bureaucratic processes, committees, and all-day meetings.
A sense of "play" is so important in creating fantastic software. Some of the best products are the result of engineers having full creative control and the liberty to "play". See, for example, Google's "20% time policy" in the early 2000s which birthed Gmail, or 3M's "permitted bootlegging" policy which birthed Post-it notes.
I'm still junior, as in I spend more time reading docs than writing code because most code I have to write is stuff I haven't written before.
IMO, first impression? This is just a straight-up better way to show docs to me. To quote the landing page: "Often times, I’ll want to refer to different pages at the same time. So I’ll CMD + click “a couple times” while browsing around and before I know it, I have 12 new tabs open – all indistinguishable from each other because they share the same favicon."
Wow. They fixed it. First of it's kind, at least in my career so far. If you're got an example from DOS then yeah, I missed out, and agree that something important was lost along the way.
I threw a (much more limited) version of a "desktop" website together in about a couple of hours.
http://xgpu.net/ is about an ongoing project for an external gpu for the Atari range of 16-bit (and actually I even have plans to make it work on the 8-bit range) computers. It's somewhat in limbo at the moment because I just moved continent and most of my stuff is on a ship in the Atlantic. Once that arrives, and we start to settle in, I'll get back to it.
If I was an investor I would not be happy with my money being poured into this pointless project.
This is why we can't have nice things...
Can we just appreciate cool things please.