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Comment by mrweasel

1 day ago

Once in a while I stumple on sites like Ask.com, and I can't help wonder what it's like to work there.

At some point they may have outsource almost everything, but it's hard to imagine that they don't have a few IT on staff. What does these people do? Is it like working at a dying retailer out in the sticks and it's a little confusing when a customer actually works in?

I can tell you I still work there :) Its been an awesome job, startup feel but backed by a big public company. Ask.com was only a small part of the whole, we had 3000+ search brands. I worked with people who had been with Ask for 20+ years. I've been there for a decade and I'm still grieving about it shutting down.

  • What are they having you work on now that they’re shutting down search?

I worked for MapQuest in 2021 as an engineer. It’s pretty weird. I led a rebuild from Angular to React. Backend was all Scala. Really fun job and I worked with some excellent engineers. But the future, despite what leadership wanted us to think, was very clear in that it was a dying product with no real way back.