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Employee #1: Dropbox

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Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#21

Post by dasmoth »

typetypetype wrote: post #2

> We were all using the product so when there was funny stuff we tended to catch it. I love this. There have been so many times I've run into a bug that makes me wonder if anyone on the engineering team actually used the product.

I somewhat blame this on the emphasis that now gets placed on automated testing (to the extent that nobody actually pronounces the "automated"). It's got some good points, but if it comes at the expense of manual testing I'm not convinced that's always a great trade-off, especially for interactive software.

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#22

Post by frew »

diamondtrim wrote: post #11
dude_abides wrote: post #7

> But I ended up picking Mercurial for the distributed version control system, which we were definitely wrong on that one–should have picked Git. I'm curious to know: is this sentiment widely shared? Is git really that much better than hg?

Never used mercurial. I suspect it's just as good, but the problem the author probably sees is, like me, most everyone is familiar with git and new hires need to be trained in something unfamiliar with less community around it.

Used to work at Dropbox. Existing knowledge of new hires was 90% of the challenge with Mercurial with the other 10% being weird edge cases (e.g. very large/numerous repositories) that hadn't seen as much attention due to the smaller community.

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#23

Post by _RPM »

samfisher83 wrote: post #16
_RPM wrote: post #12

Does Drew come from a privileged family?

His dad went to harvard so I am guessing he grew up pretty well off.

Yep. That explains how he was able to focus full time on Dropbox then. He must have always had a trampoline to bounce him back up should he fail. I know it was funded from the beginning most likely, but there had to have been a time before it was funded.

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#24

Post by BinaryIdiot »

typetypetype wrote: post #2

> We were all using the product so when there was funny stuff we tended to catch it. I love this. There have been so many times I've run into a bug that makes me wonder if anyone on the engineering team actually used the product.

In my experience dogfooding is the only way to build a great product. Without dogfooding features erode. The "oh I haven't tested that in 6 months" happens frequently. The UX never evolves. I have NEVER worked on a product that got worse when it was dogfooded and I have NEVER worked on a product that consistently got better without dogfooding (sometimes it'll get better but it's always in spurts before going back down again).

Dogfooding is so under utilized especially in big companies.

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#25

Post by BinaryIdiot »

dasmoth wrote: post #19
walshemj wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I worked for a pre internet messaging company our terminals speed was slowed down to the same (1200 or 2400 baud) as a dial up user would see.

There was a story last year about Facebook having "2G Tuesdays" to give employees an idea of what life on a slow network is like. I wonder whether it caught on?

Such a genius idea. I see far too many web applications not caring about latency. Forcing a developer to experience the same pain should help them. Unless that simply becomes the day everyone typically takes off, blames productivity on slow network connectivity, etc.

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#26

Post by ryandrake »

keithwhor wrote: post #10

I was lucky enough to hear this story almost verbatim from Aston and it's so exhilarating to listen to how much fun everybody seemed to be having. He tells it with a lot of enthusiasm that you can feel just from the depth of his responses. I think the one thing that stuck with me, personally, is the issues Dropbox had in the early days (TC 50 tech issues) and that it took six months to get Aston on board. From what I…

What I don't get is why try to recruit the same person over and over for six months? I wonder what the outcome would have been had they just hired someone else equally as talented right away instead of going without an employee for all that time. You can't re-play these things so we'll never know, but it just seems odd to me.

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#27

Post by nostrademons »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #25
dasmoth wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a story last year about Facebook having "2G Tuesdays" to give employees an idea of what life on a slow network is like. I wonder whether it caught on?

Such a genius idea. I see far too many web applications not caring about latency. Forcing a developer to experience the same pain should help them. Unless that simply becomes the day everyone typically takes off, blames productivity on slow network connectivity, etc.

Google had a latency proxy on the corp network that you could use to simulate dialup, 2G, DSL, etc (along with unreliable connections). It was a great tool, and you could learn a lot by doing all your normal searches through the latency proxy. Alas, not many developers knew about it, and even fewer were willing to take the convenience hit to use it as part of their normal experience.

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#28

Post by psyc »

_RPM wrote: post #23
samfisher83 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His dad went to harvard so I am guessing he grew up pretty well off.

Yep. That explains how he was able to focus full time on Dropbox then. He must have always had a trampoline to bounce him back up should he fail. I know it was funded from the beginning most likely, but there had to have been a time before it was funded.

I know it's fun to be envious of rich people, but I grew up in poverty, and so far I've earned myself 5 years to focus full time on my stuff. I know it's a little harder, maybe, but all I had to do was go to work first. Most people go to work anyway.

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#30

Post by nostrademons »

ryandrake wrote: post #26
keithwhor wrote: post #10

I was lucky enough to hear this story almost verbatim from Aston and it's so exhilarating to listen to how much fun everybody seemed to be having. He tells it with a lot of enthusiasm that you can feel just from the depth of his responses. I think the one thing that stuck with me, personally, is the issues Dropbox had in the early days (TC 50 tech issues) and that it took six months to get Aston on board. From what I…

What I don't get is why try to recruit the same person over and over for six months? I wonder what the outcome would have been had they just hired someone else equally as talented right away instead of going without an employee for all that time. You can't re-play these things so we'll never know, but it just seems odd to me.

They didn't have funding (other than YC, which at the time was $6k/founder, not nearly enough to support an employee) until right before they hired Aston.

Drew had approached me about being employee #2 for DropBox, and I had lunch with him, Arash, and Aston in Feb 2008. They'd only closed the Sequoia seed round about a month before. IIUC, Aston had been officially hired the day before. I (stupidly in hindsight, but for good reasons at the time) ended up declining. I actually reconsidered about two months later and asked if the position was still open, but they had long since filled it - I think they got some very good MIT grads literally later the afternoon after I had declined.

So they were hiring very aggressively, but they started recruiting before they were in a position to actually hire, to warm up potential employees.

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