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Did Jeff Atwood leave Stack Exchange or was he fired by Joel Spolsky?

  • I was originally a bit shocked to see Jeff Atwood leaving Stack Exchange last year, given that they had not even started making a profit around that time. Initially, I believed that he was leaving to probably spend more time with his family. Over time, I have realized that Jeff Atwood does not possess any of the brilliance like Joel - he is just a great writer, that's all. A particular quote in his post - http://blog.discourse.org/2013/02/the-discourse-team/ - sort of provided confirmation - "Which is fantastic, because Sam is a superstar – that’s why I originally hired him at Stack Exchange." Given the high standards Joel set for developers, I find it hard that someone hired by Jeff would leave Stack Exchange in such a short time. As is often observed in companies, employees hired by a partner are also usually fired when the partner is fired. Anyway, is there a definite answer to this question?

  • Answer:

    Read what Jeff himself said in his announcement of his departure (http://blog.codinghorror.com/farewell-stack-exchange/): Startup life is hard on families. We just https://twitter.com/#!/codinghorror/status/165546374597840896 into our family, and http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/09/go-that-way-really-fast.html isn't sustainable for parents of multiple small children. The death of Steve Jobs, and his subsequent posthumous biography, http://www.deliberatism.com/blog/not-like-steve/ for a lot of folks... Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange have been wildly successful, but I finally realized that success at the cost of my children is not success. It is failure. Isn't that enough of a reason to get out of the startup lifestyle?

Bill Karwin at Quora Visit the source

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I doubt it. Most of the dev team was hired by Jeff. Jarrod Dixon, their first developer, was a friend of Jeff long before being hired for SE. (http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/01/welcome-stack-overflow-valued-associate-00002/), so the bit about waffles leaving doesn't mean much. Waffles has always been pretty into FOSS, so when Jeff announced that he was leaving Over time, I have realized that Jeff Atwood does not possess any of the brilliance like Joel - he is just a great writer, that's all. The idea for Stack Overflow was Jeff's, too. And that's no little contribution. He was being an active part in guiding the communities on Meta. I doubt he would have been fired. If that was the case, they probably wouldn't have let him keep his diamond (legally, as Jeff has the diamond and is not a community moderator or employee, so falls under the third category of an http://stackexchange.com/legal/privacy-policy which implies that he still has some ties with SE).

Manish Goregaokar

Considering they had a farewell podcast with him and invited him back on later: https://blog.stackexchange.com/2013/08/podcast-51-the-return-of-codinghorror/, it seems very unlikely. Also, if you listen to either of these podcasts, it truly gives the impression of an amicable split.

Tony Leif

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