Mr. Atwood, probably yelling at you for wanting to learn a new hobby. (flickr.com/pepez)

The "learn to code" meme probably reached its pinnacle around the time Mayor Bloomberg announced his dedication to the initiative, but it has now begun the inevitable slide into backlash territory. Who would have thought that a fluffy gesture of commitment to a burgeoning New York industry would tip over into controversy? This is why we can't have nice things, Internet.

In a post published today on his popular blog Coding Horror, Stack Exchange founder Jeff Atwood publicly decried programming newbies' hilarious attempts to learn the art of code. As if you pathetic wannabes could ever know as much as he does about coding.

According to Mr. Atwood, Keeper of All Code:

Look, I love programming. I also believe programming is important … in the right context, for some people. But so are a lot of skills. I would no more urge everyone to learn programming than I would urge everyone to learn plumbing. That'd be ridiculous, right?

See, there's this thing called hobbies, and sometimes people like to do stuff in their free time because they think it's interesting, not because they want to "learn code just for the sake of learning code," or for the "fat paychecks." We get it: Yours is an elite circle filled with only the most logical, intelligent Python slingers around. But isn't it possible that some people are just interested in the Internet, and learning how to make it work?

Plus, even if it's not intended as a hobby, wanting to learn how to code is still not equivalent to wanting to be a programmer. Considering how prevalent computers have become in our society, acquiring basic programming skills is beneficial for all kinds of professions (including Betabeat writers, though we never went so far as to make a resolution).

Seems like many of the folks on Hacker News also disagreed with Mr. Atwood's controversial blog.

"If tomorrow you want to learn to cook, how would you feel if a master chef told you 'No, don't. You'll never be as good as me. If you're hungry, come to my restaurant instead'," wrote one commenter named shin_lao.

"Jeff has interpreted 'learn to code' with 'become a programmer'. They're not the same thing," concurred jkahn.

Look, we agree that the whole 'learn to code' thing probably jumped the shark. But it's kind of hard to see what's really going on from all the way up there on your pedestal.

When I decided to write about using a standing desk, I expected to join the ranks of exhilarated converts. I’m not tall, don’t weigh much, and have never had back trouble, so I figured I was a prime candidate. But it’s the fourth day of the experiment, and my computer screen is angled down, and my neck is craned up, like a fourth grader.

I am sitting at my standing desk.

Using a standing desk seemed like a great idea a few weeks ago, when I took a tour of the Internet startup Stack Exchange, where islands of tall desks make it look like the office was preparing for a storm surge. “I love it,” said one community manager who was loitering after hours at one of the spindly worksurfaces. He looked so relaxed there, leaning on one elbow, his legs crossed jauntily at the ankle, smiling like a life-size Wellbutrin commercial. “I can never work at a normal company after this.”

Ten percent of the employees at Facebook and AOL reportedly use a standing desk; Google offers them under its “wellness program.” San Francisco startup Asana, which actually means “sitting down” in Sanskrit, gives new employees $10,000 to customize their workstations. In 1999 the ultimate symbol of employee appreciation was the $900 Herman Miller Aeron chair; now it’s the $1,500 Steelcase Airtouch Height-Adjustable Desk by Details, which has an electric motor in the base.

The current Internet boom is fueled not only by recent news reports on the health hazards incurred by simply sitting on one’s ass but by a pathological need to optimize. Book a doctor’s appointment from your iPhone. Connect your Google and Facebook to get personalized recommendations. Rent out that extra bedroom on Airbnb, the extra car on Getaround, and the extra parking space on ParkatmyHouse. Recently, two dueling startups launched in Manhattan for scheduling laundry pickup and delivery online.

The standing desk mashes up two of our current compulsions—exercising and working—which makes it perhaps the ultimate emblem of our efficiency-crazed moment.

John Durant eats raw foods and lean meats as a follower of the Paleo Diet, and owns a lifestyle brand themed around mimicking ancient human behavior in modern times. He tried to build a standing desk in 2006, using a milk crate and a variety of objects he found around the Midtown management consulting office where he worked as an associate. The contraption lasted for two days. Standing at work felt awkward, and, judging by the sideways glances of his colleagues, it looked equally odd. “Coworkers think it’s goofy and they tease you about it,” he explained. “It makes them feel like they’re lazy. It’s like being the one person at the office birthday who turns down a piece of cake. ‘Just eat the cake!’” He sat back down for four years.

Now well into a full-time career as a Manhattan caveman, Mr. Durant is pounding out his book, tentatively titled Live Wild, on a laptop perched on a small coffee table atop his dining room table. “I now take phone calls standing up,” he told me over the phone. “Right now I’m outside pacing around.”

I was also standing up, having constructed a standing desk out of a file box, an Amazon box, a stack of books and a binder of dry-erase markers. As I type, the keyboard is a bit precarious though the computer is at the ideal height and a hardback copy of The Masters of Private Equity and Venture Capital makes for a workable mouse platform. The pain in my arches is becoming distracting.

I asked Mr. Durant if it would be permissible to sit down periodically. “As long as you’re moving in the right direction of spending more time on your feet,” he said. “It’s going to be hard at least for a little bit, and there is a little period where you might just want to tough it out.”

The standing trend was given a boost by the emerging field of “inactivity research,” which has produced results that show prolonged idleness exacerbates heart disease, diabetes and obesity, spawning a meme, “sitting kills,” and a spate of articles about the popularity of standing desks accompanied by pictures of erect office workers. Somehow, this campaign worked. Standing desks promised to eliminate the 3 p.m. slump, knock a few pounds off the scale, and add a few years to the end of one’s life. Converts say they drink less coffee and get better sleep. Healthwise, quitting sitting has been compared to quitting smoking.

Like many standing-desk converts, Mr. Durant became a zealous advocate. A series on his blog, entitled “Upstanding Citizen,” has honored celebrity standing-desk users James Murdoch, Dwight Shrute on The Office and Donald Rumsfeld. “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?” the former secretary of defense once scrawled on a memo about interrogation techniques at Guantanamo.

If you go by the volume of Google searches, the standing desk started to take off in the early days of 2010 (resolution season!). Since then, the volume of queries for “standing desk” or “stand up desk,” as it’s often searched, has quintupled. David Kahl is the owner of Ergo Depot, a Portland, Ore.-based provider of ergonomic office solutions that has sent standing desks to Nike, MTV, Goldman Sachs, Procter & Gamble, Accenture and Harvard, among others. The company’s relatively new adjustable-height desks are now the “centerpiece” of its offerings, Mr. Kahl said, with sales up 40 percent over last year. “We’ve actually been somewhat blown away by how fast they’re becoming accepted in the marketplace,” he said. “It’s getting really popular. We’re seeing the product accepted by law firms, CPA firms. We even have some that are for super tall people.”

Drew Magary, a writer for Deadspin, switched to a low-tech standing desk on doctor’s orders after multiple back surgeries. He puts his laptop on a chair and puts the chair on a table with his screen at eye level. He was tired and sore after the first few days, he said, but he’s adjusted. “I feel pretty good at the end of the day,” he said. “I don’t just stand there for eight straight hours—every 20 minutes, I just sort of walk from the end of room and back.” As for feeling more alert, “I think that’s bullshit. That’s just people believing what they want to believe.” He works at home, so he’s spared the acerbic mockery of his colleagues at Gawker Media.

Convinced that the potential upside of passive exercise was too great to ignore, I set up my standing desk on a Wednesday afternoon, straightened my knees and began taking notes:

2 p.m. The coworker to my left starts giggling and snaps a photo on her iPhone. “Are you going to be doing this for a long time? I can’t look at you!” Another colleague walks by and sniggers. “Wow! Participatory journalism!” I am getting a lot of visits. I feel as though I’m being watched. Can people read my screen?
2:49 p.m. Realizing my headphones no longer reach my ears, I repose to watch a video.
3:15 p.m. Eating a slice of pizza while standing. Am accused of “cheating” because I am leaning against the desk with one foot on the chair.
3:22 p.m. Lower back is starting to hurt.
3:31 p.m. A colleague stops by, corrects my posture and tells me to get rid of the sweatshirt I’m using to cushion my heels.
3:53 p.m. Back pain.
4:28 p.m. Back pain.
4:47 p.m. Awkwardly stretching.
5:05 p.m. I sit. It feels good. My computer and keyboard are at an awkward angle but I think my posture is slightly better. I crack my back a bunch. Adjacent coworker laughs.
5:40 p.m. Back on my feet. Colleague: “I’m going to laugh at you now. Ha. Ha. Ha.” He points to my hand on the chair. “Cheating!”
6:03 p.m. Everyone loves me now that I have a standing desk. Colleague: “So how does this work?” I explain the benefits. He’s interested in trying it.
6:18 p.m. Stretching, squirming.
6:32 p.m. Sitting.
6:38 p.m. I leave work earlier than usual, desperate to escape the standing desk. A shooting pain in my left hip prevents me from running to catch the downtown A/C/E. I find relief sitting on the next train. Did I mention I’m 25? At bedtime, I fall asleep immediately and dream I am a hunter-gatherer.

“The average CEO or office worker, they get up out of bed, they sit down at the breakfast table, they get in their car, they sit in their car or subway or what have you, they go to work, they sit down at work all day, then they get back in their car and sit down, they drive home, they sit down for dinner, they sit down in front of the TV, maybe they do a little exercise and then they lay down and go to bed,” Jim Gattuso, CEO of Amish Country Furniture Sales in Ohio and owner of standupdesks.com, told me the next day. I had mounted my phone on top of a scanner. “I mean, it’s a lot of sit-down or reclined position. That isn’t good for you.”

It did sound like a lot of sitting. Still, on day two, I find myself thinking of the prisoners at Guantanamo. I make up excuses to walk around the office and am struck by terrible hiccups.

Only a handful of Mr. Gattuso’s customers have returned one of his desks since he started selling them in 1994. He’s sent 18 desks at once to a law firm, he said, but usually he gets serial orders: once the first person in the office gets a standing desk, at least a couple others are sure to follow. Amish Country Furniture Sales, which makes classic-looking, wooden office furniture, has sent standing desks to almost every government agency in D.C. and has at least three desks in the White House. “Once you get used to it, people just swear by it,” he assured me.

On day three, I make it an hour and 40 minutes before sitting down, which feels like progress. A sedentary holiday weekend follows—hey, cousin Victoria just got a standing desk and a kneeling chair—and by noon on Monday, my vertebrae are feeling crushed again. One television finance reporter who works five hours a day standing at a desk directed me to the Cole Haan Nike Airs she and her anchor swear by, but I was starting to think a kneeling chair might be more my style. Or a real chair, with armrests, wheels and a soft mesh back.

A version of this article was published in the New York Observer the week of April 11, 2012.

The view from the Fog Creek office. (joelonsoftware.com)

Fog Creek Software has a fish tank embedded in one wall. The fish are pretty and colorful, but not neon; it looked like there might have been an eel in there too. They wandered around their dark blue and green environs, their movements accompanied by the soft white noise of the pump, imparting a sense of calm.

The offices of the developers of Fog Creek look sort of like fish tanks, because they have sliding glass doors to make them more soundproof. The compartments look airtight, as if you could fill the whole thing up with water. Founder Joel Spolsky has been preaching for years that developers should have private offices. It's better for their temperament, and it reduces distractions and makes them more productive, he argues. Mr. Spolsky himself has a closed-door corner office, with a view of the Financial District in one direction and Fog Creek's airy lunch room in the other.

Fog Creek has a motto: "What if programmers were treated like rock stars?" Betabeat had a chance to glimpse the office of the esteemed New York company last night during a class, "How to Hire Developers in a Competitive Market," taught by two employees of Fog Creek's uppity younger cousin, Stack Exchange. The message at the end of the night: developers are choosy, peculiar, brilliant and needy. But their needs are actually pretty simple.

The night started out with an amateur psychoanalysis of the developer. The developer is a detail-oriented perfectionist. He or she has a "very strong bullshit meter." He or she needs to be able to get into the "zone;" Fog Creek has what amounts to a "do not disturb" sign on one of the doors that says, "The sys admins are working heads down until _____." The developer is also obsessed with merit and craves status within his or her own sphere. Other adjectives included "pasionate," "competitive," and "opinionated." "Prima donna!" suggested someone in the audience.

So how do you go about ensuring your developers are happy, healthy and at their most productive?

First, the Stack Exchangers said, figure out what developers care about:

• interesting work
• good conversation
• being stimulated outside of work
• creature comforts (standing desks, soft mats to stand on, ping pong tables, food)
• being able to get into the zone
• having the right tools for the job
• independence and self-direction
• sense that they're having an impact

Mr. Spolsky has been thinking about this stuff for a long time. At the end of the night, we were given copies of "Smart & Gets Things Done," Mr. Spolsky's 2007 book about how to find and hire the best people. (The title is stolen from Microsoft's recruiting philosophy.) Back in February, Mr. Spolsky wrote a blog post entitled "Programmer Nesting Rituals." In it, he argued that developer salaries are not the most important factor for a developer picking a job; he will expand on that idea in a keynote at the ERE Expo, a recruiters' conference in San Diego, later this month.

It was interesting to see the ideas implemented in life. Both the offices of Fog Creek and Stack Exchange are spacious and pleasant. They have fully-stocked kitchens, with cereal, beer, pizza, and the works; employees can send an email to the office manager with grocery requests. Fog Creek has a strict 9-5 rule, so the office was completely empty at 6 p.m. Upstairs at Stack Exchange, a few sales, community managers and programmers still hadn't left by 7 p.m. Fog Creek has a corner office that's been converted to a library, complete with leather armchairs and shelves of programming books. Programmers are encouraged to order whatever books they want from Amazon. Stack Exchange, where sales and community employees sit in a bullpen-style office in the middle of the room, with developers in offices around the perimeter, has a ping pong table. Every desk is electronically convertible to a standing desk. Mr. Spolsky is also a big proponent of the Aeron chairs, the spendy furniture that became a symbol of dot-com excess, which start around $600. In six years, he wrote in 2007, no one had ever quit.

Much of this seemed obvious to us, but the best practices are surprisingly uncommon at places that hire developers. Mr. Spolsky seems to have made it his mission to make the world a better place for developers by evangelizing about job satisfaction and workplace culture. As the presenters talked about developer care, one attendee periodically burst into laughter. She had recently quit her job at a finance firm.

Mr. Atwood

Yesterday, Stack Exchange CTO Jeff Atwood did the unthinkable, at least in Startupland where work is your life and companies are talked about and tended to with the same care as young children. On his blog Coding Horror, Mr. Atwood announced that effective March 1st, he would leave day-to-day operations of Stack Exchange, the beloved New York-based community-driven Q&A site for programmers, behind.

But not for all the usual reasons like starting his own company, starting a VC fund, or untold riches in preferred Facebook stock. No, Mr. Atwood did for actual human young children. Earlier this month, his wife gave birth to twin girls whose Twitter handle (@theladybabies) is probably better than yours.

"Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange have been wildly successful," Mr. Atwood wrote, "But I finally realized that success at the cost of my children is not success. It is failure."

Reached by email, CEO Joel Spolsky, who co-created Stack Exchange, told Betabeat, "We're really going to miss him. He did great work building a site that genuinely makes the Internet a better place to get expert answers. It grew from nothing to be in Quantcast's top 150 US networks and every developer relies on it every day."

The response to Mr. Atwood's heart-felt confession, which referenced Steve Jobs death as a wake-up call to entrepreneurs, seems to have struck a cord with his fellow technophiles who shared their thanks for building Stack Exchange and the wisdom of his decision on Hacker News, their personal blogs, and, of course, Twitter:

Sincere thanks to @codinghorror for the passion & love it takes to make the web better! "Farewell Stack Exchange": codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/f…

— Anil Dash (@anildash) February 6, 2012

An amazing reminder from @CodingHorror about what startups and being an entrepreneur are all about: family - j.mp/A3mcQe

— Tim Jahn (@timjahn) February 7, 2012

On Jobs the dad: "If you want your kids to know you, spend time with them. (Biographer unnecessary.)" deliberatism.com/blog/not-like-… via @codinghorror

— Brian Alvey (@brianalvey) February 7, 2012

Kudos to @codinghorror for not only building a great product, but for knowing what's truly important and acting on it: codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/f…

— Dave Greiner (@davegreiner) February 7, 2012

Thanks jeff - you have made the web better “@codinghorror: Farewell Stack Exchange codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/f…”

— Bijan Sabet (@bijan) February 6, 2012

Although @theladybabies have yet to weigh in on this development, we imagine their response is something like: "Yaaaaaaaaaay!" Well that or, "Feed Me." Babies, man. Such a one-track mind.

Admiring their handywork

Betabeat stopped by Stack Exchange the other day to interview the CHAOS team. We snapped some pictures of the big monitor array they have set up, including some eye popping stats on the way traffic is growing. But we didn't want to make those public just yet, since we were invited in to visit to report another story.

But today Stack Exchange COO did an interview with founder Joel Spolsky about the big board and tipped their hat about some of these numbers. Over the last 30 days Stack Exchange has grown 40 percent, hitting more than 17 million page views on 6.3 million unique visitors. Gaming.stackexchange.com led the way, with 245 percent growth in the last month. 

There are now more than 70 sites that make up Stack Exchange, with dozens more being tested in Area 51, the section of Stack Exchange were users can suggest new verticals. All these sites put together still don't come close to the godfather of them all, Stack Overflow, which clocked in at 19 million unique visitors and more than 132 million page views. But the new sites are growing much faster.

The release of SkyRim, the most played game of 2011, has led to the huge growth on the Gaming Stack Exchange. As Seth Schiesel reported in the New York Times, SkyRim is the sort of game that lets a single player get sucked into a fantasy world for hours and even days on end. But when these gamers come across a particular challenge they can't solve, or just want to discuss which way to lead their character, they are increasingly turning to Stack Exchange as the best forum for discussion. For example, What Did Happen on That Drunken Night Anyway and Where Did I Get This Wedding Ring?

The CHAOS team in action

When Stack Overflow was created in 2008 as a forum for questions about computer programming, there was no need to worry about understanding the community. Co-founders Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood had long and storied histories working in the software industry. But as the Stack Overflow blossomed into Stack Exchange, a group of more than 70 sites covering topics from photography to parenting to cooking, they found that groups of humans do not respond well to being managed by an algorithm.

Everyone knows the drill. A community springs up online, leaders naturally emerge, and their commitment earns them the right to become moderators. But over time whatever small biases these folks bring with them are amplified in the minds of new users, until the inevitable charges of fascism begin to fly and a full-on flame war breaks out.

Is it possible to find a formula for combating this decline? In a row of two desks at the far end of the Stack Exchange office, just off the ping pong table, sits the CHAOS team (Cheerful Helpful Advocates of Stack), a group of community managers who spend their days experimenting in the laboratory of human interaction. "We're trying to derive some universal principles about how to grow a community on the internet that can govern itself and regenerate after a conflict," said CHAOS member Abby Miller. "So far we've learned that there are no universal principles."

Stack Exchange Growth 2010

An Anthropology major, a former staffer for Wizard magazine and comic convention veteran, these are the kind of talents Stack Exchange was looking for when it formed CHAOS. Their job is to ensure that the torrid growth at Stack Exchange leads to lasting sites that don't rise and fall as Myspace, Digg and so many other social services have in recent years.

When the parenting exchange launched, there were brutal fights going on about topics like spanking and co-sleeping. Questions were being closed for being even slightly off topic or just too inflammatory. "We had to find ways to channel that controversy into something productive," said CHAOS member Aarthi Devanathan.

Slowly, through the meta section, where users go to discuss the purpose and scope of each Stack Exchange, two canonical opinions emerged on the parenting site. As Anil Dash pointed out, this came from MetaTalk approach on Metafilter, a site Joel Spolsky knew and loved. "We taught the users that it was alright to disagree, and gave them a set of arguments they could reference without every thread degenerating into a fight," Ms. Devanathan concluded.

As social interaction comes to underpin most every site on the web, these skills are becoming widely sought after. "What we are learning is that no two sites are the same," said Joel Spolsky, preparing espresso for his staffers during the team lunch. "We don't want Stack Exchange to become Yahoo, where the fitness channel is exactly the same template as the automobile channel, just a different subject."

A lot of venture capitalists are mulling over this same problem. "Online communities require both software and people. Sometimes the software part is the easier part," writes Fred Wilson. "Modern community building isn't easy but if there is one thing the Internet has taught me over the past 15 years, large engaged communities are incredible powerful things, both commercially and socially. Building them is important and ultimately very valuable work."

Fred Wilson refers to himself as the bartender on his blog, AVC. Mr. Spolsky uses a similar metaphor to describe CHAOS. "This job will be sort of like being a community organizer at a non-profit. It combines elements of marketing, PR, and sales, but it’s really something different. I don’t expect that there are a lot of people out there who already kn0w how to do this well, so I’m going to train them, personally." The team has grown from two people to eight agents in the last few months. "Everyone who joins the program (and survives for a year) will come out with an almost supernatural ability to take a dead, lifeless site on the internet and make it into the hottest bar in town. That’s a skill worth learning for the 21st century," Mr. Spolsky concluded.

Stack Exchange and Facebook announced a partnership today--facebook.stackoverflow.com, a Facebook-centric forum embedded within Stack Overflow's programming-focused, question-and-answer wiki--and there was much rejoicing.

"It came about very quickly," said Alex Miller, director of strategy at Stack Exchange, the network of wiki-esque forums that includes Stack Overflow. (Mr. Miller is also chief of staff and "sidekick to the CEO," Joel Spolsky, who is on vacation this week and was unavailable. He also holds more than a dozen other titles for which he has corresponding business cards, according to his various duties. Betabeat can empathize.)

"One of the joys of us being a small agile start-up is, we can do things very quickly," Mr. Miller explained. "In late June, early July they approached us and basically initiated a discussion about ways for us to partner on it. They were looking for a new solution and recognized the value of the platform ... we were obviously thrilled to work with them."

Stack Overflow was already serving as an official forum for Android developers, with Google sponsoring the Android tag on posts. Perhaps that's how Facebook got the idea of moving the official Facebook developer forum, a standard thread-based community with which many developers were frustrated, onto Stack Overflow.

The Facebook forum is basically a curated mini-site within the Stack Overflow site, where the more than 10,000 posts about Facebook that had already amassed have been curated into a coherent destination, with a few extra features for usability, Mr. Miller said.

The advantage for Facebook developers on the new curated mini-site is that their questions are also seen by the Stack Overflow community at large--so if it turns out the problem isn't with the Facebook API, but with something in the underlying code, a befuddled developer can still get an answer.

This is a new product offering for Stack Exchange, but Mr. Miller hesitated to call it a potential revenue stream. The revenue comes from its careers mini-site, he says, which has grown explosively since its launch a few months ago at the LAUNCH conference in San Francisco. He sounded very happy with the Careers 2.0 revenue, which he says is mutually beneficial to both job seekers and employers. It's a positive feedback loop you don't find with other revenue possibilities such as advertising. With a jobs site, more users leads to more job postings which leads to more users, he said--whereas ads can really either be optimized for advertisers, making the user experience worse and vice versa.

Still, Mr. Miller noted, don't be surprise if you see more mini-sites come out in the coming months. Stack Exchange doesn't have anything specific planned, but there's been interest. "All of our sites have launched based on community demand and support," he said. "As the community asks for more ... I'm sure we'll roll out more in the future."

"Let me see if I can explain how 'Internet Startups' work," he writes. "They make these apparati that draw a box on somebody's computer screen. That person then types words into that box on their screen. Then, the Internet Startup uses some computer codes to copy those words onto somebody else's computer screen, so that other person can then read them."

Some founders took issue with this description. "We're a telecom startup that happens to use the internet," founder John Sheehan said. "I think you're mocking the internet," writes Ben West. "Also, I know an internet startup that copies words from 3 little boxes onto paper, and delivers them to other users, who aren't on the internet.

But others were quick to play along. "And then, Steve Jobs, the father of all Internet Startups put a camera in his devices, allowing people to photograph and videograph themselves, and copy those into that box on their screen," Dharmash Shah writes. "This begat about half of all new Internet Startups."

"You could go a step further and say that all Internet companies modify the voltage in a series of memory units in someone else's computer," says Doug Jones in another comment.

And our favorite: "You forget about the internet startups that aggregate all the little things people type into boxes and sell them to other companies."

Mr. Spolsky was careful to point out that another aspect of internet start-ups is the backlight that turns your phone into a flashlight.

Reddit user Samdumb got the trolling started. "I think that's misleading. You and your co-owner are both employees and are presumably receiving the vast majority of that money."

Spolsky fires back. "There are a couple of dozen owners of Fog Creek. My co-founder (Michael) and I started 3 years before almost everyone else, so we have more seniority (e.g. I have 10 years, the most senior employee has 7). But we're not even close to receiving "the vast majority of that money." That's not the way we roll."

Bring it on Samdumb. "I find it hard to believe that of the millions that Fog Creek makes in revenue per year you and your partner are not taking the majority of that. Whether it be through large salaries, bonuses, dividends, or some other mechanism.
You're making it sound like you make just a bit more money per year than the oldest employees, which is very doubtful."

A Fog Creek employee steps in to defend Spolsky. "Because our revenues are publicly available--in real time, no less!--to employees at the company, it's really easy to do a back-of-the-napkin calculation to see whether this is actually how Joel and Michael are running the company. And it turns out that, yep, sure is. I'm sorry that someone actually doing what they say they're doing is hard to swallow, but that just is what's going on here. Sorry there's no scandal to point at."

Real time revenue metrics for calculating your personal bonus? Betabeat wants to know more.

To show you how easy it is to be Quora--or Ask Jeeves, or Facebook Questions, or Google Questions, or Allexperts.com--I’m starting my own question and answer site right here in this very column. If I’m half as lucky as Quora, I should get $150 million.

Why is anyone even paying attention to Quora, at all?

Excellent question. As part of the slavering press frenzy that accompanied Quora’s debut, co-founder Adam D’Angelo told some reporter that he quit Facebook to start Quora because “Q & A is one of those areas on the internet where there are a lot of sites, but no one had come along and built something that was really good yet.” And they still haven’t.

He also said, “We think there’s a lot of knowledge that is still in people’s heads that hasn’t really been written down on the internet in a useful format yet.” Totally.

People think it’s a good idea to care about Quora because question and answer sites are as fashionable right now as rompers were last summer. See, just like the romper,  Q & A sites inexplicably makes a comeback every few years. With Google flooded with spam and SEO nonsense, technophiles are thinking it’d actually be better if we farmed out our question-answering needs to “social networks” of humans. Much in the same way grown women periodically think it’s a good idea to dress themselves in one-piece outfits for two-year-olds, Q & A sites like Quora and Stack Exchange rear their ugly heads now and then.

Plus, just like Hashable, Quora capitalizes on the narcissism and incestuousness of tech start-up culture, generating outsize enthusiasm from a group of people who love nothing more than to hear their opinions and mutual adulations echo around whatever virtual forum happens to be popular at the moment.

That’s it?

Self-promoter Robert Scoble at one point was the site’s No. 1 user, but Quora got upset that he was using it as a personal branding vehicle (an odd objection, considering personal branding is one of the only reasons anyone has any incentive to answer dumb questions on Quora to begin with). Scoble got in a fight with Quora and eventually wrote a passive-aggressive fake mea culpa, and some people who read tech blogs paid attention to that.

Who runs Quora?

Charlie Cheever (my boss’s friend) and Adam D’Angelo, two ex-Facebook guys who decided to jump ship in hopes of making a buck off investors who are going crazy over tech companies. Sound familiar? It should.

How is Quora different from Yahoo! Answers?

Quora is not different from Yahoo! Answers.

How is Quora different from Stack Exchange?

Unlike Stack Exchange, Quora does not make a habit of weeding out poorly formed and illogical questions. (Stack Exchange’s Pokemon questions, for example, are very well thought out and pragmatic, whereas on Quora you get threads like “Who is the sexiest Pokemon?”)

Is Jeeves on Quora?

No, Quora has even less going for it than the ill-fated question and answer engine, because Quora does not even have a cartoon butler for a mascot.

How much is Quora worth?

Somewere between $86 million and $300 million, if you believe the deep-pocketed, glorified lottery players at Benchmark Capital. My valuation is closer to the $0 range, but my opinion doesn’t matter as much as that of venture investors making scattershot investments in hope of cashing in a winning start-up lottery ticket.

Why is this happening?

Mainly because what drives any American bull market is a group of wealthy and self-congratulatory -- but also ignorant -- people wasting their money on fashionable but ultimately worthless investments.

Should we grow up now?

Yes, grow up, you babies.