Last night I got lost reading and reading the complaints at Fucked Company.  It’s a website that’s been around forever — the point is that disgruntled employees (and former employees, and 13-year olds, and trolls who may never have heard of these companies) can write in anonymously and bitch about their bosses.  A complaint is referred to as a fuck (i.e., "this is not a fuck, just a comment…") and the subject lines on the complaints always include some clever play on the fucked company’s name.  Like, if you were going to complain about Sears, you’d title it "Sneers" or something like that.  A lot of the companies listed are internet-oriented, but not all.


So anyway I was shocked and amazed to see a place I used to work at listed on there, Agency.com.  Can I bore you to death with this story?  The year was 1995, I was in New York and just learning HTML.  Friend of a friend said I might be able to find freelance work doing coding at a place that had just opened up.  They had a sweet office in midtown; I think it was in the Time-Life building or some other high-tone office building.  It was a sort of an advertising agency for Internet-only campaigns… a place that would create websites for other companies.  Agency.com, what a concept!!  Yeah, nowadays there’s web-boutiques all over the place but at the time it was actually somewhat of a wild idea, since the internet was only just starting to creep into the mass consciousness.  The owners were Kyle and Chan, and they definitely seemed to fancy themselves as visionaries, though they acted and dressed like college kids and didn’t seem to know much about computers.  At any rate they didn’t do any of the coding; they just had meetings all the time trying to scare up new business.  They were pretty good at that!  My direct boss — the one who DID get his hands dirty with code — was Clay Shirky, one very smart guy.  I was just a temp worker, hired for a couple of months of part-time work.  I’d go in, and they had a spare desk and computer for me to work at.  There were maybe 10 employees in all, maybe.  It was a pretty nice gig while it lasted.  I learned a whole lot more from them than they probably got from me in terms of work… I was a coding newbie so Clay had to spoon-feed me a bit to get me started on anything new.

I hadn’t heard anything about Agency.com since the time that I worked there, other than to notice that Clay’s been doing a lot of techie writing over the years, and is a champion of P2P, which doesn’t surprise me at all.  So imagine my surprise when I run across a stream of literally hundreds of comments about them over at Fucked Company.  Seems they really exploded in the years since I worked there.  Ate up a bunch of other competing web-shops and opened offices all over the U.S., even one in Amsterdam.  And subsequently imploded in the dot-com bust, sold off most of their interests and eventually sold themselves off to some other company.  The website’s still there but from the comments on FC, it seems like the place is more on a par with the 10-man operation it was in 1995.  Lotta people went along for the ride, and a lotta people got bucked off that horse.  All I can think is, "wow".  Back in ’95 it was a little hard for me to believe in their "vision".  To this day I still think commercial websites are mostly just advertising, just magazine ads plopped onto a web format.  A bunch of pamphlets you can read online, and there’s nothing too visionary about that.  I NEVER understood how a company could be charging such outrageous amounts of money to create a website… the money didn’t seem to have anything to do with the actual man-hours involved.

After the gig at Agency.com, I did freelance work at many other webshops, both in New York and after I moved to Chicago.  It’s all the same everywhere you go.  Some P.T. Barnum character thinks he’s revolutionizing the way we do business.  He hires a bunch of geeks to slap something on the web, and turns around and charges the customer 100 times what it cost him to put the project together.  No wonder so many of them have fallen on their asses.  Really I think a team of 10 people is already pushing the limits of having too many fingers in the pie…!!  If you’re running a webshop but you have more marketing staff than coders… well, to me that seems pretty ass-backwards.  It also seems silly to hire out a web-design firm to do the job of an ad agency!  I used to work at a huge ad agency in New York; we handled all methods of advertising, like print, radio, television and outdoor (billboards and bus-stops).  So why not the web, why can’t that just be one more arm in a ten-million-dollar ad campaign?  Well, they’ve probably figured that out by now, which is probably why all these web-boutiques are folding.  In-house designers and coders.  Duh!!