failing like never before

A Postmortem of Temporary Success

I submitted my previous post, Why Working at Google Is Not My Dream Job (Anymore), to HackerNews and it hit the front page! Within the first hour of its submission my post reached the front page, and then quickly peaked at number ten. It floated between the number ten and twelve spots for another three hours, but after six hours it had dropped to the second page. By the time I got home from work, it had fallen to the fourth or fifth page and had accumulated 196 points and 166 comments. You can tell I am a little bit excited about all this. I think in one day I had the same number of views that I have had in the last three years. Here's a link to the HN comments.

Have a look at this traffic graph of my site from today:

Some other quick notes.

• I probably should have picked a different title. It served well to grab the attention of readers on HN, but it doesn't serve as well to summarize the contents of the post.
• Lots of people had similar experiences with Google and other large companies. This is not surprising.
• Lots of people had quite the opposite experience interviewing at Google. This is also not surprising.
• There were some pretty rude/crass comments made. This should be expected with the internet.
• At peak bandwidth, my server was struggling a little bit. Pages were definitely loading a little slower.
• My comments section needs work. It is not escaping quotes properly
• Someone took the opportunity to explore other posts and comment on a six year old post.