Greenspun: One big turning point was getting Levi Strauss as a customer. They had acquired a small company that made custom-cut khaki pants, and they wanted a web front end for this new factory that they were building that could take your measurements and sew you a pair of khakis to your specs. They asked around MIT, "Who's really an expert on building this kind of thing?" They came to us and it was a happy coincidence, because they were happy to pay for lots of software and infrastructure and tools and let us keep the rights to it all.

That was one good thing about working for non-technical companies. If you worked for IBM, they make their money by owning technologies, so if you build a technology for them, they want to own it. Whereas publishers or clothing companies, they make their money by having a brand or unique content. I did a lot of work for Hearst Corporation and they don't want to give away the content of Cosmo magazine or their relationship with Fabio, but if you build some Perl scripts for them to do server administration, it doesn't occur to them that that's something that they have to own and prevent other publishers from getting hold of.

So Levi's was a great client and it was a big turning point because it gave us the money to build whatever we needed to build.

For programmers, I had a vision—partly because I had been teaching programmers at MIT—that I didn't like the way that programmer careers turned out. Now that I fly airplanes, I realize that the average programmer is really much less happy in his/her job than the average airplane mechanic, which is pretty sad when you consider that becoming an airplane mechanic is an 18-month trade school education. For $30,000 and a year and a half, you can become an airplane mechanic (even less if you want to work as an apprentice for 3 years and get your FAA certification). You work in a small group, you meet the customer directly. You don't have the alienation from the customer that Karl Marx talked about as being a bad thing about factory work versus craftsmanship—that you never find out if your work really connects with people because you're in a factory and the customer is at the other end of a railroad line.

Airplane mechanics have a direct interaction with the customer. A lot of the jobs require two to three people, so it's kind of social, and I noticed that they're just really happy. Programmers are isolated. They sit in their cubicle; they don't think about the larger picture. To my mind, a programmer is not an engineer, because an engineer is somebody who starts with a social problem that an organization or a society has and says, "OK, here's this problem that we have—how can we solve it?" The engineer comes up with a clever, cost-effective solution to address that problem, builds it, tests it to make sure it solves the problem. That's engineering. If you look at civil engineers, architects, they're all dealing directly with the customer and going through the whole process.

I wanted them to have a real professional résumé. In the end, the project was a failure because the industry trends moved away from that. People don't want programmers to be professionals; they want programmers to be cheap. They want them to be using inefficient tools like C and Java. They just want to get them in India and pay as little as possible. But I think part of the hostility of industrial managers toward programmers comes from the fact that programmers never had been professionals.

So it was falling apart very quickly financially; I could tell that. The board meetings got more acrimonious. They actually precipitated the ultimate fight. They said, "Look, we're going to kick you off the board and sue you for injuring our self-esteem. You better talk to a lawyer."

Livingston: Didn't you also insult them by describing publicly what it was like to have VCs run your company?

Greenspun: Only after they sued me. I said it was like watching a kindergarten class get into a Boeing 747 and flip all the switches and try to figure out why it won't take off. That was before I got my pilot's license. Now I know how apt it was.