Josh Weinberg
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2019–2024
10:24 · 2.8M views · Apr 14, 2009
A comedy video in which a salesperson demands that a web developer fix a down website, with the two talking past each other. It won a Webby award.
HN treats it as a beloved piece of tech-workplace humor, quoted whenever an outage or sales-versus-engineering friction comes up.
4 comments from Hacker News
Something along similar lines that I really enjoyed was the "Website is Down" series of videos, starting with "Sales Guy vs Web Dude": this video
Yeah, but how much of that time is actually butt in seat coding vs hardly paying attention in meetings? I've worked at multiple big firms and startups and I don't believe that even the majority of people are working "40 hours" in the same way that most people work 40 hours. This is the wonderful thing about technology. I was literally motivated to get into tech by the old "The Website is Down" videos, and in practice, it seems to be how many tech workers operate: this video
> do you really think there are masses of people who can’t tell the difference between a single sign on service being down and individual sites being down and reporting it to downdetector? Have you never seen The Website Is Down? this video The answer is: way more people than a software developer might think. Ask anyone in IT, or go to anywhere bugs are reported and read a handful.
> We run a Saas and someone wrote an email saying that our server was down, and when we'd expect it to be up. Not having had a notification, I double checked from a couple of geographic locations that our application was indeed up and responding. A tale as old as time: this video