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Comment by malbs | Hacker News Reader

Ahh FuckedCompany.com

I remember when I sat in an interview for a position at marchFIRST in Melbourne, Australia. And when it came time in the interview for them to ask "Have you got any questions for us?"

"Yeah, look this is kind of awkward, but I've seen marchFIRST mentioned quite a number of times on this website called fuckedcompany.com... Is that indicative of any issues I should be aware about?"

"Oh, don't worry about that, thats just our american parent company"

"Oh great"

So I accepted the offer, worked off-site for 3 months, and then marchFIRST went chapter 11.

Should have paid more attention to that damned website.

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I worked at marchFirst back in the day. Even had the chance to meet Bob Bernard. That experience shaped how I run the company I co-founded 3 years ago. M1's number one problem was a culture of spending money without any thought of a return. Which was probably really odd for folks on the Whitman Hart side of the merger. It really was a merger of two opposite cultures.

This extended back to USWeb/CKS. I might still have a shirt bragging about a $300M quarter (Though if you looked at the financials,we had something like a $50M loss).

It was like the Tres Comma club, but tackier.

marchFIRST -- it even has a Wikipedia entry [0]!

  marchFIRST was a Nasdaq traded public company whose peak stock
  price reached $52. By the time the company filed for
  bankruptcy, it traded for pennies ($0.16 on March 28, 2001).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MarchFirst

> "Oh, don't worry about that, thats just our american parent company"

Translation: "don't worry about that, that's just the company you are applying for"

I was young and really wanted the job! It was easy to overlook the obvious

I'm making fun of their gall more than anything else. I'd probably have overlooked that too when I was young.

It's possible that you made the right decision - you were young, you got the job, you got experience on your resume.

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