enron :: discover the power of WHY (2001) | Hacker News Reader

enron :: discover the power of WHY (2001)

enroncorp.com

151 pointsgdedhitchhiker71 comments

Enron...sigh.

I went to college near Houston (Texas A&M) and interviewed with Enron in early-mid November, 2001 prior to December graduation. Given the timing, I believe it may have been the very last interview loop they did.

For a soon-to-graduated Comp Sci student, Enron put on an amazing presentation. The interview was onsite at Enron headquarters. They took the candidates to dinner one evening, put us up in a nice hotel, and spent all day the next day grilling us in panel interviews, having us work individual problems, and challenging groups of interviewees with team problems. It was calculated, thorough, and to this day it's the most comprehensive and satisfying interview experience I've ever had. Driving home, I knew they had successfully sifted our group to identify who the best candidates were.

The job market was also really tough in late 2001, with the dotcom bust and 9/11 making it challenging to find good opportunities. If memory serves, some of the other options I was considering at the time were to write PowerBuilder for an old-school oil company and maintain Fortran for a small, decades-old engineering firm. Enron, in comparison, seemed like a godsend.

Enron was opulent. Enron paid well. The software people seemed genuinely interested in what they were doing. Everyone seemed smart and ambitious. We were shown one room that was an open workspace and each desk had a pair of flat panel monitors (this was three years before I bought the first flat panel for my home PC and years before I had two screens at home). Enron was as sexy to a software professional as any workplace in the world in its time.

I knew there was some drama surrounding the company, but I was generally oblivious to the details. I was overwhelmed with a 16-hour course load, a student job slinging C++ for a local consultancy, and a job search. While onsite, a few better-informed candidates asked some of the employees about the brewing scandals. The Enron folks shrugged it off. They believed in the company and believed in the work they were doing.

I had a great interview and left really excited. A week later I got a call from their recruiter and was told they liked me and an offer was incoming. I was stoked. Then, silence. Maybe the Thanksgiving holidays were the reason for the delay, I thought. In another week or two, the Enron collapse was headline news. Every single Enron employee I had interacted with was out of a job, and the prospect of thousands of Enron employees hitting the market simultaneously made my job search even tougher.

Enron provided me and my fellow interviewees some SWAG while we were there. I had a hat, a clear plastic mug, and a few other items. I sold them for a dollar at a garage sale a few years later.

Thanks for sharing; Enron's downfall is fascinating to me (honestly not sure why) and I appreciated this perspective on it.

>The Enron folks shrugged it off. They believed in the company and believed in the work they were doing.

In my experience, one should, in a corporate environment, take most seriously what is shrugged off and discount anything taken seriously. Because the reactions are revelatory of the attitudes that lead to crisis and crime.

This is so insightful. I’m going to remember this.

Did they tell you what you would actually DO there? I still try to piece together how they kept so many people busy on bogus energy derivative markets.

So did you take the PowerBuilder job or the Fortran job?

(Nice story, BTW, thanks.)

I took a job at a small-town consulting firm writing C++ and Java near where I grew up (I had worked for them a couple of summers in college). It turned out to be an outstanding first post-college job. I learned a lot, was challenged, and provided useful experience upon which I was able to build a career.

So in sum, it all worked out. But there was definitely a stretch were I chewed my fingernails down to the quick.

The number of people in Houston who have Enron on their resumes is incredible. Probably every fifty-something in Houston doing anything in finance or finance-adjacent is an Enron alum.

Great recap of your experience, btw.

I had an interview with worldcom around the same time. They sent an incredibly beautiful woman to interview me. Thankfully I took a different job.

After the dotcom crash I looked for some safe haven outside of the industry, and found a landing place at a global fiber optics networking division of an energy trading company called Dynegy. Sounded safe!

A month after joining they backed out of their planned buyout of their largest competitor Enron. Apparently this Enron thing was cooking their books.

Enron sued Dynegy, Dynegy countersued, and started laying people off. They decided that the fiber business wasn’t worth preserving since there were about a dozen such networks and not the demand to accommodate more than one.

Over my 11 months in of employment there I had 9 different managers and was finally one of the last 4 people keeping the lights on in the 500 person global HQ.

It was a weird time. For several months I kept the perp walk photo of Jeff Skilling in handcuffs as my desktop background. It was cathartic.

You might have fun poking around their mail archive:

http://www.enron-mail.com/email/maggi-m/inbox/Enron_Dynegy_M...

> In addition, all information, documents and communications related to the merger between Enron and Dynegy should be coordinated through and approved by Mark Muller, Lance Schuler, Robert Eickenroht, Mark Haedicke, Rob Walls or Greg Whalley of Enron. It is absolutely critical that this procedure be maintained. To the extent that information is required to be disclosed to Dynegy under the merger agreement, then such disclosure should be approved by one of the foregoing individuals.

Most of the “foregoing individuals” are missing from the archive, but not all:

http://www.enron-mail.com/email/haedicke-m/

The (small) list of removed items is hilarious: http://www.enron-mail.com/email/removed

The other comments explaining that this is a restoration project make me wonder where this script came from. The archive of the original website?

There are more directories: http://www.enron-mail.com/email/

Probably a good idea to hide 22 freak emails from a 22 year ol(d scandal.)

Enron wasn't just cooking their books a little.

Enron created a "bandwidth marketplace", that is, a commodity market like there is for energy where providers can bid for data transit between locations. Then they estimated all the value of all the future trades on that market based on some very optimistic assumptions, estimated all their own future profit as the market maker using even more optimistic assumptions, and marked all that hypothetical profit to market and immediately recognized it as profit on their books.

It was tens of billions of dollars. Despite the fact that a "bandwidth marketplace" doesn't actually make sense (data transfer is a lot less fungible than energy, and there are usually only very few possible competitors for any route), and even if it had made sense, they couldn't have hoped to secure anywhere near the cut they assumed, and even if they had, the bottom was going to fall out of the market because people kept coming up with new and exiting ways to move more data on the same fiber, leading to massive overcapacity.

That takes wishful thinking to dizzying new heights!

Feels like those subprime mortgage risk markets in the mid 2000s: financial "instruments" that are incredibly complex and seem to offer amazing returns. Stated simply like that, we might wonder why so many people jumped on board, but in reality it wasn't introduced in such a straightforward way.

It's a restoration project

https://github.com/facundopignanelli/enroncorp

We need more of these restoration projects to populate the internet

The “Who We Are” page highlights the difficulty of defining exactly what they do, but whatever it is, surely it will include the word “innovative”. Brilliant.

Today’s Enron would talk a lot about blockchain on this page. “It’s difficult to even start describing how EnronCoin makes virtual and physical commodity markets better because the opportunities are so vast and numerous…”

Web design wise, the double colon in the page title is such a 2001 tick. I remember working with someone who believed that every header looked better in 10px Verdana Bold if you put it inside a box with one corner cut off and surrounded it with double colons :: like this ::

When I first heard of "E Corp" in Mr. Robot the first thing that came to my mind was Enron LOL

That was my take too, just the idea if Enron was still around and kept growing. They would have taken over Bitcoin mining and renamed it E-coin. Enron would have been the Blackrock of today.

For those who don’t know ENRON’s design still lives on in the Texas grid (serious). The Texas energy market was designed by ENRON.

https://www.kut.org/energy-environment/2021-07-23/heres-how-...

Works great: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/texas-p...

A system is what it does.

This system is extremely efficient at transferring wealth from Texans to corporations while killing them.

POSIWOD: The purpose of a system is what it does.

-- Stafford Beer

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...>

Corporate implosions of the dot-com era are fantastic reads. I was a part of the Northwestern Corporation, Expanets, Lucent fiasco. It was crazy the decisions that were made. I spec'ed a million dollar Sun Hardware purchase, my boss turned it into a $25 million 5 year, rental at a Quest DC in Denver.

We also had an entire floor of an Arthur Andersen building in Jersey where we were writing our new app. There was another floor that was off limits to anyone not a partner. A friend of mine saw trucks of document boxes come in. The paper shredders were working overtime there, we assume anyway.

Expanets didn't need to go down that way, greed and stupidity are powerful drugs.

Yes, those are great stories... we were a small VC funded startup that had maybe five customers. We needed a network monitoring solution, so I built out a Big Brother network monitoring system (for nostalgia, check out the demo site: https://web.archive.org/web/20010124042600/http://bb4.com/bb...). I was told under no uncertain terms that Big Brother was not professional enough for our purposes and we needed to build out an entire NOC with HP OpenView. To monitor about 20 servers at the time, maybe growing to 100. At a cost of about $2m for the hardware, training, and facility buildout.

There was also the $1m/month rental of the EMC Symmetrix storage array (again, for five customers). When things went belly up and we needed to cut costs, we just moved data centers in the middle of the night, abandoning the Symmetrix storage array at the old facility (since the lease was covered in our colo payments).

Ahhhh those were the days... I did enjoy driving 26' rental trucks full of mission critical datacenter racks around the area as a 21yo. Fun fact: it's easier to rent a box truck as a 21yo than a regular car (at least it was at the time).

Submitted title was "How is this zombie enron site still going?"

Good question! but the place for it is the comments, not the title. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: ""Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." The original title is linkbaity, but it's so retro linkbaity that I think it counts as interesting again.

Now can anybody figure out the year? (Edit: I've put 2001 up based on https://enroncorp.com/corp/pressroom/releases/2001/ene/51-en... being listed as the most recent news)

zombo.com is still going, so why not Enron?

Overall, zombo.com has done better than Enron

for one, zombo.com has never caused rolling blackouts by knocking power stations offline during peak demands to juice prices.

ah the beauties of deregulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%9301_California_ele...

But you can cause rolling blackouts at zombo.com. The only limit is yourself.

Enron was cooking the books and collapsed because it was a criminal fraud. The power outages and whatnot were the fault of California regulators, every energy company did the same thing because it's what the poorly written laws said they could do. And regulation arbitrage was one of Enron's few legal profitable endeavors.

Deregulation which Enron lobbied heavily into place on the expectation that they could turn a massive profit from exploiting it. Blaming CA gov has some real "stop hitting yourself" energy to it, and while it's important for every government to protect themselves by being more skeptical of deregulation going forward, it's also crystal clear that Enron was highly culpable in the disaster they created for profit.

Of course, it turns out that the same people who were chasing the old capitalist dream of "create the problem, sell the cure" were also cooking their books. Shocking.

Enron profited from the 2000s crisis due to government regulation demanding energy distributors purchase energy at an unsustainable rate. This is documented in the "Effects of partial deregulation" heading and in the lede.

I think a good portion of that is because of the fundamental differences in business philosophy. Enron dictated success at any cost, and that resulted in the necessity of fraud. Meanwhile, Zombo Com provided an open-ended framework for users to build their own success. Not only does this change the entire tone of their business dealings, but it cleverly offloads liability onto the user where the only limit is, in fact, themselves.

Huge fan of Enron branding, it was done by none other than Paul Rand: https://www.paulrand.design/work/Enron.html

I was already a fan but I just now realized that it's also like an electrical plug viewed from above https://i.imgur.com/TeZC5a8.jpg

I remember watching those "why" commercials and thinking "wtf?". What are they selling? Can't help but think the dysfunction of Enron was ultimately reflected in the nature of their ad campaigns.

Today, I see YouTube ads from Enbridge, another monster energy company out of Calgary. Exactly the same sort of weird, disconnected nonsense: roosters (for some reason) and childish music.

Were their ads national or just local? I really don't remember them.

I highly recommend Bethany McLean’s "The Smartest Guys in the Room" to read up on Enron. Also, Lucy Prebble - who is now a consultant on HBO‘s succession - has written a nice play on the matter.

Alex Gibney ftw if you're into docu films

I recently listened to the aquired podcast on Enron: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/enron

It's pretty long, but it's a good podcast, IMO. It also mentioned the book in it, and I think it was one of the main sources of information.

Sgitr is a great book and gives a real appreciation of how Ernon could have happened and will happen again. The perfect storm of hands off management and belief that ideas are more important than execution, plus the usual greed and slippery slope of covering small frauds with increasingly bigger ones. Other than Skilling and Fastow, they weren't all bad guys, I hope I'm never caught in a situation like that.

Also interesting is that sgitr is almost identical to "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou (sp?) about Theranos. Most of the same elements were present in that fraud.

This site was made back when companies unironically used meaningless marketing speak and no one seemed to notice they were completely full of shit. People defaulted to believing that these companies were just transcendent. “What they do is just beyond my feeble understanding.”

A lot of companies still do this, but more people can see through it now.

Consider: Dilbert is popular since the beginning of the '90s. People knew corporate bullshit for what it was, then and now.

Who do you think next "Enron" would be? Tesla? [1] Others?

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/bq06lc/the_smart...

Theranos

Let us never forget that Elizabeth Holmes’ father was a VP at Enron.

https://www.masterresource.org/enron-legacy/chris-holmes-enr...

We would probably be talking about Tesla as the new Enron already had the COVID boom not happened, which threw the car market into a pro-seller extreme. Before COVID they were so desperate for money that they were stiffing vendors, not paying the ones they had to be until after financial statements for the quarter had been generated (to appear profitable on paper), literally taking scrap parts out of the dumpsters in the back of the factory to cobble together cars that they tried to pass off on people by making them take delivery before seeing the vehicle, etc. Not to mention the 'financially delivered' nonsense.

If Tesla is still continuing those practices then there is simply no future for the company. Hopefully they have fixed those issues.

I remember that era of using `<select>` dropdowns for navigation. Phew.

It's the part of the site that worked the best on mobile for me.

In fact it worked better than many hamburger menus I find on modern mobile sites.

It's not the greatest UX but it's not that bad either.

It might be because it is standard. It offloads everything to the native UI, which in many situations is a good idea. I don't know how many times I have had web pages break on mobile because of some fancy date selection widget.

Still works better than many JS burger menus.

Explained just 6 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35151667

So who pays the operations bill? Is this some forgotten ancient server hanging in a dark closet?

What I always take away from looking back at these kinds of digital artifacts is just how much things change. And how much they stay the same.

This is supposedly a restoration project but I’m pretty sure it’s a parody.

The corporate responsibility page returns “The page you were trying to reach cannot be found” which is a little too on the nose.

It's not, it's just a re-hosted clone of the original Enron site circa 2000 (https://web.archive.org/web/20011003192049/http://www.enron....).

stock quote last updated August 2001

it would be worthless just 6 months later

Eeeeyeah. When I'm applying for a job, if I go to their corporate site and their about us page reads like the KPMG anthem, or Weird Al's "Mission Statement", it's a huge red flag or at least it prompts followup questions. (Most annoying is when I ask the crooter followup questions and get "Did you check out their web site?" as a response. Yes, I did, and it told me nothing. Did you?)

Based on that, we should've seen Enron's collapse a long time coming.

Weird Al’s “mission statement” was released in 2014 and was itself a parody of the KPMG anthem (which was done in earnest) that was leaked less than a year prior to Enron failing. There would likely have not been any collective cultural sentiment around this text in the year 2000 in the same way as there is today.

Just something to keep in mind when viewing historical events, even if they seem recent, with a modern lens and values.

Wow, somehow I’ve never come across the KPMG anthem thing before. Awesome!

https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2001/dec/09/theobserver...

tldr:

KPMG, We're strong as can be, A dream of power and energy. We go for the goal, Together we hold On to our vision of global strategy...

Following that logic most large companies would be about to collapse?

Not saying that they aren't. Who knows. Off-topic: I'm personally just waiting for the new Bernie Madoff (Ken Griffin) to be caught sometime in the coming decades or so.

Most large companies are pretty upfront about the kinds of products and services they provide.

It's being vague or evasive about that that's the warning sign.

According to WHOIS, the domain is registered to one Facundo Pignanelli, in Buenos Aires.

Yeah, it's a restoration project. https://github.com/facundopignanelli/enroncorp

loads fast!

they haven’t been able to hire people to slow it down

wat. who pays for this website to even be hosted right

just not the answer?

because in retrospect we know it to have been "because fraud" ahahha

plus ça change...

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