fizbin

I'm just this guy, you know?

  • he/him

40-ish white guy in tech


Writing this up so I can point people on Bluesky at it.

This story takes place back when I was working for Google. As background for this, you should understand that the way Google prefers to hire PMs is to hire them straight out of undergrad into a role known as "Associate Product Manager", or APM, have them get used to things in that role for a few years and then promote them to PM.

Also, I'm going to assume here that you know what LambdaMOO is or can look it up. The short summary if you insist on not doing that is imagine the metaverse but non-profit and all text.

So in the fall of 2008, I had been at Google for about a year and, being 32 at the time, was maybe 5 or so years older than most of the other people on my team. There were two other people approximately my age, and our new just-graduated APM, but most of the other people on the team were in the 24-28 year-old age range.

At lunch with two of my younger colleagues I was telling a story about this thing that had existed on LambdaMOO, where it was a basic programming test to see if you could program your way out of a paper bag. When I finished, one of the people I was eating with asked "What's LambdaMOO?", so I then explained about MOOs and MUDs and those things and contemplated that I had been kind of on the tail end of those things being popular when I was in undergrad, so it makes sense that those two wouldn't know about it.

When we got back from lunch, I asked the people closer to my age on the team if they'd ever heard of LambdaMOO. One person who graduated a year before me hadn't heard about it at all. The other only vaguely remembered it, and had known someone at undergrad who was really into all manner of MOOs and MUDs, but said he'd never seen the appeal. I'm feeling a bit like the old rambling Simpson Grandpa at this point.

Then our just-graduated-that-year APM turns around and says "Oh, LambdaMOO! I remember that." Aha! Well, good, nice to know it's still a thing...

She continued: "We studied it in my 'History of Social Media' class."


You must log in to comment.