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 wasnât 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.
It's a restoration project
https://github.com/facundopignanelli/enroncorp
We need more of these restoration projects to populate the internet
The âWho We Areâ page highlights the difficulty of defining exactly what they do, but whatever it is, surely it will include the word âinnovativeâ. Brilliant.
Todayâs Enron would talk a lot about blockchain on this page. âItâs difficult to even start describing how EnronCoin makes virtual and physical commodity markets better because the opportunities are so vast and numerousâŚâ
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 ::
For those who donât know ENRONâs 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-...
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.
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)
Huge fan of Enron branding, it was done by none other than Paul Rand: https://www.paulrand.design/work/Enron.html
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.
I highly recommend Bethany McLeanâs "The Smartest Guys in the Room" to read up on Enron. Also, Lucy Prebble - who is now a consultant on HBOâs succession - has written a nice play on the matter.
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. âWhat they do is just beyond my feeble understanding.â
A lot of companies still do this, but more people can see through it now.
Who do you think next "Enron" would be? Tesla? [1] Others?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/bq06lc/the_smart...
I remember that era of using `<select>` dropdowns for navigation. Phew.
Explained just 6 months ago
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 Iâm pretty sure itâs a parody.
The corporate responsibility page returns âThe page you were trying to reach cannot be foundâ which is a little too on the nose.
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.
According to WHOIS, the domain is registered to one Facundo Pignanelli, in Buenos Aires.
loads fast!
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...
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.