Ben Bleikamp

I resigned from Bleacher Report last week after accepting a job at Yelp as a product manager.  Officially, I am a UI product manager, meaning I am guiding design decisions and helping with interaction design across the site.  I am very excited about the new position.

Leaving Bleacher Report was much harder than I anticipated it being, mostly because it was difficult to decide to leave the people I work with.  The team that B/R has built is incredible.  It’s easy to build a solid team if you’re Google or Twitter – recruiting consists of posting a job on your site and watching the thousands of resumés role in.  As a start up without much hype, it takes a lot of work to hire the right people and I think Bleacher Report has done a great job.

The decision ended up coming down to where I wanted my career to be in five or ten years and this move will help me get there.  Continuing as the designer at Bleacher Report would be great, but I don’t want to be a designer forever.  Design is fun, but I have no desire to be a Creative Director and I am never going to spend the time learning to become a world-class visual designer.

Yelp is a bigger team, a bigger website, and my role is something that I haven’t done before, so it will be challenging.

I figured out why the company that manages my apartment complex (Avalon Bay) was not accepting my rent payments.

First, back story:

In August 2009 I was trying to pay my rent and it would not go through (I use a direct deposit from my checking account and pay online).  The error said “Routing number must be 9 digits.”  My routing number was 9 digits.

I called them and they assured me that it was an issue on my end and that I should double check my routing number with my bank.  I assured them it was correct and that I use it on a number of sites (PayPal, credit card payments, etc.)  But no, they insist I double check.  I did double check, I was right.

I call back and imply that maybe the recent redesign of their resident backend and administration system might have broken something.  “Oh no, definitely not, it was done by Intuit - they are VERY reputable!”  Right…I ended up paying by phone two months in a row because the website wouldn’t work, but they assured me they were looking into it.

This month I tried paying again and got the same error.  I decided to put my routing number in the “Account Number” field and my account number in the “Routing Number” field.  It worked.  Payment made.  Whoever their developers are should be fired.