I recently realized that between FogBugz (which my company uses for bugs, to-do items, and wiki) and Kiln (which my company is now using for Source Control/Code Reviews), the Fog Creek products are emerging as a Bizarro-world version of Microsoft's TFS.
My uninformed prediction of what's next: a hosted CI service like CruiseControl or TeamCity, both of which are useful (I would say indispensable) but can be intimidating to set up and start using.
This is a tangent but you might want to take a look at Hudson as a CI server; it's incredibly easy to set up, not at all intimidating, and very extensible.
I sincerely hope you mean that the "bizarro-world" aspect of Fog Creek's products compared to TFS is that they actually are usable and work really easily. :)
Making a nice place to work was our primary objective.
Maybe I'm a little old fashioned, but I still have a tough time understanding any goal != "maximizing our customers' success".
I once went to a sales seminar for technical people and we had to introduce ourselves and describe what our companies did. The first 15 people described their products. Then on my turn, I said something like, "We provide our customers tools to help them succeed." The instructor remarked that I was the only one who mentioned "customers" in his introduction. I didn't even think about it at the time; that's just the way I was trained.
It took almost ten years, but I think we finally got the mission for the next ten nailed.
Good for you, Joel. In your business, I imagine it's a fine line between an employee and a customer because they're both programmers. I would expect that sooner or later, focus must revert to the customer.
"We provide our customers tools to help them succeed."
That seems like an overly general phrase. Using the generic 'customer' seems like a cop-out, since it feels like you haven't really asked yourself which market you're making your product for. "Help them succeed" implies to me that you haven't really figured out the tangible benefit to the customer, which in turn means that you're in a really weak sales position.
Let's say you worked for a company making pie chart software. That phrase could apply, or something more specific like "We provide middle-managers with pie chart software to help them impress their bosses".
A good sales pitch follows directly from an understanding of who you're selling to, what they want, and how your product gives it to them.
Almost every software job in the city was terrible.
You had a choice of which kind of terrible.
Want to wear a suit and work long hours under crummy
conditions? Take a job at a bank.
Interesting that Joel semi-praises Microsoft but didn't mention his other former employer, D. E. Shaw / Juno (and the growing number of firms similar to DESCO). They are (relatively) hacker-friendly finance companies with no suits or long hours.
Weird, if anything my experience was the opposite, almost too little management. Maybe his experience was exclusive to the way things were run at Juno as opposed to the trading side of the business.
That's exactly the sort of place I wouldn't want to be. The best companies have a mission that's far beyond mere survival. That mission is why they stay ahead of their competition.
Companies that look at their employees as "heads" or "resources" and look at their customers as nothing more than revenue sources inevitably fall behind. When you operate that way your most talented workers don't give their best and many of them eventually leave, and you don't produce the best products (because you simply don't care). When a competitor who does care comes along they eat your lunch, because their more efficient and put out better products.
Though I'm a wage slave, my goal is to make myself superfluous. When I found a company, that will also be my goal: build and deliver a product, until there is nothing I can or want to add anymore.
Anyone check out the video at the bottom? Holy @#$* that's a nice workspace. I live in a cube. I'd actually be excited to go to work if that were my workplace.
I picked one up on cragslist for a couple hundred and it has been great for the back. I noticed that I can now sit at the desk for longer periods without fatigue like my last chair. The material they use is firm and took a bit to get used to at first.
I can't really figure out why, but something about Joel bothers me when I read/watch his stuff. Does anyone have a similar experience? I can't think of any good reason why this would be the case, he is obviously a smart guy, StackOverflow is brilliant. Maybe it's the tone of how he writes stuff or maybe it's because he seems to be a Microsoft sympathizer, neither of which are good reasons.
It's totally irrational but I get that gut feeling a lot with him. Am I the only one? Any other ideas why?
I read his stuff occasionally and appreciate it when he makes a good point, which he does sometimes. At the same time, I feel a consistent smugness in what he writes. It's messages like "every other job in the city sucked" (and the implication that they still do) versus "FogBuz rocks", and "I don't want to live in 'lesser cities' [than New York]".()
There's also a lack of substance to much of his writing. Aeron chairs are what makes FogBuz great? Really? That's a pretty low bar to match. To me, a great company has purpose, vision, and smart-but-zero-ego people who enjoy working together to produce something that will actually make a difference in the world. Give me those things and I'll sit on a milk crate.
() (And, for the record, I live in NYC myself and think it's a pretty awesome city.)
My uninformed prediction of what's next: a hosted CI service like CruiseControl or TeamCity, both of which are useful (I would say indispensable) but can be intimidating to set up and start using.