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A Conversation with Joel Spolsky   printer-friendly format   recommend to a colleague What it takes to build a good software company: The outspoken software entrepreneur and blogger extraordinaire discusses building a software developers' utopia. Fog Creek

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Sections 1: Fog Creek 2: Cost Center 3: Management 4: Knowledge Work 5: The Web

Joel Spolsky has never been one to hide his opinions. Since 2000, he has developed a loyal following for his insightful, tell-it-like-it-is essays on software development and management on his popular Weblog "Joel on Software" (http://www.joelonsoftware.com). The prolific essayist has also published four books and started a successful software company, Fog Creek, in New York City, a place he feels is sorely lacking in product-oriented software development houses.

Spolsky started Fog Creek not with a specific product in mind, but rather to create a kind of software developers' utopia, where "programmers and software developers are the stars and everything else serves only to make them productive and happy." So far, he has succeeded. The company has maintained a 100 percent employee retention rate while shipping several profitable software products. Its latest release, Fogbugz, is a comprehensive, Web-based project-management system that uses a technique called EBS (evidence-based scheduling) to help software developers better predict their release dates.

For this month's interview, Queue editorial board member Ben Fried from Morgan Stanley sat down with Spolsky in Fog Creek's snazzy Manhattan offices and discussed, among other things, how EBS works, the challenges of Web 2.0, and why the military doesn't breed good software managers.

BEN FRIED You did a lot of things before you started Fog Creek. What brought you to this point?

JOEL SPOLSKY I started my career at Microsoft and really enjoyed it. I would have stayed there for a long time except that I didn't like living in Seattle. I had a lot more friends in New York, and life is more exciting and more dynamic here.

"There's something really weird about being a little gear in a very large project and not being able to describe to anybody what you do, not really being able to influence the way things happen."

I came back to New York and sort of bounced around to various places, all of which were somewhat interesting, but I was frustrated by the lack of a real technology product company in New York. There are definitely lots of places to do technology in New York. Most of them are banks. The next large category is probably the entertainment industry. And then there were dot-coms for a while. But for a software developer, there's nothing more exciting than working at a software company, and I couldn't find a company that was close enough to being a software company, that was organized around making software developers happy. So, sort of lacking any place to go to work, I started one. I think if Google had gotten to New York a few years earlier, I might have just gone there.

BF You've spoken eloquently about how you view it's your mission to create a utopia for software developers and that the things that come out of it will naturally be profitable. That sounds a bit like Google.

JS From what I've heard, Google does a really good job at some of the things that I preach. That said, there are some things that Google has forgotten. For example, I think Google is a little bit too diversified, that it has too many product ideas going at once. That 20-percent-time thing - it's a nice idea in theory, but it generates too many ideas for one company to follow up on. And it's hiring way too fast. The people at Google probably don't think this, but they are certainly hiring engineers too fast to keep a single, unified corporate culture and shared values in a way that would be productive.

BF Weren't you a sergeant in the IDF (Israel Defense Forces)? There are those who might say that being a paratrooper would help with being the CEO of a software company.

JS Occasionally I have thought back to the way in which the army creates cohesion and leadership in military circumstances and considered whether it might be applicable in the civilian world. But I discovered recently that it just wouldn't. The military has a problem that other institutions don't have in leadership: specifically, it needs to be able to give people commands to do things that are suicidal and to have those commands instantly obeyed. With that in mind, it has a very specific form of discipline and a very specific form of training. If you tried to do that in a software company, everybody would just leave and go to another company.

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Discuss A Conversation with Joel Spolsky

Latest Comments   Insightful..... - excellent interview. thoughtful questions and insightful answers. as a developer in large company, l...   Going both ways... - I would like to know what Joel thinks about young developers that work hard and get promoted to mana...   Tom - comment on risk aversion... - Tom - I've been following Joel's work for many years, and I must say that I've had the same thoughts...   Joel's paradox... - Great interview. I think Joel laves his pragmatic touch on every aspect of his company. But one th...   Interviewing Developers... - I'd like to know more about how to test for developers understanding problems at different levels co...   Truth in it... - I am a developer and I believe what Joel says about managing developers is true - especially the sce... Post your comment now! name: email: subject: comment: note: only <b>, <i>, and <br> tags allowed Please type in the captcha number below