I have become sick and tired of the carping and flaming you see from some folks whenever Joel publishes a rant, accusing him of douchebaggery and all sorts of sin. The usual behaviour is that he has one great insight, a bunch of entertaining ranting, and one egocentric point. And on the basis of this, the whole thing is junk and he is a has-been windbag.
I don't go along with that sort of vilification. If a post has one great insight, something I can learn from, I'm a happy man. I can chuckle at Joel complaining about competing for interns with Google as long as I'mn entertained by his prose and intrigued by his central thesis.
I would have loved this post on that basis.
Except.
WTF is with the dig at playing Ultimate? Joel, you have totally lost it this time. Ultimate is the ultimate nerd sport, and interns who play Ultimate are your best hires ever.
Ultimate involves complex plays involving team co-ordination. A skill that just might come in handy working on a software development team. The flight of the disc is the kind of thing the mathematical mind drools over--gyroscopic procession, ballistics, aerodynamics, everything comes in to play.
Ultimate players are healthy and I'll wager can crank code for long hours compared to those who eschew aerobic sports in favour of foosball.
And for those who are still single... Ultimate is a great place to meet people of every gender and orientation. Which leads to cohabitation, the purchase of homes, large mortgages, and a slavish devotion to working your ass off to earn a fat bonus.
Joel, I wanted to like this post, I really did. But you have got to stop making insanely wrong pronouncements about things that matter most.
I was trying to satarize all the people elsewhere complaining about the last paragraph. As you can see, I am not a very funny writer.
I like the post very much. His point about Lotus taking over MSFT reminded me of Jamie Zawinski's story about Collabra taking over Netscape:
"Our punishment for that success was that management saw this general-purpose mail reader and said, "since this mail reader is popular with normal people, we must now pimp it out to `The Enterprise', call it Groupware, and try to compete with Lotus Notes!"
"To do this, they bought a company called Collabra who had tried (and, mostly, failed) to do something similar to what we had accomplished. They bought this company and spliced 4 layers of management in above us. Somehow, Collabra managed to completely take control of Netscape: it was like Netscape had gotten acquired instead of the other way around.
"And then they went off into the weeds so badly that the Collabra-driven "3.0" release was obviously going to be so mind-blowingly late that "2.1" became "3.0" and "3.0" became "4.0". (So yeah, 3.0 didn't just seem like the bugfix patch-release for 2.0: it was.)"
I also enjoyed the vast majority of the article, but I have to admit the last paragraph was annoying. It just seems like everything Joel writes these days (since he started his Road Show) is Submarine.[1]
I realize everyone is going to talk about what they are doing, and Joel does Fog Creek, but I can't help getting that greasy used-car salesman feeling. I don't own Joel, and he owes me nothing, but it still makes me sad, because I used to enjoy his blog so much.
Really it just seems like that article should have been two. One about architecture astronauts, which was quite insightful and amusing, and one about the annoyance of competing on salary with Google/MSFT. Putting them together just makes Article #2 looking like the hidden motive for Article #1, which makes it seem like he didn't really mean the stuff he said for #1, he just said it to segue into #2.
And as for his salary issues: I thought Joel's whole deal was that he hired rockstars and treated them like Made Men. Salary isn't the only component of that, and probably not even the most important. Complaining about bigger players offering higher salaries is like complaining that some people are born richer. Complaining about it gets you nothing. You don't compete with someone by playing to their strength. You compete by playing to their weakness. All he has to do is keep trumpeting about his sweet office space and small team/fun environment, and he will have plenty of rockstars.
Oh, and thanks for the JWZ link. I love his stuff!
I guess blog posts are often glass half-empty/half-full thingies. It's totally valid to feel that the annoyance of the empty part of the glass outweighs the enjoyment of the half-full part.
On my good days, I feel a lot more charitable about such things than on my bad days. It's dogs are sages all over again:
I reread your comment with fresh eyes and I can see the sarcasm now. I kind of feel like the Mitch Hedberg joke:
My friend said to me, "I think the weather's trippy." I said, "No, man, it's not the weather that's trippy, perhaps it is the way that we perceive it that is indeed trippy." Then I thought, "Man, I should've just said, 'Yeah.'"
"Veteran programmers of many years with obvious ability and talent go down with a fit of the blues. The intelligence is directed inwards in mournful contemplation of the inadequacies of their favourite programming language."
I don't go along with that sort of vilification. If a post has one great insight, something I can learn from, I'm a happy man. I can chuckle at Joel complaining about competing for interns with Google as long as I'mn entertained by his prose and intrigued by his central thesis.
I would have loved this post on that basis.
Except.
WTF is with the dig at playing Ultimate? Joel, you have totally lost it this time. Ultimate is the ultimate nerd sport, and interns who play Ultimate are your best hires ever.
Ultimate involves complex plays involving team co-ordination. A skill that just might come in handy working on a software development team. The flight of the disc is the kind of thing the mathematical mind drools over--gyroscopic procession, ballistics, aerodynamics, everything comes in to play.
Ultimate players are healthy and I'll wager can crank code for long hours compared to those who eschew aerobic sports in favour of foosball.
And for those who are still single... Ultimate is a great place to meet people of every gender and orientation. Which leads to cohabitation, the purchase of homes, large mortgages, and a slavish devotion to working your ass off to earn a fat bonus.
Joel, I wanted to like this post, I really did. But you have got to stop making insanely wrong pronouncements about things that matter most.
Like which games interns ought to play ;-)