Architecture astronauts take over
joelonsoftware.com
joelonsoftware.com
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 ;-)
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 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!
[1] If anyone doesn't know what I mean by Submarine... here ya go: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
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:
http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/03/programmers-are-sages.ht...
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.'"
Anyway, enjoy the coffee!
"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 actually laughed out loud.
I'd actually wager that the true cream of the crop is primarily interested in starting their own companies and cashing out early. It's the second tier that are interested in working for MSFT and GOOG. And then, the rest of the companies are fighting for scraps. I could be wrong, I'm not doing the HR thing like Joel is.
And, it's only going to be a matter of time before undergrad salaries across the board start climbing. And once the press starts writing "Tech shortage. Salaries skyrocket!" there will be a lot more people going into CS as a major.
Sadly, increasing quantity will probably have little impact on increasing quality.
So if we increase salaries a lot and this results in more people going into CS, I think it's pretty safe to say most of those additional recruits will be more in it for the money and less because that's what they should pursue, thus reducing the overall quality.
If programmer salaries went to 200k overnight, do you think the quality of undergrads would go up or down?
[edit] If anything, the new influx of interested students would maybe counter a little the need for CS departments to dumb down the curriculum in order to stay above whatever arbitrary number. Maybe it would result in less JavaSchools. ;) [/edit]
Ray Ozzie and the rest of MS should have realized by now that the only thing that really works is building something. Give us something to criticize. Look at YUI. It's not great in places, but at least it works, and it there, and available to play with, and fun, and cross-platform.
It's coming to something when the most interesting thing out of MS is probably F#, and Photosynth. Aren't these from MSR?
What is the rest of MS doing?
[Personally I'd be glad if they finally got round to fixing all the damn non-resizable dialogs in their apps, which infest all MS software like cockroaches.]
Duplication seems to beat unification. Just look at how Wikipedia and Google, writhing seas of duplication, kick the living shit out of closed taxonomies and hierarchal directories. Anand Rajaraman hit the nail on the head with his "more data beats better algorithms" observation, and I'd skew it here as "more copies beats better organization." I want to asynchronize my data, not synchronize it. The tricky part is making this model work at a personal level, across devices and yet not exposed to the world at large. I wouldn't put my money on MSFT figuring it out.
From Wikipedia:
"a killer app is an application so compelling that someone will buy the hardware or software components necessary to run it"
Sorry, DropBox (while very, very well done) doesn't even come close to cutting it.
It doesn't hold a candle to Visicalc. Or email. Or Photoshop.
Is that close enough?
I have friends that do the same and I've also seen a number of restaurants in Vancouver (Rugby Club), Montreal (Bières et Compagnie), and Haifa (Stella's?) that use it too (among other places).
Bill Gates used every CES keynote in recent memory to go on about the "digital decade" and pose "in the year 2000" scenarios. Of course, this was all after The Road Ahead, a vision book which famously had a shorter shelf life than a bag of potato chips.
Apparently he's not the only one at Microsoft who suffers from this peculiar affliction. All these strategies for a digital millennium and manifestos for an online services marketplace or whatever are laughable. Particularly amusing is how they always find a way to drag every Microsoft business group into their vision. Suddenly, you're supposed to believe that Halo 3 is an embodiment of Microsoft's comprehensive cloud computing paradigm.
Kudos to Joel on calling them on it so entertainingly.
Just another example of Microsoft denying the future. If they could sue the Internet for jeopardizing their current business model, they would have probably tried by now.
Example: You want to send a mail using Yahoo Mail where you attach a document created with Google docs. When you created that document you wanted to use an image from Flickr. That's 3 different services that needs to be synchronized. What happens when you add other web applications.
When/if people move to web applications, the synchronization problem moves with them.
All of the data people really care about is on their iPhone/iPod. Contacts, photos, music, TV shows, movies, email, web access. When you think of it, iTunes main purpose is syncing and organizing your media. And with iTunes Store seamlessly syncs a lot of the data people care about from the Internet, also (for pay movies and music, but a lot of free podcasts, too).
While Microsoft continues to try to solve the synchronization problem as an abstraction, Apple has actually created something everyone uses because it Just Works.
are you suggesting that the execs should go and read the code that some intern wrote in order to figure out how their customers buy paperclips?
I think he is a pretty smart guy with a successful business - but I am not sure the work environment sounds interesting enough for some of the top grads. Who wants to work on the ASP -> PHP compiler they have, or write a bunch of AJAX?
Unless he has some luring new projects in the work like some sort of cloud based synchronization... :)
My guess is you want to give everybody what programmers have been able to do for years with distributed VCS, publicly addressable computers and rsync. And presumably want to do it well enough that even programmers who could get it for free wouldn't be able to fool themselves that paying wasn't worth the convenience.
Now what Microsoft is doing is probably connected with there life-logging stuff. MSR has been going on for a while about how we'll never delete anything and every document and every phone call we make etc will be recorded and searchable. The mesh is presumably the infrastructure that all these Windows Mobile devices would use to make this seamless.
However this is insane, there are already more mobiles in Europe than people, and Microsoft can't even keep XBox Live running. Just have the devices query/talk to each other without getting some central server involved.
"When architects get prizes, the people suffer."
I want all of my media everywhere. Is that so wrong?
Go interoperability!
I dunno. With some spare parts and a few hundred lines of code, Trevor Blackwell could probably make it happen.
http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/feature-stude...
I like Groove, at least until Microsoft bought it. I use it everyday and it rocks. Whether or not something is over-architected or not is beside the point: does it deliver value for my needs. Groove does.
You can make the case that it does a lot of stuff that I don't care about. So what?
Priceless
I guess if you omit the 2008 it does look like April 2001......................