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Comment by manicennui | Hacker News Reader

I actually bought this on DVD. I miss Joel on Software and hearing about Fog Creek.

I remember when he made a splash by designing the office so that every developer had a window and a door. I think they later abandoned the idea, but it felt like the first time someone had actually put real thought into developer's ergonomics when building an office.

Other classics from his blog: why you should never do a Big Rewrite (he was scathing of Mozilla), "Fire and motion", relentless advocacy for "boring" tech, the historical bits about Excel and Lotus... I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot more. It really was a blog worth reading, when most of them were already turning into the "microblogging" spam that eventually begat Twitter.

Joel started his career at Microsoft in Redmond, WA, where it was common for developers to have their own private offices.

I was there from 2007-2010, long after Joel had left, but I mostly had a private office the whole time. I had to share an office for the first six months, but then after that, I had my own private office for the rest of my time there. My last year, I got a window office. Most of my co-workers had private offices, too.

I got spoiled because that was my first job out of college, and I've never had such a good office setup as I did there.

I worked at Microsoft from 2005-2017 and mostly had a private office during that entire period. There were some teams that I joined in the later years that were more "startupish" that worked in open spaces, which I really didn't like, and you could see the company moving to that model in the mid-2010s.

Having a private office spoiled me as well, although I had come from companies that had cubicles. There was nothing like being able to close the door and turn up your music while you were coding. Nowadays, everyone is out in the open with headphones on, of course.

I worked for Microsoft (not in Redmond) in 2020-2022, and remember seeing on Yammer posts about “Hey look, we’re turning these old abandoned offices (nobody wants to work in a private office anymore, amirite?) into [touchdown spaces/mini conference rooms/storage areas]!”

I don’t know if it was all private offices, but the general feeling was that private offices were going away. Moot point for us as we were a satellite office that never had private offices to begin with.

wait, you guys actually used yammer????

And here I was wondering why Microsoft paid so much for it. Well this answers it.

Yeah, Yammer was used pretty extensively within Microsoft. I didn’t use it much, but if you were at Microsoft but not based in Redmond, it was probably the best way to keep up with what was going on company-wide (for those that actually cared).

> I remember when he made a splash by designing the office so that every developer had a window and a door. I think they later abandoned the idea, but it felt like the first time someone had actually put real thought into developer's ergonomics when building an office.

I think Tom DeMarco wrote about this in the 80s. Interesting how we've now even managed to make the computer system itself a high-interrupt environment for developers. OTOH, the trade-off between collaboration and focus is a touch one.

> I remember when he made a splash by designing the office so that every developer had a window and a door.

I can't believe it's been 20 years since I read this post[0], but I remember how clever it was that each office had a only a single window, but had sight lines to other windows also, making it look like each one was a corner office.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-office/

Off the back of Joel's blog posts I convinced my employer to go with FogCreek CoPilot (remote control / remote assist software), and it was such a disappointment; after all the blog posts about how to Do Software Right(tm) I has raised my expectations that the result of all this process and care would surely be as good as anything could reasonably be. It had few features, was unreliable and slow from the UK, and comparatively expensive.

It's a long time ago so I can't remember the details, but it's stuck with me for ~15 years as a lesson in not believing the hype, and ... I dunno, you can't procedure your way into building amazing things, maybe? Post-hoc looking back from the outside, FogCreek building somewhat generic tools for developers seems very navel-gazing like they didn't have a burningly compelling idea (such as StackOverflow was) and you can't add more private offices unto business/market success.

I guess it was (at least initially) built by interns.

The compelling idea was supposed to be CityDesk. This was pre-Wordpress, when everyone was building a CMS because normies were paying top dollar to be able to write on the web. Joel described it in a post as "the future belongs to people who can make JavaScript sing", which was slightly ahead of time.

As many developers did at the time (and still do), they built their own tools, and eventually realized their bugtracker was decent enough to sell to Joel's blog readers. FogBugz sales quickly outstripped CityDesk, so they pivoted to selling Dev tools. From there onwards, they were a bit all over the place. They still managed to score StackOverflow and Trello, though...

I thought the Never Rewrite article was about Netscape, not Mozilla or Firefox?

Agreed, these are great posts.

Wasn’t Mozilla/Firefox started as a complete rewrite of Netscape? So the complaint was something like “why not just fix the recently OSSed Netscape instead of writing Firefox from scratch.”

The follow-up blog post about automating / streamlining the postal form printing just to ship out the ordered DVDs was another great article.

I was given a copy on DVD when visiting Fog Creek around this time. I vaguely recall it was for sale on Google Video when that was a thing.

> I actually bought this on DVD

Same here. Bought it back when it was released, and still have it.

Thoroughly enjoyed it, but I agree with the article in that it was very much all over the place in terms of scripting.

Same!!!! I still have it knocking around somewhere in the basement. Wild to think about where we’ve all gone since that era. Amazing ride.

> I actually bought this on DVD

I did too. It was quite motivating to watch at the time!

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