How to Get Hired at Fog Creek, Part 1

Things like Moose, KiokuDB, and so on all came out of this work.

This contradicts my personal experience.

I worked for a great organization (ThoughtWorks) which had a great development process (Extreme Programming with "lean" elements, with a lot of tailoring and flexibility, the team could do almost anything really) and I worked with great, awesomely talented people, but I got bored to death with the enterprise apps we were building (the domains were all incredibly boring to me, and I could switch off 90% of my brain and still deliver successful projects) and so I left.

Now I don't have an "organization" (I often work alone or with small groups of people assembled for a project and that too virtually), but my domains (AI/robotics/ Computer Vision/Planning software) are so much richer than what I used to work on, (and so is my toolkit - C, erlang,lisp etc vs java/ruby-on-rails) that I wouldn't exchange the "grind" bits of these projects for the "cool" bits in my old work.

I suggest that just as working in lisp maybe in general more pleasant than working in COBOL, (there will always be exceptional situations where COBOL is more pleasant, or the odd person who prefers working in COBOL), programmers would in general prefer some fields of programming to others.

You say,"What matters is having a very good effort->reward loop. You can get that loop from building project management software." .

I agree totally, but I'd also say that unless you are running your own startup making such software, this would be a rare experience.

In my experience the "reward" in enterprise software comes from understaning customers in depth and satisfying them. In a non startup enterprise coding effort, this is hard (but not impossible - see jrockway's example in his answer - I am just claiming this is more the exception not the rule) to do?

What Steve Blank calls "Customer Validation" remaining equal, maybe there are levels of "blub" in domains and/or projects too?

EDIT: This quote from PG expresses this idea much more clearly than I could

" It's pretty easy to say what kinds of problems are not interesting: those where instead of solving a few big, clear, problems, you have to solve a lot of nasty little ones. One of the worst kinds of projects is writing an interface to a piece of software that's full of bugs. Another is when you have to customize something for an individual client's complex and ill-defined needs. To hackers these kinds of projects are the death of a thousand cuts.

The distinguishing feature of nasty little problems is that you don't learn anything from them. Writing a compiler is interesting because it teaches you what a compiler is. But writing an interface to a buggy piece of software doesn't teach you anything, because the bugs are random. [3] So it's not just fastidiousness that makes good hackers avoid nasty little problems. It's more a question of self-preservation. Working on nasty little problems makes you stupid. Good hackers avoid it for the same reason models avoid cheeseburgers."

from PG's "Great Hackers" essay.

PS: I don't claim to be a great hacker but I am probably a good one.

And they'll also generally think you're somehow in charge of search and e-mail at Google. :)

Kind of like having been in the Air Force and everyone asking you what kind of jet you piloted.

Egads. I was curious about MENSA and went to some meetings. A more self-congratulatory group of people I'd never met. I was offered membership but turned it down!

Does having a high GPA indicate that this is what the person was trying to prove? Does it even suggest that following rules was the motivator that got them where they are? As I pointed out in my earlier comment, maybe the graduate's GPA was high due to motivations that had very little to do directly with wanting to achieve a high GPA or wanting to please other people.

The meaning is ambiguous; as are the meanings of everything someone might rely on to assess someone's ability. You need context to figure out what each individual indicator means, and this includes the GPA; it might mean absolutely nothing, or it might be the thing that pulls two or three other indicators out of ambiguity and makes the true ability of the person become more believable.

It's not just famous people too: at least 2 or 3 folks I work with regularly are former startup founders, not including myself. Seems to be the new career path for bright aspiring programmers whose startups fail: graduate from college, start a company, fold up company, work for Google.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/how-hard-could-it-be-th...

Summary: Intern comes up with a job sales board for Fog Greek, grosses $1m. Joel decides not to compensate him, arguing that it is difficult to measure the contribution of each individual.

The whole article is sickening, because Joel tries so hard to contort reason and make it sound like he was being fair.

Wow, really? High marks is an indication of a person's servileness? It can't be that they were fascinated by what they were learning, and as a result to perform well even though they didn't care that much about getting a high GPA, or have that much discipline or deference to authority? It seems there are two options here: do well and be branded as a servile, unmotivated toady who can't learn a damn thing on their own; do poorly, and be branded as an independent spirit who just might be brilliant depending on the results of further probing and research.

From this comment and its parent, it seems that colleges are being paralleled to boot camps, where the real goal isn't to develop knowledge and/or body strength and endurance, respectively, but to develop a psychology of doing what you are told instinctively. That you learned something along the way is completely immaterial, because that has nothing to do with the average you came out with. If you are capable of any independent thought, you would've known the material before taking the class, and scored low out of sheer boredom and apathy. Doing well shows you both didn't know the material before, and you were more interested in impressing upon someone else your knowledge of the material than actually learning anything at all.

If this is the case, I did it completely wrong. I suspect, however, that this is not the case, and that people are taking the metaphor of GPA to Obedience Average way too seriously. It can mean that, but it very much depends on the institution and the student, and probably a number of other variables.

In the spirit of full disclosure, my GPA in college was rather high. I will not say how high, because then the replies to this comment will be about that instead of the larger point. I worry just mentioning this much will dilute what I am saying, but not doing so seems disingenuous.

Conversely, I have been prodded by managers, coworkers, and friends repeatedly to be more disciplined, more respectful of authority, and more interested in pleasing people. I suspect I was this way in college as well, given the similar comments friends made there. Being too deferent has never been a problem for me.

Maybe I'm one of the outliers people discount to show a nice, clean correlation between two groups; it is merely misfortune that I am then rolled up into the correlation to suggest that I am as all the evidence I've gathered so far suggests I am not.

In all honesty, I'm not totally sure how I ended up with a high GPA. Maybe the institution I went to was too easy. Maybe my curiosity for the material I was learning was motivating in the same degree as the need to please authority was in the other high performers. Maybe that I had a curiosity for the material is a mark against me; it shows I was either curious about the wrong things, or not curious enough to learn it on my own without "structure" there to force it upon me. Maybe one or both are true. Maybe I, and those I know, are completely wrong about me.

I'm not saying either of you are wrong about what Joel is looking for by taking GPA into account. I'm not saying your right either. This is just about what high marks "mean" on their own. They can have more than one cause: it could be a sign of obedience, or it could be a biproduct of some other force that had nothing to do with the marks. The other metrics being taken into account will probably clarify which case it is.

Oh, and one other thing:

Coding a one loop bubble sort in hex blindfolded while juggling eggs, playing 12 games of chess, solving a 100 x 100 sudoku, providing an alternate solution to the 4 color theorem, teleporting tonights winning Powerball numbers, and cooking dinner would be a more applicable barometer.

Please, can we ease up on the machismo when discussing what makes for a great developer. The best metaphor I can come up with is the overly muscular guy at the gym claiming to bench some obscene amount of weight, and staring down everyone else to intimidate them from benching anything at all. Yes, it may be part of the culture to be over the top like this, I've always considered it one of the more unbecoming traits; it just seems excessively primal.

So from my perspective, GPA is about 95% useless in real life.

The great programmers I respect easily got CS degrees without working too hard; you show up and submit your tests/projects using your self-acquired knowledge. You should also have a natural curiosity for the subject matter. I think this is why Google's strict GPA policies work for them.

When your paying large amounts for a college education you want to make the most out of it.

PS I didn't know this when I was an undergrad.

I chose courses that interested and challenged me. I had semesters that were nothing but computer science, math and physics. Between implementing a compiler, figuring out how to display a polygonal topographical map and learning the life cycle of stars, I didn't have time for side projects.

I submit that if your side projects interest you more than your studies, then you are in the wrong place.