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Comment by gruseom | Hacker News Reader

It's nice to see Spolsky get this enthusiastic about something other than his marketing, and I'm sure Peter Seibel agrees. But he negates his entire point at the end. After going on about how great duct tape programmers are, he says, don't think that means you can be one, because they're magic. (He says "pretty", but in this case pretty means magic.) To wit:

Duct tape programmers have to have a lot of talent to pull off this shtick.

In other words what matters is talent, not duct tape. Untalented duct tape programmers do as much damage as the untalented design-pattern programmers he scourges. So what was the point again?

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The point was that he exercised for 60 minutes today, instead of 30.

Absolutely agree. I work with a "duct tape" programmer and you couldn't pay me enough to touch his code. I'm so sick of someone asking me what's going on with RelayHandler's mda function and what do the variables "a", "sb", and "c" stand for? I kid you not... I don't always agree with Joel and this is one of those times where I absolutely do not agree. Duct tape programmers can stay the hell away from me.

He talks in his analogy of people who haven't taken off in their go-cart and are discussing design issues, and the people who took off and are fixing things with duct tape. There's a big difference between what I would call a "duct tape programmer" and someone who happens to keep a roll of duct tape handy. The former will run that duct-taped system in the next race, and will keep adding duct tape as problems arise. The latter will run the race, but then tear of the duct tape and look at why cart needed duct tape anyway and will then start debating design changes to get it to work better next time.

I think "duct tape programmer" should be derogatory, while "practical programmer" or "pragmatic programmer" would be more apt for Joel's idols.

I got pulled up short by that ending too.

Most of the piece seems to be about the benefits of keeping it simple and doing the obvious thing that will work rather than outsmarting yourself. All well and good advice, easily applicable by anyone with the confidence to face down blowhards that would rather things feed their leet-programmer ego than actually meet a customer's need.

But then it goes into not writing tests and doing complicated bit-munging to save a bit of time or space (both of which you think would be the opposite of the previous advice of keep it simple and accept your own human failings) and which is stuff that you can only get away with if you are both talented and lucky.

If he dropped the last paragraph and the bit about not writing unit tests (which, the theory goes, will save you time assuming, again, that you're not a lucky genius) then this would hold together somewhat coherently.

Agreed. I wasn't really sure what I had just read. One thing I feel fairly certain about though is that these duct-tape people will screw up a project in the long run.

I think duct-tape programmer is not a very well defined concept. People who are careless and sloppy are the ones who will wreck a project. Duct-tape sounds too sloppy to me as well, but it could also be a metaphor for being pragmatic and keeping it simple.

Gruseom, you are absolutely right that it is talent that matters, and Spolsky understates this point, appending to the end of his post seemingly as an afterthought. A talented hacker can take some duct tape and turn it into a thing of beauty, like those prom dresses and tuxedos people make every year out of actual duct tape. A bad coder doing this would make only a piece of trash that falls apart, just like a bad coder making a standard garment would try to add so many frills and accessories and various things that its complexity would soon outstrip his talent.

So what's his point? Be talented.

Tangent: you think Spolsky overdoes it with the marketing stuff, gruseom?

No, actually, I think he's brilliant at it. I tend to at best half agree with him on software issues, but I enjoy how lively his writing is and the way he uses it to promote his company is usually fine with me. In some ways it's exemplary, because the promotion is typically secondary to what he's writing about, and tends to be related to the subject at hand, so it doesn't come across as arbitrary or sneaky. I suppose a lesser writer might have trouble pulling it off, but it's a good model for software people.

Still, it was nice to see him get excited about something not directly in that vein.

Edit: It was also by reading a Spolsky post way back when that I originally discovered PG's essays. So I can't ever get too mad at him.

It's tricky, right? We blog a lot for a company our size --- multiple books worth of technical writing on the blog --- and we still feel like we have to be ultra-careful about promoting ourselves to keep people from feeling like we're just trying to sell something. For instance, I'm not sure we've ever worked in a call to action for our consulting services in a post.

It's definitely one of the things I'm most impressed about with 37s and Fog Creek, that they've managed to extract so much business value out of their blogs.

Reading Spolsky back in '03-'04 was what made me want to become a product manager, which I was pretty quickly able to do, which experience taught me what little I know now about the software business (you know, besides actually writing and shipping code, and, uh, getting funding, neither of which appear to have any correlation with success in the business ;] ).

I actually think Spolsky's weakest on the hard tech content, and strongest on the product marketing side.

I'm not in your target audience, so I've seen very little of you guys' blog, but it certainly didn't feel marketing-driven to me.

I agree about Spolsky & Co. not being that technically strong, which is a little ironic given how much he's written about attracting the best programmers, etc. Still, although I don't read him regularly, I almost always enjoy when I do. And a lot of what he says about the software business is really helpful. Chris Dixon linked to a post of his the other day about lowering the price of complementary products which was a great example.

>It's nice to see Spolsky get this enthusiastic about something other than his marketing

Uh... wasn't that his affiliate amazon link? If he gets a cut each time somebody buys the book he keeps telling us to buy, isn't it still his marketing?

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