Misc. Ramblings

Joel Spolsky, he of the "Joel on Software" site, has a longish article on quality versus quantity when it comes to programming and software companies.

The common belief is that when you're building a software company, the goal is to find a neat idea that solves some problem which hasn't been solved before, implement it, and make a fortune. We'll call this the build-a-better-mousetrap belief. But the real goal for software companies should be converting capital into software that works.

For the last five years I've been testing that theory in the real world. The formula for the company I started with Michael Pryor in September, 2000 can be summarized in four steps: Best Working Conditions --> Best Programmers --> Best Software --> Profit!

It's a pretty convenient formula, especially since our real goal in starting Fog Creek was to create a software company where we would want to work [Emphasis in the original]. I made the claim, in those days, that good working conditions (or, awkwardly, "building the company where the best software developers in the world would want to work") would lead to profits as naturally as chocolate leads to chubbiness...

What a concept: Having the best employees saves time and money while, at the same time, increasing profits through the creation of great products. In order to get and keep these employees, management must create and maintain an environment in which employees want to work. There are a lot of deep psychological underpinnings to all this but the bottom line is that it works - if, that is, what you want to produce is the best. It doesn't work if who you want to sell to are Wal*Mart-type customers. His software is not free (other than a free trial version) nor even cheap (but then, nothing from Apple is cheap either). But there's another old saying: You get what you pay for.