Kinda a big announcement – Joel on Software

I’m Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. More about me.
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For my day job, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Stack Overflow, the largest online community for programmers to learn, share their knowledge, and level up. Each month, more than 40 million professional and aspiring programmers visit Stack Overflow to ask and answer questions and find better jobs. Stack Overflow is also the flagship site of the Stack Exchange network, 160+ question and answer sites dedicated to all kinds of topics from cooking to gaming. According to Quantcast, Stack Overflow is the 30th largest web property in the United States and in the top 100 in the world.
I also founded Fog Creek Software, one of the most influential small tech companies in the world. As an independent, privately-owned company, we’ve been making customers happy since the turn of the century. We share what we've learned about how to make great software, both by writing about our ideas and by creating products, like FogBugz, Trello and Gomix, that help others make great technology. As a result, Fog Creek's impact on the world of developers rivals companies a thousand times our size.
The other day I was talking to a young developer working on a code base with tons of COM code, and I told him that even before he was born, everyone knew that COM was already so deeply obsolete that it was impossible to find anyone who knew enough to work on it. And yet they still have this old COM code base, and they still have one old programmer holding onto their job by being the only human left on the planet with a brain big enough to manually manage multithreaded objects. I remember that COM was like Gödels Theorem: it seemed important, and you could understand it all long enough to pass an exam, but ultimately it is mostly just a demonstration of how far human intelligence can be made to stretch under extreme duress.
And, bubbeleh, if there is one thing we have learned, it’s that the things that make it easier on your brain are the things that matter.
Programming changes slowly. Really slowly.
Since I learned to code forty years ago, one thing that has mostly, mostly, changed about programming is that most developers no longer have to manage their own memory. Even getting that going took a long long time.
I took a few stupid years trying to be the CEO of a growing company during which I didn’t have time to code, and when I came back to web programming, after a break of about 10 years, I found Node, React, and other goodies, which are, don’t get me wrong, amazing? Really really great? But I also found that it took approximately the same amount of work to make a CRUD web app as it always has, and that there were some things (like handing a file upload, or centering) that were, shockingly, still just as randomly difficult as they were in VBScript twenty years ago.
Where are the flying cars?
The biggest problem is that developers of programming tools love to add things and hate to take things away. So things get harder and harder and more and more complex because there are more and more ways to do the same thing, each has pros and cons, and you are likely to spend as much time just figuring out which “rich text editor” to use as you are to implement it.
(Bill Gates, 1990: “How many f*cking programmers in this company are working on rich text editors?!”)
So, in this world of slow, gradual change and alleged improvement, one thing did change literally overnight, or, to be precise, on September 15, 2008, which was when Stack Overflow launched.
Six-to-eight weeks before that, Stack Overflow was only an idea. (*Actually Jeff started development in April). Six-to-eight weeks after that, it was a standard part of every developer’s toolkit: something they used every day. Something had changed about programming, and changed very fast: the way developers learned and got help and taught each other.
For many years, I was able to coast by telling delightful little stories about our incredible growth numbers, about the pay web site we made obsolete, and even about that one time when a Major Computer Book Publisher threatened to BURY US and launched their own Q&A platform, which turned out to be more of a Scoff Generator than a Q&A platform, but actually now almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf.
Stack Overflow got to be pretty big as a business. The company grew faster than any individual’s skills at managing companies, especially mine, so a lot of the business team has changed over, and we now have a really world-class, experienced team that is doing much better than us founders. We’ve done incredible work building a recruiting platform for great developers, a “reach and relevance” platform for getting developers excited about your products, and, most importantly, Stack Overflow for Teams, which is growing so quickly that soon every developer in the world will be using the power of Stack Overflow to get help with their own code base, not just common languages and libraries.
And yeah, the one thing I made sure of was that everyone that came into the company understood exactly why Stack Overflow works, and what is important to the developers that it is by and for. So while we haven’t always been perfect, we have kept true to our miss