Top 10 – 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.
A young man comes to town. He is reasonably good looking, has a little money in his pocket. He finds it easy to talk to women.
He doesn’t speak much about his past, but it is clear that he spent a lot of time in a soulless big company.
He is naturally friendly and outgoing, and quietly confident without being arrogant. So he finds it easy to pick up small gigs from the job board at the local Programmer’s Cafe. But he rapidly loses interest in insurance database projects, vanity web pages for housewives, and financial calculation engines.
After a year, he calculates that he has saved up enough money to pay his modest expenses for a year. So, after consulting with his faithful Alsatian, he sets up a computer in a sunfilled room in his rented apartment above the grocery store and installs a carefully-chosen selection of tools.
One by one, he calls his friends and warns them that if he seems remote over the next months, it is only because he is hard at work.
And he sits down to spin code.
And what code it is. Flawless, artistic, elegant, bug free. The user interface so perfectly mimics a users’ thought process that the people he shows it to at the Programmer’s Cafe hardly notice that there is a user interface. It’s a brilliant piece of work.
Encouraged by the feedback of his peers, he sets up in business and prepares to take orders.
His modesty precludes any pretensions, but after a month, the situation in his bank account is not looking encouraging. So far only three orders have been taken: one from his mother, one from an anonymous benefactor at the Programmer’s Cafe, and the one he submitted himself to test the commerce system.
In the second month, no more orders come in.
This surprises him and leaves him feeling melancholy. At the big company, new products were created on a regular basis, and even if they were inelegant and homely, they still sold in reasonable quantities. One product he worked on there went on to be a big hit.
After a few more months pass, his financial situation starts to look a little bit precarious. His dog looks at him sadly, not quite certain what is wrong, but aware that his face is looking a little bit gaunter than usual, and he seems to be unable to get up the energy to go out with friends, or go shopping to restock the dangerously low larder, or even to bathe.
One Tuesday morning, the local grocer has refused to extend him any more credit, and his banker has long since refused to return his calls.
The big company is not vindictive. They recognize talent, and are happy to hire him back, at a higher salary. Soon he is looking better, he has some new clothes, and he’s got his old confidence back. But something, somewhere, is missing. A spark in his eye. The hope that he might become the master of his own destiny is gone.
Why did he fail? He’s pretty sure he knows. “Marketing,” he says. Like many young technicians, he is apt to say things like, “Microsoft has worse products but better marketing.”
When uttered by a software developer, the term “marketing” simply stands in for all that business stuff: everything they don’t actually understand about creating software and selling it.
This, actually, is not really what “marketing” means. Actually Microsoft has pretty terrible marketing. Can you imagine those dinosaur ads actually making someone want to buy Microsoft Office?
Software is a conversation, between the software developer and the user. But for that conversation to happen requires a lot of work beyond the software development. It takes marketing, yes, but also sales, and public relations, and an office, and a network, and infrastructure, and air conditioning in the office, and customer service, and accounting, and a bunch of other support tasks.
But what do software developers do? They design and write code, they layout screens, they debug, they integrate, and they check things into the source code control repository.
The level a programmer works at (say, Emacs) is too abstract to support a business. Developers working at the developer abstraction layer need an implementation layer — an organization that takes their code and turns it into products. Dolly Parton, working at the “singing a nice song” layer, needs a huge implementation layer too, to make the records and book the concert halls and take the tickets and set up the audio gear a