
Architecture astronauts take over - mqt
http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html
======
raganwald
I have become sick and tired of the carping and flaming you see from some
folks whenever Joel publishes a rant, accusing him of douchebaggery and all
sorts of sin. The usual behaviour is that he has one great insight, a bunch of
entertaining ranting, and one egocentric point. And on the basis of this, the
whole thing is junk and he is a has-been windbag.

I don't go along with that sort of vilification. If a post has one great
insight, something I can learn from, I'm a happy man. I can chuckle at Joel
complaining about competing for interns with Google as long as I'mn
entertained by his prose and intrigued by his central thesis.

I would have loved this post on that basis.

Except.

WTF is with the dig at playing Ultimate? Joel, you have _totally lost it this
time_. Ultimate is the ultimate nerd sport, and interns who play Ultimate are
your _best hires ever_.

Ultimate involves complex plays involving team co-ordination. A skill that
just might come in handy working on a software development team. The flight of
the disc is the kind of thing the mathematical mind drools over--gyroscopic
procession, ballistics, aerodynamics, everything comes in to play.

Ultimate players are healthy and I'll wager can crank code for long hours
compared to those who eschew aerobic sports in favour of foosball.

And for those who are still single... Ultimate is a great place to meet people
of every gender and orientation. Which leads to cohabitation, the purchase of
homes, large mortgages, and a slavish devotion to working your ass off to earn
a fat bonus.

Joel, I wanted to like this post, I really did. But you have _got_ to stop
making insanely wrong pronouncements about things that matter most.

Like which games interns ought to play ;-)

~~~
delano
It sounds more like a dig on their programming experience.

~~~
raganwald
I was trying to satarize all the people elsewhere complaining about the last
paragraph. As you can see, I am not a very funny writer.

I like the post very much. His point about Lotus taking over MSFT reminded me
of Jamie Zawinski's story about Collabra taking over Netscape:

"Our punishment for that success was that management saw this general-purpose
mail reader and said, "since this mail reader is popular with normal people,
we must now pimp it out to `The Enterprise', call it Groupware, and try to
compete with Lotus Notes!"

"To do this, they bought a company called Collabra who had tried (and, mostly,
failed) to do something similar to what we had accomplished. They bought this
company and spliced 4 layers of management in above us. Somehow, Collabra
managed to completely take control of Netscape: it was like Netscape had
gotten acquired instead of the other way around.

"And then they went off into the weeds so badly that the Collabra-driven "3.0"
release was obviously going to be so mind-blowingly late that "2.1" became
"3.0" and "3.0" became "4.0". (So yeah, 3.0 didn't just seem like the bugfix
patch-release for 2.0: it was.)"

<http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html>

~~~
Xichekolas
I also enjoyed the vast majority of the article, but I have to admit the last
paragraph was annoying. It just seems like everything Joel writes these days
(since he started his Road Show) is Submarine.[1]

I realize everyone is going to talk about what they are doing, and Joel does
Fog Creek, but I can't help getting that greasy used-car salesman feeling. I
don't own Joel, and he owes me nothing, but it still makes me sad, because I
used to enjoy his blog so much.

Really it just seems like that article should have been two. One about
architecture astronauts, which was quite insightful and amusing, and one about
the annoyance of competing on salary with Google/MSFT. Putting them together
just makes Article #2 looking like the hidden motive for Article #1, which
makes it seem like he didn't really mean the stuff he said for #1, he just
said it to segue into #2.

And as for his salary issues: I thought Joel's whole deal was that he hired
rockstars and treated them like Made Men. Salary isn't the only component of
that, and probably not even the most important. Complaining about bigger
players offering higher salaries is like complaining that some people are born
richer. Complaining about it gets you nothing. You don't compete with someone
by playing to their strength. You compete by playing to their weakness. All he
has to do is keep trumpeting about his sweet office space and small team/fun
environment, and he will have plenty of rockstars.

Oh, and thanks for the JWZ link. I love his stuff!

[1] If anyone doesn't know what I mean by Submarine... here ya go:
<http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

~~~
raganwald
I guess blog posts are often glass half-empty/half-full thingies. It's totally
valid to feel that the annoyance of the empty part of the glass outweighs the
enjoyment of the half-full part.

On my good days, I feel a lot more charitable about such things than on my bad
days. It's dogs are sages all over again:

[http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/03/programmers-are-
sages.ht...](http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/03/programmers-are-sages.html)

~~~
delano
I reread your comment with fresh eyes and I can see the sarcasm now. I kind of
feel like the Mitch Hedberg joke:

My friend said to me, "I think the weather's trippy." I said, "No, man, it's
not the weather that's trippy, perhaps it is the way that we perceive it that
is indeed trippy." Then I thought, "Man, I should've just said, 'Yeah.'"

Anyway, enjoy the coffee!

~~~
raganwald
\+ a bushel of upmods for the Mitch Hedberg reference. Somehow, I think Mitch
would have been a Bipolar Lisp Programmer if he was into programming...

<http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm>

~~~
delano
That's a great essay. Funny, sad, and true.

"Veteran programmers of many years with obvious ability and talent go down
with a fit of the blues. The intelligence is directed inwards in mournful
contemplation of the inadequacies of their favourite programming language."

I actually laughed out loud.

------
iamelgringo
I actually found the most interesting part of the article towards the end:
Joel's really upset that MSFT and GOOG are picking up all the top CS grads,
despite Joel's great internships and Aeron chairs. And, he's also upset that
the starting salary for a CS grad is now pushing 6 figures.

I'd actually wager that the true cream of the crop is primarily interested in
starting their own companies and cashing out early. It's the second tier that
are interested in working for MSFT and GOOG. And then, the rest of the
companies are fighting for scraps. I could be wrong, I'm not doing the HR
thing like Joel is.

And, it's only going to be a matter of time before undergrad salaries across
the board start climbing. And once the press starts writing "Tech shortage.
Salaries skyrocket!" there will be a lot more people going into CS as a major.

~~~
edw519
"there will be a lot more people going into CS as a major"

Sadly, increasing quantity will probably have little impact on increasing
quality.

~~~
Hexstream
I think it will have a big, _negative_ impact on increasing quality.

~~~
mariorz
how do you reason that?

~~~
Hexstream
I think a career in CS is already sufficiently attractive, for monetary and
other considerations, that those who have a great potential and a passion for
it already choose to pursue it.

So if we increase salaries a lot and this results in more people going into
CS, I think it's pretty safe to say most of those additional recruits will be
more in it for the money and less because that's what they should pursue, thus
reducing the overall quality.

If programmer salaries went to 200k overnight, do you think the quality of
undergrads would go up or down?

~~~
mariorz
It would obviously go up or stay the same, following your logic. Even if the
proportion of good programmers out of CS programs decreases there is no reason
the real total number would go down.

[edit] If anything, the new influx of interested students would maybe counter
a little the need for CS departments to dumb down the curriculum in order to
stay above whatever arbitrary number. Maybe it would result in less
JavaSchools. ;) [/edit]

~~~
Hexstream
I was speaking in relative terms, not absolute. I meant the the _average_
quality of programmers would go down.

------
watmough
That is absolutely vintage Joel. And he's right.

Ray Ozzie and the rest of MS should have realized by now that the only thing
that really works is building something. Give us something to criticize. Look
at YUI. It's not great in places, but at least it works, and it there, and
available to play with, and fun, and cross-platform.

It's coming to something when the most interesting thing out of MS is probably
F#, and Photosynth. Aren't these from MSR?

What is the rest of MS doing?

[Personally I'd be glad if they finally got round to fixing all the damn non-
resizable dialogs in their apps, which infest all MS software like
cockroaches.]

~~~
michaelneale
Simon Peyton-Jones and his work on Haskell is very interesting.

~~~
neilc
He's also at MSR -- the folks at MSR are doing lots of very interesting work.

------
maxwell
The problem with most synchronization systems I've encountered is that they're
based on unification -- "one version to rule them all." Unification seems to
be an optimization strategy, seen in all kinds of networks, from computer to
political. History doesn't suggest it's a very good model in the long run,
since it's so fragile. The Bible survived because so many people duplicated
it, while all those single manuscripts in Alexandria, however divine, went up
in smoke.

Duplication seems to beat unification. Just look at how Wikipedia and Google,
writhing seas of duplication, kick the living shit out of closed taxonomies
and hierarchal directories. Anand Rajaraman hit the nail on the head with his
"more data beats better algorithms" observation, and I'd skew it here as "more
copies beats better organization." I want to _asynchronize_ my data, not
synchronize it. The tricky part is making this model work at a personal level,
across devices and yet not exposed to the world at large. I wouldn't put my
money on MSFT figuring it out.

~~~
wanorris
Maybe we just need to put all our data in git or mercurial and forget about
all this other nonsense.

~~~
ivank
I yearn for the day when my cell phone runs git and has a single namespace for
my data (including that maximum-length WEP2 key that I've typed into my iPhone
twice).

------
sanj
The term "Killer App" has gotten brutally watered down. And y'all aren't
helping.

From Wikipedia:

"a killer app is an application so compelling that someone will buy the
hardware or software components necessary to run it"

Sorry, DropBox (while very, very well done) doesn't even come close to cutting
it.

It doesn't hold a candle to Visicalc. Or email. Or Photoshop.

~~~
omouse
Or video games.

~~~
delano
Or Winamp.

~~~
sanj
Would you buy a computer to use Winamp? Or, perhaps more fair today: would you
switch OSs to use it?

~~~
baha_man
No way. I use Amarok at home and love it. At work I have to use Windows, and
used to be happy with iTunes - until I started having to update it every week
(60MB download, no I don't want Safari, no I don't want to see the Quicktime
icon, I'll check the box asking not to be propmted when there's a new version
- oh, you're going to tell me anyway). Anyway, I thought I'd try Winamp again
(I used it about seven years ago and liked it) - it doesn't seem capable of
playing a CD without crashing. If anyone can recommend a free and/or open
source media player for Windows I'd be grateful.

~~~
delano
What version of Winamp did you use? There is a golden version: 2.91.
Everything above is a perversion.

<http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=winamp>

------
zach
There is a kind of obsession here, one concerned with fabricating narratives
and strategies for their own sake.

Bill Gates used every CES keynote in recent memory to go on about the "digital
decade" and pose "in the year 2000" scenarios. Of course, this was all after
_The Road Ahead_ , a vision book which famously had a shorter shelf life than
a bag of potato chips.

Apparently he's not the only one at Microsoft who suffers from this peculiar
affliction. All these strategies for a digital millennium and manifestos for
an online services marketplace or whatever are laughable. Particularly amusing
is how they always find a way to drag every Microsoft business group into
their vision. Suddenly, you're supposed to believe that Halo 3 is an
embodiment of Microsoft's comprehensive cloud computing paradigm.

Kudos to Joel on calling them on it so entertainingly.

------
danielrhodes
Synchronization is going to be really useful when the majority of applications
moves online and there are no files to synchronize anymore. ;-)

Just another example of Microsoft denying the future. If they could sue the
Internet for jeopardizing their current business model, they would have
probably tried by now.

~~~
mtts
Exactly, or, to put it another way: right now synchronization is yet another
way to share files either with someone else or with yourself, and there's
already hundreds of methods for doing that, and once everyone starts using web
applications exclusively, it'll be a non issue.

~~~
ks
Web applications will not solve our synchronization problems

Example: You want to send a mail using Yahoo Mail where you attach a document
created with Google docs. When you created that document you wanted to use an
image from Flickr. That's 3 different services that needs to be synchronized.
What happens when you add other web applications.

When/if people move to web applications, the synchronization problem moves
with them.

~~~
cstejerean
I think you're talking about integration not synchronization.

------
jimbokun
It struck me after reading the article that the company who has solved
synchronization is Apple.

All of the data people really care about is on their iPhone/iPod. Contacts,
photos, music, TV shows, movies, email, web access. When you think of it,
iTunes main purpose is syncing and organizing your media. And with iTunes
Store seamlessly syncs a lot of the data people care about from the Internet,
also (for pay movies and music, but a lot of free podcasts, too).

While Microsoft continues to try to solve the synchronization problem as an
abstraction, Apple has actually created something everyone uses because it
Just Works.

~~~
jolhoeft
And interestingly, Apple isn't selling synchronization. They are selling
products that use it, but only mention in passing the synchronization.
Synchronization isn't a product, it is something you need for certain
products.

------
joshwa
To me the real Architecture Astronauts are the Enterprise Architects, who
think that documenting in some 6-figure modeling tool how I order paperclips,
and defining a paperclip SOA and sending EVERYTHING over a 8-figure ESB they
bought from IBM-- now those are some space cadets!

~~~
osipov
>documenting in some 6-figure modeling tool how I order paperclips

are you suggesting that the execs should go and read the code that some intern
wrote in order to figure out how their customers buy paperclips?

------
TrevorJ
The file syncing issue CANNOT be addressed effectively as a proprietary,
closed system. Maybe there are companies out there who have the fortitude to
create some sort of framework that can remain open enough to engender enough
pan-device support to make it useful to real people who happen not to want to
be stuck in the windows (or mac, or whatever) environment on all there
electronic devices.

------
simplegeek
Ok, but he's not pointed out a solution. I guess MSFT has lost the battle and
solution is to admit it and they should work on their strengths. There is a
whole lot of potential in there. I mean look at Vista & IE 7 ;( Even though
.NET powers some heavy-traffic websites but the framework is still catching
up. LINQ is somewhat cool but they're giving out MVC in (ahem) 2000 and 8.

~~~
mrtron
Exactly, what is he really offering at his company to attract the top talent?

I think he is a pretty smart guy with a successful business - but I am not
sure the work environment sounds interesting enough for some of the top grads.
Who wants to work on the ASP -> PHP compiler they have, or write a bunch of
AJAX?

Unless he has some luring new projects in the work like some sort of cloud
based synchronization... :)

------
shaunxcode
Yeah I think its a bit of an odd critique. Sure pie in the sky promises are
just that, but it doesn't mean it's always a bad idea. Microsoft bob: bad,
online file/data synch: good. Obviously the MS implementation is bound to fail
for reasons circling the proprietary-lockin-nonstandard-triangle but the idea
itself is killer. I am really digging dropbox for instance.

------
dhouston
we beg to differ that sync/sharing isn't a killer app ;)

~~~
maximilian
I wish you guys would include me in the beta! I've been tooling around with
JungleDisk which hasn't been working (which sucks!). I'm a grad student so I
have a lot of back and forth between school and my computer and I'm always
syncing files back and forth through email (which is such a pain!). File
syncing is a big deal for me. The fact that you guys do version control sorta
by default is awesome. I've been thinking about how you guys do that, and I
think I know how, but I'll keep it to myself as you probably wouldn't comment
or confirm it anyway. (so nobody steals your thunder).

~~~
aston
Max! You don't have your email in your profile...Shoot us an email.

~~~
dhs
If this is how it works, then here's another shameless attempt to hasten
acceptance into your beta program (I've also applied for registration by the
regular means you provide :-). If Dropbox works as advertised, I promise I'll
pay a monthly subscription fee. This is something I want.

------
simplegeek
Well, McCarthy correctly predicated sometime back ;)

"When architects get prizes, the people suffer."

------
muerdeme
This is laughable to me. I've muttered more obscenities trying to deal with
synchronization problems between computers than with anything else I can think
of.

I want all of my media everywhere. Is that so wrong?

~~~
mtts
You and, well, maybe everyone here and, uhm, maybe everybody at reddit and
slashdot and then, well, nobody else.

------
watmough
Speaking of the synchronization problem, Google calendar now syncs faultlessly
with Outlook (my version is 2003) which makes both apps significantly more
useful to me.

Go interoperability!

------
AndyKelley
Hey Joel, look at me! I'll come work for you. I'm a young strapping
rapscallion, and I made a python script to play ultimate frisbee FOR me!

------
edw519
"And dammit foosball doesn't play itself."

I dunno. With some spare parts and a few hundred lines of code, Trevor
Blackwell could probably make it happen.

~~~
procrastitron
It's already been done:

[http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/feature-
stude...](http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/feature-students-put-
knowledge-to-work-build-innovative-projects)

------
DanielBMarkham
I don't read this guy that much, and (to the best of my knowledge) I haven't
griped about his style.

I like Groove, at least until Microsoft bought it. I use it everyday and it
rocks. Whether or not something is over-architected or not is beside the
point: does it deliver value for my needs. Groove does.

You can make the case that it does a lot of stuff that I don't care about. So
what?

------
DaniFong
'And dammit foosball doesn't play itself.'

Priceless

~~~
cellis
Hell no it doesn't.Its a full time job where I work!

------
noas
I hate the last paragraph!

------
Jesin
Just want to point out, this is dated April 2001.

~~~
dgabriel
Um, actually: "This item ran on the Joel on Software homepage on Thursday, May
01, 2008"

~~~
Jesin
Oops. I guess I fail. I swear I saw a 1.

