

Joel Spolsky: The Day My Industry Died - twampss
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090701/joel-spolsky-the-day-my-industry-died.html

======
tptacek
Waiwaiwaiwaiwaiwait...

What about CityDesk? Wasn't that your first product? Did you really go
straight from consulting to a successful product, or did you have a second
false start? How'd you guys navigate that?

I know the Inc. audience probably doesn't need the details, but I'd be
interested in them.

~~~
pchristensen
The order was 1) consulting, 2) FogBugz, 3) CityDesk. FogBugz was a side
project that grew into a successful product, CityDesk was the first
intentional product but it was not successful.

~~~
galactus
Are you sure?

From <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000009.html> (October
2001):

"I've been rather quiet lately on this weblog -- mainly because we've been
working so hard at Fog Creek getting ready for the beta of CityDesk, our
flagship product."

I have been reading Joel on software for quite a long time, I remember reading
that fogbugz was just their home-grown brug tracking system, not intended to
be a real "product" at the beggining.

I also remember how Joel used to argue that citydesk would win because no one
would like to write a blog using a web interface...

~~~
pchristensen
FogBugz 1.0 shipped November 2000 (<http://www.foundersatwork.com/joel-
spolksy.html>)

Version history (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FogBugz#Version_History>)

Version 2.0 - March, 2001

Version 3.0 - November, 2002

Version 3.1 - February, 2003

Version 4.0 - December, 2004

Version 5.0 - March, 2006

Version 6.0 - August, 2007

Version 7.0 - July, 2009

~~~
tptacek
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000013.html> clears all this
up.

------
SamAtt
A nice read but a badly titled article. The truth is Web Consultancy is
probably 10,000 times bigger than it was in 2000 it's just decentralized now.
So yeah, if you're trying to make it in the bay area as a web consultant you
probably don't stand a chance. But elsewhere there's about as much opportunity
as you're willing to try for.

The truth is it's so big now that it (sadly) manages to sustain a fairly
significant underbelly of complete incompetents along with all the qualified
people.

~~~
callmeed
I totally agree with you, but they almost _feel_ like different industries.
Back then, old media and F500 companies _had_ to hire the consultants because
there was no one in-house to do it. Today, most of those corps have entire
departments devoted to web design/app development. Sure, they still outsource
some gigs, but it seems like the consultancy industry now focuses on smaller
companies (even down to the mom-and-pop level).

~~~
cstross
Anecdote from 1996 in the UK, back when web consultancy was still relatively
small, but growing: fma (my employer at the time) bid for one web design job
against competition. When we got the job, we learned that our bid was the
highest by a factor of two! And we got the job because we were "reassuringly
expensive"!

Folks who don't understand a new field will throw money at it because they
want a serious professional to hold their hand. As the old 80s aphorism put
it, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"; an executive at an FT100 company,
dabbling in the web for the first time, would _expect_ to spend lots of money
at the steep start of the learning curve. But once they began to get a clue
about how difficult (or easy) the job really was, they'd start to play
hardball.

And that's what the early web consultancies didn't understand: they were
living on borrowed time, and basing their growth on a commodity that could
only scale linearly (web developer/programmer hours).

------
davi
I got a job offer from aD back in the day... went for a walk w/ Greenspun +
Alex to talk about it. I didn't like how everyone at the company's ego seemed
to depend so entirely on programming ability (I was fresh out of college and
cared about these things a lot).

His response? "At least it's a meritocracy!"

Not a bad answer, really. I am glad to have participated in that time
(1998-2000) + place (Boston).

------
jasonkester
The late 90's was a great time to be alive, and it taught me one lesson that
still guides me today:

The dot-com boom was a goldrush, and if you look back to the Klondike goldrush
100 years previous you can notice a pattern. There were two groups of
individuals who got rich back then: The guys that got there first, and the
guys that sold shovels to everybody else.

It's hard to be that First Guy, but it's easy to notice him and set up a
shovel stand.

~~~
brown9-2
This is true of all bubbles. It's what makes a bubble a bubble. See: Housing
bubble of mid 2000s.

------
sgoraya
The day I knew things were in trouble was at a party in San Francisco (fall
2000). A recruiter for a "hot new start up" was trying to hire my friend, a
history major, as a programmer that did not have to program, guaranteeing that
he would make "75k" starting. If he hit his recruitment numbers, a big bonus
was in store. He may have been drunk but was sober enough to give my buddy a
business card and rough directions to the office.

One of my favorite stories from _those_ days.

~~~
silentbicycle
As an aside - Just because someone is a history major, it doesn't mean they
can't program. (Given how many things seem to be invented, then forgotten,
then recreated from scratch and shown off as the new hot breakthrough every
few years, the field could benefit from caring more about its history.)

~~~
Locke1689
The problem with that is exactly as Peter Norvig states: learn programming in
ten years[1]. I would not argue that some great programmers have never had any
formal training. But they worked hard. Really hard. For a _long_ time. To
believe that someone who has never touched a programming language before is
ready for a developer job after a couple weeks, a couple months, or even as
much as a year is just ridiculous.

When CS _grads_ can't even program for years after graduation, the solution is
not to bring in people with even _less_ training.

[1]<http://norvig.com/21-days.html>

~~~
silentbicycle
While I'm just one data point, I was a history major, and _I've been
programming since I was six_. I already knew C, C++* , Perl, Python, and small
bits of other stuff, and majoring in CS to learn Java didn't seem appealing. I
majored in history (with a focus on history of science and medicine) and
continued teaching myself on the side.

While majoring in CS correlates with previous programming experience, it isn't
an absolute indicator. College is probably too late to learn the fundamental
techniques and mindset of programming, anyway.

* Inasmuch as anybody can really know C++...

~~~
donaq
Huh. I first learned programming as an undergrad. Why do you think it is too
late?

[Edit] Anyway, I think that depends on whether said CS major applied himself
in college, don't you? I do have friends who graduated out of CS (well,
actually we were in CE, but it's close enough) without knowing, or later
forgetting, the difference between a class and a function (true story, that.
he asked me that question about a year after working in the industry as a
"consultant". the bugger works in a big IT consulting firm you've probably
heard of). On the other hand, I discovered programming in university, got
interested, and kept pushing. I don't claim to be a programming god or
anything, but I do at least know how to do fizzbuzz. :)

It also depends on what sort of programming you're doing. If you're talking
about typical web apps, then yes, I would agree with you that experience
rules. Knowledge of the tools used in that trade are more important than
anything a CS course could teach you. However, let's say you do crypto, or
write 3D animation software, or any serious number-crunching/algorithmic app.
That's an entirely different ball game. I'm sure there are hackers out there
who are autodidacts in advanced algorithms, but CS training _helps_.

Should have made this shorter. In summary, it's never too late and formal CS
training helps (if you have interest).

~~~
silentbicycle
It's not impossible - many older hackers learned to program in college because
computers were inaccessible to the public - but the people who haven't tried
to learn on their own are years behind, and (perhaps worse) less
curious/motivated/used to teaching themselves.

------
old-gregg
Say all you want about Joel the programmer, but Joel the writer is awesome.

Sadly, we're in exactly the same situation right now: after almost 2 years of
exsiting life of self-funded young company in NYC, suddenly most of our
customers did not renew, our recurring revenue is being consumed by medical
insurance and rent and we're brainstorming on new business ideas... This piece
gives me hope, because living off your savings in NYC is scary-scary! :)

BTW if someone is working on something cool in NYC let me know [see my
profile].

------
tlrobinson
I still have my CueCat somewhere :)

It's interesting the idea is sort of making a comeback with QR codes and cell
phone readers. Perhaps CueCat was just far ahead of it's time (and flawed by
not being portable)

~~~
joe_bleau
I have a couple as well, one still plugged into to my PC at work. I never
understood why people thought it was such a terrible idea.

~~~
Quarrelsome
Cause of the whole chicken <-> egg problem. No-one will use CueCats unless
there are lots of those barcodes online. The barcodes wont appear in
significant numbers online unless everyone has a CueCat.

------
bjplink
This story is kind of more of the same and I'm sure a lot of the readers here
have heard it before; if not about Joel in particular, than at least about
ArsDigita and Razorfish and this era of the tech boom in general.

What IS interesting though is his mention of the Startup.com documentary. If
you haven't seen it, and have any kind of passing interest in the startup
space or starting your own web company, I strongly suggest you check it out.
It's fantastic.

------
Batsu
There's something about the stories told by Joel that always feel more down to
earth than the typical sensationalist blog write up. Good read.

~~~
diz
I thought it was a little dry, even for Joel, who isn't terribly interesting.
He sure knows how to sell a/his product, though.

------
sanj
It is strange that City Desk never gets mentioned:
<http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk/>

From what I recall, that was the primary product and FogBugz was an in-house
tool used to track it.

~~~
kailoa
Joel uses his articles as marketing tools. FogBugz makes money and CityDesk is
part of that industry that died.

~~~
lackbeard
How is CityDesk part of the dead industry? I thought it was basically blogging
software. That industry was just being born at that time.

~~~
blasdel
It was Site Publishing software written as a Windows GUI application that
generates static files.

At least it wasn't as mindbogglingly stupid as Dave Winer's MacOS/Win32
desktop/server programming-language/blogging-platform/outliner floor-
wax/desert-topping

------
koos
These inc articles are just re-hashing stuff that you can read in "Founders at
Work" or even Joel's blog. It's a bit disappointing actually.

~~~
gamble
Joel built his business by relating Microsoft gossip and telling programmers
what they wanted to hear. It's a marketing blog. Now that his customers are
businessmen, he's telling them what they want to hear, in a forum they're
likely to read.

~~~
discojesus
"Joel built his business by relating Microsoft gossip and telling programmers
what they wanted to hear."

I'm pretty sure programmers don't want to hear "you need to be writing
functional specs" [<http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000036.html>],
"you don't know enough about Unicode"
[<http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html>], "if you don't 'get'
pointers and recursion, you just ain't cut out to be a programmer"
[[http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.ht...](http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html)],
or "you should never scrap a working codebase and start all over"
[<http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html>]

------
omouse
_The immediate problem all those consultancies faced in 1999 and 2000 was
that, like ArsDigita, they couldn't find enough great software developers to
handle all the new business they were bringing in, so they had to turn away
clients._

I thought the trouble was that they were hiring so many people that they
couldn't keep the same company culture and in the end the software devs became
outsourceable?

~~~
kscaldef
In 1999, ArsDigita was never more than 40 people (and probably started the
year with less than 20). It's possible at that time that they were turning
away business. I joined in Jan 2000. By August the company was over 200 and
the sales stream was collapsing. They had massively overshot the demand of the
market. (Largely because the market they were serving was other dot-coms,
which were now in the process of imploding.)

To keep all those people busy, and in an attempt to shift from a services
company to a product company, a "core engineering" team was created with the
task of rewriting the ACS in Java. This further exacerbated the revenue stream
problems, because the version of the software we used for client projects was
now stagnant, making it harder to get or keep contracts.

In the end the rewrite was never finished before the money ran out, although I
think it did live on for a while as some sort of RedHat offering. (The
"assets" of the company were bought by RH in the end.)

------
thomasfl
And in the late nineties everybody was making content management systems. Two
of my web content management systems became products.

------
keltecp11
Probably one of the more inspirational postings I've seen on HN in awhile.
Thanks for sharing.

------
smithjchris
Oh my god Joel has Spoken. Must worship etc etc. Seriously - why do people
genuinely wait on his every word? Atwood is the same!

All they do is spurge illogical capitalist business nonsense for the sake of
making a few pounds/dollars/yen etc. The blog is a marketing medium for their
products and their mindset. They constantly contradict (think Joel on
simplicity a while back).

What about people who do this because they like it and want to help people.
What about those people and their motivations. The altruistic nature
surrounding these people is far more important than the self-important blog
pimps.

And yes CityDesk and FogBugz are crap. CityDesk is a chunk of jumk reminiscent
of MCMS 2002. FogBugz is FlySpray with some tartyness and some cost added. So
whoopee doo.

~~~
smithjchris
Modded to -2. Thou must not insult those who are holier than thou.

~~~
allenbrunson
As a matter of fact, the social mores around here prohibit insulting
_anybody_. You can disagree, but it must be done respectfully.

~~~
smithjchris
I noticed. My last 4 posts have been a semi-trolling attempt to see how people
react. It's a good indicator on if I can be bothered to read the comments in
future.

~~~
allenbrunson
Ahem. news.yc is not here for you to run experiments on. People who don't
participate in good faith tend to get banned.

