

A job at Joel's company doesn't pass the "Joel Test" - ryanjodonnell
http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/16279/software-developer-new-york-stack-exchange?a=jetZPCo

======
patio11
I don't think I'd be speaking out of school to mention that a) StackExchange
and Fog Creek are different companies with their own products, processes, and
engineering cultures and b) engineering best practice is a moving target
_especially_ since the way we deliver software has changed so much since the
days of "gold master which costs $X million and 12 months if we screw up
anything on it." If all of your software is web apps delivered over the open
Internet, and you have traffic like egads, then you can use a different set of
engineering practices to ensure that the proportion of customers
inconvenienced by bugs is essentially the same as before without needing a
dedicated testing phase/team/etc.

There are projects in Fog Creek which are organized around that philosophy,
too. I think the Trello guys have written about it fairly extensively. The
first thing Google came up with was
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html> \-- search for "bugs."

~~~
famousactress
I was thinking similarly (about the moving target). My ideas about dedicated
testers have shifted over the last few years with a pronounced emphasis on
shorter deployment cycles and unit tests, and I was surprised to see the up-
to-date schedule bit in there at all!

Show me a project with an up-to-date schedule and I'll show you a project that
has a tool for declaring success in the face of failure.

------
rglullis
What really upsets me about both FogCreek (and StackExchange now) is the
requirement of "permanent legal right to work in the US".

Joel used to write a shit ton of material about how they will save no effort
to attract the best developers they can find, on how they need to impress
candidates, on how they will bring the guy on a limo, etc, etc, etc... but if
you are a foreign student graduating on a top school from the US, or if you
already have a ton of experience but need a sponsor for your H1B, they will
not even look at your application? For what? Saving the extra $5-10k incurred
in the legal process?

Not cool, FogCreek. Not cool.

~~~
codinghorror
IMO if you are truly, actually, really serious about hiring the best of the
best, you'll hire them wherever they live. Moving to the USA shouldn't be
required or necessary, particularly in software development.

This is why the Internet was invented.

Otherwise you're just hiring "the best people we could convince to move to
{location} for {competitive salary}".

~~~
rglullis
Orthogonal problems. In my case, they wouldn't need to convince me to move.
They just need to help me find a legal way to stay.

Yes, they could just as well try to have people working remotely, but then
it's another set of arguments that need to be taken. Joel never wrote about
how working remotely is "just as good" as working in a office environment
geared towards developers - quite the opposite. So I could understand why
FogCreek/SE would require people to work locally, but I still don't get why
they can't put some effort to sponsor visas.

~~~
codinghorror
I believe the visa issue is thorny, not just because of the money, but because
of the logistics and lawyering and so forth.

It'd be easier for everyone involved to just acknowledge, like GitHub does,
that remote devs can be extremely kick ass.

To be clear, Stack Exchange and Fog Creek are different animals in this area.
But Joel is, at his heart, an "everyone must sit down to lunch at the same
table or the entire company is doomed" kind of guy. Me, not so much.

~~~
rglullis
The logistics and lawyering and so forth is something that you will have to
deal once. After that, the process is entirely reproducible.

In fact, a company the size of FogCreek or SE should be able to just hire one
immigration lawyer and get this done with.

In fees to the government, a H1B application costs less than $1k (~$2.5k if
you get the "expedited" process to bring the response time from USCIS from 3
months to 15 days), so the $5-10k range should actually include more than
enough hours from a half-decent office that can deal with getting the
paperwork and filling all the requirements from the government.

The one thing that they could have used as an excuse not to do it: the fact
that all the Googles and Microsofts around take all the quota of H1B
applications and they are pushed out of it. That would've been valid until
2008, but since 2009 the quota hasn't been filled.

------
shpiel
In my, albeit short, experience I have found that the "do you have testers?"
and "do you fix bugs before writing new code?" to be overkill for most
consumer-facing web applications.

They are very important if the software is mission-critical or if there is
some sort of physical cost to shipping patches. But if you can continuously
update the live site its not that big of a deal if a bug gets out. It will be
noticed soon, often by your users, and then you fix it and that is it.

This works if the developers and other stakeholders at the company are testing
the product themselves and are responsive and can triage bug reports quickly.

Having an up-to-date schedule can often be unrealistic as there can be
shifting priorities and developers should be flexible to move around and
respond as necessary.

~~~
xxpor
>But if you can continuously update the live site its not that big of a deal
if a bug gets out. It will be noticed soon, often by your users, and then you
fix it and that is it.

You consider this acceptable? "Don't worry, if there's a bug, our users will
tell us, no need to test!"

~~~
shpiel
Yes. Not all bugs are the same in terms of end-user impact and how they affect
the overall performance of the system. You can expend a lot of resources
trying to track down every single last glitch in many cases you should.
However, if you have the luxury to be able to push updates and fixes at any
time and you a free non-critical service, its better to just have a culture of
fixing things quickly and allocating resources to more high-priority things
like adding new features.

More eloquently stated: [http://www.quora.com/Quality-Assurance-QA/When-is-
not-having...](http://www.quora.com/Quality-Assurance-QA/When-is-not-having-a-
Quality-Assurance-team-for-software-projects-better-than-having-one)

Ideally, most of the testing should be automated and engineers should be
writing test cases as they build features.

------
usea
Isn't the joel test less about pass/fail and more about communicating and
encouraging certain things that make a better environment for developers? I
don't really care if they "pass" the joel test or not, but I do find the
answers to the questions helpful. I sure as hell wouldn't want to work in a
place with no source control.

~~~
unimpressive
Joel didn't leave himself much breathing room on interpreting the test
results.

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html>

 _"A score of 12 is perfect, 11 is tolerable, but 10 or lower and you've got
serious problems. The truth is that most software organizations are running
with a score of 2 or 3, and they need serious help, because companies like
Microsoft run at 12 full-time. "_

~~~
tomjen3
Which just goes to show how old that is. Which tech company wants to be in ms
shoes, without the pegacy cash cows?

------
outside1234
Is the question "do you have testers" obsolete - should it be "do you have
tests?"

I'd personally rather work at a place that has tests vs. testers.

~~~
tomjen3
How do you test that your gui works correctly when the user is running ie6?
How do you write a test to ensure that animations are smooth?

~~~
shpiel
Selenium can handle a lot of gui issues with different browsers. There are
also tools to compare images (could be used with screenshots).

Yes ultimately you need human eyes and on the product. It also helps to have
someone with a QA mentality, who has a developed intuition for breaking things
and finding edge cases. But rigorous use of automated testing, code review,
and dogfooding greatly reduces the need for dedicated QA.

------
yen223
The lack of a schedule I can understand, but Stack Exchange has no testers?!

~~~
xyzzyz
Maybe it means that they have no _designated_ testers, no separate QA team,
and everybody is responsible for testing.

~~~
astrodust
For a site that important, that seems like a serious oversight.

Maybe the testers are unsuspecting users in the A/B pool of Facebook-style
deployment where A = stable and B = mystery meat.

------
excuse-me
Somewhat off-topic but why do companies feel the need to write:

"Stack Exchange, Inc. does not discriminate in employment matters on the basis
of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, military service
eligibility, veteran status, sexual orientation, marital status, disability,
or any other protected class."

Presumably they are legally required not to discriminate in these matters, in
which case it's rather pointless to announce it. They don't specifically state
that they wont kill you and harvest your organs - but I assume that they don't
(although Oracle might)

Or if these are areas where companies are allowed to discriminate then they
are hardly likely to say so on their job ads.

~~~
xxpor
Some of those are not protected classes under Federal law, specifically sexual
orientation.

~~~
postfuturist
It is a protected class under NYC law:
<http://www.nyc.gov/html/cchr/html/aunderthelaw.html>

------
ryanjodonnell
Look at the bottom to see the "Joel Test". 10/12. Lol.

