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.
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.
"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...
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.
"Decentralized" is the key word here. Back in 2000, the term Web Consultancy refered to a company with 200+ developers on staff, who would charge you $250/hr to build your site. Nothing ever cost lest than six figures, and any decent site would run you at least half a million dollars.
That is the industry that went away. A few of the little guys (myself included) survived the Mass Extinction, much in the same way that proto-mice survived the alien first strike that killed the dinosaurs.
10 years later, we still aren't seeing any of those giant Consultancies emerging again (at least not onshore). It's just a big mess of little shops. And many of us have product lines to smooth out the revenue curve.
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).
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).
There may be more demand now (I don't about x10,000 more..) but there's a lot more supply too. Many of the "web consultants" Spolsky is referring to were people making 6 figure salaries for barely knowing HTML (not even CSS). The common "15 minute blog" you see in many frameworks' intro could command $n0,000 contracts.
There's no lack of hype in the current web, but that first bubble was really something to see :)
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).
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.
There's a good chance the company the recruiter was working for would actually hire your friend. Many companies were under pressure to increase their staff and show "growth" to their investors. I was working for a company with a super-talented team of about 20-30 people, which suddenly ballooned to ~100, many of whom simply had nothing to do.
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.)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Hmmm, I got nothing. That was perfectly said; I agree completely. I am actually a huge proponent of a CS degree simply for the algorithms and data structures courses. You don't want to know how many times I have seen people doing linear search on a large set of sorted data because they were never paying attention when they got taught binary search.
I am actually a CS/physics major, so I would say that a degree is extremely useful for many of the things that I've seen. One of my projects was writing an elementary OpenGL physics engine that offloaded most of its processing to the graphics card. I can't tell you how much my computer architecture and physics modeling courses helped with this.
You make it sounds as if children need to be indoctrinated into programming. Maybe you are suffering from bias and are clouding your judgment?
Unless you really think it is too late for someone to learn programming starting at the college level. People can learn quantum/high energy/particle/etc. physics or <choose your own advanced field> starting at the college level with no previous experience. Is programming really that hard or is it more a matter of time needed to be invested studying/working becoming better?
Is programming really that hard or is it more a matter of time needed to be invested studying/working becoming better?
It's really a matter of time invested. I should probably take that back about self-trained programmers being better. Instead, what I should say is that self trained programmers are "usually" more interested in programming, which is why they started teaching themselves. If you like programming you will do it a lot, especially outside of class, and that will give you a lot more experience very quickly. On the other hand, I have a number of friends who just started programming in college. Some of these quickly became enamored and did as much outside of class as I do. Although they started behind, I have no qualms that they are as good in a couple years as those who taught themselves. Also, be careful with my statement -- I never said that those who started programming in college will never be as good as those didn't. Instead, my point was that, right out of college, many people will only have 4 years experience (mostly in classwork). In contrast, I am one of a group of people that I know that had contributed to a number of large open source projects and other things (like kernel hacking) before college even started. I'm sure that the smart people who major in CS will have no trouble with doing that in a couple years time, but I'm hesitant to say that 4 years of teaching assignments actually prepare you for programming in industry.
"Indoctrinated" has strong, inappropriate connotations.
If it's anything beyond the sheer amount of time, it's that 1) people who don't teach themselves will probably be at a disadvantage given how much new material regularly needs to be learned, and 2) there is likely a window during which time picking up new skills is easier. Learning programming is probably analogous to learning a musical instrument, a new language, etc., in that people seem to pick things up more quickly if they start while fairly young. While learning a new API or something once you've been programming for a while is largely a matter of time, but there are Big Ideas that need to be learned upfront. I didn't mean to imply that it's impossible to learn them, just that it's harder.
I agree that learning takes place at a faster rate during childhood and that the non-autodidact will be at a disadvantage, especially in programming.
That said, my main disagreement was with your comment, College is probably too late to learn the fundamental techniques and mindset of programming - this was very reminiscent of the dialogue many religious groups will say about instilling church fundamentals, hence the reason I used the word 'indoctrinated', along with its connotations. As for the mindset of programming, there are many fields who are surprisingly close to the needed mindset, and still, it may be largely a personal matter in as much as some person will have the needed mindset no matter the field they choose.
I certainly have no argument over the amount of time needed to learn programming, and definitely agree that starting in college is much more difficult. It is just that I have been impressed by late learners to programming who came from other fields (mathematics/physics/economics being some of the best to draw from), and as such I can not underestimate the ability of another who came to programming later in life.
FWIW, both here and below I rewrote a paragraph several times about the analytical mindset overlapping with several other fields. I never found a wording I liked, so I cut it.
Same here. I would definitely count you as one of the people who worked really hard for a long time. That was my main point -- if you love programming and have an interest in it, then you will develop those ten years of experience easily. However, most people have nowhere near that amount of experience, including CS majors. The one insurance point that a CS degree gives you is that you've been exposed to programming for at least 4 years. In fact, coming out of college, I would put self-trained programmers (like you and me), regardless of degree, above any CS major who just started programming in college. I think CS teaches you a lot of useful things (I regret nothing from my CS theory courses), but when it comes to actually developing applications, experience rules all.
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.
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].
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
I'm not questioning anyone's credibility. I made a statement about the article's redundancy with a work that many HNers might read or have read. It's the same guy talking about the same topic, so he could reasonably be expected to say the same or very similar things.
"Typically, self-plagiarism is only considered to be a serious ethical issue in settings where a publication is asserted to consist of new material, such as in academic publishing or educational assignments [13]. It does not apply (except in the legal sense) to public-interest texts, such as social, professional, and cultural opinions usually published in newspapers and magazines."
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?
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.)
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.
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.
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.