I hope we are too busy finding good things to build, good ways to build them, and good people to build them with (and for!) to sit around gossiping about who's over the hill and who sucks.
The entire spirit of HN is to upvote what you like. We don't need to engage in meta-discussion about which blogs are worth reading because we simply upvote the specific posts that are worth reading. Prolific and consistently good writers simply appear more often.
If you, I or anybody else doesn't like what Joel writes or Jeff writes or Reg writes, the solution is definitely to write a blog post. But not this post. Instead, write the kind of blog post you want people to read. Be a force for positive change.
And if you don't feel like writing, don't get sucked into pointing fingers and sneering at others. Spend your time reading the good stuff.
Once there was a horse tied up on the side of the street. Whenever someone tried to pass, the horse would kick them. Soon a crowd gathered around the horse until a wise man was seen coming close. The people said “This horse will surely kill anyone who tries to pass. What are we going to do?” The wise man looked at the horse, turned and walked down another street.
I beg to differ with you. It's highly articulate criticism coming from a regular JS blog reader and with an incredibly high reputation on StackOverflow (Cletus seems to be the 4th top ranked user.)
Cletus's post raises very valid points and expresses the feelings of betrayal of many people who contributed to StackOverflow many hours of work for free. And he shows several contradictions in what Spolsky preaches and what he practices.
Ironically your comment doesn't add much to the discussion and criticizes Cletus' blog post for being a negative post. Also you seem to confuse the author of the post with the submitter in HN:
"Cletus's post raises very valid points and expresses the feelings of betrayal of many people who contributed to StackOverflow many hours of work for free."
I'm kinda curious about this sentence. Are there people out there who didn't know that Joel runs his website/forums/StackOverflow for Joel's benefit and not necessarily for the benefit of those who contribute?
I read a bunch of Joel's articles in college, then decided that his site wasn't the place for me. I felt that I wasn't really learning anything new from him, and that the forum participants were rehashing really basic stuff that I'd already learned and wanted to move on from. When it came time to get a job (which was right around Joel's big "Great Programmers Work for Fog Creek" push), I kinda laughed and figured that if I were really a great programmer, I'd rather go build search engines or financial models than bugtracking software. So I just quietly applied to financial software startups, stopped reading JoS, and didn't make a big stink about it on the Internet.
I thought about not writing this comment because, as Raganwald notes, I'm being part of the problem and not part of the solution. But I found my life got so much easier when I started worrying about my goals first and other people's second, rather than assuming other people were looking out for me and then feeling betrayed when it turned out they weren't. That doesn't mean being an asshole or never lifting a finger to help someone. It means that when I help someone out on the Internet, it's because I want to, and I don't expect Reputation or Karma or a job offer because of it. They're nice if they happen, but not something to expect.
I don't care who Cletus is, I was responding to what he(?) wrote. If his post was good but he had a low SO reputation, would I discount his opinion? And I have no idea there is a cletus here as well as there. I wasn't paying any attention to who he is for the same reason I was dismayed by how many words he(?) used to discuss who Joel is.
Finally, I never said his post was not truthful. There is dreck in the world. I know that and so do you.
p.s. But yeah, I hesitated before commenting on account of the irony. And then I removed the first paragraph, which originally read:
(but also lists a fourth in the body of the posting)
4. Employee referrals
Obviously, Stack Overflow is based on building a community and now they are trying to leverage that community to generate money from matching companies with developers.
In his post, Joel states that "[t]he average great software developer will apply for, total, maybe, four jobs in their entire career." Paraphrasing the next two paragraphs, he asserts that the truly great (as opposed to average great) developers "...show up on the open job market once...".
Maybe I'm jaded, but I cannot think of a single truly great developer that got hired through the standard recruitment methods. Recruiters and, especially, HR departments filter out all the truly great developers when sieving resumes because the truly great developers tend to be modest and honest, not traits that get them through a buzzword filter. The truly great developers I've worked got in by bypassing the HR system via an inside person.
I would assert that truly great developers pick the companies they wish to work for. As a result, the only way to catch them is to have a great company so that they find you and you still need to get lucky. As Joel writes, "The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market."
I'm sorry but this kind of rhetoric ("they're so good you never even see them..") smacks more of "rock star" mythology than realism.
The best programmers, say Ward Cunningham (to name one more name than you or Joel do), are methodology gurus. The best methodologies admit that all programmers make mistakes and are limited. Perhaps we could learn something...
The assertions (granted, unsubstantiated) were that the gurus aren't putting their CV on web sites for HR departments to find. They are targeting companies they want to work for.
Ward Cunningham is a good name. Lets look at some legendary software engineers...
From Ward Cunninghams's linkedin page, you will see he has held two jobs for a long time: Tektronix for 10 years and his own company for 18 years. Tek was his initial hire and he had two short stints at Microsoft and the Eclipse Foundation. He probably applied traditionally to Tek (first job). His titles at Microsoft and Eclipse Foundation make me wonder if he went through the HR department for those jobs. Ditto for AboutUs. Obviously, he did not interview for Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc.
Linus Torvalds worked at Transmeta for 6 years, OSDL for 3 1/2 years, and Linux Foundation for 6 1/2 years. I'm sure he never had a traditional job application/interview encounter.
Wikipedia lists Ken Thompson as working for Bell Labs, Entrisphere, Inc, and Google. I'm willing to bet he didn't have to run the standard Google gauntlet to get hired there.
Wikipedia lists Dennis Ritchie working for Lucent Technologies (currently) and Bell Labs. Not much resume shoveling going on there.
The Wikipedia page on Brian Kernighan is somewhat vague, but lists Bell Labs and the Computer Science Department of Princeton University.
Guido van Rossum went through more companies than the other gurus listed here. Again, I'm sure the Google interviewers were more nervous than he.
Yukihiro Matsumoto has only worked for NaCl according to LinkedIn and Wikipedia.
David Heinemeier Hansson is another example: he founded and built a Danish online gaming news website, which he ran until 2001. I believe he went from there to 37Signals. He did some contract work for them and was hired on the basis of his obvious talent. Again, non-traditional.
Point wasn't that famous programmer don't have an easy getting hired. Their fame, by itself, would allow this whatever else is happening.
My point is that a theory that bases itself of "the qualities of great programmers" when you mean famous "rock star" programmers, is fundamentally flawed. I think the ideas of the great programmers, at least their great ideas, support this.
The point that charging for finding a job is, in some locations illegal, ought to be cause for concern. The point those entities which charge job seekers for exposure have historically been cons should be considered also.
Perhaps there is are very good answers to these concerns but I don't think these question can be dismissed as gossip.
I read the entire thread and didn't see anyone else agreeing with you. So I wanted to go on record and say that I wish I had more points to upvote you with. Excellent thought and request. I will try to publish more and submit the good things I'm reading to HN.
I got this same feeling while reading it, that the author strung together thousands of words to illustrate two strange points: that what Joel and Jeff have done is different from the existing model and thus, might not work and that Joel is past his prime even though he was once really good.
Are those two points really worth thousands of words, whether they are true or not? It doesn't seem like it to me. I wish that at least 500 of the words would have been used to introduce me to something new that the OP thought was better than StackOverflow/Careers.
Of course, the irony is, here I sit writing a comment about an article while producing nothing. I think I'll go write some code.
The entire spirit of HN is to upvote what you like. We don't need to engage in meta-discussion about which blogs are worth reading because we simply upvote the specific posts that are worth reading. Prolific and consistently good writers simply appear more often.
If you, I or anybody else doesn't like what Joel writes or Jeff writes or Reg writes, the solution is definitely to write a blog post. But not this post. Instead, write the kind of blog post you want people to read. Be a force for positive change.
And if you don't feel like writing, don't get sucked into pointing fingers and sneering at others. Spend your time reading the good stuff.
Once there was a horse tied up on the side of the street. Whenever someone tried to pass, the horse would kick them. Soon a crowd gathered around the horse until a wise man was seen coming close. The people said “This horse will surely kill anyone who tries to pass. What are we going to do?” The wise man looked at the horse, turned and walked down another street.