Great Programmers Equals Great Products

August 4th, 2005 · No Comments

Programming Nerd

This is what Joel writes. Excerpt:

In March, 2000, I launched this site with the shaky claim that most people are wrong in thinking you need an idea to make a successful software company:

The common belief is that when you’re building a software company, the goal is to find a neat idea that solves some problem which hasn’t been solved before, implement it, and make a fortune. We’ll call this the build-a-better-mousetrap belief. But the real goal for software companies should be converting capital into software that works.

For the last five years I’ve been testing that theory in the real world. The formula for the company I started with Michael Pryor in September, 2000 can be summarized in four steps:
Best Working Conditions → Best Programmers → Best Software → Profit!

It’s a pretty convenient formula, especially since our real goal in starting Fog Creek was to create a software company where we would want to work. I made the claim, in those days, that good working conditions (or, awkwardly, “building the company where the best software developers in the world would want to work”) would lead to profits as naturally as chocolate leads to chubbiness or cartoon sex in video games leads to gangland-style shooting sprees.

For today, though, I want to answer just one question, because if this part isn’t true, the whole theory falls apart. That question is, does it even make sense to talk about having the “best programmers?” Is there so much variation between programmers that this even matters?

Maybe it’s obvious to us, but to many, the assertion still needs to be proven.

Several years ago a larger company was considering buying out Fog Creek, and I knew it would never work as soon as I heard the CEO of that company say that he didn’t really agree with my theory of hiring the best programmers. He used a biblical metaphor: you only need one King David, and an army of soldiers who merely had to be able to carry out orders. His company’s stock price promptly dropped from 20 to 5, so it’s a good thing we didn’t take the offer, but it’s hard to pin that on the King David fetish.

And in fact the conventional wisdom in the world of copycat business journalists and large companies who rely on overpaid management consultants to think for them, chew their food, etc., seems to be that the most important thing is reducing the cost of programmers.

Read on to see how he backs his opinions up with numbers. I agree with this guy 100% and find it sad that the emphasis these days is on price and not on quality. Managers just don’t seem to get it with their tiny little intellects.