Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the… — Joel Spolsky Copy Share Image
If your goals is to produce something of permanent value, you start to think differently about you want on the site. — Joel Spolsky Copy Share
Remember, just because Microsoft can do something, doesn't mean you can. Microsoft makes their own gravity. Normal rules don't apply to them. — Joel Spolsky Copy Share
“If you can’t understand the spec for a new technology, don’t worry: nobody else will understand it either, and the technology won’t be that… — Joel Spolsky Copy Share
So if you want to get things done, you positively have to understand at any given point in time what is the most important… — Joel Spolsky Copy Share
Not having a schedule is OK if it's your PhD and you plan to spend 14 years on the thing, or if you're a… — Joel Spolsky Copy Share
If you are a programmer working in 2006 and you don’t know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch… — Joel Spolsky Copy Share
“In any case, even if a usability test resolves a dispute, it doesn't do it in any kind of a statistically valid way. Unless… — Joel Spolsky Copy Share
“The confidence you get from knowing about every crash, anywhere in the world, is crucial to delivering a high-quality product that needs to be… — Joel Spolsky Copy Share
“Many rookie software managers think that they can "motivate" their programmers to work faster by giving them nice, "tight" (unrealistically short) schedules. I think… — Joel Spolsky Copy Share
Beware of Methodologies. They are a great way to bring everyone up to a dismal, but passable, level of performance, but at the same… — Joel Spolsky Copy Share
Never put yourself in a position that will put yourself at risk if you make the wrong decision. We spent cash on everything. It's… — Joel Spolsky Copy Share
Writing code is not production, it's not always craftsmanship though it can be, it's design. — Joel Spolsky Copy Share
There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old… — Joel Spolsky Copy Share
