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Comment by falsestprophet | Hacker News Reader

I don't know much about Mr. Spolsky or Fog Creek, so perhaps I am entirely incorrect. I understand he has a lot of respect in the software community, but every time he writes about business it reeks of charlatanism. He seems to do well enough; but, he hasn't quite built an empire.

Being kind to your employees and your customers is a laudable idea, but it is not a business plan.

You also don't need world class intellect to build the software he is selling. This is fortunate, because I doubt his $75,000 could buy the soul of someone great who wanted to work on something important.

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Being kind to your employees should really just be obvious. Unfortunately it is not. Many people with rank in a company treat others terribly, simply because they can. Probably they don't know any better, and haven't considered the downsides. Joel does a really good job of packaging ideas from books like Peopleware and Mythical Man-Month in a way average people will respond to. No matter what his software company does, that's valuable service.

I don't know all that much about bug tracking software, but at my last company the trouble ticketing system they used was a monstrosity (Peregrine Service Center). Everyone hated it. It had a sluggish java applet client. It was an enormous resource hog, it was buggy, and had a horrid interface. It took forever to log in and logged you out after 15 minutes of inactivity (taking over your desktop to inform you of that fact). I'd guess this load of crap was costing the company a fortune compared to a shrink-wrap solution like FogBugz.

Here's a picture of the interface: http://www.goladus.com/_.jpg

That 'world class intellect' gets stuff done so much more efficiently that it works out cheaper than several weaker coders.

How do you get "world class intellect" to work on a proprietary bug tracking software, though? I think it is written in ASP, too? (Could be mistaken, though).

"FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic with closures and lambdas and Rails-like active records that can be compiled down to VBScript, JavaScript, PHP4 or PHP5. Wasabi is a private, in-house language written by one of our best developers that is optimized specifically for developing FogBugz; the Wasabi compiler itself is written in C#." http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html

Writing your main cash cow in a private, in-house language seems like one of the riskier decisions you can make.

If they would have at least open sourced it and tried to get some sort of community around it it would have at least start to become less dangerous as the community grows.

But programming your main (only?) product in a language nobody except your current employees knows? Employee turnover must be even more of a bitch over there then it is in most companies.

I wouldn't want to work there when this "one of our best developers" quits/dies/retires

It depends.

I've got an impression that Wasabi is highly-specialized domain-specific language (just a wild guess from his article). If it is a general-purpose language it's worth to build a community and get feedback, but if it's a niche DSL, it's less likely that you get a growable community and it's more likely that feedback tends to be feature requests that aren't necessary for the original purpose of DSL.

And if it is designed well, the risk of the original developper's quitting is just about the same as having in-house libraries or workflow, I think.

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