Joel Speaks; You Read

Nice long interview with Joel Spolsky on Salon today. The usual high signal to noise ratio, plus answers to something I'd wondered about: how his company is doing, between consulting, "City Desk" and "FogBugz". Good stuff; Salon membership or free day-pass required.

On being so careful to not repeat mistakes that it slows you down too much:

Basically, by the time [his grandmother] got to be 65, every mistake she'd ever made in her life she had corrected by creating a new procedure by which she made sure that she never made that mistake again. For example, before she left the house, she double-checked that she had her keys, the burglar alarm was on and so forth. So she had been acquiring these habits to prevent making mistakes she had made in the past. And by the time she got to be 65, it took a half-hour to run through the whole checklist!...

It's what the Army calls fatigue. Fatigue is everything in the Army that you do to keep your equipment in good working condition: polishing your shoes, brushing your teeth, making sure that you're ready and that all your bullets are clean and there's no sand in your gun. It's all called fatigue, and it takes about two hours a day for an infantry guy. And it's everything but the actual thing you're trying to do. Microsoft has now got to the point where it's like 80 percent, 90 percent fatigue. So even though they're still scoring a [perfect] 12 on the Joel test, we need another category, which is "and you're not Microsoft."

And a nice simple description of software requirements, excerpted for no reason whatsoever, certainly not because my own company can't find its ass with both hands:

If you think of the requirements as being this paragraph, and the specification as being this page, and the code as being several pages, at each point, you're adding more detail. And in fact you can go straight from the requirements to the code, and most people try to do that. The trouble is, it's like eating your meat without chewing it -- you tend to choke a little bit. Whereas the specification is just a hope that before you actually start on the code you can think of as many problems as possible and solve them when it's still easy to make changes, before you get into the code and it's more costly to make changes.