Joel on software office

Advertisement Hide. This service is more advanced with JavaScript available. Authors Joel Spolsky. Covers three years of the best essays Ranges from the technical to humorous essays Authored by one of the most popular programmers. Front Matter Pages N2-xvi.

Front Matter Pages Choosing a Language. Pages The build-out was done on budget and paid for almost entirely by the landlord. Skip to content Fog Creek Software , News. That took rather longer than expected. Having drop-dead gorgeous, private, windowed offices makes it a lot easier to recruit the kinds of superstars that produce ten times as much as the merely brilliant software developers.

It better be nice. Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation. Programmers need lots of power outlets.

They should be able to plug new gizmos in at desk height without crawling on the floor. It should be possible to do pair programming. The office should be a hang out: a pleasant place to spend time. However if K is all you spent in addition to your lease with a standard buildout allowance, you got a great deal.

Like Joel, I bootstrapped a software company to similar size 25 employees. I did a calculation and we spend about 1. Given that this would be our 4th move in 6 years, I tend to be careful about long leases and lease buildouts.

I'd rather invest in paying good salaries, offering the best equipment and a nice but not extravagant work environment. Then I can afford to launch new products without being beholden to investors. I really like the glass walls though Where do you work in Western MA? I'm a software CEO as well and do a lot of work out there. We should get together sometime. Mistone on Dec 29, prev next [—]. Why not built a super cool company that you love to work at instead? I doubt it has a good ROI via recruiting, etc.

Joel mentioned he spent more than a million on improving the interior design. No recruiting is going to make up for that, any time soon. And in a few years Fog Creek will move to a different location again - at which point they'll have to build a new high end office. So really, this seems to be a case of spending money to improve quality of life.

The other benefits, such as for recruiting and PR are just a nice side effect. Remember that the office-construction expenses can be massaged by accountants to reduce taxes on them, and that an employee's e. To say nothing of the costs of recruiting a single employee. Just curious, how come your profile is written in 3rd person? Is this really Joel Spolsky, or a representative? Joel hang out here on a pretty regular basis. It's not written in the 3rd person! That would be more like "Joel thinks that the savings blah blah".

It's worth it for your recruiter to chase the weird ones if they're not right for XYZ Co. Footnote: I'm a recruiter, who -- sadly -- does not get to work with awesome companies like Fog Creek. Working on it, though. Oops, mental typo. Thanks for the correction. I agree, but then of course, spending a shit ton of money just to make yourself feel better is one of the luxuries of not being beholden to outside investors.

Between ludicrous offices and the 37s "4 days a week" plan, I'd probably go with 37s. Heh, you just won't let go of that "beholden to outside investor" thing, will you?

Are you suggesting that investors keep startups from getting ludicrous office space? From my experience with well-funded dotcom startups, they all tend to spend staggering amounts on sexy office space. We're lightly funded, so we sure as hell didn't.

Decent investors would only involve themselves if you were spending an unreasonable amount of money. Joel could be up to his armpits in Series D financing and not have an investor blink at this expenditure. You're right.

I'm wrong. Although I'm unlikely to "let go" of the outside investor thing; I help run a bootstrapped company, and had a bad VC experience. Or I was idly thinking once of a plan where you sprint for 3 weeks still with weekends off and then everyone has an entire week off.

I wonder if a refreshed, happy, and likely less compensated team like that could keep up with a full time one. No recruiting is going to make up for that, any time soon So what's your idea? Just how little do you think they earn? To have "a good ROI via recruiting," never mind the etc.

Although the chain of causality here has a lot of randomness attached to it, if he has a few million dollars in revenue per year, such an improvement hardly seems implausible. The flip side is that spending a lot of money on something apparently unnecessary might incline you to spend more money on things that are actually unnecessary. My envy on this place is mighty and all this from a bug tracker? Why can't I middle-click to open pictures in new windows? Because Google Breaks The Browser.

If you were using The Browser, Opera, here's how you could open those pictures effortlessly in new tabs: 1 Right-click on top of a picture, keep the button down. Every checkbox, every formatting option, and every feature in Microsoft Office has to be represented in file formats somewhere.

That has to be in the file format. And that means if you want to implement a perfect Word clone than can correctly read Word documents, you have to implement that feature.

They have to reflect the history of the applications. A lot of the complexities in these file formats reflect features that are old, complicated, unloved, and rarely used. But if you really want to do a thorough and complete job of parsing and writing these file formats, you have to redo all that work that some intern did at Microsoft 15 years ago.

A file format is just a concise summary of all the features an application supports. I want to look at the very first BIFF record in the spec. The Excel file format specification is remarkably obscure about this.

A classic piece of useless specification. If you were a developer working with the Excel file format, and you found this in the file format specification, you might be justified in concluding that Microsoft is hiding something. This piece of information does not give you enough information. At no point in history did a programmer ever not do the right thing, but there you have it. Both and file types are commonly found in the wild, usually depending on whether the file originated on Windows or Mac.