Don’t miss Joel’s speech at Yale
Great speech about careers in software development, told around Joel’s experience.
From part 2, which is as far as I’ve read so far:
No matter how critical it was for Viacom to get this internet thing right, when it came time to assign people to desks, the in-house programmers were stuck with 3 people per cubicle in a dark part of the office with no line-of-sight to a window, and the “producers,” I don’t know what they did exactly but they were sort of the equivalent of Turtle on Entourage, the producers had their own big windowed offices overlooking the Hudson River. Once at a Viacom Christmas party I was introduced to the executive in charge of interactive strategy or something. A very lofty position. He said something vague and inept about how interactivity was very important. It was the future. It convinced me that he had no flipping idea whatsoever what it was that was happening and what the internet meant or what I did as a programmer, and he was a little bit scared of it all, but who cares, because he’s making 2 million dollars a year and I’m just a typist or “HTML operator” or whatever it is that I did, how hard can it be, his teenage daughter can do that.