Joel Spolsky: The Day My Industry Died

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090701/joel-spolsky-the-day-my-industry-died.html

by twampss • 17 years ago

175 63 17 years ago

inc.com

keltecp11• 17 years ago

Probably one of the more inspirational postings I've seen on HN in awhile. Thanks for sharing.

sanj• 17 years ago

It is strange that City Desk never gets mentioned: http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk/

From what I recall, that was the primary product and FogBugz was an in-house tool used to track it.

kailoa• 17 years ago

Joel uses his articles as marketing tools. FogBugz makes money and CityDesk is part of that industry that died.

lackbeard• 17 years ago

How is CityDesk part of the dead industry? I thought it was basically blogging software. That industry was just being born at that time.

davi2• 17 years ago

A Maker's marketing can be more interesting than a non-Maker's reporting.

bjplink• 17 years ago

This story is kind of more of the same and I'm sure a lot of the readers here have heard it before; if not about Joel in particular, than at least about ArsDigita and Razorfish and this era of the tech boom in general.

What IS interesting though is his mention of the Startup.com documentary. If you haven't seen it, and have any kind of passing interest in the startup space or starting your own web company, I strongly suggest you check it out. It's fantastic.

Batsu• 17 years ago

There's something about the stories told by Joel that always feel more down to earth than the typical sensationalist blog write up. Good read.

diz• 17 years ago

I thought it was a little dry, even for Joel, who isn't terribly interesting. He sure knows how to sell a/his product, though.

SamAtt• 17 years ago

A nice read but a badly titled article. The truth is Web Consultancy is probably 10,000 times bigger than it was in 2000 it's just decentralized now. So yeah, if you're trying to make it in the bay area as a web consultant you probably don't stand a chance. But elsewhere there's about as much opportunity as you're willing to try for.

The truth is it's so big now that it (sadly) manages to sustain a fairly significant underbelly of complete incompetents along with all the qualified people.

callmeed• 17 years ago

I totally agree with you, but they almost feel like different industries. Back then, old media and F500 companies had to hire the consultants because there was no one in-house to do it. Today, most of those corps have entire departments devoted to web design/app development. Sure, they still outsource some gigs, but it seems like the consultancy industry now focuses on smaller companies (even down to the mom-and-pop level).

netsp• 17 years ago

There is even a lively market in blog themes for individuals.

cstross• 17 years ago

Anecdote from 1996 in the UK, back when web consultancy was still relatively small, but growing: fma (my employer at the time) bid for one web design job against competition. When we got the job, we learned that our bid was the highest by a factor of two! And we got the job because we were "reassuringly expensive"!

Folks who don't understand a new field will throw money at it because they want a serious professional to hold their hand. As the old 80s aphorism put it, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"; an executive at an FT100 company, dabbling in the web for the first time, would expect to spend lots of money at the steep start of the learning curve. But once they began to get a clue about how difficult (or easy) the job really was, they'd start to play hardball.

And that's what the early web consultancies didn't understand: they were living on borrowed time, and basing their growth on a commodity that could only scale linearly (web developer/programmer hours).

nir2• 17 years ago

There may be more demand now (I don't about x10,000 more..) but there's a lot more supply too. Many of the "web consultants" Spolsky is referring to were people making 6 figure salaries for barely knowing HTML (not even CSS). The common "15 minute blog" you see in many frameworks' intro could command $n0,000 contracts.

There's no lack of hype in the current web, but that first bubble was really something to see :)

jasonkester2• 17 years ago

"Decentralized" is the key word here. Back in 2000, the term Web Consultancy refered to a company with 200+ developers on staff, who would charge you $250/hr to build your site. Nothing ever cost lest than six figures, and any decent site would run you at least half a million dollars.

That is the industry that went away. A few of the little guys (myself included) survived the Mass Extinction, much in the same way that proto-mice survived the alien first strike that killed the dinosaurs.

10 years later, we still aren't seeing any of those giant Consultancies emerging again (at least not onshore). It's just a big mess of little shops. And many of us have product lines to smooth out the revenue curve.

koos• 17 years ago

These inc articles are just re-hashing stuff that you can read in "Founders at Work" or even Joel's blog. It's a bit disappointing actually.

_cbsz4• 17 years ago

Very similar to Founders at Work. Might be some lifted or paraphrased paragraphs in there.

rewind• 17 years ago

That's a pretty bold statement. Care to be more specific? "Might" doesn't cut it when you're publicly questioning somebody's credibility.

gamble• 17 years ago

Joel built his business by relating Microsoft gossip and telling programmers what they wanted to hear. It's a marketing blog. Now that his customers are businessmen, he's telling them what they want to hear, in a forum they're likely to read.

discojesus• 17 years ago

"Joel built his business by relating Microsoft gossip and telling programmers what they wanted to hear."

I'm pretty sure programmers don't want to hear "you need to be writing functional specs" [http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000036.html], "you don't know enough about Unicode" [http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html], "if you don't 'get' pointers and recursion, you just ain't cut out to be a programmer" [http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.ht...], or "you should never scrap a working codebase and start all over" [http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html]

sgoraya• 17 years ago

The day I knew things were in trouble was at a party in San Francisco (fall 2000). A recruiter for a "hot new start up" was trying to hire my friend, a history major, as a programmer that did not have to program, guaranteeing that he would make "75k" starting. If he hit his recruitment numbers, a big bonus was in store. He may have been drunk but was sober enough to give my buddy a business card and rough directions to the office.

One of my favorite stories from those days.

silentbicycle5• 17 years ago

As an aside - Just because someone is a history major, it doesn't mean they can't program. (Given how many things seem to be invented, then forgotten, then recreated from scratch and shown off as the new hot breakthrough every few years, the field could benefit from caring more about its history.)

jodrellblank• 17 years ago

"Programmer-archaeologist" (credit: Vernor Vinge)

Locke16894• 17 years ago

The problem with that is exactly as Peter Norvig states: learn programming in ten years[1]. I would not argue that some great programmers have never had any formal training. But they worked hard. Really hard. For a long time. To believe that someone who has never touched a programming language before is ready for a developer job after a couple weeks, a couple months, or even as much as a year is just ridiculous.

When CS grads can't even program for years after graduation, the solution is not to bring in people with even less training.

[1]http://norvig.com/21-days.html

nir2• 17 years ago

There's a good chance the company the recruiter was working for would actually hire your friend. Many companies were under pressure to increase their staff and show "growth" to their investors. I was working for a company with a super-talented team of about 20-30 people, which suddenly ballooned to ~100, many of whom simply had nothing to do.

tlrobinson• 17 years ago

I still have my CueCat somewhere :)

It's interesting the idea is sort of making a comeback with QR codes and cell phone readers. Perhaps CueCat was just far ahead of it's time (and flawed by not being portable)

joe_bleau• 17 years ago

I have a couple as well, one still plugged into to my PC at work. I never understood why people thought it was such a terrible idea.

Quarrelsome• 17 years ago

Cause of the whole chicken <-> egg problem. No-one will use CueCats unless there are lots of those barcodes online. The barcodes wont appear in significant numbers online unless everyone has a CueCat.

old-gregg• 17 years ago

Say all you want about Joel the programmer, but Joel the writer is awesome.

Sadly, we're in exactly the same situation right now: after almost 2 years of exsiting life of self-funded young company in NYC, suddenly most of our customers did not renew, our recurring revenue is being consumed by medical insurance and rent and we're brainstorming on new business ideas... This piece gives me hope, because living off your savings in NYC is scary-scary! :)

BTW if someone is working on something cool in NYC let me know [see my profile].

omouse• 17 years ago

The immediate problem all those consultancies faced in 1999 and 2000 was that, like ArsDigita, they couldn't find enough great software developers to handle all the new business they were bringing in, so they had to turn away clients.

I thought the trouble was that they were hiring so many people that they couldn't keep the same company culture and in the end the software devs became outsourceable?

kscaldef• 17 years ago

In 1999, ArsDigita was never more than 40 people (and probably started the year with less than 20). It's possible at that time that they were turning away business. I joined in Jan 2000. By August the company was over 200 and the sales stream was collapsing. They had massively overshot the demand of the market. (Largely because the market they were serving was other dot-coms, which were now in the process of imploding.)

To keep all those people busy, and in an attempt to shift from a services company to a product company, a "core engineering" team was created with the task of rewriting the ACS in Java. This further exacerbated the revenue stream problems, because the version of the software we used for client projects was now stagnant, making it harder to get or keep contracts.

In the end the rewrite was never finished before the money ran out, although I think it did live on for a while as some sort of RedHat offering. (The "assets" of the company were bought by RH in the end.)

davi2• 17 years ago

I got a job offer from aD back in the day... went for a walk w/ Greenspun + Alex to talk about it. I didn't like how everyone at the company's ego seemed to depend so entirely on programming ability (I was fresh out of college and cared about these things a lot).

His response? "At least it's a meritocracy!"

Not a bad answer, really. I am glad to have participated in that time (1998-2000) + place (Boston).

tptacek2• 17 years ago

Waiwaiwaiwaiwaiwait...

What about CityDesk? Wasn't that your first product? Did you really go straight from consulting to a successful product, or did you have a second false start? How'd you guys navigate that?

I know the Inc. audience probably doesn't need the details, but I'd be interested in them.

pchristensen2• 17 years ago

The order was 1) consulting, 2) FogBugz, 3) CityDesk. FogBugz was a side project that grew into a successful product, CityDesk was the first intentional product but it was not successful.

galactus• 17 years ago

Are you sure?

From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000009.html (October 2001):

"I've been rather quiet lately on this weblog -- mainly because we've been working so hard at Fog Creek getting ready for the beta of CityDesk, our flagship product."

I have been reading Joel on software for quite a long time, I remember reading that fogbugz was just their home-grown brug tracking system, not intended to be a real "product" at the beggining.

I also remember how Joel used to argue that citydesk would win because no one would like to write a blog using a web interface...

jasonkester2• 17 years ago

The late 90's was a great time to be alive, and it taught me one lesson that still guides me today:

The dot-com boom was a goldrush, and if you look back to the Klondike goldrush 100 years previous you can notice a pattern. There were two groups of individuals who got rich back then: The guys that got there first, and the guys that sold shovels to everybody else.

It's hard to be that First Guy, but it's easy to notice him and set up a shovel stand.

brown9-2• 17 years ago

This is true of all bubbles. It's what makes a bubble a bubble. See: Housing bubble of mid 2000s.

binarycheese• 17 years ago

The one who gets extremely rich is the one whole suppliers beer & liquor to all the bars (& w houses)

smithjchris3• 17 years ago

Oh my god Joel has Spoken. Must worship etc etc. Seriously - why do people genuinely wait on his every word? Atwood is the same!

All they do is spurge illogical capitalist business nonsense for the sake of making a few pounds/dollars/yen etc. The blog is a marketing medium for their products and their mindset. They constantly contradict (think Joel on simplicity a while back).

What about people who do this because they like it and want to help people. What about those people and their motivations. The altruistic nature surrounding these people is far more important than the self-important blog pimps.

And yes CityDesk and FogBugz are crap. CityDesk is a chunk of jumk reminiscent of MCMS 2002. FogBugz is FlySpray with some tartyness and some cost added. So whoopee doo.

smithjchris3• 17 years ago

Modded to -2. Thou must not insult those who are holier than thou.

allenbrunson2• 17 years ago

As a matter of fact, the social mores around here prohibit insulting anybody. You can disagree, but it must be done respectfully.

thomasfl• 17 years ago

And in the late nineties everybody was making content management systems. Two of my web content management systems became products.

Joel Spolsky: The Day My Industry Died

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