The context is important. First, it is in reply to this, which quotes Spolsky as:
"This seemed to piss off a guy named Greg Whitten who headed up the App Architecture
group. Now, Greg was something like Microsoft employee number 6. He had been around
forever; nobody could quite point to anything he had done but apparently he had
lunch with Bill Gates a lot and GW-BASIC was named after him."
Second, the post to the mailing list itself is a forward of a private e-mail
from Greg Whitten. I can't see if he said anywhere he was okay with making
it public.
I hope that John Foust had Dr. Whitten's permission to publish this apparently private mail. To the people who say that Whitten is arrogant or bitter, please read Joel's disrespectful comments first:
"This seemed to piss off a guy named Greg Whitten who headed up the App Architecture group. Now, Greg was something like Microsoft employee number 6. He had been around forever; nobody could quite point to anything he had done but apparently he had lunch with Bill Gates a lot and GW-BASIC was named after him."
Disrespectful? So what -- Joel's comments sound accurate, particularly after reading the letter. The phrase "architecture astronaut" ran through my head over and over while reading the email. Along with arrogant ass.
In particular, this line: "I was a world class expert in
graph theory, analysis of algorithms, sparse matrix algorithms for linear systems, numerical analysis, and non-linear multi-variate time series analyis before arriving at Microsoft to write language compilers." Any one of the set {graph theory, algorithm analysis, numerical analysis, linear systems, and non-linear multivariate ts} is a full PhD and a full life on its own. Nobody is an expert in all 5.
Frankly, he sounds like the sort of person startups in particular should stay as far away from as humanly possible. I worked for someone like this at my last startup and he was a cancer. But he could hold endless meetings, drop jargon like a master, demean fellow employees, and act as a general barrier to accomplishing useful work.
Definitely. It's hard to sit comfortably with passages like "Unfortunately, for Microsoft and .NET, I left the company in 1998. The .NET team made a number of significant mistakes."
Yeah, especially considering how much more of a nightmare COM and the rest of the .NET predecessors were which he was involved with, as compared to .NET, which he wasn't.
Maybe he's spot on, maybe not. But one thing is for sure; his story does not contain a trace of humility.
I got the same vibe too... I don't know exactly if what he says is true (or if it's just exaggerations) but the way he says it doesn't make me want to meet him.
Especially the passage on OMG made me cringe...
How many times did this guy use "I did blah blah" in his mail ... most egotistical thing I have ever heard, atleast Linus Torvalds does it sarcastically, I think this guy was really serious about everything !!
it was a response to Joel's claim that the only thing this guy did at msft was have lunch with Bill G. The links backing this up are on the reddit thread.
The part about Spolsky, if true, is interesting because Joel obviously doesn't see some of the decisions he made at Microsoft as wrong since he's still doing the same thing.
"He made other similarly stupid decisions like creating a custom programming interface for BASIC in Excel instead of sharing a common interface as strongly recommended. "
Did anyone else think of his special Fog Creek internal programming language?
I particularly like this article that says you should only write new production code in a language lots of people know and others have lots of experience in and then ends with we don't though.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html
You know, "meh". This is basically like saying, "when he was at Microsoft, Spolsky traded off the vision of a grand unified scripting architecture for all Microsoft products in favor of something that the Excel team could actually execute on and launch. Later on, when he founded Fog Creek, he allowed a developer to write a custom scripting language to implement common-codebase cross-platform, rather than waiting for the industry to come up with a totally acceptable cross-platform development environment". He sounds consistently pragmatic, if perhaps a bit inelegant.
"when he founded Fog Creek, he allowed a developer to write a custom scripting language to implement common-codebase cross-platform, rather than waiting using one of the many totally acceptable cross-platform development environment readily available"
> (Yes, it's a rhetorical question, but if there's a reason why this has suddenly become timely I'd actually like to know.)
That I can answer. In a recent episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, Joel Spolsky mentioned that old Excel Basic story as an example of dealing with self-declared software architects. Unfortunately, I don't remember the exact episode number and the transcription wiki doesn't have it yet. But he basically didn't say anything that he hasn't already said in his "Two Stories" article (link below).
(I don't know if this new discussion is particularly interesting or relevant, but that's why it suddenly erupted.)
It would be surprising to me if someone didn't build this concept with valves and vacuum tubes before 'software' even existed. People always quote it as some major milestone like the invention of the wheel or something but it honestly seems to me like a natural and obvious design that just about anybody comes up with when faced with the right set of problems to solve.
Yeah yeah, well Joel is not fan of those "Chief Software Architects" at Microsoft either. If you listen to the #44 stackoverflow podcast, he really disses those "architect" types.
This just goes to show how important is to be nice ALLLL the time on the internet.
The one time JS is a douche, he gets called on it big time, and there's nothing he can say to make himself seem like less of a douche.
I am sure JS and GW are both perfectly fine people if you sit down with them for a cup of coffee, and if they randomly sat next to each other on a plane they'd probably get along fine too.
