ISerializable - Roy Osherove's Blog

Microsoft and standards in the same article?

Are you a comedian? Have to read about this in your resume.

Well I am one of those guys coming out from college and I can tell you that not even on 7 figures I would join a mediocre company like microsoft.

Bye

Thanks for the reality check.  Joel could have as easily written an article about all the baskets Michael Jordan missed during his career.

Maybe, just maybe, Joel can figure out how to get his FogBugz product to delete related cases (a feature that people have been *begging* for for YEARS now!).  Also, hopefully, he can hire someone that can figure out how to update his application without restarting the whole web server!

How he got "famous" hawking a mediocre product like FogBugz is beyond me.

I think your wrong on that point. Microsoft would love to have me. They just won't.

By the way unit testing ain't a art. It's a mediocre and limited technique to prove nothing about the product your selling but asking more money for it. If you want something serious take a look at formal methods.

Stop evangelizing these kind of things and start working on nice projects. Unit Testings, .NETs. ASPNETS, "agile" development. Drop them all. Get serious.

Support open standards and open-source. That's the future. And leave that crap of a company you work for.

I'd attribute a lot of what you raise to researchers, obviously the big companies have put the man power in to create the product but a lot of what is being done before/now/future has been around for years and years. A quick search on something like ACM or IEEE would yield many papers on supposed "new" solutions.

Granted that *some* of these researchers are funded by the big companies though.

Joel really "went for it", i mean "working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy" really?? that's what he thinks of MSFT and GOOG? Aren't these the two companies that have shaped the internet and desktop app's to become what they are today?  aren't these companies somewhat responsible for all of us having jobs?  (in my case that's obvious...)

Nuno: you're a douche, if MSFT offered you an internship where YOU had pay then you should take it and maybe learn a thing or two.

"not even on 7 figures"

whatever... I guess your parents are paying for your Harvard education as well?

Joel is very elitist in his attitude, because he was a project manager for Excel many many years ago, he thinks he knows everything.

stfu idiot.  yer a overrated hack with a shitty blog.  who the fuck cares what you have to say.

You've really missed the hole point of his article...

Joel has no problem with unsuccessful projects, nor with MS's great success stories.

All he's saying, with his usual funny as hell sarcasm, is that the hole sync shebang is - again - getting out of hand...

And whilst you can agree and disagree about that, his bigger problem is that like in the beginning of the big hi-tech bang, big companies pay big money to small children, which is not good for the industry, not good for the companies and especially not good for these children.

In my opinion you are somewhat exaggeratig Joel's idea.

I've re-read the article second time and I don't see he is blaming on the system totally.

It looks like he is trying to state that the current ideology of handling the industry needs of technological breakthroughs sucks.

That's pretty much valid point for me, for I'd prefer in the future to continue with English language as the primary language of communication in technology, not with some kind of hieroglyph-based language.

The current system sucks tremendously. And there is no fast way to regulate it. Talking about it as a math function, you may influence on only n-th derivatives, and these n-th derivative coefficints are youth-related (starting even from school age). The western civilization (including post-Soviet area) seems not to be able to develop a viable one concept.

Funny thing. I've just clicked on the link you labeled "How do you support X millions of transactions per minute?" and get the following response:

   Sorry, we were unable to service your request at this time. Please try again later.

   (Code: c26353c3-f292, 5/2/2008 12:36 PM)

You should all proof-read your blogs and comments before posting! From this page alone:

gogole

Gogle

your wrong

your selling

exaggeratig

the hole point

...

Even if Joe might be a bit harsh I think you place a little too much belief in the 2 big ones. Yes, both MS and Google have contributed to the world of computing and networking, but saying things like: 'When was the last *important* thing you've built that didn't rely on some knowledge that came out of one of those two huge companies?' I think you ar egiving them a bit too much credit. Most things they are very good at were started elsewhere (and is still done elsewhere) and there's tons of existing tech outside them (RoR, django, all from apache foundation, sun).

Having said that,I just must answer Nuno Job (let's feed the trolls!;-), you clearly haven't much clue. unit testing is an excellent tool. formal methods are all very nice, but cost a lot in time and money, for spaceshuttles, cars and aeroplanes yes, pleae use them but for everyday application development? slight overkill.

Yes I do have a clue Fredrik. How can you assume that without knowing me or my work? That is plain stupid.

The reason I (re)acted like a jerk is the fact that the guy that posted this article is a jerk himself and can't relax, read joel article and have fun with it. Instead he's a microsoft grupie so he must whine and whine against all that comes in ms way.

You're spot on Roy.  I read Joel's post and it seemed like he was bitter about MSFT and Google luring away the brighter devs with more money and brand name.

He put out an article a few years where he said he paid a high starting salary (75K) to new grads to attract them, apart from the environment.  If it takes more money nowadays to get the best talent, then he needs to cough it up.

Personally, I don't get the appeal of product companies. You work on a small module that is part of the entire product, never get to see the entire picture, and spend a large amount of your time doing bug fixes, and building on top a stable framework.  The opportunity to learn new technology is minimal.  This was my experience at least.

I much prefer project-based work, where you get to work on a variety of apps and domains.

I agree.. I was surprised when I read Joel's post. It seemed to be a marketing stunt to get more people to work for him (or to keep them working for him) and it seemed to go against what he said in the past.  Keep in mind, his analogy of "architectural astronauts" is very true... Indeed after reading about it, I am seeing them all over the place!

"Support open standards and open-source. That's the future. And leave that crap of a company you work for."

*Snort* I can't think of a company more involved in standards than "that crap of a company he works for"

Oh right.. to be true open source means you have put the anti-microsoft blinders on. got 'ya.

"Unit Testings, .NETs. ASPNETS, "agile" development. Drop them all. Get serious."

*Snort* Hmm.. lets see, apparently serious doesn't involve 1) Open source projects (jUnit/nUnit/xUnit/etc and other open source unit test frameworks) used by both fortune-500 and small orgs alike. 2) Standards-based development platforms(ECMA-335 CLI) that are implemented by 3rd parties (Novell with Mono, Others) 3) Who knew asp.net had xHtml/html conformance? 4) Methodology being implemented by fortune-500 and mum-and-pop development orgs alike..

Hmm.. Funny definition of serious..

Thank you Roy I like your response a lot. There is nothing wrong with thinking big. I have been known to be an Astronaut Architecht, and yes I have designed and built complete and utter bombs; however, that is how we progress.

Out of one of the bombs in particular came a tiny piece of understanding and design around a complex problem, which was used to build the next version of a key service for a company I worked for.

There is nothing wrong with getting something wrong. There is something wrong with not learning from it.