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Oslo Dinner

You're invited to a Joel on Software dinner in Oslo, Norway on Thursday, August 14th, at 19:30 at Peppe's Pizza, Karl Johansgate 1 (outside Oslo S).  I'm arriving that afternoon on SAS 1514; you may want to check if the flight is horribly delayed or cancelled, in which case the meeting is still on but I won't be there!

Yes, we'll have more dinners in other cities in the future.

Joel (March 28): “... when you relocate more than a couple of miles, some employees' lives would be too disrupted to make the move, so you lose a lot of employees, and all the institutional knowledge, skill, and experience that comes with those employees. While I was working at Viacom one of their companies, Blockbuster, decided to move from Florida to Texas after they hired a new CEO who lived in — Texas! What a coincidence! Only a small portion of the employees made the move. For years and years the business press watched agog as Blockbuster made mistake after inexcusable mistake, re-trying all kinds of ideas that had failed only two years earlier.”

LA Times (April 13): “Investigators are examining whether the move eviscerated Boeing's technical capability and played a role in the Columbia disaster on Feb. 1.... The decision to move the jobs was highly unpopular among Boeing's workforce, and about 80% of the California engineers refused to relocate, forcing the company to hire workers in Texas and forfeit much of the experience of its California engineering base.”

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About the Author: I’m your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. Since 2000, I've been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet on this site. For my day job, I run Fog Creek Software, makers of FogBugz—the smart bug tracking software with the stupid name, and Fog Creek Copilot—the easiest way to provide remote tech support over the Internet, with nothing to install or configure.

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