Wanted: Senior Systems QA Engineer at Arxan Defense Systems, Inc (West Lafayette, IN 47906). See this and other great job listings at jobs.joelonsoftware.com.

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This item ran on the Joel on Software homepage on Saturday, December 04, 2004

I just ordered a copy of The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, which, among other things, debunks the stories about how Eskimos have lots of words for snow.

Now for the bit that only Hebrew speakers are going to understand.

No matter how debunked Whorf is, I'm still convinced that Israelis are more likely to do things דווקא, simply because they have a word for it. And I have been forced to write entire essays simply because I cannot find any other way to convey to English speakers the difference between ראש גדול and ראש קטן. All I wanted to say was that methodologies encourage ראש קטן and I need everyone on my team to be ראש גדול.

To someone who has never learned Hebrew it takes me two or three books to explain that. MSF is a fraud–an attempt to consolidate all the ראש גדול things Microsoft programmers do in a set of rules which are supposed to work if you force ראש קטן bizonim to implement them. And it’s never going to work.

I have been trying to translate this simple concept to English for years and am just about ready to give up. The Joel on Software award for excellence in technical translation will go to the person who can best express the preceding two paragraphs in English!

Oh, and by the way: My company, Fog Creek Software, has paid internships in software development for qualified college students. They're in New York City. Free housing, lunch, and more. And you get to work on real, shipping software with the smartest developers in the business.

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.

Enter your email address to receive a (very occasional) email whenever I write a major new article. You can unsubscribe at any time, of course.

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. More about me.

There's a complete archive of everything going back to 2000. The home page is reserved for minor, ephemeral thoughts, but occasionally I write a longer article. You can sign up to receive email whenever this happens at the bottom of this page. We also have one of those RSS thingamajiggies. If you don't know what that is, consider yourself lucky.

This site is actively translated by volunteers around the world into more than thirty languages.

Want to hire great developers? Looking for a job that doesn't suck? Over 200,000 great programmers read my job board at jobs.joelonsoftware.com.

StackOverflow podcast series at ITConversations

Jeff Atwood and I have a weekly podcast on IT Conversations where we chat about software development, especially the new website we're building, stackoverflow.com.

Have feedback? There are several popular discussion boards on this site:

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Business of Software
Design of Software
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TechInterview.org
CityDesk
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You can also email me directly, although my mailbox is an official disaster area.

For my day job, I'm the CEO of Fog Creek Software, a bootstrapped software company in New York, NY.

We make FogBugz, a bug tracking system that actually works and can be used to manage everything your development team does, from bug tracking to customer email to feature management to project scheduling and so much more. Free online trial.

We also make Fog Creek Copilot, which lets you control someone else's computer (with their permission, of course) over the Internet. It's the best way to fix someone's computer problems remotely. There's nothing to install, it's simple as heck, and it works through any kind of firewall, NAT, or proxy situation with zero configuration. More

If you're in college, Fog Creek Software has a very cool paid internship program (last year's interns developed Copilot in one summer). We also run a Software Management Training Program, an intensive two year program for college graduates to learn about managing high tech that combines a Masters in Technology Management with extensive hands-on experience in a variety of positions.

Share links to interesting URLs with other readers at the Joel Reddit (about).

Wondering what it's like to develop software at Fog Creek? The documentary Aardvark'd covers the story of the development of Copilot. It's available on DVD.

Read the archives in dead-tree format! There are now four books available at your favorite bookstore: User Interface Design for Programmers, Joel on Software, Smart and Gets Things Done, and More Joel on Software. All are excellent ways to catch up on years of the drivel that appears here without going blind reading it on a computer screen.

Fog Creek co-founder Michael Pryor has his own site on Technical Interview Questions.

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