Joel on Software

2002/01/31

This is one of those days where I could write a comment that says:

maybe it's easier to do this at eval time.
We could tag the foreach onto the malkovitch.

and it would actually make sense.

What is Six Degrees?

When software companies say that "their capital assets go home every night," they are serious. Dead serious. And when Quark goes down in flames because the bean-counters pushed out the experienced developers and hired new, cheaper ones 10 time zones away, there will be a great case study in Harvard Business Review to prove it.

There are not a lot of software companies to work for in Denver. So when the key designers of QuarkXPress 5.0 got sick of being treated like interchangable code slaves, they started their own shop and quickly sold it to a smart Vancouver-based company that wrote them a blank check and let them stay in their hometown.

What they came up with is nothing short of a breakthrough in the field of personal knowledge management, an effervescent field that has not quite made it onto the radar of the buzzword maniacs. Six Degrees is gonna be Google for the desktop.  Everywhere I look I see people blabbing about how they're going to crack the knowledge management nut. It's like 7 years ago when everybody was making a search engine. But only Larry and Sergey figured out the formula to make search actually work, and only Mark, David, Cameron and Zach figured out the formula for to make knowledge management actually work. This is cool stuff. Ship it already, dammit, I need it yesterday!

Work with me, here! Fog Creek Software has great 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.

Want to know more?

You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make FogBugz, an enlightened project management system designed to help great teams develop brilliant software, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop access easy.