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To me, this sounds a lot like cognitive dissonance. It seems like Joel believes that his blog has primarily served to further Fog Creek and that he does his bl
by j_baker 17y ago
To me, this sounds a lot like cognitive dissonance. It seems like Joel believes that his blog has primarily served to further Fog Creek and that he does his blog because he enjoys it. To cope with these two competing ideas, he comes up with a new one: he likes his blog because it promotes Fog Creek. Therefore, when the blog quits being beneficial to Fog Creek, he quits.
I actually find this sad. In hindsight, some of Joel's writings might not seem terribly radical, mostly because they've since been accepted. But most of them were when he actually wrote them. I think we underestimate the effect that Joel has had on the software industry.
- jrockway 17y agoWhat are Joel's contributions, exactly? Write your own programming language and quit your job if you don't have an Aeron chair in your own private office?
- rglullis 17y agoOh, much more than that: his Strategy Letters are full of insights. He was one of the first to speak against being too focused on looking for VC. He has always been a proponent of BDUF but rejected any kind of "software engineering certification" as a measure of code quality.
- 4chan4ever 17y agoOh, please. If Spolsky doesn't want to continue blogging, I think the world will survive. For a couple years now all Joel has offered to the software community is: "here, read this, listen to my Stackoverflow podcast while I whore out Fog Creek." The few times he actually decides to really talk software, it's pretty good, and his VC stuff is pretty good, but there's nothing he contributes that the world can't get from a dozen other guys. And frankly, he comes across as kind of an a-hole in his podcasts. Atwood is a much nicer guy.
- barredo 17y agoI'm sorry but you lost me at 'BDUF', what does it mean? (Google results seems to agree on "Big Design Up Front" but I still do not understand)
- goof 17y agoYeah, he's referring to Big Design Up Front. It just means doing specs and schedules instead of PG style exploratory programming. e.g. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000036.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000036.html
- statictype 17y agoI think comments like this are part of the reason he's stopping.
- adamc 17y agoMy take-away was slightly different: I think his goals changed along the way. These days, he is very interested in furthering Fog Creek. But when I started reading his essays (before even "Joel on Software", when he was using Dave Winer's software to manage his blog), I think his goals were less clear and a lot of the essays were just ideas that he needed to express. As with many similar bloggers, I think his early years were incredible, but the good ideas gradually became scarcer -- compare his last five years of essays with his first five years. I suspect that is because in his early years he could mine the many ideas he'd had prior to blogging. So it may not be a bad thing from him to let that lie fallow for a while. He can always un-retire if so moved. Anyhow, I wish him well and hope he finds joy in following his current interests.