Being kind to your employees should really just be obvious. Unfortunately it is not. Many people with rank in a company treat others terribly, simply because

Being kind to your employees should really just be obvious. Unfortunately it is not. Many people with rank in a company treat others terribly, simply because they can. Probably they don't know any better, and haven't considered the downsides. Joel does a really good job of packaging ideas from books like Peopleware and Mythical Man-Month in a way average people will respond to. No matter what his software company does, that's valuable service. I don't know all that much about bug tracking software, but at my last company the trouble ticketing system they used was a monstrosity (Peregrine Service Center). Everyone hated it. It had a sluggish java applet client. It was an enormous resource hog, it was buggy, and had a horrid interface. It took forever to log in and logged you out after 15 minutes of inactivity (taking over your desktop to inform you of that fact). I'd guess this load of crap was costing the company a fortune compared to a shrink-wrap solution like FogBugz. Here's a picture of the interface: http://www.goladus.com/_.jpg http://www.goladus.com/_.jpg