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I find the Joel test such a useless measure. It doesn't actually tell you anything about the quality of the code being written. In other news, tomorrow is my l

by latch 15y ago

I find the Joel test such a useless measure. It doesn't actually tell you anything about the quality of the code being written. In other news, tomorrow is my last day at a large investment bank...I plan on curling up in a ball and crying for the next couple weeks over just how miserable the experience was.

veyron 15y ago
I agree that many of the parts aren't really that useful. That having been said, if we were to devise the "HN test", what would be required?
- latch 15y ago
  I'm at the point where I've heard so many stories from people hiring, that I really just want to see source code. Point me to a public repo of projects your company (or, failing that, you yourself) have.
montanalow 15y ago
The Joel test gives a nice proxy to measure the experience levels of the people in charge. Inexperienced people seem to underestimate their risks, and overestimate their abilities. Everyone eventually makes a mistake, but the Joel test reveals how likely mistakes are to be caught early, and how quickly a team will be able to recover. When it comes to an complex system, these quickly become critical to maintaining a measure of quality, regardless of how "awesome" the individuals are.
InclinedPlane 15y ago
That's not what the Joel Test is intended to measure. You can write quite excellent code even with having a score of 0 on the Joel Test. It's purpose is instead to gauge the quality of the team and workplace and their ability to get the work that needs doing done without being bogged down with all the problems that come with poor processes. In general the practices highlighted in the Joel Test are some of the most high impact in improving overall development velocity and efficiency as well as in preventing burnout. There is a pretty strong correlation (at least in my experience) with low Joel Test scores and teams/companies who spend a lot more time fighting fires, fighting with tooling, struggling just to get basic dev. tasks completed (e.g. building and testing), working excessive hours, etc. As a consequence of that their productive work vs hours worked ratio is so low that they end up putting out a lower quality product at a much higher cost and they end up causing a lot of excessive stress to developers.

by latch 15y ago

veyron 15y ago

I agree that many of the parts aren't really that useful. That having been said, if we were to devise the "HN test", what would be required?

latch 15y ago
I'm at the point where I've heard so many stories from people hiring, that I really just want to see source code. Point me to a public repo of projects your company (or, failing that, you yourself) have.

montanalow 15y ago

The Joel test gives a nice proxy to measure the experience levels of the people in charge. Inexperienced people seem to underestimate their risks, and overestimate their abilities. Everyone eventually makes a mistake, but the Joel test reveals how likely mistakes are to be caught early, and how quickly a team will be able to recover. When it comes to an complex system, these quickly become critical to maintaining a measure of quality, regardless of how "awesome" the individuals are.

InclinedPlane 15y ago

That's not what the Joel Test is intended to measure. You can write quite excellent code even with having a score of 0 on the Joel Test. It's purpose is instead to gauge the quality of the team and workplace and their ability to get the work that needs doing done without being bogged down with all the problems that come with poor processes. In general the practices highlighted in the Joel Test are some of the most high impact in improving overall development velocity and efficiency as well as in preventing burnout. There is a pretty strong correlation (at least in my experience) with low Joel Test scores and teams/companies who spend a lot more time fighting fires, fighting with tooling, struggling just to get basic dev. tasks completed (e.g. building and testing), working excessive hours, etc. As a consequence of that their productive work vs hours worked ratio is so low that they end up putting out a lower quality product at a much higher cost and they end up causing a lot of excessive stress to developers.