6 ms·

A job at Joel's company doesn't pass the "Joel Test"

26 points by ryanjodonnell 14y ago

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ryanjodonnell 14y ago
Look at the bottom to see the "Joel Test". 10/12. Lol.
usea 14y ago
Isn't the joel test less about pass/fail and more about communicating and encouraging certain things that make a better environment for developers? I don't really care if they "pass" the joel test or not, but I do find the answers to the questions helpful. I sure as hell wouldn't want to work in a place with no source control.
- coreyja 14y ago
  I agree. Also, I don't know if I would consider a 12/12 the only way to "pass," if you want to think about it that way. A 10/12 is a pretty good score, but I think it is more about the transparency and knowing what the job offers and what it doesn't.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  Joel didn't leave himself much breathing room on interpreting the test results. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html "A score of 12 is perfect, 11 is tolerable, but 10 or lower and you've got serious problems. The truth is that most software organizations are running with a score of 2 or 3, and they need serious help, because companies like Microsoft run at 12 full-time. "
  - excuse-me 14y ago
    And if you are in the operating system business and you score less than 12 you are in trouble If you are competing with microsoft in web services you can probably afford to score rather less!
  - tomjen3 14y ago
    Which just goes to show how old that is. Which tech company wants to be in ms shoes, without the pegacy cash cows?
yen223 14y ago
The lack of a schedule I can understand, but Stack Exchange has no testers?!
- mjibson 14y ago
  The dev cycle is: type code -> build -> push to prod.
  - JasonPunyon 14y ago
    That middle part is where the tests run. On Careers for example we have a decent set of Selenium tests that run through the core functionality of the site on every dev build (Can I Login? Can I buy something? Can I post a job? If I have a profile and I go to the profile page is it there? type stuff).
- xyzzyz 14y ago
  Maybe it means that they have no designated testers, no separate QA team, and everybody is responsible for testing.
  - astrodust 14y ago
    For a site that important, that seems like a serious oversight. Maybe the testers are unsuspecting users in the A/B pool of Facebook-style deployment where A = stable and B = mystery meat.
outside1234 14y ago
Is the question "do you have testers" obsolete - should it be "do you have tests?" I'd personally rather work at a place that has tests vs. testers.
- postfuturist 14y ago
  Tests are important, as are dedicated QA engineers.
- tomjen3 14y ago
  How do you test that your gui works correctly when the user is running ie6? How do you write a test to ensure that animations are smooth?
  - shpiel 14y ago
    Selenium can handle a lot of gui issues with different browsers. There are also tools to compare images (could be used with screenshots). Yes ultimately you need human eyes and on the product. It also helps to have someone with a QA mentality, who has a developed intuition for breaking things and finding edge cases. But rigorous use of automated testing, code review, and dogfooding greatly reduces the need for dedicated QA.
patio11 14y ago
I don't think I'd be speaking out of school to mention that a) StackExchange and Fog Creek are different companies with their own products, processes, and engineering cultures and b) engineering best practice is a moving target especially since the way we deliver software has changed so much since the days of "gold master which costs $X million and 12 months if we screw up anything on it." If all of your software is web apps delivered over the open Internet, and you have traffic like egads, then you can use a different set of engineering practices to ensure that the proportion of customers inconvenienced by bugs is essentially the same as before without needing a dedicated testing phase/team/etc. There are projects in Fog Creek which are organized around that philosophy, too. I think the Trello guys have written about it fairly extensively. The first thing Google came up with was http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html -- search for "bugs."
- famousactress 14y ago
  I was thinking similarly (about the moving target). My ideas about dedicated testers have shifted over the last few years with a pronounced emphasis on shorter deployment cycles and unit tests, and I was surprised to see the up-to-date schedule bit in there at all! Show me a project with an up-to-date schedule and I'll show you a project that has a tool for declaring success in the face of failure.
shpiel 14y ago
In my, albeit short, experience I have found that the "do you have testers?" and "do you fix bugs before writing new code?" to be overkill for most consumer-facing web applications. They are very important if the software is mission-critical or if there is some sort of physical cost to shipping patches. But if you can continuously update the live site its not that big of a deal if a bug gets out. It will be noticed soon, often by your users, and then you fix it and that is it. This works if the developers and other stakeholders at the company are testing the product themselves and are responsive and can triage bug reports quickly. Having an up-to-date schedule can often be unrealistic as there can be shifting priorities and developers should be flexible to move around and respond as necessary.
- xxpor 14y ago
  >But if you can continuously update the live site its not that big of a deal if a bug gets out. It will be noticed soon, often by your users, and then you fix it and that is it. You consider this acceptable? "Don't worry, if there's a bug, our users will tell us, no need to test!"
  - shpiel 14y ago
    Yes. Not all bugs are the same in terms of end-user impact and how they affect the overall performance of the system. You can expend a lot of resources trying to track down every single last glitch in many cases you should. However, if you have the luxury to be able to push updates and fixes at any time and you a free non-critical service, its better to just have a culture of fixing things quickly and allocating resources to more high-priority things like adding new features. More eloquently stated: http://www.quora.com/Quality-Assurance-QA/When-is-not-having-a-Quality-Assurance-team-for-software-projects-better-than-having-one http://www.quora.com/Quality-Assurance-QA/When-is-not-having... Ideally, most of the testing should be automated and engineers should be writing test cases as they build features.
- codinghorror 14y ago
  basically the Joel Test is out of date in a few areas. It reflects a Microsoft Excel development-centric view of the world. The way Excel was built and shipped in 1993 no longer reflects the way most software is built and shipped today.
excuse-me 14y ago
Somewhat off-topic but why do companies feel the need to write: "Stack Exchange, Inc. does not discriminate in employment matters on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, military service eligibility, veteran status, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, or any other protected class." Presumably they are legally required not to discriminate in these matters, in which case it's rather pointless to announce it. They don't specifically state that they wont kill you and harvest your organs - but I assume that they don't (although Oracle might) Or if these are areas where companies are allowed to discriminate then they are hardly likely to say so on their job ads.
- jwb119 14y ago
  I think they print it just as extra ammunition to show that they are complying with federal law. If you're interested in some applicable law, this is a good summary: http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/qanda.html http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/qanda.html
- xxpor 14y ago
  Some of those are not protected classes under Federal law, specifically sexual orientation.
  - postfuturist 14y ago
    It is a protected class under NYC law: http://www.nyc.gov/html/cchr/html/aunderthelaw.html http://www.nyc.gov/html/cchr/html/aunderthelaw.html
- GiraffeNecktie 14y ago
  It has nothing to do with legalities and everything to do with communicating the values that are part of the corporate culture. And it sends the message that if you have a problem working with/for people of a different color or sexual orientation, don't bother applying.
rglullis 14y ago
What really upsets me about both FogCreek (and StackExchange now) is the requirement of "permanent legal right to work in the US". Joel used to write a shit ton of material about how they will save no effort to attract the best developers they can find, on how they need to impress candidates, on how they will bring the guy on a limo, etc, etc, etc... but if you are a foreign student graduating on a top school from the US, or if you already have a ton of experience but need a sponsor for your H1B, they will not even look at your application? For what? Saving the extra $5-10k incurred in the legal process? Not cool, FogCreek. Not cool.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- codinghorror 14y ago
  IMO if you are truly, actually, really serious about hiring the best of the best, you'll hire them wherever they live. Moving to the USA shouldn't be required or necessary, particularly in software development. This is why the Internet was invented. Otherwise you're just hiring "the best people we could convince to move to {location} for {competitive salary}".
  - rglullis 14y ago
    Orthogonal problems. In my case, they wouldn't need to convince me to move. They just need to help me find a legal way to stay. Yes, they could just as well try to have people working remotely, but then it's another set of arguments that need to be taken. Joel never wrote about how working remotely is "just as good" as working in a office environment geared towards developers - quite the opposite. So I could understand why FogCreek/SE would require people to work locally, but I still don't get why they can't put some effort to sponsor visas.
    - codinghorror 14y ago
      I believe the visa issue is thorny, not just because of the money, but because of the logistics and lawyering and so forth. It'd be easier for everyone involved to just acknowledge, like GitHub does, that remote devs can be extremely kick ass. To be clear, Stack Exchange and Fog Creek are different animals in this area. But Joel is, at his heart, an "everyone must sit down to lunch at the same table or the entire company is doomed" kind of guy. Me, not so much.

26 points by ryanjodonnell 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ryanjodonnell 14y ago

Look at the bottom to see the "Joel Test". 10/12. Lol.

usea 14y ago

Isn't the joel test less about pass/fail and more about communicating and encouraging certain things that make a better environment for developers? I don't really care if they "pass" the joel test or not, but I do find the answers to the questions helpful. I sure as hell wouldn't want to work in a place with no source control.

coreyja 14y ago
I agree. Also, I don't know if I would consider a 12/12 the only way to "pass," if you want to think about it that way. A 10/12 is a pretty good score, but I think it is more about the transparency and knowing what the job offers and what it doesn't.
unimpressive 14y ago
Joel didn't leave himself much breathing room on interpreting the test results. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html "A score of 12 is perfect, 11 is tolerable, but 10 or lower and you've got serious problems. The truth is that most software organizations are running with a score of 2 or 3, and they need serious help, because companies like Microsoft run at 12 full-time. "
- excuse-me 14y ago
  And if you are in the operating system business and you score less than 12 you are in trouble If you are competing with microsoft in web services you can probably afford to score rather less!
- tomjen3 14y ago
  Which just goes to show how old that is. Which tech company wants to be in ms shoes, without the pegacy cash cows?

yen223 14y ago

The lack of a schedule I can understand, but Stack Exchange has no testers?!

mjibson 14y ago
The dev cycle is: type code -> build -> push to prod.
- JasonPunyon 14y ago
  That middle part is where the tests run. On Careers for example we have a decent set of Selenium tests that run through the core functionality of the site on every dev build (Can I Login? Can I buy something? Can I post a job? If I have a profile and I go to the profile page is it there? type stuff).
xyzzyz 14y ago
Maybe it means that they have no designated testers, no separate QA team, and everybody is responsible for testing.
- astrodust 14y ago
  For a site that important, that seems like a serious oversight. Maybe the testers are unsuspecting users in the A/B pool of Facebook-style deployment where A = stable and B = mystery meat.

outside1234 14y ago

Is the question "do you have testers" obsolete - should it be "do you have tests?" I'd personally rather work at a place that has tests vs. testers.

postfuturist 14y ago
Tests are important, as are dedicated QA engineers.
tomjen3 14y ago
How do you test that your gui works correctly when the user is running ie6? How do you write a test to ensure that animations are smooth?
- shpiel 14y ago
  Selenium can handle a lot of gui issues with different browsers. There are also tools to compare images (could be used with screenshots). Yes ultimately you need human eyes and on the product. It also helps to have someone with a QA mentality, who has a developed intuition for breaking things and finding edge cases. But rigorous use of automated testing, code review, and dogfooding greatly reduces the need for dedicated QA.

patio11 14y ago

I don't think I'd be speaking out of school to mention that a) StackExchange and Fog Creek are different companies with their own products, processes, and engineering cultures and b) engineering best practice is a moving target especially since the way we deliver software has changed so much since the days of "gold master which costs $X million and 12 months if we screw up anything on it." If all of your software is web apps delivered over the open Internet, and you have traffic like egads, then you can use a different set of engineering practices to ensure that the proportion of customers inconvenienced by bugs is essentially the same as before without needing a dedicated testing phase/team/etc. There are projects in Fog Creek which are organized around that philosophy, too. I think the Trello guys have written about it fairly extensively. The first thing Google came up with was http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html -- search for "bugs."

famousactress 14y ago
I was thinking similarly (about the moving target). My ideas about dedicated testers have shifted over the last few years with a pronounced emphasis on shorter deployment cycles and unit tests, and I was surprised to see the up-to-date schedule bit in there at all! Show me a project with an up-to-date schedule and I'll show you a project that has a tool for declaring success in the face of failure.

shpiel 14y ago

In my, albeit short, experience I have found that the "do you have testers?" and "do you fix bugs before writing new code?" to be overkill for most consumer-facing web applications. They are very important if the software is mission-critical or if there is some sort of physical cost to shipping patches. But if you can continuously update the live site its not that big of a deal if a bug gets out. It will be noticed soon, often by your users, and then you fix it and that is it. This works if the developers and other stakeholders at the company are testing the product themselves and are responsive and can triage bug reports quickly. Having an up-to-date schedule can often be unrealistic as there can be shifting priorities and developers should be flexible to move around and respond as necessary.

xxpor 14y ago
>But if you can continuously update the live site its not that big of a deal if a bug gets out. It will be noticed soon, often by your users, and then you fix it and that is it. You consider this acceptable? "Don't worry, if there's a bug, our users will tell us, no need to test!"
- shpiel 14y ago
  Yes. Not all bugs are the same in terms of end-user impact and how they affect the overall performance of the system. You can expend a lot of resources trying to track down every single last glitch in many cases you should. However, if you have the luxury to be able to push updates and fixes at any time and you a free non-critical service, its better to just have a culture of fixing things quickly and allocating resources to more high-priority things like adding new features. More eloquently stated: http://www.quora.com/Quality-Assurance-QA/When-is-not-having-a-Quality-Assurance-team-for-software-projects-better-than-having-one http://www.quora.com/Quality-Assurance-QA/When-is-not-having... Ideally, most of the testing should be automated and engineers should be writing test cases as they build features.
codinghorror 14y ago
basically the Joel Test is out of date in a few areas. It reflects a Microsoft Excel development-centric view of the world. The way Excel was built and shipped in 1993 no longer reflects the way most software is built and shipped today.

excuse-me 14y ago

Somewhat off-topic but why do companies feel the need to write: "Stack Exchange, Inc. does not discriminate in employment matters on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, military service eligibility, veteran status, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, or any other protected class." Presumably they are legally required not to discriminate in these matters, in which case it's rather pointless to announce it. They don't specifically state that they wont kill you and harvest your organs - but I assume that they don't (although Oracle might) Or if these are areas where companies are allowed to discriminate then they are hardly likely to say so on their job ads.

jwb119 14y ago
I think they print it just as extra ammunition to show that they are complying with federal law. If you're interested in some applicable law, this is a good summary: http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/qanda.html http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/qanda.html
xxpor 14y ago
Some of those are not protected classes under Federal law, specifically sexual orientation.
- postfuturist 14y ago
  It is a protected class under NYC law: http://www.nyc.gov/html/cchr/html/aunderthelaw.html http://www.nyc.gov/html/cchr/html/aunderthelaw.html
GiraffeNecktie 14y ago
It has nothing to do with legalities and everything to do with communicating the values that are part of the corporate culture. And it sends the message that if you have a problem working with/for people of a different color or sexual orientation, don't bother applying.

rglullis 14y ago

What really upsets me about both FogCreek (and StackExchange now) is the requirement of "permanent legal right to work in the US". Joel used to write a shit ton of material about how they will save no effort to attract the best developers they can find, on how they need to impress candidates, on how they will bring the guy on a limo, etc, etc, etc... but if you are a foreign student graduating on a top school from the US, or if you already have a ton of experience but need a sponsor for your H1B, they will not even look at your application? For what? Saving the extra $5-10k incurred in the legal process? Not cool, FogCreek. Not cool.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
codinghorror 14y ago
IMO if you are truly, actually, really serious about hiring the best of the best, you'll hire them wherever they live. Moving to the USA shouldn't be required or necessary, particularly in software development. This is why the Internet was invented. Otherwise you're just hiring "the best people we could convince to move to {location} for {competitive salary}".
- rglullis 14y ago
  Orthogonal problems. In my case, they wouldn't need to convince me to move. They just need to help me find a legal way to stay. Yes, they could just as well try to have people working remotely, but then it's another set of arguments that need to be taken. Joel never wrote about how working remotely is "just as good" as working in a office environment geared towards developers - quite the opposite. So I could understand why FogCreek/SE would require people to work locally, but I still don't get why they can't put some effort to sponsor visas.
  - codinghorror 14y ago
    I believe the visa issue is thorny, not just because of the money, but because of the logistics and lawyering and so forth. It'd be easier for everyone involved to just acknowledge, like GitHub does, that remote devs can be extremely kick ass. To be clear, Stack Exchange and Fog Creek are different animals in this area. But Joel is, at his heart, an "everyone must sit down to lunch at the same table or the entire company is doomed" kind of guy. Me, not so much.