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Joel Spolsky's Talk at Yale, Part 3
- run4yourlives 19y agoI've got to say it, sorry - weak ending. I was really looking forward to this after part one and two, which were really interesting. Part 3 makes a great point - the importance of being able to communicate in the written form - but could have been fleshed out a lot more. Oh well.
- Goladus 19y agoI liked the little anecdote of the professor who hated grades. He's not the only one. I know many professors who tear their hair out about student obsession with grades.
- jkush 19y agoI agree with you. I guess the whole series was simply a reflection on how a CS degree may or may not contribute to your success. And, oh yeah, come work for us 'cause we'll teach you what you REALLY need to know.
- run4yourlives 19y agoYeah, Joel never seems to stop marketing - I wonder where he learned that! I usually don't mind it in his articles, but at a speech to a university crowd, it comes off as a little arrogant.
- dcurtis 19y agoYeah, this series was really inspirational and interesting, and the first time he mentioned Fog Creek it was funny. But at the end, that was just tacky. I like his stuff, he's an intelligent guy, but he pushes his company/products into his insightful articles/speeches almost to a fault. But then, I wont stop reading his articles and I guess that means I wont stop hearing about his company. Does that mean he's marketing successfully?
- iamelgringo 19y agoIt's an old sales adage: Never stop selling, kid. Never stop selling. And, he does it because it works. We all know what Fog Creek Software does, don't we? I betcha a number of people here have tried his bug tracking software, too.
- jgrahamc 19y agoMe. I'm currently using FogBugz at a company where I'm consulting. We haven't been using it for long, but it's nice enough. (In the past I've used Jira, Trac, Bugzilla). Overall favorite is Trac.
- albertcardona 19y agoThose who can write properly own the future. What other ending do you need?
- cowmoo 19y agoActually, I thought the last part was the most interesting. Yeah, I know most people on 'Hacker News' are either, a) the true academic "hacker" who are offended about Joel Spolsky's sacrilegious comments about Haskell and Prolog (he insulted automatic program proofs), b) the web 2.0 "hackers" who scoff at Joel's mundane bug-tracker software (he doesn't make social network software). But what I have taken away from Joel's whole article and the classes and companies he had worked at is this: true CS people are misunderstood by the authorities of the world. On one hand, the authorities in the ivory tower expect us to prove that our programs work, but don't actually care how the program look or run in the real world. On the other hand, the authorities in the corporate board-room expect us to use standard toools and off-the-shelf solutions (always about the bottom-line), but don't actually care about how the program look or run in the real world. So what is a hacker to do, but to do what every single true artist have done, to trailblaze his/her own path; and this is what Joel Spolsky/Steve Jobs/Brin&Page & Company exactly did.
- amichail 19y agoHis reason for not going to grad school is silly. There's more to CS research than proving correctness in a formal way.
- dcurtis 19y agoI think his point was that it's tedious, and most graduate CS stuff requires a ton of work and time with diminishing benefit.
- aston 19y agoHis description of "Algorithm Thinking" sounds so similar to a class at MIT I took nicknamed 6.xxx that it's spooky. It did, however, count towards my CS degree...