Joel Spolsky Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

So if you want to get things done, you positively have to understand at any given point in time what is the most important thing to get done right now and if you're not doing it, you're not making progress at the fastest possible rate.

Joel Spolsky
Beware of Methodologies. They are a great way to bring everyone up to a dismal, but passable, level of performance, but at the same time, they are aggravating to more talented people who chafe at the restrictions that are placed on them.

Joel Spolsky
People ridiculously overvalue aesthetics and beauty when evaluating products. It's one of the reasons iPods, and, for that matter, Keanu Reeves, are so successful.

Joel Spolsky
The secret of Big Macs is that they're not very good, but every one is not very good in exactly the same way.

Joel Spolsky
Most college students, fortunately, are brash enough never to bother asking their elders for advice, which, in the field of computer science, is a good thing, because their elders are apt to say goofy, antediluvian things like "the demand for keypunch operators will exceed 100,000,000 by the year 2010" and "lisp careers are really very hot right now."

Joel Spolsky
We just have to come in every morning and somehow, launch the editor.

Joel Spolsky
Full service brokers, in this day and age of low cost mutual funds and discount brokers, are really nothing more than machines for ripping off retail investors.

Joel Spolsky
If something seems possible, that's probably because someone is already doing it. When something seems that it can't possibly work, nobody tries it. Real innovation happens when someone tries anyway, overlooking an obvious flaw, and finds a way to make an idea work.

Joel Spolsky
Remember, just because Microsoft can do something, doesn't mean you can. Microsoft makes their own gravity. Normal rules don't apply to them.

Joel Spolsky
Writing code is not production, it's not always craftsmanship though it can be, it's design.

Joel Spolsky
A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.

Joel Spolsky
Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.

Joel Spolsky
Indeed one of the best ways to deflect attacks is to make it look like they're succeeding. It's the software equivalent of playing dead.

Joel Spolsky
Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn't know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again.

Joel Spolsky
Common programmer thought pattern: there are only three numbers: 0, 1, and n.

Joel Spolsky
If you can't understand the spec for a new technology, don't worry: nobody else will understand it either, and the technology won't be that important.

Joel Spolsky