Joel Spolsky Quotes

Listen to your customers, not your competitors.

Design adds value faster than it adds cost.

There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. [...] The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It's harder to read code than to write it.

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.

Good software, like wine, takes time.

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.

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.

Every day that we spent not improving our products was a wasted day.

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

Nothing works better than just improving your product.

Talk to your customers. Find out what they need. Don't pay any attention to the competition. They're not relevant to you.

If your goals is to produce something of permanent value, you start to think differently about you want on the site.

It's harder to read code than to write it.

Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.

Life is a bit hard sometimes, and sometimes you have to step up and fight fights that you never signed up for.

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.

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.

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

An idea isn't worth that much. It's the execution of the idea that has value. If you can't convince one other person that this is something to devote your life to, then it's not worth it.

Software development takes immense intellectual effort. Even the best programmers can rarely sustain that level of effort for more than a few hours a day. Beyond that, they need to rest their brains a bit, which is why they always seem to be surfing the Internet or playing games when you barge in on them.

Entrepreneurship boils down to the simple fact that a team of really smart people who can get things done are going to get smart, useful things done.

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.

That's another flaw with performance-based rewards: They are easy for one of your competitors to top.

Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected.

Never put yourself in a position that will put yourself at risk if you make the wrong decision. We spent cash on everything. It's fashionable to make 'bet the company' decisions, but don't do it.