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Pie-in-the-Sky Ideas

Published by marco on

The world is full of ideas, some of them good. There are some ideas that sound so damned good that they keep coming back, no matter how many times they’ve been stabbed through the heart with a wooden stake. They are ideas about products not enough people want (pet supplies online), products offered under impractical conditions (DRM music) or products that would never work (hovercars). And then there are the all-encompassing theories-of-everything (TOEs) of the IT world that haunt the R&D divisions of larger companies. Architecture astronauts take over by Joel Spolsky calls proponents of such TOEs, “architecture astronauts”. Using Ray Ozzie as an example, he defines them as people who:

“…can’t stop rewriting [the same] damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time. […] And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn’t stop him. [It’s a] fun programming exercise that [is] just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can’t figure it out.”

Damned skippy. And, if you’re harboring such an idea and didn’t for a moment have a sour feeling in your stomach that perhaps it’s not quite such a good idea after all, well, then congratulations, you might be an architecture astronaut. Unless you’re independently wealthy and can tinker along making things you like—and which other people may at some point be taught to love—you better make sure enough people are willing to pay for what you’re selling before you go to all the trouble.[1]

What does this all have to do with Joel, you may wonder?[2] Never fear, Fog Creek Software (Joel’s company) has no such space-travelers in its employ[3]. Instead, it’s the larger firms that are promulgating these cool-sounding ideas—and offering appropriately astronomical salaries for working on them, to boot. From the article,

“…between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can’t think of a single useful thing to build for us, but they need another 3000-4000 comp sci grads next week.”

Ah. So the applicant market for Fog Creek is drying up—or, more precisely, the applicant market composed of good comp-sci students who don’t expect to be paid six figures[4] is drying up. The point about these “companies [being] like cancers”, though harsh, is basically correct—they do have to grow to survive, which is ultimately a doomed venture. That they can’t think of a “single useful thing to build for us” is unfair, considering GMail, Google Search, the .NET framework, MS Office and so on. Sure, they’ve also come up with a lot of duds (Windows Vista, I’m looking at you), but it would be more precise then to say that “everything they build isn’t useful”. But, it’s the internet and hey, hyperbole gets you page impressions.[5]


[1] Unless you’re building an elaborate tax-shelter/government-funded scam and plan to cash out early and move to the Bahamas, in which case, godspeed.
[2] And, if you’re expecting to have that question go unanswered, then you haven’t read very much by Joel Spolsky.
[3] Though they did find time to invent their own programming language, which all in-house developers have to use and, presumably, learn to love.
[4] And, as mentioned in footnote [3] are willing to program in a completely unknown in-house language called “Wasabi”.
[5] And, if you don’t like hyperbole, then you shouldn’t be reading Spolsky[6]; or anything on the internet, for that matter.
[6] Just like, if you don’t like footnotes, you shouldn’t be reading this blog.