Business Insight Zone

The short version: This crisp little book is stuffed with practical advice and important philosophical insights for any manager, in the software business or otherwise, who wants to build better teams. It also implies good advice for non-managers who want to be a building block, rather than an obstacle, toward better teams. Plus the book has a sense of humor!

Read on for the full-dress version . . .

Joel Spolsky long ago proved his chops as a master programmer: among other things, he was on the early team at Microsoft that developed a spreadsheet application called Excel. (Perhaps you’ve heard of it?) But since 2000 he’s won a far broader base of fans with his site Joel on Software, where he writes with wit and insight on all aspects of the software business, from the technical to the managerial to the architectural. (That’s architecture as in buildings, not as in software design.)

Better, he proves that being a crack programmer and expressing oneself well in English can go hand in hand; his essays, besides being models of informal good humor, are written in the clearest prose. It really does make sense to talk about his pieces as “essays” rather than “posts,” since many of them rise far above the standard of the garden-variety blog entry.

LESSONS BEYOND SOFTWARE

This must account for his appeal beyond the software development community. I myself could not — not with a gun to my head — program anything on a computer; the Pascal and Basic I learned once upon a time in school have long ago departed from my mind, and the HTML tweaks I make to Web pages hardly count as programming. Yet I return to Spolsky again and again for his good sense on many aspects of business, and for his insights into human nature, a topic far more important to business than any technical consideration.

Having said all this, you will understand why this book, although it contains a handful of computer-science references that are over my head, is well worth reading for anyone who wants to do a better job of attracting top talent. More and more, I evaluate business books on how well they offer (metaphorical, not software) “algorithms“ that transcend industries and circumstances, and how much they tell their readers about using those algorithms to get business done. Judged on that score, Smart & Get Things Done lives up to its own name, admirably.

SPOLSKY’S FORMULA FOR PROFIT

Since 2000, Spolsky has run Fog Creek Software, the small New York City firm that he co-founded. His formula for Fog Creek was simple — but difficult — from the beginning:

• Best Working Conditions –>
• Best Programmers –>
• Best Software –>
• Profit!

So far, the formula has worked to a T. Fog Creek continues to thrive “even though” (Spolsky would say “because”) it supplies every programmer with a private office in Manhattan. As of last year, when Spolsky wrote this book, none of his programmers had ever quit. I’d say that’s a pretty good recommendation, both for Fog Creek and for Spolsky’s fitness to write this book.

In the book, Spolsky discusses the many obstacles you will face as you try to recruit top talent, and offers advice and encouragement for overcoming each of them.

HITTING THE HIGH NOTES

Early on, he gives his rationale for hiring the best of the best in the first place. He compares way-above-average programmers to those rare operatic sopranos who can hit that staggering F6 in Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” aria. No number of mediocre sopranos combined will ever hit that note, just as no number of mediocre designers combined could ever achieve the design appeal of the iPod.

As icing on the cake, superstars are also more productive than mediocre performers, so they can hit deadlines and debug code efficiently while sparing brainpower for deeper issues like style, user happiness, and emotional appeal — the very things that have made the iPod such a runaway hit.

THE IMPORTANCE OF WORKSPACES

So that his great programmers can give attention to these issues, Spolsky has gone to great lengths to give them optimal workspaces with doors that shut, multiple big monitors, superfast computers, comfortable chairs, and big worktops. I’ve learned a lot from Spolsky’s site about the need for creative people to operate in the Flow state for long periods, and about the concomitant evil of interruptions. In the book, he spells out his rationale for this in some detail, pointing out the horrible false economies in skimping on things like large LCD monitors, Aeron chairs, and separate offices with doors that shut.

Some of these measures will be beyond the reach of middle managers in the corporate world, but even if you can’t wrangle private offices for your people, you can follow Spolsky’s lead in demonstrating extraordinary care to the social and physical settings in which your people work. For starters, you can set better expectations about how the team’s workflow will go, especially in the area of not interrupting one another.

RECRUITING THE BEST

Much of the book details Spolsky’s process for recruiting and screening potential hires for Fog Creek. He offers convincing reasons why resume mills and other standard recruitment practices — including employee referrals — are ineffective for finding the superstars you need to hit the highest notes in software design.

Among other things, he talks about the absurdity of having professional recruiters who aren’t savvy in programming screen out resumes based on simplistic combinations of technical keywords. The best hackers can get up and running in new programming languages in a couple of weeks, so the fact that their resumes don’t already contain all the specific languages you’re looking for ought not be used to disqualify a brilliant programmer from consideration.

Spolsky’s own process of recruitment depends on pursuing star programmers early, while they still have a couple of years left in college. He has gone to great trouble to build an appealing, even dazzling, internship program at Fog Creek, because he knows that many of the very best programmers essentially never go on the job market: their professors help them get top internships, the companies where they intern extend pre-emptive hiring offers to them, and for the rest of their career they’ll be hired away by other firms based on their established reputation for awesomeness.

But whether you can follow this internship model or not, Spolsky offers lots of practical advice on the screens you need to put in place when you’re reviewing resumes, screening solid candidates by phone, and interviewing the best candidates in person. He even suggests particular questions you might ask, some technical and some general, at each step along the way.

SCREEN AND SCREEN AGAIN

The point of all this screening — and he recommends a lot of it — is to find the candidates who match the title of his book:

Remember, Smart and Gets Things Done. The only way you’re going to be able to tell if somebody Gets Things Done is to see if historically they have tended to get things done in the past.

He makes a special point of looking for those who display passion for their work (”You want people to care about the stuff that they did”) and who have a track record of working past roadblocks (”I’m looking for people who challenged the status quo, who overcame objections, and who made things happen”).

As as aside, I would point out that this good advice doesn’t apply only to hiring managers. In these uncertain economic times, it’s a good idea for workers who are concerned about their job security — i.e., potentially anybody — to think about how well these traits show up in their own work histories. Maybe you can’t change your level of “smart” overnight (though I think even that can be improved over time), but you surely can do more to demonstrate “passionate,” “gets things done,” and “overcomes obstacles.” In fact, now would be an excellent time to get that ball rolling.

HIRE OR NO HIRE

Why is it so important to enforce so many screening processes, with such an unforgiving focus on “Smart” and “Gets Things Done”? According to Spolsky, “It’s because it is much, much better to reject a good candidate than to accept a bad candidate.”

Lots of companies pay lip service to hiring, maintaining, promoting, and developing the most talented workers, but Spolsky’s business formula for Fog Creek absolutely depends on it. As he puts it, “Great people are much, much more valuable than average people. In programming, they are three to ten times as productive, while only costing 20% or 30% more. And they hit high notes that nobody else can hit.” That’s how you create the kind of great products that supply you with enough profits that you can afford to have private offices for everybody in your Manhattan offices. It’s a virtuous cycle, but every aspect of it fundamentally requires that Spolsky hire only the very best programmers.

As Spolsky explains, worthy candidates whom you mistakenly reject will land on their feet anyway — they’ll just end up programming for Oracle or Google rather than you. But taking on even one unworthy candidate spoils the mix: that weak link in the chain will create problems, not just in their own work but at all the points where their work interacts with everyone else’s.

All of this implies a very simple evaluation rubric for Spolsky: Hire or No Hire. If you’re not sure about a candidate . . . No Hire. If you think they might work out . . . No Hire. If you think they could work out, but only if they’re slotted on the perfect team . . . No Hire. At every phase of the screening process, every person who’s doing the screening votes “Hire” or “No Hire.” There is no maybe.

This rubric generalizes very well to other contexts, I think. Plenty of businesses would be well served to review more of their activities on a binary basis: “Great client” or “A Client We Don’t Want,” “High-Profit Activity” or “Activity We Don’t Do,” et cetera. Yes, it’s hard to apply, and no, you won’t be able to make the transition in two minutes — but it’s worth it to start moving in this direction.

OTHER JUICY TIDBITS

Along the way, Spolsky touches on some topics dear to my heart. Here are just a few:

–The fruitlessness of a command-and-control managerial model for knowledge workers. To make this point, Spolsky hearkens back to his experience as a young paratrooper in the Israeli military, and — in agreement with points I’ve made before — shows how inappropriate this model is for managing software programmers or other workers trying to do innovative work:

In other words, the military uses Command and Control because it’s the only way to get 18-year-olds to charge through a minefield, not because they think it’s the best management method for every situation.

In particular, in software development teams where good developers can work anywhere they want, playing soldier in going to get pretty tedious, and you’re not really going to keep anyone on your team.

Sure, if you’re the manager, you can always “win” the argument that begins with “You disobeyed a direct order!” by firing the disobedient worker — but you’ll lose in the long run.

–The need to make remarkable products.

The software marketplace, these days, is something of a winner-take-all system. Nobody else is making money on MP3 players other than Apple. Nobody else makes money on spreadsheets and word processors other than Microsoft . . .

You can’t afford to be number two, or to have a “good enough” product. It has to be remarkably good, by which I mean so good that people remark about it.

Seth Godin would be proud.

–The poverty of the “Econ 101″ management method. Trying to motivate your stars with nothing more than crass money incentives promotes extrinsic motivation (doing a thing for more money) and demotes intrinsic motivation (the desire to do a thing well for its own sake). In a riff that resonates with Mark McGuinness’s writing on the same subject, Spolsky says, “Intrinsic motivation is much stronger than extrinsic motivation. People work much harder at things that they actually want to do.”

Spolsky’s well-justified conviction on this point leads him to excoriate the Econ 101 model:

The biggest problem with Econ 101 management is that it’s not management at all: it’s an abdication of management. A deliberate refusal to figure out how things can be made better. It’s a sign that management simply doesn’t know how to teach people to do better work, so they force everybody in the system to come up with their own way of doing it.

Amen.

SUMMARY

Fortunately, Spolsky shows his readers much better ways of proceeding, not just in the abstract but in the nitty-gritty details of hiring great performers and cultivating great teams. If you want to hire better . . . if you want to attract better candidates for your team . . . if you want to manage high performers better . . . or if you want to think through your own development as a worker who’s Smart and Gets Things Done — this short book will repay your attention many times over.

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Related posts:

• The Basic Basics: “It’s my fault.”
• What if your company outlawed multitasking?

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Category: Books, Management, Technology