Founders at Work.pdf

324 Founders at Work
They applied the same technique to SharePoint. They had to do some
research. They looked at Vignette, Broadvision, the ArsDigita Community
System, a few other things, and they said, “These are some features that we
think we should have.” The product managers spec SharePoint, they send it out
after about a year or two of development, and customers don’t like it. It’s too
hard to program; it’s too hard to understand. So they interview people, find out
what they don’t like, refine it. It takes them years and years.
If you don’t have any way of seeing how your customers are using the software
except by shipping them the CD and then standing in the back of their
living room while they type, maybe this is a reasonable way to develop software.
But if you have the capacity to just install it on the server and essentially look
over their shoulders by looking at the web server log and seeing what kind of
complaints they email to the help desk or the website, then why not do that?
You can shortcut the whole 2-year development cycle down to maybe 2 months.
We would have releases every 2 or 3 months.
So we worried about competitors, but it was an unreasonable fear. As a
friend once pointed out, most gunshot wounds are self-inflicted.
Livingston: ArsDigita was different because it was much faster?
Greenspun: Yeah. If you look at a book on how to develop software, it will
always have this long cycle with all these people involved. It’s very slow because
it’s predicated on the fact that you can’t just watch people as they use your running
system—which you can do on the Web.
Livingston: You had an interesting culture at ArsDigita. Was it part of your
strategy to get these young, really good hackers who could develop themselves
professionally? And did you know that they likely had friends who were really
good hackers who you could recruit?
Greenspun: That was part of it; it was hard to hire people. No matter what you
did, most of the people with really good credentials and experience were occupied.
There was so much money chasing a relatively limited talent pool. The
folks who were in their 30s were simply not available. They were tied up working
at their own startups. So we thought, “OK, how are we going to hire and
grow people?”
For programmers, I had a vision—partly because I had been teaching programmers
at MIT—that I didn’t like the way that programmer careers turned
out. Now that I fly airplanes, I realize that the average programmer is really
much less happy in his/her job than the average airplane mechanic, which
is pretty sad when you consider that becoming an airplane mechanic is an
18-month trade school education. For $30,000 and a year and a half, you can
become an airplane mechanic (even less if you want to work as an apprentice
for 3 years and get your FAA certification). You work in a small group, you meet
the customer directly. You don’t have the alienation from the customer that
Karl Marx talked about as being a bad thing about factory work versus
craftsmanship—that you never find out if your work really connects with
people because you’re in a factory and the customer is at the other end of a railroad
line.