Founders at Work.pdf

Joel Spolsky 351
Things that to us are basic: Aeron chairs; private offices with doors that
close for every programmer; letting programmers report to other programmers,
so that your boss will understand you. We had 4 weeks of vacation and another
week of holidays, which you can move I think. For the consulting business, we
had a rule that you fly first class and that you never be away from home on a
weekend.
We actually figured out the entire business model, and we figured that, if
we spent 4 percent more or 8 percent more giving people a better work environment
in these particular ways, everybody would want to come work for us
and not go to the Scients and the Razorfishes of the world. And that was going
to be our business model. Everybody is charging $250 an hour for these consultants
and paying them $60 an hour. We would pay them the equivalent fully
burdened of $64 an hour. That was our clever trick that we came up with, and
that’s what we thought our innovation was. It turned out not to have been what
we did.
Livingston: What did you do?
Spolsky: We started a consulting business and we hired a couple really smart
people. We had a few clients. We did the whole $60/$250 thing, which was
great, and that business then disappeared very rapidly out from under us. So we
became just a real software company.
Livingston: But you still kept a lot of your culture for the programmers.
Spolsky: Oh yeah. That was always sort of the goal, really, in creating Fog Creek.
If you are in Boston, Austin, Raleigh-Durham, Silicon Valley, or Seattle, as a
programmer you have a lot of choices of where to work. In New York, the
choices are investment banks, some hospitals, advertising agencies—but not
technology companies. There are very, very few technology companies in
New York.
But New York still is the largest city in America, and there are an awful lot
of programmers who are stuck in New York because their wife is going to medical
school, or their family is there, or they just love the city, or they want to do
improv theater and this is the best place to do it—millions of reasons why a programmer
might find themselves in New York. Every programmer wants to
work at a product company because it is so much better than working as a slave
in an investment bank. And there were none in New York.
We would go to parties, and we’d find geeks, and they’d say, “Do you know
of any software product companies in New York where I can work?” And we
would say, “Gee, no. I can’t really think of any.” This is what programmers
would talk to each other about: how can I get out of the investment bank in
New York? So part of our model was, “Let’s create a fun place for us to work,
since we are stuck in New York City. Create a software company specifically in
New York City.”
With many programmers, you are sort of peripheral to the goal of the company
and you are doing a peripheral path, so that you’re never a part of the
company and nobody cares about you.