Founders at Work.pdf

358 Founders at Work
kibbutz army program. It was two years on a kibbutz, which is a communal farm
in Israel. They usually have industry, and the kibbutz I was on had a bakery,
which was this gigantic factory that made bread. I spent almost 2 years making
bread every night in this factory that made hundreds of thousands of loaves of
bread. It was not artisan bread by any stretch of the imagination. It was a big,
noisy bakery. There are so many things that I learned from that about how
people work, how to think about working, how to manage, how an assembly line
might be organized, how industrial machinery works.
But my first job at Microsoft is really where I learned the software industry.
I got there in 1991. At the time, there were almost—I hesitate to say this, but—
no software companies that really knew the basics of how to develop software in
the way that Microsoft did. They accomplished what they did because they figured
out a ton of things about how to make software, repeatedly and reliably,
that people want to buy, that nobody else had figured out. And they were doing
things like bug tracking—like having a bug-tracking database—that seem completely
obvious, and, when you looked around, 80 percent of commercial
software companies did not do bug tracking. Or 80 percent of commercial software
companies did not write specifications. Or 99 percent of commercial
software companies did not do usability testing.
If you were an alien and you came here in 1991 and you wanted to learn
how to develop software, you would learn ten times as much at Microsoft as
anywhere else, I think, because I watched these companies kind of flail making
mistakes. There were things—really basic things, that companies did not know.
Microsoft knew that loading a segment register on the 386 was a very timeconsuming
operation, and therefore on the 386 architecture you can’t use far
pointers unless you absolutely have to because it’s extremely slow. Borland did
not know that. Result: Microsoft Access loaded in 2 or 3 seconds; Borland
Paradox for Windows took 90 seconds to get running. Because of something
that Microsoft knew that Borland did not know. And that’s one of a million
examples.
Now Microsoft has forgotten all these things, and they’ve hired a lot of
morons that don’t know these things anymore. I think that now Microsoft is
kind of a big tar pit where you can barely move forward because there’s so
much bureaucracy. But I learned a lot.
Livingston: There were only 5,000 people back then, right?
Spolsky: Right, 1,000 of whom were developers. 200 were program managers.
I was a program manager. I was working on Excel, which was really at the heart
of the company, other than Windows and DOS, so it was really cool.
Livingston: What do you think makes a good hacker?
Spolsky: I think what makes a good hack is the observation that you can do
without something that everybody else thinks you need. To me, the most elegant
hack is when somebody says, “These 2,000 lines of code end up doing the
same thing as those 2 lines of code would do. I know it seems complicated, but
arithmetically it’s really the same.” When someone cuts through a lot of crap
and says, “You know, it doesn’t really matter.”