Joel Spolsky’s blog

I started my career at Microsoft, a little software company outside of Seattle, where I was a program manager on the Excel team. My area was "programmability" and most of what I did in those days was to replace the Excel macro language (XLMs) with Excel Basic, and provide an object-oriented interface to Excel. Excel Basic became "Visual Basic for Applications" and the OO interface is what you know as OLE Automation, a.k.a. IDispatch. In those days, Microsoft was small (5000 employees!) and reasonable. But I was tired of having no life outside of work, so I moved to New York, where I spent about ten minutes working for Microsoft Consulting before I fled in fright, getting on a bicycle and riding straight across the USA over the course of 10 weeks while I figured out my next plan. I had two more jobs in New York. I spent a couple of years at Viacom Interactive Services, doing a lot of goofing around but also building an application server for MTV which was really fast. Then I crossed the street to work at Juno Online Services, a national ISP. But I had always wanted to start my own company, and I finally reached the point where my mind had tricked me into thinking it was going to be easy. So, together with my friend Michael Pryor, I started Fog Creek Software in September, 2000, which is what I've been doing ever since. We've been growing steadily, without any outside investment, since then, and despite the so-called downturn we've managed to double our sales every year. We didn't start with a particular product in mind: our goal was simply to build the kind of software company where we would want to work, one in which programmers and software developers are the stars and everything else serves only to make them productive and happy. The theory, which has proven itself over and over again, is that this kind of thinking would allow us to attract the super-talented software developers who would do great things and make us successful.