[Cadre-politics] Fwd: [JoelOnSoftware] My First BillG Review

[Dan MacNeil]

Fred G. Martin wrote:
 > On the Bill Gates thread, here is an interesting essay about software
 > project management, and why Bill and Microsoft used to be good at it.

 >>   http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

Like all Joel's stuff this is short clear and worth reading. I'm 
certainly in favor of the people understanding the things they have 
charge of.

As an aside, for my first coding job my audition was to write a 
checkbook balancing routine (write a for loop) in the original excel 1.0 
macro language. The company [] sold Excel spreadsheets that made 
construction estimating  much easier.

	[] http://www.turtlesoft.com/

The 1.0 macro language is every bit as nasty as Joel makes it out to be. 
Even after Excel Basic had been out for some time, we still worked in 
the macro "language" because the owner of the company figured that most 
of his customers were working with pirated copies of Excel and couldn't 
be bothered to spend the effort to steal a more recent version.

As a tangent to the tangent, how I got fired from this company:

	"This morning, I was going to give you a raise,
	 now I'm going to fire you, pack up your stuff,
	 I'll drive you to the dunk'n donuts."

..is my second most entertaining getting fired story.