or an e-commerce site and say, ‘OK, I’ve looked at your business and your goals;
here are some ideas that we can bring in from these 10 other sites that I built,
these 100 other sites that I’ve used.’ And be an equal partner in the design, not
just a coder.”
I wanted to grow people into being able to do that, and I thought, “Let’s try
to make these people true professionals in the sense that lawyers and doctors
and real engineers like civil engineers are professionals.”
Livingston: What would that mean?
Greenspun: They would have to develop the skill of starting from the problem.
They would invest some time in writing up their results. I was very careful
about trying to encourage these people to have an independent professional
reputation, so there’s code that had their name on it and that they took responsibility
for, documentation that explained what problem they were trying to
solve, what alternatives they considered, what the strengths and limitations of
this particular implementation that they were releasing were, maybe a white
paper on what lessons they learned from a project. I tried to get the programmers
to write, which they didn’t want to do.
People don’t like to write. It’s hard. The people who were really good software
engineers were usually great writers; they had tremendous ability to
organize their thoughts and communicate. The people who were sort of
average-quality programmers and had trouble thinking about the larger picture
were the ones who couldn’t write.
Livingston: You had a different atmosphere, such as encouraging your people
to be part of the process. Didn’t you also have educational sessions?
Greenspun: Yeah, and we had very strict code reviews. Basically the whole idea
was to grow the company by having apprentices. We would bring in some
people, and then the handful of people who were already there would work
Philip Greenspun 325
with them and review their code and show them how to do things more
cleanly—how to use features of the toolkit instead of writing extra software.
The idea was that, once they had done two or three projects for customers, they
could take on an apprentice and mentor that person.
We had younger people, and we had more women than other firms. We had
Eve Anderson and Tracy Adams—two of the most senior people at the company
were female, which was kind of unusual. We never wanted to have more
than two or three people on a project. The consequence of that was sometimes
they would have to work pretty hard. But my model of the world was MIT

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• or an e-commerce