software companies did...
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.”
For example, Ruby on Rails is a framework that you can use with the Ruby
programming language to access databases. It is the first framework that you
can use from any programming language for accessing databases to realize that
it’s OK to require that the names of the columns in the database have a specific
format. Everybody else thought, “You need to be allowed to use whatever name
you want in the database and whatever name you want in the application.”
Therefore you have to create all this code to map between the name in the
| ← when we released | database and the → |