If everything got deleted from the Joel on Software website, I would miss 2 articles:
- The Joel Test for Software Development
- The Joel Plan, which those folks implemented successfully
,
| Best Working Conditions | -> | Best Programmers | -> | Best Software | -> | Profit! |
At the company where I’m the lead software developer, we are committed to the Joel Plan. At first we started out by trying developers on the cheap but have started to focus more towards making budget for a great environment (an office in Westwood close to food and parking), and hiring the best developers. We have one of the guys working on the Kohana framework, Justin Hernandez, helping us with key pieces of software.
Some folks think lean means:
- leveraged open source frameworks (LAMP + Danga) ( @ericries)
- agile
- customer-centric development, where devs interface directly with customers
We definitely agree with what Eric Ries, and other successful entrepreneurs are saying about the lean startup.
However, I personally don’t agree with folks that sacrifice the first two parts of the Joel Plan, the best conditions and the best developers, under the name of lean startup. I won’t name names because these guys in the East Coast C and D’d me before but honestly, if you want your East Coast company to think like a startup, you have to treat your East Coast developers like the valuable resource they are.