38 Quotes by Joel Spolsky

Life is a bit hard sometimes, and sometimes you have to step up and fight fights that you never signed up for.

Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again.

Full service brokers, in this day and age of low cost mutual funds and discount brokers, are really nothing more than machines for ripping off retail investors.

If something seems possible, that’s probably because someone is already doing it. When something seems that it can’t possibly work, nobody tries it. Real innovation happens when someone tries anyway, overlooking an obvious flaw, and finds a way to make an idea work.

People ridiculously overvalue aesthetics and beauty when evaluating products. It’s one of the reasons iPods, and, for that matter, Keanu Reeves, are so successful.

Remember, just because Microsoft can do something, doesn’t mean you can. Microsoft makes their own gravity. Normal rules don’t apply to them.

Beware of Methodologies. They are a great way to bring everyone up to a dismal, but passable, level of performance, but at the same time, they are aggravating to more talented people who chafe at the restrictions that are placed on them.

I’ve been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system – it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes.

If your goals is to produce something of permanent value, you start to think differently about you want on the site.