A very irresponsible journalist, Paul Boutin, wrote a whole story in the Industry Standard which appears to me made up from whole cloth.

He is attributing, to me, a comment posted by an anonymous poster.

I am not using Google Apps, I did not write the comment in question, basically none of the things that Boutin said I did are true.

A part of the problem is the design of my discussion groups, which look too much like the main Joel on Software site. A part of the problem is unregistered, anonymous posters… that will be turned off immediately. Another part of the problem is The New Tech Journalism, which will have to remain a rant for another day.

Over on the Business of Software group, we’re discussing those big bureaucratic companies who want a custom legal agreement to buy $79 worth of software. “Lawyer-infested companies that are obsessive-compulsive about contracts do not pirate software and they CERTAINLY don’t try to trick you into signing a contract ‘allowing’ them to pirate your software. This theory is laughable.”

After I posted pictures of the new Fog Creek office, a lot of people wrote to ask if they could visit it. So we’re holding an open house here on Friday, January 30th, from 12:00-1:00 pm (absolutely no one can be admitted after 1:00, sorry). There will be free food and drinks.

Fog Creek is at 55 Broadway, New York, on the 25th floor.

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“Simply because one programmer’s idea translated visibly and directly into a lot of money didn’t mean that the other team members weren’t adding just as much value to the business, albeit in a less direct way.”

From my latest Inc. column: Thanks or No Thanks

News.com.au: “Australian scientists have reviewed a global pool of research into the effect of modern office design, concluding the switch to open-plan has led to lower productivity and higher worker stress.”

Just because there’s room on the dialog box, doesn’t mean you have to put something there. The Java installer starts off with a dialog box that manages to repeat the word Java six times without really telling you what it is, just that it’s “everywhere.”

People don’t like to read. If you can’t think of anything to say, maybe you should just shut up. This whole damn dialog could read

Java Loves You—Please Wait

without any loss in functionality.

Seth Godin reminded me about having goals. “Having goals is a pain in the neck,” he says, but “the people who get things done, who lead, who grow and who make an impact… those people have goals.”

OK, good point. Here are Fog Creek Software’s goals for 2009, in no particular order:

• Ship FogBugz 7.0 for all platforms
• Ship Copilot Desktop for all platforms
• Release the next documentary about software development
• Build a kick-ass new product from the ground up with the summer interns, and get the first dollar of customer revenue before they go back to school
• Put on a fantastic Business of Software conference
• Relive the glory days with another FogBugz World Tour

I like what Seth said about how “if you don’t have a goal, you never have to worry about missing it.”

Fog Creek Copilot is an inexpensive, and very easy to use, remote tech support system that allows you to remote-control someone else’s computer over the Internet without installing anything special. It’s perfect for ad-hoc tech support, and used extensively by helpdesks, software companies providing telephone support, and people helping their friends and families with computer problems. At Fog Creek, we even use it to conduct coding interviews for programmers.

The new Copilot OneClick feature lets you preinstall the software on all the computers you connect to frequently, so every time your dad calls up needing help with the accounting software running his Ponzi scheme, you just click one link and you’re logged onto his computer.

As usual, it works through all kinds of firewalls, proxies, and NATs without any configuration, it’s protected by 128-bit SSL, and there’s never anything to configure.

Today, the Copilot team released the Macintosh version of the OneClick feature, so all the Copilot goodness is available on Windows or Mac, or both (you can control Windows computers from Macs and vice versa). And it’s cheap, by which I mean, inexpensive—I don’t mean that you can just buy it two drinks and take it back to your apartment and expect to be taking a bubble bath with it—most people get the $19.95 unlimited plan; it’s even free on weekends when we have lots of unused bandwidth.

Read about the team’s experience developing a Mac-based installer, then try the free trial! Bubble bath not included!

Are you a software developer applying to a small company?

Here’s a tip from someone who has read thousands of resumes. When you’re applying to a startup, or a software company with less than, say, 100 employees, you may want to highlight the Banging Out Code parts of your experience, while deemphasizing the Middle Management parts of your experience.

When a startup CTO sees a resume that says things like:

• Responsible for $30m line of business
• Architected new ERP platform
• Managed team of 25 developers
• Optimized business processes

they think, “Spare me, that’s all we need, somebody running around trying to manage and optimize and architect when we just need someone who isn’t afraid to write code.” Here’s the stuff CTOs at startups want to see on a resume:

• Single-handedly developed robust 100,000 LOC threadsafe C++ service
• Contributes to OpenBSD file system in spare time
• Wrote almost 75% of the Python code running IsIt2009Yet.Com

If you’ve been in a large company for too long, you may feel that you put in your time, with all those years working your way up the hierarchy from the $50,000 coder jobs to the $250,000 Senior Vice President in Charge of Long Meetings With Other Senior Vice Presidents, and you’re kind of enjoying the nice parking space and the personal assistant and stuff, and coding? not so much, so now you’ve found a cool startup or small company, and you’re thinking, maybe now’s the time to jump ship? So you send your resume with your ERP stuff and SAP stuff and Vice President stuff to the startup, and it gets tossed.

Those VP jobs just don’t exist at startups, and the few VPs they have are the founders and a key early hire or two. Not you. And startups certainly don’t need extra middle managers. To a startup founder, middle managers just seem like added expense without more code getting written, and the only thing we REALLY need is

• code to be written, and
• customers to be called on the telephone.

Now, there’s a lot of resumes I see where, actually, I suspect that the candidate may have been (ahem) slightly overemphasizing the management/leadership/“architect” parts of the job, and slightly underemphasizing the banging out of code. And that’s fine if you’re looking to jump to a management position at a big company that, inexplicably, doesn’t have anyone to promote from within.

But for startups, everything about your resume has to scream getting your own hands dirty. Otherwise your resume makes you look like you’re looking for the kind of job where you can call meetings that take people away from coding all day long, which, to a startup, is about as useful as a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest.

(More resume tips, and, if you’re really looking for a job, don’t forget the job board).

Tom suggested that I use Animoto to jazz up the slideshow of Fog Creek pictures. Here’s what came out of that:

Animoto is very simple: you give it a bunch of pictures and choose a soundtrack, and it gives you a video presentation. The part I liked best was how easy it was to get your pictures… you just point it at one of the five most popular online photo sharing services, and it shows you a list of your albums on that service. One click and all your pictures are imported:

The service is free for 30 second videos (about 15 pictures worth). For longer videos, it’s $3.00, which gets you a low res version. To upgrade to high res is another $5. There are all kinds of packages available if you plan to make a lot of videos. I was pretty impressed by the simplicity of the whole thing. It does take quite a while to render the video, though, so unless you have all day, you can’t make very many adjustments before you get tired of fooling around.