Business of Software: Day 1
The Business of Software conference kicked off today in San Jose, California and I was lucky enough to be in attendance. It's a two day conference and I'll be at the second day, but the first day was the one that really attracted my attention. I think I'll give a recap and some deeper thoughts on the speakers over the next few days, but right now I'll just hit the highlights. There were a total of 12 speakers and I already have 14 pages of notes so there's a lot more to talk about than I can right here.
Tim Lister was definitely on my highlight list for this conference after reading Peopleware earlier this year. He's obviously a really smart guy but I had a hard time figuring out how to apply his message. He went through several slides that identified patterns within several development companies. This is perfect for what he does because in Peopleware, he talks about visiting and consulting for a lot of software companies. However, I wish he would have focused on a few patterns and then discussed how to deal with them. His message was good, which was to seek out patterns in your company, name them, and then propagate or defeat them. He just didn't even really say, in a lot of cases, whether he thought some of the patterns were good or bad. He did have one quote which made me think,
Your software process is what you do under pressure. Everything else is window dressing.
I didn't know what to think of this at first but it makes sense, especially when you consider that you're always under pressure. I'll take this with me back home and look at our "process" with a different perspective.
Joel Spolsky is indirectly the reason I'm here, in that our CEO found the link on his site and we eventually decided it was a good idea for me to attend. He was the final speaker and, as always, I ate up his words like sweet, sweet mana. His talk focused on Fog Creek's hiring practices, including why they hire interns and who they get to do their busy work (because he only hires brilliant people and brilliant people don't like busy work). He gave us the amount it costs to hire interns, and then the amount of revenue that his intern-created jobs board has brought in, and it immediately became clear why the internship program is still around. The end of his presentation was Fog Creek's six categories to score people on: Passion, Communication, Creativity, Selectivity, Brains, and Diversity. He says he generally hires people who score well in all six categories, and that every single interviewer has veto power. I won't go into too much more detail because most of what he said is available on his blog. If anyone wants to know anything specifically that he talked about, feel free to email me, but you could probably email him and get a better answer.All the speakers were really interesting; Guy Kawasaki gave an inspirational message about innovating, Bill Buxton gave his pretty bleak outlook on the industry as it relates to UI design, and Eric Sink gave an entertaining view on marketing for geeks, among others. There were five Software Idol finalists speaking on a variety of subjects. My favorite was Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing. The biggest takeaway from his speech that I took was,
Great software is built by people, not companies.
His introductory slide pointed out that software is a hobby, not a business. The adoption of high speed internet and Software as a Service has made this more possible than ever. Whereas before, an individual programmer was limited by distribution costs, they can now make whatever they want and as long as they can find a way to host it, people can use it. This has given rise to a lot more startups where all the employees are actually hobbiests and are making software because they want to, not necessarily because the business analysts found there was a market for something. This subject was touched on by a few different speakers, as you can imagine.
So far the conference has been great. I've had the chance to talk to a lot of the presenters in person and also chat with other attendees. While Joel Spolsky and Tim Lister were the two at the top of my list, I've been pleasantly surprised with the rest of the speakers and I'm excited to see what tomorrow has in store.
