Better Ways To Work

Two good reads came out recently. First is Joel Spolsky's Hitting the High Notes which argues that hiring the best programmers really does make a difference. The second is Paul Graham's latest, entitled What Business Can Learn from Open Source.

Graham describes three lessons. The first is that open source allows people to work on what they love and businesses have to compete with them. While not all of these projects are good, businesses have to compete with the best of themwhich can be difficult. His second point is that typical work environments suck and are not very condusive to productivity. The third point is something about bottom up being better than top down but I can't say I followed what he was applying it to. He talks about ideas bubbling up from the bottom and things being successful when many eyes look at and pick out the best ideas. He also suggests that openess is faster giving a publishing example.

He is "not claiming companies can get smarter, just that dumb ones will die", a macro view of things. But is that really a new notion? He's arguing for more startups but I think the fact he did only one, which turned out to be highly successful, biases him. I can nitpick about a lot of things in the essay, but I agree with his general point, businesses must adapt to this new form of competition.

Open source isn't perfect, it's a lot slower than other development methods (it took a dozen years before Linux became popular and 6 years for the Mozilla foundation to ship Firefox 1.0). it's also not good at getting done what isn't interesting, even if it is important, like the version 3.2 he mentions. And a lot of open source projects fail, I'd be really interested to know how the statistics compare to failed startups.

Businesses have been the same for a while. I'm not sure if they're going to change much because some startups do things differently. Particularly when in a previous essay Graham said "most startups that succeed do it by getting bought." So what kind of company is going to do be doing the buying?