[Produce]

Why does everyone pay so much attention to what people like Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky have to say? Looking at Jeff's resume, he has had all of two jobs in his professional life, one of which was given to him by himself. Joel's resume is similar, a few low profile jobs (MS was not notable back then) then one given to himself.

From experience in the industry, it's pretty clear that programmers who stay in one spot for a long time are mediocre at best. Good developers move around a lot in order to work with a variety of people on a wide range of problems. Having an average job then starting a company does not automatically make one qualified to comment on anything.

In terms of the complexity of the software owned by the companies they respectively own, seriously? One is an average-at-best bug tracker and the other is a message board. I don't intend to scoff at people's achievements, please don't take it that way - all I'm saying is that the pudding contains too little proof, IMHO.

In short, I'll take Linus's or Shaw's opinion on a given software related subject over these guys' opinions any day of the week. They've produced valuable software and documentation, have worked on problems of a far larger scope and, IMO, are qualified to tell us what's better or worse.

The lesson to take away from this is that if you start a company, blog about your opinions, you will be considered important. Capitalize on that if you're an idiot, otherwise, go and do something useful for humanity.

[jameshart]

Wow - on Hacker News, you're going to dismiss people who start up and bootstrap successful technology companies as just "giving themselves a job"?

On Hacker News.

I mean, Mark Zuckerberg's only ever had one job, which he gave to himself. So we can pretty much ignore anything he has to say, too. How many jobs has Paul Graham had? Two, maybe? How many of them were "given to him by himself"? I think... two?

[Produce]

I didn't call them bad enterpreneurs, in fact, I think it's the contrary. But a programmer who's only had two jobs probably hasn't seen very much of what's out there. For the record, I would ignore what Zuckerberg has to say on programming related subjects. I would, however, take any advice he has on how to run a business. Paul Graham has made huge contributions to the software world including several books, and a language. Neither Jeff, Mark or Joel can say that they've even come close to that.

In short, I was talking purely about the programming aspect of these peoples' skill sets, not their enterpreneurial prowess.

[jaredsohn]

>MS was not notable back then

Really? Then by your standard which tech companies were notable then? (he worked there during 1991-1993) BTW, Joel created VBA for Excel as a program manager around the time when Excel gained popularity over Lotus 1-2-3. There are graphs here: http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/book/sheets/sheet.html. Figure 8.6 shows revenue share.

The other company that he had worked at (Juno) was something that I was also familiar with as a consumer.

To support your point, however, Joel's work experience was more on the product side than actual programming. However, ironically for this discussion, the VBA that Joel designed is the way that many noncoders in a business first start coding.

[dbecker]

Even if you generally trust Linus more than Jeff, on this particular issue people are criticizing Jeff for being too harsh on beginners. Linus is consistently a harsher critic than Jeff.

[Produce]

I never criticized Jeff for being harsh, I only used a logical fallacy (an inverse appeal to authority - what is this called?) to disclaim his opinions. In reality, I don't think that it's right to white-wash the issue and say that none of his opinions hold weight, that's simply not true. I do, however, think that his opinion is massively overrated since there is a correlation between being correct and having relevant experience in something. But that's just my opinion.

Not to mention that they are harsh in different ways. Jeff is advocating being harsh to people who don't know what they're doing and admit as much. Linus grills people who step into his kitchen and don't know how to hold a knife. Apples and oranges.

[roopeshv]

linus criticizes code when people submit code, and criticizes people when they act like asses. never the people for submitting half assed code