Joel on Software

2000/08/28

I'm designing the compensation package for programmers at Fog Creek Software!

How do you compensate programmers?

Reader's feedback is here.

Rant Time

Normally, I edit documents for this site in FrontPage or Dreamweaver. Today, I wanted to post a document that I had originally written in Word.

Unfortunately, Word, which "uses HTML as its native format," made a mess of it. The "HTML" that it generated was full of unnecessary formatting crap that only Word cares about. That took 15 minutes of manual editing to strip out. Later I discovered that Word uses smart quotes, and it leaves them in the doc, even though they are not a part of HTML and they don't show up right on non-Windows platforms. That took another 15 minutes to hunt down and remove.

Grumble grumble grumble. Good thing there's Demoroniser!

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Want to know more?

You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make FogBugz, an enlightened project management system designed to help great teams develop brilliant software, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop access easy.