Give your developers the tools they want/need/crave to get the job done

I read Joel Spolsky's Smart, and Gets Things Done book about a week ago.  It's pretty concise, around 200 pages, but it's a small book (in page size), so it goes very quickly.

The most important take-away that I could come up with is for managers and is in the title: give your developers the tools they need to get things done.  It doesn't make any sense to force your developers to justify why they need an extra gig of RAM in their computer.  The red tape around that process kept me from even trying to ask for it at my old job.  When you start running a web browser (i.e. Firefox, the memory whore) with lots of tabs, plus a development environment, plus a bunch of putty sessions, you're pretty much asking for your computer to crap out on a gig of RAM.  So for the love of god, make it easy for your developer to get that $30 stick of RAM.  And forget a third monitor.  I already did consider myself lucky, as very few groups at my old company got two monitors.  But a third would definitely have come in handy.  Still, at $150 ish for a 17" monitor, my company could have made me very happy and that much more productive.

Spolsky's even justifies Aeron chairs, long the symbol of dot-com excess and VC stupidity.  Despite the chairs being $1000, they last forever, and are more comfortable anyways.  His cost-benefit analysis comes out to the Aeron chair costing the company about an extra $1 per week per developer.  "You wouldn't dare bring up toilet paper in a board meeting," he says, "and that's what we're talking about here." (paraphrased).

A few other highlights:

• The best developers are 5-10X (or sometimes even as high as 30X) more effective than an average programmer, and salaries (for better or for worse) don't follow that scale.  Investing in the best programmers you can get is worth the 1.5 or 2 times-as-high salaries you may have to pay.  Simple cost-benefit analysis here.
  
• Great developers are seldom on the market, for several reasons - their employers try to retain them, so they stay at companies longer; they know they can get any job, so they'll typically only apply to a couple, as opposed to sending their resume to every company in a 50 mile radius on monster; and they get their couple job offers, find their best fit, and disappear for another 5-10 years.
• Employee referrals produce a degrading stream of employees - employees don't always want their friends to work there, and their "great developer" friends aren't unhappy enough to leave their jobs.  So employees refer people they think will just make the cut and try to turn the referral bonus into a profit venture.
• The most important thing you can do as a founder, manager, or recruiter, is make sure that the company is a place that you'd want to work.  If you check out Fog Creek's website, they have pictures of their office spaces - everyone has their own office with a view, dual monitors, choice of chair, etc.  It's because Joel's approach was to make his company a company where he'd want to work as a developer.  Developers are the rock stars, fly first class, etc.  Consequently, EVERYone wants to work there.

Definitely a good read, would recommend it to any developer (it boils down what we look for into concise concepts - if you've ever had trouble putting what's important to you into words), manager (gives insight into developers' heads), and recruiters.

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