Tuesday, October 24, 2006

People are Blogging...

I love Google Alerts!

It's like your own, completely free and completely benign version of a government wiretapping program, where you get to hear what people are saying about you on the Web.

So this is how, a few days ago, Bill and I found out some software developers in a blog called Joel on Software were having a whole discussion about our book. The "Joel," it turns out, is Joel Spolsky, a software developer whose company Fog Creek (in good old New York City), was profiled in Aardvark'd, a documentary Bill and I just watched, about summer interns working on a software project. Paul Graham, whom we quoted in our book and I subsequently interviewed on the future of web-hosted software for ASPStreet.com, was in the documentary too, with his own set of interns. Which just goes to show you how small a club the seemingly huge world of high-tech still is.

Anyhow, more about the documentary in a later post...

What was fascinating about the discussion was the things people were saying who hadn't read the book (they were the only ones with negative comments). I think they were assuming it was directed at tech people, telling them yet again they have to learn something--anything--about business...the same scolding they've been getting ever since the dot-com bust. Geeks are sick of hearing this, and I don't blame them.

But that's not what the book is about. It describes a clash of cultures, where both geeks and suits need to understand each other, and neither is to blame. So, I hope some of these naysayers decide to at least give it a read someday.

The other thing that fascinated me was where the person who posted found the book: dog-eared and mis-filed in the computer programming section. As if some programmer, perhaps suffering from job frustration, snuck in one day, read the whole thing cover-to-cover, stuck it back on the shelf next to the programming books he or she was also looking at and went away again.

If so, I hope whoever it was at least told some friends about it.:-)

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