Fog Creek Blog

Sorry, Prashant, you lost track of the plot of the story somewhere along the way. (creator of FogBugz, here) FogBugz won and Jira won, but they were playing different games. I wanted to make software development better for programmers. When I started creating Fog Creek Software in 2000 programmers were treated like typists. They were not paid very well (my starting salary was $33,000). There was almost no thought around how software should be developed. Companies that scored high on the Joel Test[1] were almost unheard of. The LAST thing I wanted to do was make another tool of oppression for management to impose gantt charts and deadlines and strict rules about who has to sign off on things. I set out to make software development better for programmers by blogging[2] and by building a company that would be a great place to work[3]. In 2000 the only way to do that was to bootstrap it. With a team of four people we couldn't build anything complicated. We started with bug tracking software because at least we could touch one aspect of programmers' lives with our philosophy. FogBugz was designed for smaller collegial teams of people that wanted to work together effectively and needed a clean and simple way to track issues using the smart workflows that small, professional teams like to use. It was remarkably successful and profitable from 2000 to today. We've never stopped working on improving it, but we also have never abandoned the market of small collegial teams of…

Fog Creek Software - New York, NY (no telecommute) - http://fogcreek.com/ Current Openings: * Software Developer * Marketing Analytics Focus * Sales: FogBugz and Kiln * Intern in software development (Summer 2011) Fog Creek Software is a small, friendly software company in New York City that was designed from the ground up to be a great place to work. We work on interesting projects with smart people, treat everyone like royalty, and eat lunch together every day. Software developers at Fog Creek get spacious, sunlit private offices, unlimited computer gear, electronic height-adjustable desks, Aeron chairs, and a plush office featuring marble showers, a library, a salt water aquarium, professional espresso machine, daily gourmet catered lunch, unlimited snacks, video games and movie nights, and the opportunity to work with a great team. We've been profitable since inception, and are growing rapidly, developing software products that help software developers make great software. We offer world-class compensation and benefits and a terrific work environment. We're always on the lookout for great people to join the team. http://fogcreek.com/Careers.html

I'm a big fan of Fog Creek's "The Most Basic Things Your Company Needs to Know About Sales" (https://www.fogcreek.com/guide/The-most-basic-things-your-company-need… It's roughly 25 pages about high level sales strategies. The PDF mentions the book "How You Make the Sale" by Frank McNair (https://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Sale-Frank-McNair/dp/1402204353)which was a great 101 level book on sales. It's high level so it could be applied to everything from selling cars and real estate to software. I found these helpful because it was less "here's 10 closing tips and tricks!" and more about the sales process.

I've used FogCreek's Kiln and honestly, their code review is amazing. No other product comes close to it. No context switch and to the point. My current org don't use it and I really miss it. http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/features/code-reviews

Fog Creek Software | HQ in New York City | Full-Time | Onsite, Remote, and Ad-Hoc Remote friendly. Fog Creek Software is a small, friendly software company in New York City that was designed from the ground up to be a great place to work. We work on interesting projects with smart people, treat everyone like royalty, and eat lunch together every day. Over the course of our adventures we created FogBugz, Kiln, Trello, and co-created Stack Overflow. https://www.fogcreek.com/careers/ Currently seeking Support Engineers (https://www.fogcreek.com/Jobs/SupportEngineer/) and Account Executives (https://www.fogcreek.com/Jobs/AccountExecutive/) I hope you'll check us out.

I also recommend Patrick Kua's 'Talking with Tech Leads' book: http://blog.fogcreek.com/becoming-a-tech-lead-interview-with-pat-kua/ There is also this interview with him here: http://blog.fogcreek.com/becoming-a-tech-lead-interview-with-pat-kua/

I believe http://www.fogcreek.com/, which is no surprise though since their affiliation with stackoverflow through Joel Spolsky.

Joel Spolsky over Fogcreek does it (I know because I see the photos they post on facebook of the lunches). http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-price-of-dev-happiness-part-three/ They always look absolutely amazing.

I make a product called Kiln that has pretty great code reviews for git: http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/features/code-reviews/

We're hiring - http://www.fogcreek.com/Careers/ I think we hit all of your points (although "great culture" is very subjective), and our application process does not hinge on OSS/SO profile/GitHub or anything of the sort.

One co-founder of Fog Creek has this to say, as a goal for the company [1]: "* great work environment, with the goal of every engineer having an office with a door that closes" And, in an oft-cited "Joel Test" [2]: "8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?" Furthermore, the company itself says [3]: "The average Fog Creek developer has 694 square inches of screen real-estate, 2 desktop computers, and an Aeron chair. Most have private offices with windows and doors." Googling for "Joel on software door that shuts" will turn up similar results. A shutting door is clearly important to the management, remote or no. [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000038.html [2] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html [3] http://fogcreek.com/about/

I'm interested. Which is a new thing. Joel Spolsky's live demo of FogBugz & Kiln is the single best product demo I've ever seen. Ever. It's so good, anyone doing demos should watch it, just because. http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/ (just the video) http://fogcreek.wistia.com/medias/z6o7hhvio5 I don't know if I care about evidence based estimating. And I'm pretty sure FogBugz is overkill for my team's needs. And I'd rather eat glass that do anything Windows. But hot damn the (apparent) integration and workflow of these two products are quite polished. Very well thought out and very well executed.

FogCreek has eliminated commissions, too. http://blog.fogcreek.com/why-do-we-pay-sales-commissions/ So have we. My thoughts? Commission-based sales is almost never a good alignment between sales people and the company. Almost always sets up unintended consequences and leads to local maxima before reaching global optmima. Also, if you're a software product company, you end up with the "doers" (software people, support, etc.) earning far, far less than sales-people, which causes them to get fed up and leave. Yes, we're a business and we have to make money, but without great software developers we won't have anything to sell. Put everyone on salary and then have company-wide profit sharing (that is equal amongst the divisions/people) tends to align everyone's interests.

There's a great description about the tech stack at http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-trello-tech-stack/ Does anyone know how many servers it runs on? I'd like to see a physical tech stack description (is it already out there somewhere? If so, my Google-fu failed me) EDIT: discussion -> description

This benefit scheme appears to be designed to encourage team building. The cost of replacing a good employee is greater then the benefit gained from introducing a new hire. I guess they don't want to reward someone for team building when they are actually a net loss in this area. I think they should have read this[1] and thought about this a bit more. 1. http://blog.fogcreek.com/why-do-we-pay-sales-commissions/

New York NY -- Full-time, on-site Fog Creek Software -- We're looking for top-notch software developers and sysadmins/devops magicians, as well as designers and front-end developers. Great salary, kick-ass benefits, paid relocation. Learn more at http://www.fogcreek.com/careers.html

Thanks for your comments. The two devs who built the entire site, and pushed for open sourcing it are amazing people, and we're lucky to get to work with them. We're hiring BTW. Need more Trello devs. Check out our tech stack: http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-trello-tech-stack/ and join us if you find it interesting. http://www.fogcreek.com/careers.html

Hi dlf! Please take a look at software developed by http://www.fogcreek.com/ Kiln, Trello and FogBugz are a good trio. Checkout http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/ for example.

Fog Creek posted a good primer here: http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-very-most-basic-things-your-company-needs… And one other useful source of advice is the is the blog of Geoffrey James at: http://www.inc.com/author/geoffrey-james Best of luck!

Great write up Patrick! I know that you are a rails guy and they use an MS stack. Any friction there? Were they able to use your A/B framework or did they have something on their own stack? Edit: Nevermind: http://blog.fogcreek.com/how-to-do-ab-testing-using-google-website-opt…

I'm no expert. But if you have no user interface background, try to read User Interface Design For Programmers (by Joel Spolsky) http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/fog0000000249.html I think it's a great source to get you started. There are some good posts on UI on codinghorror.com, but the site is not dedicated to it -- you'd have to dive in to find them. Also, try to look at how others do their web applications. 37 Signals' stuff may be inspirational, and you can look at how Gmail and Google Reader work. FogBugz can also nudge you into the right direction: http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/

Anybody remember City Desk? I loved it http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk/

Announcement on http://fogcreek.com/: "Fog Creek Software announces the beta for Kiln: Hosted Mercurial source control with code review and tight FogBugz integration."

Hard to find, but the news for the beta on their main page mentions it: http://www.fogcreek.com/ (first news entry)

RT is very full-featured and customizable, although it has a few rough edges and can take some time to learn. It's open source and is also available in as a hosted service. http://bestpractical.com/services/hosting.html FogBugz is decent -- not as flexible as RT, but may be a bit easier for non-techies to get started with. It's also available in both hosted and installable versions. http://fogcreek.com/fogbugz/

> So you're actually arguing for companies to hire employees who will likely produce negative output (their code will be so bad as to take not only their own time, but other programmers' time to fix) just to ...what, not hurt the feelings of the bottom 80 percent of developers? I did nothing of the sort. In fact, I am arguing that your hypothetical negative output employee is much rarer that some people think. > Your analogy is poor: Hiring a bad programmer is an extremely high probability event, even in a broad pool of candidates as would apply to a high-end company like Amazon, not a low priority event. I have seen no data to support this. My personal experience does not support this. > There have been studies dating back to the 70's that show a 10-20x skill difference between average and great developers. If you're going to pay roughly the same for a 1x as a 10x developer, wouldn't you want the 10x? So they tune their hiring process to skew that number as high as possible. Citation needed. I have certainly seen this bandied about the Internet quite a bit, but the best the citations only claim a 10x difference between great and terrible developers, and even those studies are likely flawed.[1] > I did know at least one person who applied to Amazon and who was rejected -- and rightfully so, in my opinion. His skills were sub-par, and the interview process detected that. Most others that I worked with while I was at Amazon were also above average; people I've…

Having mainly done line of business applications my entire life, I have a slightly different take. Jira won because it was not opinionated. You can use it however you want. FogBugz had the philosophy to make bug entry super easy above anything else. Jira will let a manager define new custom fields and make them all compulsory. It perfectly fits how manager at big companies think. FogBugz provides Completion Date Probability Distribution chart and Burn Down Chart [2]. Anyone who has worked for big companies knows that these two are USELESS for them. They set a project delivery date and you just have to hit it. At my current company, we are going for SOC1 compliance. This forces an amazingly complicated issue workflow and they implemented it very easily in Jira. I am looking at FogBugz documentation on workflows [1], and I don't see how we could have implemented the same in FogBugz. I also feel that Jira has a better ecosystem for plugins and integrations then FogBugz. [1] http://help.fogcreek.com/7483/statuses-categories-and-workflows [2] http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/features/project-management/

> Even in Phabricator, though, when you have multiple reviewers only one has to accept for it to be accepted. Oftentimes it is _more_ confusing to have multiple reviewers because you don't know who should have the final say. Yeah, this depends on workflow. We generally send every piece of code to two reviewers but just wait for either one to accept, unless there's a particular reason that both should look at the review. This works well for us but I can see how it wouldn't work as well for people with other processes. > The commenting system is a matter of preference, but having forgotten to "Clowncopterize" (a great demonstration of the professionalism of those who hack on Phabricator) comments, and given that they thread in email, it hasn't been a problem for me. Though I understand where you're coming from. Yes, Phabricator's isn't perfect but it's the best of the ones I've tried, especially if everyone using it is familiar with the tool and uses it frequently (that is, you might forget to Clowncopterize once or twice ever, but then you'll know for the future). I used to use Kiln (http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/) which had a different approach for emails – they essentially debounce emails to have a half-hour delay and coalesce any emails within that timeframe together, so you get fewer emails but don't need to submit the collection of comments explicitly. Having tried all three choices, I'd say that they're all painful in different ways and I personally prefer…

Thomas wrote substantially what I wanted to write. Edit to expand: So some of the features of WorkMob were easy for you to write, but are not in the best interests of many people who could potentially work for you. If your design showcases to clients that "Number of OSS projects" or "Number of Github followers" are how you rate developers, your clients might actually develop the impression that those two numbers a) matter and b) matter quite a lot. Instead of being inspired by freelance portfolios, which devote 95% of the emphasis to What and 5% of the emphasis to Why, maybe you should look at case studies by consulting firms who are good at what they do. One I wrote which drove substantial additional business for me: http://blog.fogcreek.com/our-marketing-is-up-fog-creek-and-what-we-did… One which I was not involved with, but which I routinely recommend for people when they ask "How do I write a case study?": http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/seomoz-case-study/ You'll note that neither of these is particularly intensive from a features-required-to-support-the-case-study perspective. All you need is a blogging engine that lets you add images. For bonus points, email capture.

SEEKING FREELANCER, ISTANBUL, REMOTE OK. Hi, We are Gerger (www.gerger.co), the creators of Formspider (www.theformspider.com), the Web 2.0 framework for Oracle PL/SQL developers. We are preparing a new version of our product and we would like to renew our product web site www.theformspider.com along with it. Our product Formspider is for a specific group of developers namely, the Oracle PL/SQL developers. It's mainly used in mid to large size companies to build Budgeting, Accounting, Order Management, HR, ERP etc.. software. Current Web site was done by us a year and a half ago. It's nice but building web sites is not our focus. The site is also showing its age. Formspider impresses our users with its simple and elegant design. It is perceived as an unusually high quality, very innovative product built with care and attention to detail. We would like our new web site reflect these facts. We want a simple yet beautiful design in our web site. Readable large fonts, excellent copyright, gorgeous pictures, icons and screen shots should provide a enjoyable experience to the visitor. We don't want run of the mill, stock photos, icons and text anywhere on the site. Each page needs to be individually crafted and be of excellent quality. The entire goal of the web site is to reflect the high quality of our product. Our favorite product, company web sites are www.apple.com (you should have seen this coming at this point :-) ) and http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/ We've been…