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Part two of Joel Spolsky’s talk at Yale was the most interesting, I think. It discussed the differences between in-house programming and software development, and seemed dead-on from what I’ve seen in my limited time in both camps.

This paragraph struck me as particularly interesting, especially in light of a few conversations I’ve had with people recently:

The assumption there was that managers exist to tell people what to do. This is quite upside-down from the way management worked in typical west-coast high tech companies. What I was used to from the west coast was an attitude that management is just an annoying, mundane chore someone has to do so that the smart people can get their work done. Think of an academic department at a university, where being the chairperson of the department is actually something of a burden that nobody really wants to do; they’d much rather be doing research. That’s the Silicon Valley style of management.