I have the honor to disagree with Joel. I’ll pick up an easy subject: Private walled offices.
Joel says that nothing improves morale and efficiency like private walled offices. I’ve worked in both way, and in two occasions companies I worked switched methods (from closed environments to open spaces) – in this experience, the gains of working on wall-less and open spaces are visible. Suddenly, everything is quick and everything is clear. No more leaving things to deal later. No more company-wide procrastination.
My advice: break those doors and those walls.
Everybody loves Joel.
Everybody loves his articles, his jokes and his books.
More than that, people love to disagree with him, so they can look smart and judgmental. The funniest part is seeing the judgmental faces they do.
In 2000, Joel wrote a cool article on “Top Five (Wrong) Reasons You Don’t Have Testers“.
He’s got some great information there, and in this post I’ll just comment it (see the ‘Annotations’ tag?).
Ok, so go on (link) and read the paper.
In his paper, Joel debunk 5 miths of companies who won’t hire testers: