Well said...I'm very impressed.

I'm usually just satisfied with reading good blog posts and don't necessarily care about linking to them. But since I thought, "this is probably the best post he's ever written" after reading this by Scott, I feel compelled to link to it. Wow, dood. I couldn't have said it better myself.

I'm of the same school of thought as Scott both when it comes to Joel and this article of his. I agree that if you're a "software company" in the sense that all (or the majority) of your profits come from selling copies of shrink-wrap software, then yeah, you need to be hiring rock star developers or you'll soon be in trouble. However, I would say without a doubt that the top 3 most brilliant developers I have the honor of being friends with work for companies whom live and die by their internally developed and maintained software, and don't even resell it to other businesses. And these aren't small businesses either. One is a major aerospace company, one is a multinational bank, and the other is a multi-million dollar real estate agency.

I have no doubt that these guys could join a team at Joel's company (FogCreek) and be very productive and beneficial to his company. They can code better, produce betters architectures, problem solve better, and just plain think better than most developers I know. But their skill is definitely not going to waste because they fall into the corporate IT developer role.

Anyway, read Joel's article, and then Scott's post in response...it's some good thought-provoking reading.