On Sat, Jan 20, 2001 at 12:52:58PM +0000, Leon Brocard wrote:
> Paul Makepeace sent the following bits through the ether:
>
> > Y'all might find this excellent piece interesting,
> >
> > http://joel.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$287
>
> Pretty darn interesting. Fogcreek sounds like a pretty cool place to
> work. I'd suggest that if we were thinking of doing something similar
> we'd need to build a product, or concentrate on a product or something
> like that. Do a MySQL or an AxKit, and get a couple of companies
> interested right from the start or there's no point. Hmmm.
Another link is
http://www.arsdigita.com/careers/
They seem to be a very good model for a consultancy business
-- they've been successfully and profitably building ecommerce sites for
several years
-- they grow by "budding" new (semi-autonomous) organisations
-- interesting structure: almost no chiefs, with several well defined
types of workers and well defined development paths.
-- interesting recruitment method: go on a 2week training course (boot
camp) to learn how to use their OSS ArsDigita Community System for free,
but they "reserve the right to offer you a job at the end of it". If you
are offered a job and refuse, you get (I think) us$1000 and of course
you can still go away and use their software to build your own sites.
The only disadvantages I see from a London.pm PoV is their chosen
platform: AOLServer,TCL,Oracle,HPUX :-}
On of the AD founders Phil Greenspun has a v.entertaining book
"Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing."
Online at: http://www.arsdigita.com/books/panda/
Also available on glossy photo paper, which gives some background to
the creation of ArsDigita. You should probably not read it if you are
irritated by criticism of one-or-more-of NT, Informix/Illustra, PCs,
academics, German women (that may be his travel writing), MS, ... actually
even his chosen environment doesn't get off free.
HtH
--
Chris Benson
