Top 30 Joel Spolsky Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s harder to read code than to write it.”

— Joel Spolsky

Featured in: Programming Quotes

2. “Good software, like wine, takes time.”

— Joel Spolsky

Featured in: Programming Quotes, Quality Quotes, Technology Quotes

3. “Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected.”

— Joel Spolsky

Featured in: Programming Quotes

4. “Nothing works better than just improving your product.”

— Joel Spolsky

Featured in: Startup Quotes, Programming Quotes, Inspirational Business Quotes, Technology Quotes

5. “Writing code is not production, it’s not always craftsmanship though it can be, it’s design.”

— Joel Spolsky

Featured in: Programming Quotes, IT Quotes

6. “Listen to your customers, not your competitors.”

— Joel Spolsky

Featured in: Programming Quotes, Inspirational Business Quotes

7. “Indeed one of the best ways to deflect attacks is to make it look like they’re succeeding. It’s the software equivalent of playing dead.”

— Joel Spolsky

Featured in: Programming Quotes

8. “Design adds value faster than it adds cost.”

— Joel Spolsky

Featured in: Design Quotes

9. “Every day that we spent not improving our products was a wasted day.”

— Joel Spolsky

10. “Common programmer thought pattern: there are only three numbers: 0, 1, and n.”

— Joel Spolsky

11. “So if you want to get things done, you positively have to understand at any given point in time what is the most important thing to get done right now and if you’re not doing it, you’re not making progress at the fastest possible rate.”

— Joel Spolsky

12. “We just have to come in every morning and somehow, launch the editor.”

— Joel Spolsky

13. “Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.”

— Joel Spolsky

14. “A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.”

— Joel Spolsky

15. “If you can’t understand the spec for a new technology, don’t worry: nobody else will understand it either, and the technology won’t be that important.”

— Joel Spolsky

16. “Talk to your customers. Find out what they need. Don’t pay any attention to the competition. They’re not relevant to you.”

— Joel Spolsky

17. “An idea isn’t worth that much. It’s the execution of the idea that has value. If you can’t convince one other person that this is something to devote your life to, then it’s not worth it.”

— Joel Spolsky

18. “All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.”

— Joel Spolsky

19. “Never put yourself in a position that will put yourself at risk if you make the wrong decision. We spent cash on everything. It’s fashionable to make ‘bet the company’ decisions, but don’t do it.”

— Joel Spolsky

20. “Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again.”

— Joel Spolsky

Featured in: Programming Quotes

21. “Entrepreneurship boils down to the simple fact that a team of really smart people who can get things done are going to get smart, useful things done.”

— Joel Spolsky

22. “If you are a programmer working in 2006 and you don’t know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I’m going to punish you by making you peel onions for six months in a submarine.”

— Joel Spolsky

23. “Life is a bit hard sometimes, and sometimes you have to step up and fight fights that you never signed up for.”

— Joel Spolsky

24. “Full service brokers, in this day and age of low cost mutual funds and discount brokers, are really nothing more than machines for ripping off retail investors.”

— Joel Spolsky

25. “Beware of Methodologies. They are a great way to bring everyone up to a dismal, but passable, level of performance, but at the same time, they are aggravating to more talented people who chafe at the restrictions that are placed on them.”

— Joel Spolsky

26. “If something seems possible, that’s probably because someone is already doing it. When something seems that it can’t possibly work, nobody tries it. Real innovation happens when someone tries anyway, overlooking an obvious flaw, and finds a way to make an idea work.”

— Joel Spolsky

27. “People ridiculously overvalue aesthetics and beauty when evaluating products. It’s one of the reasons iPods, and, for that matter, Keanu Reeves, are so successful.”

— Joel Spolsky

28. “Remember, just because Microsoft can do something, doesn’t mean you can. Microsoft makes their own gravity. Normal rules don’t apply to them.”

— Joel Spolsky

29. “If your goals is to produce something of permanent value, you start to think differently about you want on the site.”

— Joel Spolsky

30. “I’ve been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system – it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes.”

— Joel Spolsky

31. “That’s another flaw with performance-based rewards: They are easy for one of your competitors to top.”

— Joel Spolsky

32. “The secret of Big Macs is that they’re not very good, but every one is not very good in exactly the same way.”

— Joel Spolsky