Good post from Joel Spolsky about the virtues of hiring great staff, giving them good working conditions, letting them produce focused work in small teams and, implicitly, about the highly creative art/science that is producing software – judged both pseudo-scientifically in almost Taylorist style, or in terms of "style, happiness and emotional appeal".

"Essentially, design adds value faster than it adds cost. Or, roughly speaking, if you try to skimp on programmers, you’ll make crappy software, and you won’t even save that much money … The Creative Zen team could spend years refining their ugly iPod knockoffs and never produce as beautiful, satisfying, and elegant a player as the Apple iPod. And they’re not going to make a dent in Apple’s market share because the magical design talent is just not there. They don’t have it. The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that the top talent hits all the time. The number of divas who can hit the f6 in Mozart’s Queen of the Night is vanishingly small, and you just can’t perform The Queen of the Night without that famous f6."

Joel on Software: Hitting the high notes