January 30, 2026
Bring popcorn for the schedule wars
Joel Spolsky: Painless Software Schedules (2000)
Old advice, fresh fight: builders cheer, bosses bristle, and a $2B flex
TLDR: Joel’s old-school scheduling play—simple spreadsheets and coder-set deadlines—sparked fresh debate: practical wisdom or relic of a pre-cloud era. Commenters split between “let engineers plan” and “management calls the dates,” with side drama about Stack Overflow’s big sale and whether planning itself eats most of the work.
Joel Spolsky’s 2000 playbook for “painless” schedules—plan in simple spreadsheets, let the coder estimate, no fancy software—got dusted off, and the comments section turned into workplace group therapy. Fans cheered the back-to-basics vibe, with one reminiscing about a tool called “Mr Schedule” that made Joel’s method even snappier. But the real fireworks? Who gets to set deadlines. One commenter shouted what many feel: not engineers—it’s management or sales—and if you miss, expect a “PIP” (that’s a performance improvement plan, office-speak for trouble).
Others pulled the “times have changed” card: pre-cloud advice from the Netscape-era doesn’t fit a world of SaaS (software you rent, not buy) and CI/CD (code shipped constantly). Meanwhile, planners warned that breaking work into tiny steps—Joel’s secret sauce—isn’t free; for some features, the planning is most of the effort. And, because it’s the internet, a drive-by commenter derailed the thread to flex that the “StockOverflow guy” (yes, misnamed) sold for billions, sparking eye-rolls and investor what-ifs.
Between shout-outs to Netscape’s doomed rewrite and Excel-vs-Project snark, the mood is clear: Joel’s rules still hit nerves. Practical to some, outdated to others—either way, this old essay still makes modern teams argue like it dropped yesterday.
Key Points
- •Spolsky argues software teams need realistic schedules to avoid costly marketing and competitive misalignment.
- •He cites Amtrak’s Acela ads preceding service availability as a real-world scheduling mismatch.
- •Lotus delayed 1-2-3 v3.0 by 16 months to support 8086 memory limits, allowing Microsoft Excel to gain a lead as 8086 became obsolete.
- •Netscape’s full rewrite for version 5.0 caused a ~2-year delay and market share drop from ~80% to ~20%.
- •He proposes a simple method: build schedules in Microsoft Excel, avoid Microsoft Project’s complexity, and keep the format minimal (seven columns).