Joel Spolsky

Software writer cited in Remote — Office Not Required for the hiring heuristic the authors lean on to make their case for remote work. In his “Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing,” Spolsky distilled what to look for in a hire down to two qualities: “Smart, and Gets Things Done.” Remote — Office Not Required argues that remote work simply exposes what was always true — “great remote workers are simply great workers” who exhibit exactly those two Spolsky qualities — so the framework becomes the book’s lens for evaluating distributed talent.

Context: Joel Spolsky is a software developer and writer, author of the influential “Joel on Software” blog, and co-founder of Fog Creek Software, Trello, and Stack Overflow. His interviewing essays, including the “Smart, and Gets Things Done” formulation, were widely read in the early-2000s software-management world.

Where this appears

• Remote — Office Not Required — quoted for the “Smart, and Gets Things Done” interviewing standard that the authors build on to argue great remote workers are simply great workers.
• AI Is Oil, Not God — his Strategy Letter V supplies the piece’s core mechanism.