My first assignment at my first job was working at Microsoft, where I was told to come up with a new macro language strategy for Excel. Pretty soon, I had the first draft of the “Excel Basic” spec (which later evolved into Visual Basic for Applications, but that’s another story). Somehow, this mysterious group of people at Microsoft called the “Application Architecture” group got wind of my spec, which must have concerned them, because for some reason they thought that they were in charge of things like macro language strategies, and they asked to see my spec.
I asked around. Who’s the Application Architecture group? Nobody seemed to think they were very serious. It turns out that they were a group of just four people, recent hires with PhDs (very unusual for Microsoft). I sent them a copy of my spec and went to meet them, in case they had something interesting to say.
| Author | Joel Spolsky |
| Work | Two Stories |