Tribes

Tribes

In the fall of 2000, a programmer named Joel Spolsky started a blog called Joel on Software. He had no marketing budget, no publisher, no distribution deal. He had opinions -- sharp, specific, occasionally infuriating opinions about how software should be built and how the people who build it should be treated. He wrote about things like why developers should have private offices and two monitors, why you should never rewrite code from scratch, why hiring smart people who get things done is more important than any technical credential. He was not trying to build an audience. He was trying to say something true.

Within a few years, Joel on Software had become the most widely read programming blog on the internet. A scattered, leaderless community of software developers -- people who had never met each other, who lived on five continents, who wrote in a dozen different languages -- had found something to rally around. They shared Joel's posts. They argued about his ideas in forums. They drove to conferences specifically because Joel was speaking. And when Spolsky eventually co-founded Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer platform for programmers, the tribe he had built over a decade showed up on the first day. It was not a product launch. It was a homecoming.

This is what Seth Godin is writing about in Tribes, his 2008 manifesto on leadership, connection, and change. The Joel Spolsky story sits near the opening of the book for a reason. It is not a story about a technology company. It is a story about a human being who had something to say, found others who cared about the same things, and changed how an entire profession thought about its work. No factory required. No mass advertising. No permission from above.