Why do the UI designers have to... wait a minute, there aren't any!

If he spent half the amount of money he spent on this amazing office for a kick ass UI team, he would increase sales by an enormous amount for Fogbugz. I know so many people who would switch if it wasn't so damn ugly and difficult to use. I don't think people use Lighthouse because it has better features.

Joel's priorities seem very odd to me.

Could you quantify "ugly" and "difficult to use"? I use FogBugz, and while it's not the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, it's far from ugly. But then beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so it's said. I don't find it hard to use at all. I just use it for bug tracking and to-do reminder. I don't use any advanced features. What exactly do you find difficult to do?

We used to use Fogbugz then switched to Lighthouse because it was much cleaner, more intuitive and had near seamless Github integration.

It's not that Fogbugz is necessarily difficult, it's that Lighthouse is easier.

We use Fogbugz too and like it (though Pivotal Tracker is calling our names...). In my anecdotal experience, many of the people who think it's ugly and unusable got this impression from earlier versions. It's improved a bit over the last few years. Not to say that it doesn't have room to go, but it's not that bad anymore.

A couple of months ago, my company's software team evaluated FogBugz as a possible replacement for our Trac setup.

I would describe FogBugz as ugly by modern standards, because it appears to have been written a little under ten years ago. And I would describe it as difficult to use partially for the same reason, and partially because some very simple features are missing, e.g. cc'ing people on tickets and bidirectional integration with SCM repositories. The "special" features, like integration with customer email, are not important to us.

Yet what it does is not very difficult, and many other options exist -- free, for pay, hosted, or any combination thereof. I now wonder why people listen to Joel on software.

I tried using fogbugz a couple of time and agree with you. For the ease of use, I know that there were quite a few things I didn't really get (though I forgot which one). In the end I'm now using pivotal tracker instead.

Now apart from that I completely agree with joel's reasoning regarding building a great place to work for programmers, I just think that he should also hire more designers and ui experts...

Joel seems to be doing extraordinarily well without your advice.

Dustin never said he wasn't doing well, he just said he'd be doing better if the UI was upgraded.

Apparently Joel doesn't know that all good sysadmins are also good programmers.

Have to? Almost all the admins I've known love to sit in closets :) (I was an admin for a few years so this is somewhat self-deprecating)

I have been an admin in the past and I wouldn't have minded a window.