Joel built his business by relating Microsoft gossip and telling programmers what they wanted to hear. It's a marketing blog. Now that his customers are businessmen, he's telling them what they want to hear, in a forum they're likely to read.

"Joel built his business by relating Microsoft gossip and telling programmers what they wanted to hear."

I'm pretty sure programmers don't want to hear "you need to be writing functional specs" [http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000036.html], "you don't know enough about Unicode" [http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html], "if you don't 'get' pointers and recursion, you just ain't cut out to be a programmer" [http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.ht...], or "you should never scrap a working codebase and start all over" [http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html]

Very similar to Founders at Work. Might be some lifted or paraphrased paragraphs in there.

That's a pretty bold statement. Care to be more specific? "Might" doesn't cut it when you're publicly questioning somebody's credibility.

I'm not questioning anyone's credibility. I made a statement about the article's redundancy with a work that many HNers might read or have read. It's the same guy talking about the same topic, so he could reasonably be expected to say the same or very similar things.

You used the word "lifted". That's not an accusation of having a similar experience, that's an accusation of plagiarism.

Both articles are in Joel's voice and credited to Joel. You can't plagiarize yourself. I also used the word "might".

The Founders at Work interview is at http://www.foundersatwork.com/joel-spolksy.html . The Inc article is not a copy and paste, but it triggered the "seen this before" meter.

Plagiarizing himself? Huh? Is that even possible?

Yes, and it's a big fucking deal in academia -- you're bloating your publications / citations / reputation without actually contributing anything.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Self-plagiarism

From your linked article:

"Typically, self-plagiarism is only considered to be a serious ethical issue in settings where a publication is asserted to consist of new material, such as in academic publishing or educational assignments [13]. It does not apply (except in the legal sense) to public-interest texts, such as social, professional, and cultural opinions usually published in newspapers and magazines."