I think Joel (as he often does) has oversimplified this massively. If you are a really good developer then the majority of 'other peoples' code will seem to be

I think Joel (as he often does) has oversimplified this massively. If you are a really good developer then the majority of 'other peoples' code will seem to be crap, likely because it is. It is a minority of coders who really and truly care about how they build software and an even smaller group of those who know how. Crap software happens because most people don't care about how to write software. It would be like people publishing novels with only a cursory knowledge of the language (and style) they are writing with (not that this doesn't happen cough twilight cough).