I really feel as if the author should put the most important information right at the beginning of his post, namely that his coding philosophy is "you’re not he

I really feel as if the author should put the most important information right at the beginning of his post, namely that his coding philosophy is "you’re not here to write code; you’re here to ship products." Of course the way to properly tackle these two objectives is going to be vastly different, and Joel just has the second objective, rather than the first. The problem is that almost everyone who complains about what you might call 'bad code' thinks that "writing good code" is the end goal, whereas almost everyone who writes said 'bad code' has "shipping products" as their end goal. From the outside that might look like a difference in design philosophy, but really it's more a difference between someone who codes well because they care about their product and someone who codes badly because they have to put food on the table.