I'll comment on each in turn, since I think the author is so far out in the boondocks of corporate hell that he hasn't even been exposed to some of the things J

I'll comment on each in turn, since I think the author is so far out in the boondocks of corporate hell that he hasn't even been exposed to some of the things Joel is assuming as standard. 1. Source control. Sounds like they're possibly working mostly in mainframe or DB languages that don't have a clear "edit compile run" loop. This does make source control harder, but it's still important. 2. "build" doesn't refer to deploying to production. It refers to making a complete version of the product so that you can verify that Joe didn't change the method signature that Bill relies on. 3. Again, this is about build for testing purposes, not pushing to production. 4. No bug database. The answer is confused. It seems as if they don't have any concept of a bug tracker, that there is only the schedule or change requests or something along those lines. 5-8 that's great, it sounds like management is at least competent even if modern software development best practices have passed them by. 9. Best tools money can buy? I don't think you can say that without version control and a bug tracker. 10. No testing. Very alarming. Maybe acceptable for the pinboard guy ("I'm very careful") but I don't see how that can fly at a bank. 11. Code in interviews. This isn't surprising. At this point the test is moving from marks of competence to indicators of the outstanding. 12. Usability testing. I think you've effectively pointed out that at least one item on the Joel test isn't universally applicable.