Excuse me for interjecting some facts here: software development did not start in the late 90s. The group of people who were building software when it was very

Excuse me for interjecting some facts here: software development did not start in the late 90s. The group of people who were building software when it was very much an art were super sharp and analytical. It is beyond arrogance (it is ignorance) to think that we are subjecting ourselves to unreasonable "mathematical rigor" while the earlier generations were apparently clueless cavemen of IT. Utter nonsense. Go see what IBM -- just one example -- did in its heyday and just who were the people who were making and writing software for those machines. Joel is being Joel -- self satisfied -- and according himself the position of leading light of an entire industry's recruitment dilemma and direction after the internet (doh) exploded demand for software developers. The internet also caused another problem (technical blogs): all of a sudden people who would normally never even cross paths with the elites of their industry (because they were and are not in the same caliber to be quite frank) were reading their whitepaper tealeaves and writing blogs on how everyone had to do x, y and z. Recruitment is just one item. Can we discuss stack and architecture and team structure and methodology as well. So Joel is right. Blowhards with blogs are quite responsible for the mess that is the profession of software development today.