Now that thousands of (intelligent) people have wasted hours discussing Joel's insane article, can we all just move on? Please stop posting any more of the duct tape articles.
His say basically is that we should all stop talking about programming and actually program things, because we'll all learn a lot more about what actually works in practice rather than what we think might work.
This is incredibly good advice which I can't seem to follow myself. I'm on HN during the workday instead of getting my damn CSS layouts to resize correctly, after all.
His pages also tend to be butt-ugly. ;-) I get paid to make things pretty, or rather to take the pretty designs that interaction/visual designers come up with and make them actually work, across all browsers, maintainably, with a minimum number of bytes.
In return, when I'm not wrestling with CSS I can play with massive quantities of data and a few zillion machines. Not a bad trade-off IMHO.