A Disconnect from the Real World
After reading both Jeff Atwood's article and Joel Spolsky's response to a discussion topic, I'm wondering if these guys really live in the real world of programming or not. Atwood lives off of advertising revenue on his blog, and Spolsky runs a company. While I'm glad they've managed to get themselves to such good positions, I think the vast majority of programmers are not likely to find themselves in a similar position. These two are excellent writers, and Spolsky obviously has some business acumen considering that he does have a successful business. They are not in their positions due to programming skill. The "mainstream" programmer may not possess the same skills to elevate themselves to similar positions.
These two also don't seem to understand that there is a difference between programming and software development. I define programming as programming things you want to do, where software development is programming to support yourself doing whatever somebody else needs you to do. One is fun, the other is not.