There's a fair bit of piling on Joel Spolsky this morning - I had a go at him here, after seeing Avi Bryant's post. This morning, there's a lot more - Bob Congdon, John Lam, DHH, and finally, Jeff Atwood, who asks (after a long list of Joel's most insane posts:

All of this makes me wonder: has Joel Spolsky jumped the shark?

I think there's a simpler explanation for this. Based on the success of his company, I very much doubt that Joel is an "in the trenches" developer anymore. He started the long march into the ranks of the formerly technical awhile ago, and now he's fully there - complete with idiosyncratic ideas based on out of date information.

It's clear that Joel knows his stuff when he talks management, product management, and marketing. It's less clear that he has anything useful to say about the practice of code production. That's not a bad thing - it simply means that he's no longer doing that work. Maybe it's time he recognized that.